By Their Deeds Shall Ye Know Them : GW2

*** BEWARE SPOILERS ***

Living Story Episode 8 "The Point of No Return" dropped yesterday. In keeping with tradition I will begin by observing that, once again, it's short. It took me maybe a couple of hours and that was speaking to everyone, poking my nose into everything and making quite unnecessarily heavy weather of the final fight..

Short does not mean bad though. It may not have taken long to play through but I thought this was one of the best LS episodes so far. It had well-balanced and engaging gameplay throughout, there were some good exchanges of dialog here and there and the voice acting was solid. The atmosphere was palpable and also varied, from the spooky beginning through the urgency of the Silverwaste battles to the elegiac despair of the final sequences.

The format is very familiar. We begin with another visit to Durmand Priory and a further consultation with Ogden. There's another book hunt among the stacks and another ritual to complete during which some fighting ensues. Then it's back to the pact camp in The Silverwastes to consult with Logan and the rest of Destiny's Edge.

A number of forum posters and Redditers read a lot into the exchange between Eir and Braham before everything goes to code red as the mordrem attack. My irony meter is very finely calibrated, to the point where it tends to give false positives for Ironic Foreshadowing better than 50% of the time, and yet I took Eir's promise to go hunting with her son in the Shiverpeaks when it was all over at face value. I feel a bit of a mug now.

Once the camp has been secured a scurry through the skritt tunnels to the Far Shiverwastes sees us back at that sealed door in the cliff. Only this time we have the key in the form of a king-sized matchstick.

Behind the door lies a very dark tunnel leading to a very light cave. This sequence I found particularly impressive. The moving pool of light cast by the torch is convincing and atmospheric and the vista-like reveal of the glowing cave works very effectively to create the intended sense of awe.

Once the scenery has been duly admired it's time to find a spot to plant the last of Caithe's memory seeds. As we play the hot/cold game to find the right location we pass an interactive bush. Naturally I interacted and the information learned from doing so plays directly into the upcoming cut scene with Caithe, Wynne and Faolain. I found that a very effective use of the narrative tools available and it certainly helped me understand Wynn's urgent desire to have Caithe kill her before Faolain can get to work.

The cut scene confirms the suspicions many, myself included, have been nursing since even before the game began: the Sylvari are tainted. Now we know how and by whom. I'm more glad than ever that I didn't create my new elementalist as a walking plant. I played an Iksar in Everquest when Kunark launched. I know what it feels like to play a character that every NPC in the world would like to kill. It's a hard road.

The episode concludes with a boss fight: Mordremoth's lieutenant again from the fight that nearly killed The Pale Tree. Compared to just about all the previous LS boss fights this one is very straightforward although I managed to make it ten times harder by missing one simple mechanic. It was only after I'd died about six times that a quick visit to the forums told me what I should have noticed for myself - the nasty, invulnerable shadow critters that kept putting out the fires can be killed with a simple application of Divine Light.

With that figured out the rest of the fight passed without difficulty. Dead dragonnette. High fives all round. The end. Only it's not.

At this point we are treated, and I mean that quite literally, to not one but two cinematics. Both are absorbing, thrilling and disturbing. Also spectacular. There's a great deal going on but the main themes appear to be the failure of The Pact's aerial assault on Mordremoth and the complete destruction of the airship armada, the turning of the Sylvari to dragon minions and the death of all the members of Destiny's Edge except Rytlock. Oh, and we're getting an expansion and it's called Heart of Thorns.

It's a lot to take in. Luckily Vigil Warmaster Wylliam at Camp Resolve replays the video. Which is unsettling because he also gives the welcome new recruits speech all about preparing for the days ahead. In fact the whole of Camp Resolve seems to be locked in a timewarp, still hard at work building the airships we just watched crashing in flames. I'm no fan of phasing but this really is a hefty jolt for the old suspension of disbelief to soften.

Still, that's a minor cavil. Overall this was an excellent conclusion to Living Story 2. In addition to the advancement of the plot and the visual feast I felt the combat was much better balanced for the expected audience. For the most part we get to fight as our own characters, using our regular abilities on regular mobs, which is exactly how it should be. There are very few new mechanics to learn and those there are are very straightforward. The final boss fight is blessedly short with just two phases rather than the usual three to six.

