Seasons Come, Seasons Go

As the days drift into summer and I prepare to go back to work after a longish break it occurs to me to take stock of what I'm currently doing and what I might do in the months to come, at least when it comes to playing MMORPGs. For an uncomfortably long time it felt as though just about all I played was GW2 and, while I still play far more of that than anything else, at least it seems now that other games and projects are beginning to push their way in, at last.

GW2

GW2 is still dominant. I have a fanciful idea that if Mrs Bhagpuss wasn't so keen on it I might play less but the fact is I still play a lot of it when I'm home alone and she's out at work. It remains one of the best pick-up-and-play MMOs I've ever enjoyed. There's always something to do or somewhere to go and very little ever gets in the way of going there and doing it.

I think very much of the game's success rests on that incredible ease of access. I've never known any MMO with such an ever-open, revolving door, through which old faces re-appear without fanfare day after week after month after year. I wonder whether the upcoming major revamp of the trait and skill system will affect that negatively? I know that having to redo all my choices after a similar event has all but killed my interest in other games.

As we all twiddle our thumbs as we wait for Heart of Thorns the focus in our house is very much on the War in the Mists. Since Yaks Bend won the third WvW tournament last autumn and rose to the ranks of Tier Two we've been locked in a never-ending grudge match with Fort Aspenwood.

It's important to treat your enemy with respect.

Apparently there were some kind of shenanigans last week while we were away on holiday and this week there is a war of retaliation going on. We woke up on Saturday morning to find that YB had taken control of the whole of FA's borderland and waypointed all their keeps, which is the WvW equivalent of slapping someone in the face with a leather gauntlet. Our crazed and glorious leader, who almost literally never sleeps, then proceeded to stay awake for more than 48 hours making sure we held the lot.

Since then it's been a series of huge battles that never seems to end. All weekend I kept meaning to log out and do something else but there was always an emergency somewhere. As I write this we are still just short of 7k ahead, down from a high of 22k and I'm itching to log in and see what the maps look like.

Enter the Mesmer. Take 2.

I did find time to make my second mesmer, something I've been meaning to do for a while. As we approach HoT I'm trying to consolidate onto a single account for expansion purposes and my only mesmer is on the wrong one. The gold-to-gems exchange rate was as good as I've seen it for a while at the weekend so I dug into my warchest and bought another character slot.

The natural inclination was to go for yet another Asura although my first Mesmer is a human for some reason I forget. Mrs Bhagpuss has a Charr mesmer that she says is very funny to play. In the end though I decided to go for a Sylvari, just because there's an outside chance that race might have some special role in the expansion content and I currently don't have one on the right account.

The next question is whether to level the mesmer normally or boost her with xp and leveling scrolls. Since I like leveling so much chances are it will be the former although I did use one of the Advance Directly To Level 20 scrolls just to get a bit of a running start.

GW2 probably takes up two-thirds to three-quarters of my playtime each day. The rest is split between Everquest, EQ2, Dragon Nest and now Villagers and Heroes.

No Officer, I wasn't begging. My feet were just tired. Yes, I'll move along now.

 

Everquest

EQ at the moment seems to mean Ragefire. My necro dinged nine at the weekend. He's still trudging to Blackburrow and back every session, combining leveling with faction-raising. It sure takes a lot of gnoll teeth to convince that Captain Tillin a gnome's not up to no good.

I'm acutely aware I ought to get some grouping in just for the fun of it but I can't see it happening this side of Kunark. I'd love to do the Sarnak Fort in Lake of Ill Omen again. Maybe I should start a druid in preparation. Still, I've already played more than I expected and I think there are a few more sessions left in me before I wander off.

When Ragefire peters out I'd like to get back to my Magician who's currently a smidge away from dinging 90. It would be lovely to have a max level character in EQ again but the level cap is now 105 and those 15 levels, solo, even for a mage, the most capable of all solo classes in modern Norrath, would take me a year of Lessons at least.

