Puppet Patrol: EQ2

"The Play's The Thing", the new EQ2 10th Anniversary world event currently running in several zones of widely differing levels, marks something of a departure for SOE. It appears to be trying to set a new high-water mark for inclusivity.

There are no level requirements other than the de facto "must be this high" bar of being able to travel to the zones in question alive and do at least a few points of damage to the target when you get there. Even then, with the exception of Baelon, who appears deep in the level 92+ zone of Eidolon Jungle, all the fights take place within a few yards of a public transport facility (Bell, Spire, Druid ring, Sokokar post, Dock - EQ2 has a lot of transportation options). Neither do you need to be in a group or a raid to get credit. You don't even have to mentor down for the little ones: grey cons count just fine.

That's not the full extent of the designers' generosity though. Not even half. These "EpicX4" mobs aren't real raid bosses. They're not even mobs at all. They don't fight back. They aren't meant to.

In a delightfully conceived conceit they turn out to be nothing more dangerous than life-size patchwork puppets, constructed and operated by the clever technicians and performers of Roslyn Mischeva's travelling troupe, the Mischeva Play-actors. Convincingly realistic from a distance, up close you can see the weave of the hessian and the folds and bulges of the stuffing.

The "raids" are street theater performances designed with audience participation in mind and like any good actors the Mischeva crew know how to pull their punches. "Trakanon", "Roehn Theer" and the rest take a good beating but they're nothing but big sacks of straw. One of the cast even worries to himself over whether the very convincing mace he's made for Baelon might hurt someone by accident.

It may be the furthest distance I've ever seen between Risk and Reward for an event of this stripe. Not only because the risk, at least from the event itself, is entirely non-existent, but because the rewards are substantial. The special currency, useable at the Heroes' Festival merchants in Freeport and Qeynos, gets you a number of useful and attractive items.

There's a full set of armor and a choice of one- and two-handed weapons for each of the five level ranges covered by the events as well as plushies of three of the puppets. Just completing the five events once each gave my berserker enough tokens for a full set of armor that was slightly better than the Frostfell set he was wearing plus a weapon that was a major upgrade to the level 93 claymore he'd quested in Cobalt Scar.

There were a few teething problems with the event according to EQ2Wire but last night when my Beastlord did Darathor and Trak things seemed to be working as intended and this afternoon my zerker knocked off all five in an hour or two. From what people were saying the actors need a prompt from a GM now and then but the performances I took part in went off flawlessly.

The event is scheduled to run until the official release of the upcoming expansion, Altar of Malice, on November 17th, which should give everyone ample chance to enjoy the fun and get geared up. Of course the first set of quest rewards from AoM will probably make anything I got today obsolete but at least the new gear should help getting to those quest rewards more enjoyable.


I thoroughly approve of these kind of bun-fights. What this one most reminded me of was the open raid style holiday events in The Secret World, where, by and large, just turning up will give you plenty of the kind of currency that makes a genuine difference to how you can gear your character. Holiday events in MMOs should be open, inclusive and err on the side of generosity.

Especially when there's a new expansion with a level cap increase right around the corner.

Nothing Is Forever. Not Even Goodbye.

It seems like every week there's another news story on Massively where some long-gone MMO comes back from the dead. One company's dead duck becomes another's dish of the day. Even the curators and legislators are beginning to wake from their long torpor to face their responsibilities.

Of course for every recovery there's a relapse. Not all that long ago I waxed hysterical about the return of Argo Online, an old favorite of mine that I never actually bothered to play much while it was around. I didn't bother to play it much after it came back either and now it appears I may have missed my chance second time around because every time I try to log in all I get is a "Server Maintenance" message.

There are a lot of MMOs I'd love to see make a comeback. Lost loves that I miss like Rubies of Eventide and missed opportunities I never tried like EQOA. Maybe one day.