There are still enough loose threads to darn a dozen socks of course. Caithe skips off with Glint's egg yet again. Mr E doesn't get a mention. Taimi doesn't even make an appearance. The two cinematics seem to contradict each other over what happens to Destiny's Edge (and if they are really all dead I will believe it only when we find their corpses while exploring the Maguuma jungle - and probably not even then).

Where we go from here will be very interesting to see. There seems to be some confusion over whether or not this is the final episode of Living Story 2. I would anticipate some kind of coda or epilogue in two weeks time, right after the Big Announcement on the 24th. Whether there's a third season of the Living Story is uncertain. I'd bet against it.

One thing at least does seem beyond question: ArenaNet have succeeded in getting our attention once again.

Stand Well Back! Elementalist Coming Through! : GW2

"Not much chance of me going a hundred hours without making a new character somewhere"

Ah, how well I know me! As it happened it was less than a hundred minutes after I wrote the above that I found myself closing the character creation screen in GW2 for the twelfth time. The blank space in the line-up is filled. There's a new Asura in town.

I did think about other races. Charr, obviously; somehow, though, I have difficulty seeing the Charr as spellcasters. I think that has something to do with the Flame Legion and their seemingly infinite supply of "shamans"; most of whom actually seem to be elementalists stuck in Fire Attunement. I'd hate to get mistaken for one of them.

So, no Charr. Since the whole point of buying the new character slot was to get an Elementalist onto the nominated WvW account, Charr was out. Norn I also dismissed immediately. It's probably my least-favorite race to begin with and anyway the other Ele is a Norn. I'm substituting her not cloning her.

Don't think I picked the golem one before...

I considered Sylvari. I do have a mild desire to add a female Sylvari to the roster sometime. Mrs Bhagpuss has demonstrated, repeatedly, and with much variety, just how distinctive and elegant Sylvari can be made to appear, something you would never know from looking at the one example of the race on my roster, a stick-thin male Guardian whose dull green armor seems to grow on him like mouldy bark. It would be nice to have one distinguished-looking character among the gallery of clowns, nuns and ne'er-do-wells that stare out at me every time I log in.

The question is: is this really a good time to bring another Sylvari into the world? What with Scarlet's shenanigans, The Pale Tree in a coma, Caithe running off with the egg and that sociopath Canach curdling beside the least-trustworthy aristocrat in Tyria (a position for which there is much competition, let it be said...), well, the entire race has to be seen as suspect both from the perspective of players and Tyrians alike. After all, when your best option for a role model is Trahearne you know you're in trouble.

So no, not a good time for Sylvari. That leaves Human or Asura. The entire game has clearly been optimized around the human model so they have that going for them when it comes to looks but really, humans are quite dull. I play one in real life (not very well) so it's not much of a come-on to log in and play one in virtuality.

Lack of self-confidence is unknown in Asuran society.

All of which half-hearted option-pondering brought me back to exactly where I knew I'd end up: Asura. They're just so...uplifting. Your spirits rise as soon as you see one. Well, mine do. And there's really nothing to match the sight of half a dozen Asuras boiling off the waypoint  in answer to a map call to Bay, bouncing across the dock and into the water like so many snaggle-toothed superballs. If I'm going to be playing this fresh Elementalist in WvW I want to be a part of that.

The requisite nose-shortening and ear-pinning undertaken, Colleges chosen and projects selected (hoping this time I didn't yet again pick a combination that leads to the same "Personal Story " I got the last three times), it came time, finally, to step into Tyria. The intro/tutorial hasn't gotten any better over the years but it has at least gotten shorter or I've learned to skip. In a matter of minutes the little firebug was standing at the craft stations in Yak's Bend's Citadel going through the bank for xp scrolls.

I would like to level up a character through the new New Player Experience to see just how good, bad or indifferent it feels but  that's going to have to wait. This here is an Elementalist in in a hurry. Just show me the fast lane to 80.

In the bank were several Experience Scrolls, the ones that jump you straight to Level 20. She read one of those first. Then she found a stack of thirty Tomes of Knowledge, which give one level each. She read through the lot. Fast readers, Asura. That took her to level 50.