Remember me? No, apparently not.

 

EQ2

The channeler I started in EQ2 seems to have gone dormant. When I do log in it's mainly to do the Phantom and Tranquil Sea weeklies for the tokens and armor. My Berserker is slowly kitting himself out to a very good standard for a solo character. I skipped the recent Rum Cellar DLC, which seemed mainly suitable for groups, but I will certainly be buying the autumn "Campansion", assuming it has the regulation amount of solo content.

The recently-announced server merges are unlikely to affect my regular characters, all of whom are on Freeport, the second most populated server behind Antonia Bayle. Server merges can spell bad things for an MMO but in this case its something people have been asking for for a long time so its probably good news on balance.

I seem to have gone all pastel crayonny.

 

Wind-Down Games

Dragon Nest has gone unplayed since I got back from Spain last week but only because of lack of time, not interest. There is a risk it might conflict directly with the new shiny, Villagers and Heroes, for the same end-of-day wind-down slot, though.

They aren't really anything at all alike, DN being fast, action-oriented and badly translated while V&H is stately, steady and beautifully written, but somehow they have a similar, light-hearted, ironic humor and a bright, cheerful surface that makes them both ideal to play just before bed. I hope I'll find time to keep playing both, unlike previous candidates like Eldevin or Istaria which seem to have slipped off the table entirely.

 

TSW

The changes to overland solo content difficulty in TSW didn't do much to hold me after I popped in to check it out. They're good changes but, honestly, I never really had much trouble with that part of the game. I soloed all the way to the end of Carpathian Teeth on my original run. It's the instances that I always had trouble with.

I would love to finish the main sequence quest from the original TSW sometime but I am stuck on a fight about three chapters or so from the end (I think) and I can't face doing it again. I'd need to do whatever it takes to overgear myself because it seems to be a DPS issue (as well as an incompetence one, but my experience in MMOs is that you can almost always upgrade your character to compensate for your inability as a player if only you wait long enough). Even the addition of mounts hasn't been enough to lure me to log back in.

He said wait right here, I'll be back soon. But that was months ago!

 

ESO and ArcheAge

ESO and ArcheAge both ended extremely abruptly for me. I was enjoying both of them, playing and blogging, and then I just seemed to hit a complete full stop.

In ArcheAge it was the moment I filled up my work point bar or whatever it's called. It felt like that was what I'd been aiming to do and now I'd done it and I literally never logged in again. Crazy.

In ESO it was the change to F2P. My free 30 days finished, there was a short gap before it went free and that small hiatus was enough to derail me. Again, haven't logged in since.

WildStar

I'd like to get back to both of those sometime but then there are other MMORPGs to consider. Not least WildStar. I looked at the box on Amazon yesterday. I was about to put it in my basket when I noticed the game is Region Locked, something I'd completely forgotten. I really dislike playing on European servers so now I have to think about whether to buy a box from Amazon.com (they will ship them, I checked) so as to get a US server code.

Or maybe when the game goes F2P it won't be region-locked any more. If so, I should maybe just wait. A region-locked F2P would seem very weird unless it was franchised to different companies across the world, which I don't believe WildStar is.

 

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Then there's SW:ToR. It's not a game I ever had any interest in playing but the current change in development direction makes me wonder if the original MMO-proper part of the game will be around for much longer. The upcoming Knights of the Fallen Empire that everyone's making such a big hoo-hah about doesn't sound so much like an expansion to me as a completely different game.

A game that I wouldn't call an MMO at all. With the months of 12X xp leading up to launch and the xpack coming with a free level 60 anyway it looks very much as though BioWare is going out of the MMO business and retrenching back to the single-player/co-op story model on which they built their latter-day reputation.

If that's the plan then SW:ToR would become an instanced lobby game not a real MMORPG. Maybe between now and the coming of KotFE will be the last chance to play the game as a proper MMO. If so I would want at least to give it a look before it goes away because for sure there will be no Original SW:tOR Emulator Project coming along later to satisfy anyone's historical curiosity.