It's not only whole MMOs that rise from the grave. Sometimes lost limbs float up to the surface too. (Lovely image...) I logged into EQ2 this week and spotted this tantalizing offer:

The Isle of Refuge, long-lost and much lamented home of Milo, returns as the 11th Anniversary Veterans Award (11th Anniversary for a 10 year old MMO - it's magic!) and I'll be entitled to one for free - next year. We foolishly unsubscribed for six months around the time we played WoW (something Blizzard denies I ever did according to the reply to the ticket I just opened when my  "come back for a free week" email led nowhere, but I digress...).

Poor Milo shouldn't have to wait that long just because of my poor judgment and parsimony and since I have over 18k Station Cash doing absolutely nothing right now he doesn't have to. I bought him an early Frostfell present. Best 1350 SC I ever spent - even better with the 10% subscriber discount. I even grabbed a pack of five goblins so Milo would have some company other than his mercenary. Company you have to pay doesn't really feel the same.


Milo only had time for a quick lope around the old place on his fearsome white wolf before I had to log. No mounts on the island back in the day of course - now he'll even be able to fly there when he's a little bigger. When I get time I hope to pick up a few more of the old faces from the Store. Say what you like about SOE and their cash shop ways but they do at least come up with the occasional thing I really want to buy. Not many MMOs can make that claim.

So there it is: another decorating project I probably won't find time to finish. Very nice to have the option all the same. And talking of refurbishment projects, there's another one that's coming on very well indeed, thanks for asking. It's kind of hush hush (although not so hush hush as it was - we have NPC audio now!) so I'll just say it in pictures. All taken this week.

I think I prefer it without mobs.

Happy fox dance!

We have vendors! Now all we need is stock.

Hello old friend. What are they feeding you?

Now that's what I call a sunset.

Library Priviliges : GW2

Last night I completed the Living Story element of the Echoes of the Past update. It took me about three hours, thirty minutes of which was taken up by the extremely tedious, annoying, arbitrary, yet somehow obligatory, final "epic" boss fight. Okay, maybe it wasn't a full half hour but it certainly felt like it.

To set against that single blemish, because other than that one fight I loved the entire thing, there's the three-quarters of an hour I spent exploring the jaw-droppingly magnificent Durmand Priory Library. If only the "books" were written with the same loving care and attention to detail as the artists lavished on the visuals, rather than resembling, as they do, single pages from reading primers for the under-fives. Even so, though the prose style may leave much (or all) to be desired, the content was fascinating.

The episode was short, even by Living Story standards. If you exclude the time spent gawping and taking screenshots (I just counted them. I took seventy-five, most of which I can't use yet, because spoilers) then it probably wouldn't have filled more than an hour and a half.

I'll take a top-notch ninety minutes over a lack-luster few hours any day but of course, while the instances are the major contribution to the story, they are only a small part of the content drop in full. Much more substantial in terms of occupying the average player's time over the next couple of weeks and more will be the new map, The Silverwastes.

This looks like a really substantial addition to the explorable landmass and an intriguing one. It appears to be at least as big as the whole of the previous new map, Dry Top, which was drizzled out over several episodes. It's accessed through the now-abandoned Bandit Fort in Brisban Wildlands,the one that so puzzled people since launch, inaccessible as it was, being guarded by numerous Level 80 legendary mobs. Maybe we'll finally find out who they were and what they were up to, although never, I'm sure, how they became so insanely strong.

So far I've only had a chance to explore a small portion but it's very impressive. The opening area, where the Iron Legion engineers are building and repairing aerial craft for the Pact is simply marvelous. It brought back the full gosh-wow awe I felt when I first stepped out onto the steel walkways of The Black Citadel, still my favorite location in all Tyria.

In terms of gameplay, the open raid mechanics of Dry Top would seem to have been refined and flavored with a very generous seasoning of WvW. Mrs Bhagpuss is out there right now learning the ropes and working on her achievements, which she says are definitely manageable. I've barely spent half an hour there so far but I escorted a bull laden with supplies, which felt exactly like running in a Yak in the Borderlands, only on speed, and defended a fort, which felt moderately like defending a tower.