In theory that should have been that: "Level 50 in Less Than A Minute" but that would be too easy. No, first we have the aforementioned New Player Experience to contend with. Just because you skipped the actual leveling process don't think you get to skip the fifty level "How To" guide.

Every single level comes with a prize. There's a little diamond in the lower right corner of the screen to click and clicking it opens a big "Look What You Won! You Clever Old Thing You!" reward window. There's no avoiding it - you're going to be complimented and backslapped for doing absolutely nothing, over and over again.

It was fun. A bit like watching a home-movie on fast-forward or your life flashing before your eyes as you drown. One of those. Most of the stuff was either useless to begin with or instantly outgrown as the levels chugged on but towards the end there were some decent items. Anyone who's played GW2 will  recognize that a Rare quality Aquabreather is definitely not to be sniffed at!

Fortunately we began by grabbing several bags from the Guild Vault or there might have been an overflow crisis. Even so the available space filled up fast. In an annoying and entirely unnecessary precaution against inflation of the economy all the items are Soulbound, non-salvageable and unsellable so the finale of the "pulling things out of thin air" magic act was the serial destruction of everything she'd been gifted. It did make the whole exercise seem singularly pointless but then the alternative would be to suppress the rewards when you use a scroll and I'm certainly not advocating that. Free stuff is free stuff even when it's free stuff you immediately destroy..

Scraping around the bank we also found a stack of the new xp scraps that drop out of the latest daily chests. They give a couple of thousand or so xp each. I wonder if that scales? Next time I'll use them first just in case it doesn't. She got another two levels that way landing her at 52.

By now it must be apparent even to the casual observer that GW2 has chosen to take a singularly piecemeal and scattershot approach to giving players a leg-up to the end-game it famously doesn't have. Instead of the simple boost-to-90 or instant high level character of other MMOs we get a whole slew of in-game items that do the job in stages and require a deal of micromanagement.

They don't all stack with each other, either, even when they look identical and have the same names. It all smacks of a lack of both forethought and organization but I can't deny that it's more fun than just pressing a "take me to the top or as near as you're going" button. It has the benefit of tactility and that's something I value highly in my MMOs.

Once we'd had all the free levels we were going to get it was dress-up time. Gearing a new character on an established account is both cheap and easy these days. A full set of level 50 Rare armor, weapons and accessories from the WvW vendor certainly doesn't put much of a dent in six and a half million karma.  Runes and sigils from the TP run a few silver. I went with a set of Ogre Runes for the Zerker-friendly stats and the invaluable rock dog proc. I notice a lot of those rock dogs these days. Popular rune. Popular dog.

Lastly came the skills and traits. The leveling process left New Ele with over 50 skill points but that wasn't enough to take everything she wanted so she sped-read through thirty or forty of the four hundred or so skill scrolls piled up in the bank. The necessary trait unlocks cost just a few silver from the vendor.

You'd look smug too if you'd taken an enemy Garrison three times on your very first trip to The Mists.

The much-ballyhooed alternate options for opening traits up via gameplay make no more sense now than they ever have. Less. It's hard to imagine anyone actually heading out to "earn 100% Map Completion in Fireheart Rise" - a level 60-70 map - to open a blue adept trait useable at level 40 that costs 10 silver to open at the vendor, for example. Again these are mechanics that sometimes seem to have been designed by people who have not only never leveled up a character themselves but never even spoken to anyone who has.

In the end though I'm not sure if any of that matters. What does is that, for the hour or two I spent creating and preparing this new character I thoroughly enjoyed myself. There are a lot of ways to have fun in an MMO and doing things the long, slow, or hard way isn't the be-all and-all, much though I and others might bang on about it now and then. Sometimes it's fun to splurge.

If I'd had enough scrolls and tomes and scraps I would certainly have taken New Ele all the way to 80. As it is she's had all the bootstrapping the account and guild bank can offer. The next stage is to let her use up some of the many XP boosters we have lying around. Might even use a Guild Banner or two. And there's always the crafting option.

Level 80 here we come!

Level Best : EQ2

EQ2 is in a strange place these days when it comes to leveling. The devs seem keen for players to get a move on and not hang around in the low and mid levels. We get regular boosts, sometimes for everyone, other times just for the paying few.