So there's all that, plus a gazillion other possibles like Project: Gorgon and the Pathfinder free trial and Trove and who knows what else. I haven't even finished the main storyline in City of Steam, something I thought I'd have been done with a couple of years ago.

Ah well. To every thing there is a season as they say. Or, in the case of MMOs, a session, at least.

Here We Go Again : Villagers and Heroes

What I really need is a new MMORPG. That's what I'm always telling myself as I look at the twenty-plus already waiting on my desktop.

There's that Age of Conan box still sitting, sealed, on the bookshelf to my left, for example. That's a game that always looks great in screenshots. I ought at least to give it a try before Funcom go out of business. Or what about SW:ToR? It's clearly going somewhere these days although I'm not sure anyone knows where. Wouldn't it be terrible to ignore it for five years and then find out it had been great all along? That's a mistake I don't want to make again.

Anyway, I blame MassivelyOP. They will keep putting out these little teasers for things that sound interesting, MMOs I've never heard of, or ones I'd forgotten were still around, like Villagers and Heroes.

V&H is not a new game. Far from it. It's not even new to me. It started off several years back as a cheerful little browser-based romp going by the ultra-generic name of "A Mystical Land". I played it briefly back then and found it mildly amusing, especially in the way some of the NPCs were so blatantly rude to the player characters, but it never really stuck.

At some point there was a name-change to the scarcely less-generic "Villagers and Heroes" Some gameplay tweaks followed but although I popped back once or twice it still didn't grab me. Now here it comes again, this time trading under the title Villagers and Heroes: Reborn. The screenshots from the latest revamp looked promising, it was already installed, the icon was even right there on my desktop, so...

I tried my old login details and they worked. The new version of the game updated in a few minutes. I read the extensive patch notes while I waited. AVG threw a fit but I overrode that, gave it the relevant permissions and off I went for another round.

Apparently I'd made it as far as level nine last time. There was my old character. The graphical revamp appeared to have turned him nut brown. He looked like a seventy-year old farmer. I ran him around for a while until it occurred to me that since the entire start of the game had been given a makeover I'd be better off starting from scratch.

The game, which is F2P, allows you three character slots. Since there are four classes, the extremely traditional Warrior, Wizard, Hunter and Priest, I'm guessing you can buy at least a fourth slot to make up the full set. I already had a Hunter so this time round I went for Wizard.

Character creation is excellent. Really, really good. The whole look and feel is solid, professional, warm and inviting. There aren't a whole lot of subtle variations to be made to how your character looks but the choice is reasonable.

All the time you're on the character creation screen some plummy-voiced old thesp chats away in the background. He seems to have an agenda of some kind, or possibly a grudge. Maybe against you. It gave the whole thing a vaguely sinister, off-color air that I liked a lot. I wouldn't trust him to get me a donut from the commissary, I know that much.

As you go through the selection of starting skills and abilities, choose which part of the realm you hail from and flip through the pages of your biography, each choice you make adds a detailed paragraph to your character description. It's a very effective way to give every character an automated version of the kind of detailed background dedicated roleplayers would make up for themselves but no-one else ever bothers with. I thought it gave at least as good a result as GW2's similar system.

V&H also has by far the best random name generator I have ever seen. I spent about fifteen minutes just playing with it. It brings up a huge variety of names in a range of formats - ordinary one-word names like Norman or Rose, forename and surname pairs, portentous titles, typical fantasy gibberish, surreal combinations and straightforward names you might imagine working alongside in an insurance office...

I almost went with Katie Buck Mutton. I could feel her character coming through so strongly just from that name. Too strongly. I thought she might just take me over. I plumped for something plain and simple and in I went.

There's one of those fly-past introductions to the world, voiced by the same unreliable narrator. It judders and jerks, which is a known bug, and if it had lasted more than the minute or so it did I think it would have made me motion sick. Then you touch down in the new starting zone, Ethos Island.