Whether there's an ulterior motive to this cross-pollination of in-game sub genres or whether its just creative imagination at play remains to be seen. It looks like fun though and that's what matters. In the short term, anyway.

I'm off to find out more.

Oh, Why Won't You Just Die Already?! : GW2, TSW, WildStar

Here at Inventory Full we don't do "Quote of the Day" posts but if we did Syp's plaintive cry would be a hot contender:

"Really, my combat attitude is, “I want to point at something and make it die with minimum fuss.”

I often get that feeling and rarely more so than after this last weekend in which I "enjoyed" six instanced, solo boss fights.

My travails against The Presenter have already been documented. Next there were the two parts of Tassi's encounter with Bloody Prince Eddie, first taking him out of his box and then putting him back. That one I did on both accounts because I wanted the Candy Corn Cobs to spend on kittens and pails.

Then there was the final fight with The Shadow of The Dragon in the Pale Tree's sanctum, which concludes the last episode of The Living Story. I did that months ago on one account, when it was new, and it was so teeth-grindingly tedious I have been putting off doing it on the second account ever since. Mrs Bhagpuss still hasn't done her second run, she hated it so much the first time round.

With the next episode dropping today, though, I thought I'd better get it over with. It was even worse than I remembered.

Here's the problem: all four of the fights use the same basic mechanic. They have something happen. Then it stops and another thing happens. Then the first thing happens again. Then the second. That cycle then continues until a win condition is achieved, usually either a set number of rotations completed or a sufficient amount of damage done to The Boss; often both.

If it's all the same to you, Rox, I'll stay out here with Taimi.

The first rotation can be quite exciting: you don't know what's coming and you have to react, counter, learn. The second rotation can be quite satisfying: you know what to do, now you just have to do it. From then on it's all down hill. Or should that be up hill?

There are generally two ways the fight can go from that point. The bad version is that the same fight just goes on and on for as long as it takes you to complete it. Doesn't matter if or  how often you die; you just respawn and run back to a fight that remains in the same state you left it. In the very bad version, if you die, the instance resets and you have to start over from the beginning.

I am blessed as a player of MMOs in that I have not one tiny jot of the Completionist gene. If I'm not enjoying something I can easily stop, leave and never come back. I don't feel any nagging pressure to finish anything in a video game. If it isn't entertaining me it can go die in a ditch. I can still get irritated by having wasted whatever time I have already spent on a futile exercise, though, and solo instances that reset when you fail them are deeply irritating.

Tassi's instances do that. Fortunately I found them reasonably easy to complete without dying so I only had to endure one reset on four runs. The Presenter also resets, as does every instanced boss I can think of in TSW. That's why I have never finished the Tyler Freeborn sequence and gave up somewhere near the end of the 29 steps in the main sequence storyline quest, when I hit a fight I couldn't finish.

Fat lot of help you were, Pwincess.

I might go back to those two now I have better gear, come to think of it. I'm a big fan of overgearing or overleveling to get past annoying roadblocks. It's one of the things I most like about MMOs and one of the reasons I am such a fan of expansions that raise the level cap. Usually I reserve that kind of behavior for soloing or duoing content originally intended for groups, though. Such tactics really shouldn't be necessary to finish content intended to be soloed.

Of the two designs, solo boss fights that just grind on and on until you win are the lesser of two evils. At least you know you will only ever have to do them once. They are, however, if anything, even more idiotic in terms of design. Think about it. The designer has created a fight in which the outcome is never in doubt. You know you are going through the motions and he knows it too but through those motions you just have to go. After you've died a few times the utter pointless of what you are doing gets kind of rubbed in your face. That's bound to leave a good feeling.

All of the instances I did this weekend were designed as solo battles although you can group for all of them if you wish. Other than the Living Story episode they are all holiday content too, which you might imagine would be intended primarily to entertain rather than challenge. Assuming a basic level of competence and averagely-appropriate gear most players won't find them overly-challenging in terms of DPS checks or skill. Any problems I was having turned out to be either from unpreparedness or inattention.