This weekend Gold players (we used to call them Subscribers but that's Olden Days talk now, apparently) enjoyed a 150% bonus to both adventure and craft xp and last week SOE bumped up the instant high-level Heroic Character option so that it starts at 90 instead of 85. A while back, when someone was fiddling about under the hood trying to sort out the mess the expansion had made of tradeskill xp, the whole crafting xp curve got compressed so now leveling a crafter takes a fraction of the time it used to do.

The message coming from SOE Towers is mixed. Even though the devs want us to get on with it, they still seem to have clear (if occasionally conflicted) views on how and where we should be leveling. A number of changes came in along with the Altar of Malice expansion that were ostensibly intended to persuade players to do the final five levels in the newest content, changes that were seen by some as heavy-handed and coercive. Over the following weeks adjustments and tweaks were made to address some concerns but then the controversial decision was taken to remove all xp from player-made dungeons, thereby shutting down the most popular option for fast leveling. 

The whole thrust seems to be all about getting players through the first 90 levels as quickly as possible, skipping them altogether if necessary, so everyone can cluster together in a critical mass in the content that was created during the last 12-18 months. As a way of getting around the longtime problem of population-dilution that relatively-successful MMOs have always suffered it seems to be working.

There's another motivation behind the drive to get everyone to the top of the ladder, too, it seems: a belief that old content just doesn't do a good job of representing the best an MMO has to offer. The cutting edge content, artwork and gameplay are all to be found in whatever zones, maps or expansions the designers worked on most recently, goes the argument, so to direct players anywhere else would be to do them a disservice.

It's not a belief that's unique to SOE of course. Blizzard chose to funnel everyone into the last 10 levels by bundling a free Level 90 character with the current expansion. That clearly paid off - well enough that we should probably expect to see something similar become an industry norm, at least for the few themepark MMOs that do well enough to get expansions.

Companies using a F2P model will necessarily hope to monetize the process (a Heroic Character in EQ2 will run you $35 if you buy your Station Cash at face value, although most regular EQ2 players probably get theirs for a lot less than that) but it may well be that future expansions will see everyone get one free bunk-up to somewhere near the top.

No doubt there will be variations on the theme. There's speculation that GW2's "expansion", if and when it comes, will use some kind of level-splitting mechanic to encourage (or even force) players to start over, all in the same place, perhaps effectively creating two separate games. Whatever the mechanics used, though, it does begin to beg the question "So what are all these levels for, then?".

It's not just levels though, is it? Once you start to pull on this thread the whole tapestry begins to unravel. Why keep all these old, barely-used maps and zones and dungeons? Or these ancient quests and events and raids that no-one ever does any more? In fact why waste time on a "world" in the first place? Instead of spreading everything out wouldn't it be easier to sell each of these "expansions" as a brand-new, standalone game - the next episode in an ongoing series? Just close down each version when the new one's ready.

Transfer the characters (maybe just the names) and you're off and running. All the thrills and all the publicity of a new product launch without the trouble of having to come up with an actual new product. You could even sell alpha/beta access to the new one for, oh, what, say half the lifetime of the old? Run them in perpetual overlap.

The benefits are obvious. No need for divisive stat squishes or re-balancing: there's no power creep and the "inflated economy" resets before it becomes a major pain. Could probably even re-use a lot of the art assets if you go with the ever-popular cataclysm scenario. Once you start to look at it this way it's hard to remember why anyone ever thought a truly "persistent virtual world" was a good idea in the first place.

Naturally the games need to stay online. We need that social media integration. Can't keep the digital downloads flowing without all those Twitch streams and Twitter feeds. We can keep "massively multiplayer" too - more players = more microtransactions (although perhaps we should start calling them macrotransactions? "Micro" is a tad unambitious after all...). So I guess we can still market these things as MMOs. Be a shame to lose the brand recognition...

Eh? What? What's happening? Hmmm, I think I might have nodded off for a moment there. Was I having some sort of bad dream? What was I going to write about? Oh yes, my weekend in EQ2.