Even back when it was called A Mystical Land this was always a game with strong, clear art direction and visual flair. The revised visuals keep the cartoonish look but bring it very much  up-to-date. The colors zing, everything looks solid, rounded, firm. It's one of those games that looks better when you're inside it than it does in screenshots (some games are the opposite) so, given that it looks good in screenshots...

When it comes to gameplay, V&H isn't breaking any new ground. It has been described as a "PvE Sandbox" and maybe it is but it sure has a lot of quests too. I like MMORPG questing. I like to read all the text, listen to all the dialog, follow all the plots. Anyone who doesn't like doing these things is not going to have a epiphany while playing Villagers and Heroes but for people who enjoy a well-written MMO quest with a sense of irony, a fluid prose style and a light touch, there's plenty here to enjoy.

I found myself caught up in the main storyline rather easily. Just what did failed Mayoral candidate Rhoda drop into the spooky old well after dark? What made Clementine deClancy vanish? What do the blood symbols on the note Chauncey's brother found mean?

The main-line quests are presented in great detail, first in the initial quest dialog and later in a diary-style write-up in your journal. Someone who actually knows how to write spent a long time over this stuff and it shows.The side-quests, of which there are many, get the same attention on the dialog but only a brief note in the diary. Every aspect of the UI, from the Quest Journal to the Inventory to the Crafting Window, is crisp, clean and very user-friendly.

It was nice to see that the residents of the realm haven't received any kind of politeness makeover. The unbearably snobbish Clementine dismissed me as a "filthy little ant" and Viggo thinks I have "a hooligan mouth" and sent me on a quest to get some soap to wash it out!

As I wandered about trying to find some I bumped into various crafting and gathering  trainers, which derailed my good questing intentions. Although I took Tailoring and Plant Lore at character creation, after a couple of hours play I somehow ended up as a Smith and a Miner. Doesn't matter - in V&H you can do all the things and on the evidence so far you'd want to because all the things are fun.

So, here I am in Lower Ethos Island down by the docks, looking for parchments stolen by the disturbingly intelligent local rats. I know how to Gnogment my weapons and I already killed a Daily Bounty Boss. If I was in the market for a new MMORPG this one would be in with a fair chance. Better than fair.

Good thing I don't have time for another MMO then, isn't it?

I Can See For Miles : GW2

One little wrinkle in the whole Pay-To-Win debate that never gets much of a mention is the huge disparity in hardware we all take for granted. It's something that sits in back of every aspect of the hobby from competitive PvP to solo questing.

Some developers make a huge effort to equalize the playing field within the game itself. All kinds of mechanics get a run-out. PvP matches impose a standard gear set, instances cap or snap to level, smart systems run buff checks and remove the ones they don't approve... It's a long list with a clear intent : get as close as possible to player parity.

Only no-one and nothing pays much attention to what's going on outside the game.

There's an event in GW2 called The Frozen Maw. It runs once every two hours in Wayfarer's Foothills. Like many of GW2's regularly-scheduled open raid events it's developed a culture and traditions all its own. As the pre-events conclude and the evil, dragon-worshipping shaman makes his awkward, egotistical claim that he can handle us all with a little effort, people begin quoting their frame-rates in chat.

Small turn-out today.

All big events have a tendency to drop frames but for some reason this one is the worst. As the shaman struggles to complete his ritual to summon the giant ice elemental that will never appear (I've seen the shaman win - nothing happens) the screen fills with flurrying snow. This is what usually gets the blame for the slowdown. As the snow thickens and more snow dervishes spawn frame-rates drop to single figures. Well, mine does.

My PC is getting on for five years old. It was low-mid range for a gaming rig when I got it. I've upgraded it somewhat over the years but I am guessing it would now class as straight entry-level as far as gaming goes. I was going to replace it this Spring but it still runs everything I want to play smartly and efficiently so I've put the decision off for a while.