I was still using sub-par gear on my re-match with The Presenter. I'd yet to go to B&D (TSW's combined bank and auction house) to sort out my gear deficiencies (See previous comment thread for details). Even I, however, badly-equipped and fresh from a very long lay-off, was able to knock him off air without too much trouble once I'd jimmied my build. That, even without noticing I was meant to smash the radios that were spawning all the ghosts, something that didn't occur to me  until I was writing the previous paragraph. Shame I didn't think of it at the time but I didn't actually notice the damn radios until the fight was over.

Ahem. I digress.

Yes, well, if you hadn't opened it in the first place...

So, the problem here isn't with difficulty. Nor is it with the length of the fights per se. Back in the glory days of Everquest all fights went on and on and mostly I liked it. The difference from my perspective is that a) almost all of those fights were straight-up, no scripts, drag-out beat-downs and b) we did them largely standing still. At its best combat in EQ achieved a knd of zen-like calm. In contrast, as Syp has been finding out over in WildStar, an endless diet of dodging telegraphs and rolling around can get tiring. Fast.

Open world combat in GW2 is, ironically, some of the least fatiguing and most enjoyable I've encountered in an MMO. It's nice to have the freedom to dodge and strafe, all guns blazing, but if you're feeling tired or lazy you can stand still and make progress just fine. The problem of fatigue only really arises in set-piece fights. In WildStar, as Syp tells it, there's no relief from the pressure: "Every fight is some sort of small epic war played out on a tiny battlefield".

There was a fascinating link on Massively yesterday to a series of employee reviews of Carbine's management practices. A number of times the point is made that WildStar is a great IP if only management knew what to do with it but I suspect that even stellar management would have struggled to interest a mass-market audience in "sketchy endgame content chained to a long defunct business model sneeringly aimed at a demographic that no longer exists" to quote one of the anonymous Carbine employees on the thread.

Carbine talked up their fast-moving combat style a lot before launch. Trion barely mentioned theirs when promoting ArcheAge. The localized Korean import garnered huge attention for all sorts of reasons but the best thing I've heard people say about the combat mechanics is that they're functional. It's tab-targeting of the old school and no-one is going to rave about how innovative or exciting it is.

I could just have watched it on YouTube you know.

The people who are excited by AA are excited by the virtual world and the possibilities it opens up. Probably the most successful MMO of the last year or two has been FFXIV: ARR, another stand&cast, tab target conservative. The poster-child for twitter quests, telegraphs and hyperactivity, meanwhile, is on the ropes.

I worry for EQNext. Having scrapped what was probably a traditional tab-target MMO and retooled for the new ARPG revolution, by the time the game finally appears in 2016 or 2017 will SOE find the pendulum has swung far away from the all-action, "Heroic Movement" model that seemed so dominant back in 2012? H1Z1, despite also being a late jump onto a different bandwagon, is actually looking the more likely of the two make something of itself right now, with its emphasis on slow and subtle over fast and flashy.

Meanwhile we soldier on. There is no perfect time-to-kill. No combat style is going to please everyone. Your thrill is my sore shoulder. My relaxing session is your paint drying. At least we have plenty of choice nowadays. If it's not fun we don't have to keep doing it until we brainwash ourselves into thinking it is.

Although that attitude won't get the dragon slayed, now will it?

Lion's Arch: A Work In Progress? : GW2

Halloween in Tyria is almost over. Tomorrow the Lionguard will pack up all the hay bales and pumpkins and ship them off of to the Ascalonian farmlands for the Charr farmers to use as winter cattle-feed. They'll unhook the bat bunting from the streetlights and pack it away for next year. You didn't think those were real bats did you? Mad King Thorn and his emo offspring Prince "Don't Call Me Eddie" Edrick will return to the Mad Realm by whatever wormhole in the space-time continuum they arrived and that will be that until Tixx's airship drones into view towing Wintersday behind it.