Well, the berserker didn't quite make 100. Topped out at 99.7. Even with 150% server xp, full vitality and a 110% potion running, the xp that dribbled in from the AoM questline wasn't all that impressive, so it was back to Freeport to see a Chronomage and off to good old Chelsith for a couple of circuits before banging through a few mentored dungeons. If they want us to do the new content perhaps they might make it competitive. Wait, I didn't say that! I like my mentoring xp!

The new zones are gorgeous though. A visual feast and beautifully designed. Tons to look at and pleasingly little to fight before you get to see it. I took a lot of screenshots and gosh-wowed all over the place. That globe is freakin' amazing! And I got a version for my house!

The storyline continues to be interesting if completely confusing. I lost track of what was going on a while back but I know the Akheva are in it up to their necks and something about the Shissar? Anyway, the last few quests should just about see me over the line even without bonuses.

Also I got some crafting in that took my Sage from 62 to 75 in just over an hour. I remember when that would have taken a week. And the sage started Raffik's questline. It was nice to see the little fellow again. So, a fun weekend, all in all. Let's do it again sometime soon. And when I'm a hundred I might start a new character. Er.. when the Berserker is level 100 I mean. Not much chance of me going a hundred hours without making a new character somewhere.

There's nothing like leveling up, is there? I love it. Can't get enough.

All The Burning Bridges: GW2

Jeromai has a deeply disturbing speculative post concerning the upcoming Big Announcement that ArenaNet have planned for Pax South at the end of the month. The gist is this: what if the whole of the first three years of GW2 were just the bait for the biggest bait&switch in the history of MMOs?

It all comes out of the recent video teaser entitled "Point of No Return", an apparently innocuous little squib that I watched when it came out and then immediately forgot. Others, however, saw more in it than I did. Some found their thoughts drifting back to Tyrias's past; to The Searing.

The Searing was - I guess is, since you can go and experience it right now by logging into the original Guild Wars and playing through the Origins campaign from the beginning - the previous holder of the oscar for "Biggest Bait&Switch In An MMORPG". I remember it vividly from my original playthrough back in 2005. It remains one of the most impressive and disturbing uses of the MMO form for what you could loosely call an artistic purpose.

Steering clear of the lore and avoiding detailed spoilers (although even knowing 'something happens' is itself a spoiler), Guild Wars begins by allowing you to make a character and letting you believe you're playing a particular kind of MMO in a particular kind of setting before smashing the whole thing up with a big hammer and making you start over again from scratch. This video catches the tone quite nicely although you can only get the emotional impact by playing through the game itself.

At the time it happened I hated it. I really hated it. I loved pre-Searing Ascalon from the moment I stepped out onto those golden, autumnal grasslands. I loved the petty problems and the little quests. I was ready for weeks, months of the same. Then I got to about level five and all of that was snatched away. I was hopping mad.

Still, I'd only been playing for a few hours and my character was only level five. I got over it pretty quickly, especially when what came next turned out to be quite compelling. By the time I'd reached the conclusion of the Origins storyline and was able to look back from the dizzy heights of level 20, over the month or so the journey had lasted, I was already taking a much more sanguine view of the whole approach. Yes, it was shocking but it was a real coup of storytelling and a highly impressive use of the limited narrative tools available to an MMO designer at the time. +1 ANet.

Now here we are all these years later. There's a dragon stirring and we know from the examples of Orr and The Far Shiverpeaks that, when dragons wake, everything changes. Orr is a wasteland, drowned and razed, filled with undead following Zhaitan's rise. The formidable, if inscrutable, Kodan, supposedly immortal, creators of city-sized ships hewn from ice, live as refugees, driven south by the awakening of Jormag. No-one knows what's happening down in The Crystal Desert, where Kralkatorrik fell after the abortive battle with Destiny's Edge because no-one has been able to go there or return ever since.

Mordremoth, the latest dragon to stir from its slumber, turns out to have been sleeping right below us. Given the examples of recent history how can we expect to carry on as normal now Scarlet has woken him up? Here we have motive, we have opportunity and we have form. Hence the speculation.

 ArenaNet have done this before, after all, and it worked. It's almost becoming their Modus Operandi: there's not only The Searing to consider but the long, slow death of Lion's Arch. A region; a city; why not the whole known world?