As I'm strafing around, dodging and rolling with my 9FPS, frankly I can't tell much, if any, difference. Everything looks the same as it did when I had 40FPS, which is about the best I ever get. I read once that the human eye can't distinguish frame rates faster than 30 per second although I've since read that that's not true. Either way, any difference escapes my notice.

Meanwhile, however, there will always be some bright spark claiming 80FPS and listing all the components of his rig so we can admire his good fortune and good sense. Or, really, just his disposable income.

For PvE events taking place under the auspice of ArenaNet's All Must Win Prizes ethos this really doesn't matter. In WvW yesterday, though, a discussion occurred that pointed up how sometimes spending more money really can give you a direct competitive advantage, even in as forgiving a game as GW2.

Yaks Bend had a defensive trebuchet placed in what was supposed to be an unassailable spot inside a keep. Fort Aspenwood attacked and somehow took it down. This lead to the usual, inevitable accusations of hacking.

There used to be a widely-used software hack that allowed you to see further than you should have been able to and thereby to place the targeting circle over things that ought to have been out of reach. This practice, known as "zoom-hacking", largely disappeared when ANet added a first person view. They changed the whole way the camera works, expanded the field of vision and it became possible to do just about anything zoom-hacking used to do by using the legitimate in-game controls.

Extreme close-up!

The treb that got downed by an arrow cart, however, seemed to be beyond even the new, wider FoV. Except someone on our side knew better. He explained that it could be done by playing the game in Windowed mode and stretching the image across multiple monitors, thereby extending the maximum possible field of view.

I don't know if that is an accurate description but if we take him at his word it would, surely, make what happened a legal and legitimate tactic. No third party software or other is being used to alter GW2. There was a video demo of the practice on YouTube way back when the game was in beta in 2012.

So there you have it. Pay to Win. Spend more money out of game to get a clear in-game advantage. Buy a better graphics card, a faster CPU, a topline gaming mouse. Set up multiple monitors. Hire a masseur to stand behind your swivel chair and massage your shoulders as you play. The only limit to your potential advantage over other players is your wallet.

By comparison, a mere selection of codified official advantages, available for nominal sums through the official in-game cash shop, seems hardly worth complaining about.

Flying In Draenor: An Academic Question

For a while now Wilhelm has been trying to bring discussions on issues like the recent Blizzard Flying Controversy back to one fundamental question:

"For me, the great unanswered question in all of this remains how much control over their game should a developer be allowed, whether or not the dev’s view of how their game should be played should trump the player’s view, whether MMO studios be dictating a “right way” to play and should players accept that or not?"

With rather delicious irony commenters have largely ridden over that idea, preferring to bang on about whether they do or don't like to see flying in MMOs and whether or not Blizzard are dealing with the issue in an effective or even-handed manner. The notable exception is Azuriel at In An Age, who picks out the same Wilhelm quote I did to topline his own post.

Once again, though, Azuriel quickly becomes more interested in the underlying reason for the decision/reversal, spinning out a convincing explanation for how it might have happened that still doesn't really answer the question Wilhelm is asking. Which is hardly surprising. It's a question that no-one has really been able to answer in the last half century, though entire careers have been built on the attempt.

When I studied English at Cambridge in the early 1980s there was a war going on although I barely noticed it. I was largely taught by dons of the traditionalist mode, who still harked back to the strictures of Empson and Leavis. We mostly worked under the edicts of New Criticism in which close textual reading was everything.

At least I guess we did. I just read the books, turned in the essays on time and tried not to think about it. No-one really talked about this kind of thing in my clique, probably because most of the people I hung out with were reading Maths or Natural Sciences. My crowd was more interested in going to see Dolly Mixture at The Locomotive in between catching a dozen movies a week at the multiplicity of college Film Socs. and crashing every staircase party we could find. I didn't really take my studies seriously at university - I was mostly there for the social life and the popular culture, something I have never regretted and would still recommend as the best way to spend your college years.