Between holidays we'll all just have to make do with that old chestnut, the life or death battle with the dragons, as Meldromoth makes his bid for floral world domination. Ho hum.

I've enjoyed this year's Halloween. Better than the first, back in 2012, which inconveniently arrived just as we were about to go on holiday and upset me with its needless vandalism. Better than last year's on which I didn't even bother to report. No, this year we've both done our Halloween dailies every day, enjoyed the odd zerg around The Mad Lab, acquired kittens with bows, 20 slot pails and candy by the barrow-load and its all been jolly good fun. Even Mad King Thorn seems to have acquired a new gag writer. We can only hope the old one suffered a similar fate to the hapless Estrella, who he put in a coffin filled with rats and dumped into the sea.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the whole holiday has been the way it brought Lion's Arch back to life. Well, I say that. It may well be that L.A. has been a bustling hive of happy activity for months. I wouldn't know. I've barely been there since we drove out Scarlet's armies and left a smoking ruin in place of the magical, piratical, wooden wonderland we all loved or at least loved to stand around in.

So, what progress has been made on the repairs and refurbishment of the city and the re-housing of the refugees towards which we all contributed so generously during Queen Jenna's last Pavilion bash? It's your money they're spending after all. Here's a pictorial progress report.

The Financial Center 

The Vault. One bored, irritable guard. Guarding an empty building. Progress: zero.

The Trading Post. One skritt of dubious fiscal probity running a grey-market lottery out of a derelict shell. Progress: Zero.

Infrastructure

Bridges and walkways. Workers still hammering away. Roads still full of holes. Progress: Zero.

Facilities

The Lighthouse. Fully rebuilt and looking great. Shame that project dates back to the Karka invasion. Progress: None required.

Emergency Services

Fires and debris. Still raging and/or lying there. Delete as appropriate. Progress: zero.

Rehousing

Private residency. Looting rampant. Corrupt Lionguard observed in the act of accepting a bribe of Krait wine. Progress: uncertain.

Recreation and Entertainment

Tigg's Moa Races. Asura entrepreneur getting back on his feet thanks to family backing. No evidence of any help or assistance from the authorities. Progress: encouraging but independent.

And there you have it. A damning indictment of the inadequate and incompetent response of the Lion's Arch authorities. That's what you get for voting in Kiel. Evon would have had the trains running on time by now. If we had trains.

Dead Air: TSW

As the discussion in the comments following yesterday's post makes it painfully clear, when it comes to playing MMOs, "builds" are not my strong point. If you're going to play an MMO designed around a giant skill wheel, however, there's no point whining about it, you just have to knuckle down, read the mouseovers and get theorycrafting.

Naturally my first recourse was to google for someone else's work but as this Reddit thread complains most of the builds that come up on a search are long out of date. Fortunately there was someone I could steal from - me!

Presenting The Presenter!
The one and only screenshot I managed to grab

For all I said about The Secret World being an easy game to come back to it does still rely on the returning player having some vague memory of what happened last time around. Last night I knocked off the rest of The Meowling without incident and fought my way into the abandoned soviet bunker in Transylvania for the showdown with The Presenter to conclude this year's new Halloween quest, The Broadcast.

Only The Presenter had other ideas. I fought him twice and lost twice, each battle taking ten to fifteen minutes. If I concentrated on survival I could still be fighting him now - he and his coterie of broadcast-bedazzled spooks together struggled to take me under 90% health. On the other hand, he wasn't showing much sign of dying either, since I seemed to have the approximate DPS of an elderly rabbit dual-wielding limp lettuce leaves.

If it wasn't for his incredibly irritating habit of running from room to room and making me chase him while his spectral fan club whaled away at my unprotected back this so-called fight might have gone on even longer but in the end sheer tedium wore me down and he got the better of me. Half an hour of that and I'd had enough.