That's the in-game logic with a salting of house style. There's more to it though. ArenaNet have been adamant since launch that GW2 will not have boxed expansions. They leave the tiniest wriggle room but emotionally the tone has always been "Not on our watch". Instead we've been served the thrashings and churnings of The Living Story plus intermittent Feature Packs that purport to offer (yet evidently do not), the free equivalent of a standalone, purchased add-on.

NCSoft reports show earnings declining, while trade reports confidently outline the expected action to remedy that problem - the release of planned expansions. Meanwhile ANet was spared in NCSoft's latest round of cost-cutting and there's known to be a large development team working on...something.

For a while I've been wondering how ANet might find a way to square the circle of having to release an expansion for financial reasons while still being able to claim, for reasons of personal prestige, that no expansion was released. This could be the answer. Instead of adding a whole new region or continent replace an existing one. That way Tyria hasn't been "expanded"; it's been "changed".

Well, it would be a bold move, that's for sure. A hubristic, arrogant, "Look at me Mummy!" attention-seeking move, yes, but undeniably a bold one. What it wouldn't be, of course, is original. Wasn't there another MMO that tried something really quite similar not so long ago? Stap me if there wasn't a dragon behind that one, too.

Dominant though WoW has been in the genre, this particular piece of Blizzard wisdom would be an odd model to emulate. I don't think Cataclysm is generally reckoned to be WoW's finest hour. Wasn't that the period when the game really began to bleed subscriptions? Why, yes it was.

After nearly three years observing the outcomes of whatever passes for decision-making at ANet Towers, though, I really wouldn't put anything past the current regime. The tastes or interests of players seem to bear little or no relevance in the lurches in direction the game spasmodically suffers. Neither does anyone seem especially interested in maximizing revenue streams.

Rather, they seem to revel in making changes a lot of players don't like while attempting to sell them things they don't want. It's true that MMO players are a notoriously curmudgeonly audience, willing to ascribe the worst motives to everyone but themselves, but even in that light GW2's relationship with its audience has been...difficult. For me, most everything that happens seems to be best understood as a series of internal power-plays and positionings, which, to be fair, is probably how companies with hundreds of career-minded individuals all focused on a single product usually tend to operate.

Even so, even with the most self-obsessed, solipsistic of world-views, sealed in the hermetic bubble of management meetings and focus groups, surely tearing down the world and starting again from scratch couldn't seem like a good idea to anyone.

Could it?

Normal Service Will Be Resumed When I Get Around To It : GW2, EQ2, Istaria

It's been a quiet week around these parts at least as far as blogging goes and it looks like might stay that way over the weekend. It's not due to any lack of ideas or enthusiasm - just time.

What time I have been able to find has gone straight to playing, which I guess is a good thing. In GW2 there's been one heck of a tussle going on in The Mists all week. T2 has turned into a right old grudge match and it's been hard not to spend every available minute manning the cannons or walking the yaks. Anything less feels like slacking.

Then there's the interminable Wintersday. If only I'd missed a round right at the start but no, I had to get into a perfect run of dailies every day (yes, even Christmas Day) on both accounts. Now I'm stuck on some kind of self-inflicted "I've started so I'll finish" treadmill. So unlike me. Well, I have been ill.

Thank the gods the Charr don't believe in that I never got going on Frostfell this year. As Wilhelm observed, Frostfell is still going, too. What is it with MMO holidays? Why do they always have to limp on and on? Especially the midwinter ones. Oh well, only another few days.

Speaking of EQ2, the other factor mitigating against blogging this weekend is the 150% bonus xp bonanza for subscribers members that just began. It's too tempting to ignore and I really should try and hit 100.

Istaria has cat-people? When did that happen?

For some reason I derailed myself a while back by maxing Weaponsmith and I've barely logged in since. I think somehow it flipped some kind of "I've finished" switch in the same way filling my free player Labor Points bar did in ArcheAge (which I also would like to get back to playing, some time).

There's nothing remotely rational about such reactions. They aren't choices or decisions. They just occur. It's disturbing how frequently an apparently innocuous, often quite positive event in an MMO, particularly the completion of a personal goal, leads to my interest in playing that game dissipating. I bet that's something developers don't allow for in their retention plans - or maybe they do and I just set unexpectedly achievable goals. 