In my final year, however, an event occured that made it impossible to ignore the fact that Something Big was happening. A huge row blew up between the Leavisites, the incumbent establishment of the English Department, and their sworn enemies, an ill-defined loose collective of supposed radicals fronted, largely unwillingly, by Frank Kermode.

It all came to a head over the question of whether Colin McCabe, a flag-waver for the Left and for the kind of structural approach to literary analysis abhorred by the Leavisites, believed by some to be both a drug-dealer and arms-runner, should or should not be promoted to full tenure within the English Department of Cambridge University, generally reckoned at that time to be the best in the world.

I remember going to a protest rally of some kind at the Faculty of English. I can't even remember which side it was for although I would by default have been against whatever I perceived to be the status quo. There were film crews from the main TV networks there and I watched it all play out on TV later that evening, almost certainly the only time Structuralism has featured on the Six O'Clock News.

McCabe wrote a clear and entertaining precis of his side of the affair that was published in The New Statesman a few years back. The Leavisites won their battle, McCabe left, Kermode resigned and I graduated and went back to reading comics and playing video games. I was a decade in recovery before I could read another "serious" novel.

That was probably a lucky break because the decade in question was the 1980s and it was a very good time not to be taking yourself too seriously while at the same time taking things that weren't seen as serious very seriously indeed. All the concepts I'd blithely ignored throughout my university career, if indeed I'd known they even existed, blew up around me.

My post-university social circle talked about Derrida and Foucault with the same intensity and informality they talked about Morrissey and Marr. The New Musical Express, my bible since the early 1970s, ceased to be the agit-prop, situationist playground of refugees from the collapsed underground press and instead became the domain of theory-addled autodidacts like Ian Penman and Paul Morley. After they drove it into the ground, commercially if not intellectually, I jumped ship to Smash Hits. Not even ironically although, of course, in the 1980s it was literally impossible to do anything unironically. Ironically.

Postmodernism was the sea in which we swam and I took to it like a fish to water. Nothing meant what it meant and even if it did no-one knew what that was. Every time I tried to explain my take on what William Gibson was getting at in Count Zero or what the lyrics of Rattlesnakes were trying to say, someone would handwave it all away with a derisive "that's the Intentional Fallacy" .

All these years, right up to researching this piece, I believed "The Intentional Fallacy" , which snorts that it's no business of the author to claim he knows what he's writing about, was some key tenet of Structuralist thinking, probably penned by some inscrutable Frenchman in 1975. Guess what? Turns out it was written in the mid 1940s and it forms one of the key planks of The New Criticism so beloved of the structuralism-loathing Leavisites. It's like the way if you go far enough to the Left you meet yourself coming back on the Right. Or something.

If you go to Literary Festivals, something I strongly advise against, or listen to programs like Radio 4's Bookclub, which I absolutely forbid, you will hear a seemingly endless procession of readers asking authors, sometimes aggressively, more often fawningly, what they "meant" by something they wrote. It always strikes me as about as useful an exercise as asking a cat what's on its mind.

Having grown up and formed my ideas in the smelting pot of uncertainty I find it a lot more uncomfortable trying to pin down what something is "for" or what it "means" than I do just letting it be what it wants to be, what I want it to be and what it becomes when those two things rub against each other. This is, in part, why I play MMORPGs the way I play them, why I often state that all MMOs are sandboxes and why, as a user, I never feel constrained by the intentions of makers.

In reply to something I said in the comment thread to Wilhelm's post linked at the top of this piece he observed "If they opt to not add flying, who is somebody to then exclaim that such an interpretation of the game is wrong? I mean, by bringing that up you are, by analogy, almost claiming domain to edit somebody else’s work."

Well, yes, I am. I do lay claim to that domain. It's a domain that all readers have over all books, all viewers over all films and all players over all games. I edit the work in my mind and it becomes my work. Every reading of every novel is a new work of art.