It was apparent that I'd need to rethink my build or get better gear and  wasn't convinced I wanted to see the end of the quest enough to do either. Last year I ran into exactly the same issue with The Vanishing of Tyler Freeborn. I put a lot of effort into fixing that and my hard work got me nowhere. It's an experience I wasn't keen to repeat.

Scuse me! Coming through!

After I'd moaned about it passive-aggressively at some length in the comments here, Sylow very kindly offered to help me figure out a build that would bring my time-to-kill into single figures (minutes that would be, not seconds). By the time I read his comment, though, I'd figured out a build all by myself. Or rather, I'd stumbled across the five builds I'd worked up the last time I had this problem, all neatly tucked away in the Gear Management tab I'd completely forgotten existed.

I found it right after I'd spent maybe an hour going through Actives and Passives trying to match Builders and Consumers, affliction and impairment, Blades and Assault Rifle until I'd made myself thoroughly cross-eyed and confused. At least I was able to confirm my own consistency of approach because the new build I arrived at was extremely similar to the one I'd stored away under the name DPS+Leech.

Just as well, too, because I was so eager to take a look at it I didn't think that slotting it would wipe the one I'd just spent an hour working on. Never mind. It was good practice. Or something.

Equipped with my old-new build (the one that had so singularly failed to progress me past my 50k hit point roadblock in the Tyler Freeborn quest, something I was conveniently choosing to leave forgotten) I raced through the black tunnels of the festering underground facility, ducking ghosts and knocking over barrels of irradiated waste until I was once again face to face with The Presenter.

I died, of course. Only this time he was at least taking damage at a reasonable pace. And I thought I knew where I needed to improve to make progress. First off, get my back to a wall and stop those ghosts getting behind me. Second, figure out an actual rotation for these skills that would get those synergies flowing.

And it worked. Almost all the damage I took occurred on the between-room runs when the ghosts had free shots. Other than that my health stayed up while his went down, just as it should. It got quite close near the end, when I panicked because I thought I might actually win for once and fell off my rhythm, and I did have to drink a couple of Elixirs along the way because of those darn ghosts, but in the end I was still standing and he wasn't and that's all that really counts.



The quest itself had a somewhat muted coda. As is usual in TSW it left me feeling little the wiser about what had been going on and feeling that I'd almost certainly missed something important. I love that feeling. It's one of the best features of the game.

How much more I'll be playing I wouldn't like to guess. I took a quick look at my gear and it's more sub-par than I remembered - mostly green Q10s with one or two blue Q9s. I have a green Q10 blade but my rifle is a Q8 blue - I have a Q10 green rifle but it lowers all the important stats in comparison to the Q8. What all that means I'm not really sure.

I think I saw Rick Wakeman play this thing on Tales From Topographic Oceans

This is the thing with MMOs: as Alysianah at Mystic Worlds confirms, the grind is real. If you want to do more than dabble then there nearly always comes a point when you just have to get your head down, read the guides, study the tool-tips, farm the mats, kill the mobs, knock out the dailies and do all those other things that make playing in virtual worlds feel like having a imaginary, unpaid job.

The Secret World has the best stories in MMOs but that's a lot of work, even for a good story. Also for a waistcoat, which was the reward I got.

Radio On : TSW

I'd like to thank our collective corner of the blogosphere for nudging me to do something I've been meaning to do for months - log back into The Secret World. Several times of late I've patched up and sat looking at the password screen for a minute or two before deciding it was too much trouble to go find my old log-in details. That'd be a whole thirty seconds of my life, right? Who has that kind of time?

Both Syp at Bio Break, whose Secret Adventures series  has been pressing my nostalgia button for weeks, and Rowan at I Have Touched The Sky are consistent advocates so TSW never drops off my radar. Ysharros at Stylish Corpse recently gave in to the same prompts and jumped back in, thereby adding to the welcome, gentle pressure on me to return but it was Aywren at Clean Casuals whose pithy rundown of the current Halloween events finally tipped me over the edge.