I hardly help the situation by diversifying yet further into more MMOs but I'm doing that too, of course. The time that I could and otherwise probably would have spent playing EQ2 this month has mostly gone to Istaria. Yes, that old thing.

The reason that came about was serendipitous. Or is that fortuitous? Co-incidental? Whatever, I didn't plan on doing it, that's for sure. I bought Horizons on release and although I never played it to any meaningful degree it looks as though I must have used my regular email address to sign up (something I absolutely never do - or haven't for a decade and more. Shows how long ago it must have been) because since the game, renamed Istaria, came under its current management some years back, I get a kind of Annual Report every December that outlines what has been added to the game during the year.

The bells! The bells!

It's always impressive. This year it was impressive enough that I was goaded into downloading it for, what, the fourth time? Every other attempt at playing Istaria lasted just a session or two but this time round I seem to be making some progress. Level 9 in my main combat skill at least! I may just stick at it a while. It would be nice to see something past the first zone.

So, just a set of excuses for why I haven't written much lately. Next week Mordremoth returns in the latest Living Story hiccup and towards the end of January there's the heavily-trailed Future of GW2 reveal at Pax South. That should generate plenty of commentary, complaint and speculation even if I am futzing around in a couple of decade-old has-beens and never-weres instead.

Plus there's an Istaria report to put together. I think I need to get a little further for that, though. Meanwhile, those damned handbells won't ring themselves...

What's In A Name? : Project:Gorgon

Project: Gorgon is the little MMO that could. It failed two Kickstarters but it just keeps on going. Last week the game Greenlighted on Steam. It also has a spiffy new website , a wiki and of course you can actually play it right now. There's an enjoyable and stable "very early" version of the game available, which is well worth taking a look at, especially if you're one of the gang that's hoping someone might come up with a new old-school MMO "done right".

Eric Heimburg, the developer behind Project: Gorgon, seems to know what he's about more than most indie MMO devs. He's doing everything he possibly could to turn his dream into a reality and making a pretty good fist of it, too. So, the question has to be asked: why did he give his little darling such a terrible name?

Almost every positive post you come across (and everyone who's tried Project: Gorgon is positive about it) mentions the name. No-one has a good word to say about it. It doesn't work on so many levels.

It includes the word "Project", for a start. That makes it sound experimental and unfinished. It's only two words long and yet there's a colon in there, which makes it awkward to say out loud (you have to drop in an uncomfortable, half-beat pause) and even more awkward to abbreviate. (When you do shorten it to initials you get "P:G", which both looks weird and suggests the equally inappropriate concepts of "Parental Guidance" and piano-moving primates - or at least it does where I come from).

If I say it's my house it's MY HOUSE, alright?

It's also the kind of name that sounds as though it might "mean something" yet nothing I've been able to find on the website or while playing the game offers any clue as to what that something might be. Is it a game based around Greek Mythology? (Clue: no, it's not). Maybe cheesemaking? (hmm...could be). Beats me. Eric?

However the game came by its name, that name can't be helping things. But then, how important is a name to to the success of an MMO anyway? It's not as if there's a long and illustrious heritage of meaningful and elegiac titles throughout the history of the genre, is it?

There's the "Name Of Existing IP With "Online" Tacked On" approach that's been the go-to for conservative marketing managers since 1997: Ultima Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online, The Elder Scrolls Online... There was arguably a point to that back when being "online" was both unexpected and a selling-point but it seems curiously archaic now, although it's a choice that does at least have the benefit of clarity.

Underwater effects may need a little tweaking...

Then there's the "Big It Up" approach - EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Second Life, where the name tries to sell you on something that's just too vast to be contained in any petty offline space. Or the ever-popular Made-Up Fantasy Place Name - Alganon, Istaria, Zentia, Mabinogi - seemingly chosen from a random Scrabble hand - that hopes to convince you there's an entire world to explore rather than just a handful of lackluster maps.

Some aim to pique your curiosity with their simplicity: EVE (the link I found to the origin of whose name now leads to a 404 error, making the mystery even more intriguing) Rift, There, Trove, while others rely on the emotional power of a descriptive phrase - Dark Age of Camelot, The Secret World, Pirates of the Burning Sea, City of Steam.