Although, of course, all of this is breaking down under technology, or perhaps it is. Playing an online game is like reading a book with the author still writing it. It's as if the words on the page could change while you slept so the character who died last night is alive again in the morning and the city she lived in has become a village. The malleability of form must surely soon outpace the ability of critics to parse it, if that didn't happen long ago.

Gaming may be at the forefront of the wave but it's a wave beneath which all certainty in narrative art will soon be drowned. This isn't a very helpful response to Wilhelm's question but it's the one I have. It's just too big a question for anything plainer.

Oh, when it comes to MMOs, the pragmatic answer might be that these are commercial projects, in which the only real point of conflict is what makes the most money now versus what might make more money for a longer time and the only "right way" to play might be the one that keeps the money rolling in, but that's an argument that derails when it runs up against the abutment of art. An Economics or Business Studies grad writing in response to Wilhelm's question might make it fly but I can't.

I can only respond as who I am - ex-punk, post-postmodernist, English grad, vacillating moral relativist. Until tomorrow, when I might be someone else, with a different answer.

Back To The Old House : EQ2, Everquest

Here we are again, home from our holiday. Had a great time, thanks for asking, and now I'm sitting here catching up on all the news. Although I took two tablets and an iPod Touch with me, plus a Bluetooth Keyboard and mouse that effectively turn my Linx 10 into a netbook capable of running most older MMOs albeit sluggishly, in the end I didn't even check my email or Feedly let alone play anything. It was good to have a complete break.

It does leave me with a mountain of blog posts and press releases to wade through, though. There were almost 200 items in the past week from Massively OP alone!  Blizzard's backtracking may have gotten the most attention but the most striking and unexpected piece of MMO news for me had to be Daybreak Games' announcement that EQ2 (or EQII as they seem to insist on calling it now) will be getting not one but two "Time-Locked" servers.

As I worked through the Massively news squib, Holly Longdale's Producer's Letter, Wilhelm's discussion piece and finally Feldon's summation it rapidly became apparent that not only is this supposedly impossible thing going to happen but that it's going to happen right now. Or if not quite that then at least next month. If there's one thing the recent change of ownership has made clear it has to be that being owned by a multinational was acting as a drag anchor for those livewire SOE devs.

The question, then, is no longer whether? or even when? but why? Why would I want to start another character on a new ruleset version of an MMO I'm already playing, especially since I'm very happy with the existing ruleset? That's the nub. All this our-past-is-our-future, retro-nostalgia that's sweeping across the MMO landscape right now is predicated on attracting a dissatisfied audience that needs to be lured back and by and large I'm not dissatisfied.

In my experience most MMOs improve with age. Once the initial gosh-wow of a new world wears off the large number of rough edges, unfinished systems and things that generally could have been better start to make themselves known and the games improve as those issues get addressed. Of all the MMOs I've played for longer than a few weeks I'd struggle to come up with more than a couple that I felt weren't becoming more enjoyable and more entertaining month by month, year by year, rather than the other way about.

Consequently I don't harbor much of a desire to get the old versions back. Ironically perhaps, the main exception to that rule that comes to mind immediately is GW2, which has barely been around long enough to have an "old" version. I'd love to have the launch version of that back (bugs fixed of course), original Lion's Arch and all. Unfortunately the opposite is what we're going to get.

Still, there's always the thrill of a new server. That's a big draw even without a new ruleset to go with it. Staring over is fun and starting over with a full server doing the same even more so. Only... where's the time going to come from? In my case chances are it's going to come from Ragefire. It seems somewhat unlikely that I'm going to find enough spare hours to level up characters on both EQ and EQ2 progression time-locked servers at once and by the time the latter arrives I will almost certainly be done with the former anyway.