To be precise, it was Aywren's account of a new event, The Broadcast, a recreation of 1940s radio drama, that caught my full and undivided attention. I've long been fascinated by the Golden Age of Radio. Obviously I never had the chance to listen to it first time around (I'm old but I'm not that old!) but I grew up in its hinterland, getting glimpses of that lost world from movies like Radio Days, Garrison Keilor's ironic re-creations and the countless revisitings and retellings of the panic inspired by Orson Welles' Mercury Theater production of War of the Worlds.

When they called it The Black House
they really weren't kidding

The all-pervading influence of the Internet and the World Wide Web has changed just about every aspect of our lives over the last couple of decades and one of the greatest changes has been a previously undreamt of access to the past. When I was writing articles for comics fanzines in the 1980s, if I wanted to send an editor a thousand words on 1940s cinema adaptations of comic book characters it would take me a week of research in the Central Library of a large city and even then I'd be lucky to find what I needed.

Now I can get up, make a coffee, sit down in front of this screen and have more information in a few mouse-clicks than I could possibly use, on just about any subject I could dream up. What's more, as evidenced above, writers of journalistic nostalgia don't need to describe things in detail any more; instead they can simply link to the originals and let their audiences experience those things for themselves, unmediated.

I always found Radio and MMOs a good fit, both for me and for each other. I may have missed the Golden Age but I grew up listening to the radio. From Radio Luxemburg on my mother's battered transistor and my grandfather's shortwave stations on his 1930s Bakelite valve set throughout my childhood, through the Radio One soundtrack of my adolescence to the thoughtful, eclectic, intelligent rumble of Radio Four that marks the background to my adult life, radio has been a constant presence.

When I began playing MMOs I settled into two audio habits right from the start: I always left the in-game music playing and I often supplemented it with radio in the room. For more than a decade I'd slay monsters, craft armor and explore imaginary lands to a sonic melange of looped synth samples, yelps of pain, explosions and Melvyn Bragg quizzing a bunch of professors on Nuclear Fusion or the Haitian Revolution.

I found websites that opened portals to radio stations all over the world and I'd often sort my inventory on a Sunday morning to a soundtrack of local news from Saskatchewan or some such impossibly exotic locale. Best of all I discovered archives of radio shows from long before I was born and listened to episode after episode of Academy Award Theater or The Adventures of Philip Marlowe as I murdered orcs or battered gnolls through Azeroth, Norrath or Telon. 

I used to do that. Then I stopped. Why? Because of The Secret World.

If it starts to shake put a bullet in it.

When TSW arrived back in the late spring of 2012 I found myself unexpectedly caught in its mysterious web. Along with a darkly twisted contemporary setting, drawn with astonishing visual detail and verve, came a thick, nested audio track that demanded full and undivided attention.

It wasn't just that quests were fully voiced - SOE trumpeted that little achievement for EQ2 all the way back in 2004 for all the good it did them. It wasn't the mere fact of embedded audio in game - music emerging from jukebox diners and skatepark boomboxes - Anarchy Online had both audio and video playing on in game wallscreens back in 2002.

When it comes to voiceovers and audio, TSW has never expected, like the proverbial dog walking on its hind legs, to impress us just by the act of doing. It's always been about doing it well and in that they have frequently surpassed all reasonable expectations. For the three or four months I played The Secret World as my primary MMO it was simply not an option to listen to the radio at the same time. The in-game audio was just too good to miss.

I did try. I'm good at multitasking audio. I've had decades of practice. I can usually filter all those tunes, triggers and conversations and extract the meaning I need. Always something's going to get lost in the mix, though. With such a consistently high quality of  voice acting and the complexity of the narrative threaded through so much of the game it just wasn't a viable option any more.

So I turned my radio off. Then, when GW2 came along a few months later, another visually and sonically rich MMO, only bright and bold where TSW was dark and subtle, I left it off. Over the past two years I've only occasionally played MMOs with the radio on and even then only Test Match Cricket, which is more of a background hum than something that demands close attention.