In the end, though, how much does a name matter? WildStar is a pretty solid title for an MMO with a space-opera setting and colorful, cartoonish visuals but it doesn't seem to have done anything to draw that game to the attention of an audience outside the specialist MMO ghetto. Rusty Hearts is one of the most evocative names yet to have graced any MMO but that one closed down a few months back and much though I admired the name I'd never even gotten as far as downloading it.

Forever autumn.

Certainly an MMO doesn't need a name that makes any sense if it's going to succeed. Runescape is one of the most successful MMOs ever despite having a name seemingly completely devoid of any semantic value whatsoever. Guild Wars 2, famously and controversially, is an MMO which doesn't accommodate Guild vs Guild combat. I can't help thinking, though, that, while an MMO may be able to rise above a poor title, having a name that generates a media-friendly acronym like WoW can't have done Blizzard any harm all these years.

So, Project: Gorgon may have a terrible name but is it really that much more terrible than most of the competition? You can argue precedent - MMORPG.com's extensive list of games includes four other "Project..." somethings. Of course, one of those is Blizzard's "Project: Titan", which is hardly a propitious omen, and the others are Blackout, Zomboid and Powder, which I'm willing to bet no-one reading this has ever bothered to investigate.

Just another idyllic Cotswold village.. apart from there's a freakin' praying mantis the size of a horse!

No, as far as I know, there's only one MMO that's ever achieved even a modicum of success with the "Project" label hung around it's neck and that's Project: Entropia, generator of all those news stories concerning unfeasibly large cash transactions for virtual islands over the years. It's probably not quite the model of MMO design and philosophy that Eric plans on emulating. And, anyway, even Project: Entropia changed its name, long ago, to the more professional-sounding Entropia Universe.

As SOE found with EQ: Landmark and EQ Next, if you're not careful you can find yourself stuck with a working title that no-one planned on keeping. The time to switch out a bad name is as soon in the development process as you realize just how bad it is. With Project: Gorgon now on Steam it's probably too late already.

Still, it could be worse. At least they didn't go with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.

Start As You Mean To Go On

I don't do New Year's Resolutions like Syp does. I don't really do Predictions like Wilhelm. I do, however, occasionally come up with some vague goals, like Keen.

This year I came up with a few that sounded like they might be feasible.

1. Spend a bit less time playing GW2 and a bit more time playing other MMOs. Any other MMOs would be an improvement. GW2 pretty much ate last year. And the year before that. A few new MMOs would be good. Or at least some different old ones.

2. Write more short blog posts. Shorter, anyway.

There's a synergy there. Or a failsafe. One of those. If the posts take less time to write then there's more time to play so I could get more games in even if I still played just as much GW2. It's a theory.

It all started well enough. Second day of the year and I'm level five in an MMO I've never played until couple of days ago and last night I re-installed an old MMO I've dabbled with once or twice without ever getting far. I'd say more about those but:

3. Don't start raving about MMOs I've only played for five levels and then, after two or three posts where I come off sounding like a children's TV presenter on Ecstasy leading an EST seminar, never mention them again. (Actually that's more of a Resolution than a Goal now I come to think about it...)

So, we'll get back to those new/old MMOs if and when I actually play them long enough to have an opinion on something beyond the tutorial. Maybe. Meanwhile...

GW2 had a sale. Character slots were 600 Gems. Down from 800. It was a 24-hour sale. There were only 10 hours left!  I bought one.

I had an excuse a reason. The two account plan has worked wonderfully for ages and it's still great for some things but the more ANet balance around the unity of the Account, not the Character, the more that plan frays around the edges.

Specifically, I do a lot of WvW, and it would be really nice to have all those ranks stacked on the one account. Unfortunately my two favorite WvWers are split, one on each - the super-defensive ranger on the one, the hyper-offensive elementalist on the other. I've been planning to start a second Ele on the ranger's account for several weeks. I was waiting for a sale on character slots. I was betting there'd be one at New Year. I won that bet. Now I have to level him or her.

Oh well. Let's be positive about this. I have a lot of experience scrolls lying around. It takes no time to get to 80 these days. It shouldn't up my GW2 hours that much more. Probably.

And this post is quite short.