You might consider it both ironic and appropriate then that last night I spent the best part of three hours listening to the radio inside The Secret World. What goes around comes around.

First I had to re-orient myself. It didn't take long. TSW is a remarkably easy MMO to drop back into because not all that much seems to change. That might not be great for players hoping to make it their full-time virtual home but for fairweathers like me it makes for a fine welcome back each time I put the key in the old door.

I did notice a few changes. There's a Pet system now that allows you to store your pets in much the same way you store your minis in GW2. That freed up a few welcome bag slots.

The reason I was fiddling around with my pets to begin with was because the first things I noticed when I got to the Agartha were all the cats. Everyone and his uncle had a pet out and most of them were cats. My character has a cat. I'm suggestible. So it goes.

When I'd gotten all my pets safely kenneled I turned to the two messages in my mail. One was from Dave Screed, who seemed unusually freaked out even for him over some short-wave radio broadcasts he'd heard; the other was from Madame Roget about some trouble she's been having with her cats.

The most surprising thing was that I immediately remembered who they both were and where they both lived. That in itself is testament to the strength of the writing in The Secret World. I was able to go straight to Dave in his New York Launderette to get started without needing to look anything up although once I was under weigh I did open a walkthrough because the puzzle-solving aspect of TSW only amuses me when I'm making progress.

As it turned out I barely needed to refer to the cheat sheet. Not because of my Sherlockian way with a clue but because I spent most of the three hours I was playing standing motionless next to a radio listening to some almost supernaturally accurate recreations of 1940s radio drama complete with station identifications and commercials. It was weird, compelling and also genuinely spooky.

If you think waving a katana around in a church is inappropriate behavior you clearly haven't spoken to the priest.

The first broadcast I listened to from inside the Kingsmouth Congregational Church. Not because I was too scared to stand in the Graveyard where I eventually found the radio but because, like a real radio signal, these broadcasts fade and break up as you move around. Inside the church was where I first found the strongest signal that let me hear the audio clearly. Also the stained glass windows are awesome.

The second I heard while standing outside The Black House in Savage Coast. I started off standing next to the radio inside the burned-out ruin but the racket from occasional fights as players less interested in retro-radio than I triggered the ghost that turns up at the end of the quest drove me to stand outside on the porch.

In her post Aywren says the broadcasts last 10-15 minutes but I think it's more like a full half hour. I'll time the next one and see if that's just a subjective impression or whether it really is that long. Either way they are incredibly impressive pieces of work. Frankly, the two I've heard so far are every bit good enough to be broadcast on PBS or the BBC. The sheer quality of the media work, the narrative and the writing in TSW is so far ahead of any other MMO I've played (100+ and counting) it's a joke.

The entire time I was listening to the broadcast those people in the woods were having some kind of party. Weirdos.

It's a tragedy the game hasn't been successful enough both to allow a much faster and more extensive pace of development and also to generate a feeling in the MMO industry as a whole that sharp, literate, sophisticated writers and creative artists are worth hiring. Comparing the quests in TSW to the ones I've done recently in ArcheAge, for example, is akin to comparing an exhibition in a smart, downtown gallery with the pre-schooler's crayonings pinned up on your next-door neighbor's fridge. And I like the quests in ArcheAge...

Never mind. At least we have this. And how fine it is. I'm two-fifths through The Broadcast and halfway through The Meowling (which has been in the game since 2012 but which I have somehow managed to miss until now). More reports to come, assuming there aren't any parts in either where I have to, y'know, actually win a fight, because the one part where the game and I don't really hit it off is the combat.

And yet even here TSW wins. After the first radio show ended and I clicked on the radio to progress the quest a ghost spawned. It was my first fight after my long lay-off and I couldn't remember my synergies so I died in short order. When I got back to my corpse the radio wasn't playing golden age repros any more. As a ghost I heard what Dave Screed had heard: a Numbers Station.

Would I have heard that if I hadn't died? I don't know. Does it mean anything? I don't know.

I like not knowing. I like The Secret World.