If Daybreak have any sense they'll try to stagger the "progression" of these servers so that the various expansions unlock on some approximation of a quarterly schedule. I'm not sure how much of a crossover there is between the audiences for the two versions of Norrath but there has to be some synergy there. Played right, that could keep some people subbed and swapping between the two for a couple of years or more.

Since I'm already All Accessed up I have nothing but my time (and possibly my patience and my sanity) to lose by jumping every one of these trains Daybreak set rolling. In the case of Everquest itself I'm so far adrift of the cap any new content they come up with is notional so starting over looks disproportionally attractive.

When it comes to EQ2, though, I'm virtually bang up to scratch as a solo player and I'm a lot more excited about the Autumn Campansion (that's totally a word now, apparently) than I am about taking a nostalgia trip back to somewhere that, to be quite brutal about it, wasn't up to all that much in the first place.

Holly "Windstalker" Longdale has been going out of her way to stress that the upcoming servers are not any kind of "Project 2004" for which we should all give thanks.  My memories of original EQ2 are far from fond. It was a harsh, tedious and very badly thought-out mess of a game that took a year or more to shake down into some kind of shape.

There seems to be an alternate-reality version of history going around in which EQ2 c. 2005 was a challenging, grown-up sort of MMO. It wasn't. Solo it was attritional and tedious; grouped it was trivial and tedious. My overriding memories of grouping back then are of how we couldn't believe how mindless and unchallenging the group content was compared to what we'd been used to in Everquest.

Yes, the overland Heroic mobs that people keep harping on about were tough to solo. Of course they were - they were meant for groups. If you actually did them in a group the biggest challenge was keeping up with the tank as he ran from encounter to encounter. Dungeons were only harder in the sense that they were buggier and had scripts that broke all the time. Otherwise the group content was face-roll easy at level both above and below ground. Maybe the raiding was balanced - I wouldn't know. None of the rest of it was.

So, I'm very pleased we won't be getting that back, just a version of the current gameplay on a fresh server, much the way Ragefire works already. I'm sure I'll be able to find a few hours for it here and there and I hope it's a big success for Daybreak and makes them some money. Then I hope they spend the extra profits on making new content for the current game.

Stops Along The Road: Everquest

With the opening of a second Progression Server, Lockjaw, things have quietened down on Ragefire to the extent that I can log in without facing a queue at any time during normal EU play hours. That's not to say it isn't still very busy. The Qeynos newbie yard is still fizzing with new starters and the lifespan of a gnoll in Qeynos Hills is measured in seconds.

Blackburrow is heavily camped but the trains are still running. I pulled a small one myself yesterday but it was derailed long before reaching the surface. For my money, leveling up in Blackburrow remains one of the most enjoyable ways to spend time in any MMO. The eerie yipping and howling of the gnolls add to a strangely-pleasant sense of claustrophobia and impending doom unmatched by any of the other low-level dungeons.

The loot, of course, is not of great interest. It never was, especially to a caster. Yesterday someone linked a Black Alloy Medallion in chat, a low level item that has genuine utility. That drops in Runneyeye, which is a dungeon I've always found to be very dangerous. Still, I might have to make the trip.

 Time to pick over the corpses, Genartik.

Seeing it started me wondering what's happening with all of the zones that were added independently of expansions, like The Warrens, Stonebrunt Mountains or Jaggedpine. Typically those are attached to and seen as part of the "Classic" lands but which, since they were added later, have significantly better drops. I expect that was all hashed out in the discussions that took place before launch but I wasn't paying attention.

For now I'm quite happy with the full set of cloth armor I got from kobolds and orcs on my journey to Qeynos. Despite the extreme efforts players make to get their hands on it, and the extortionate prices currently being asked by the campers, gear really isn't all that important during the original leveling game, particularly for casters. If you discount the focus effects, which were added quite a lot later, the addition of a few points of Int or Wis is scarcely game-changing.

As Keen observed it's all about the levels and the spells that come with them. As a caster levels up in Everquest he or she gains access not just to upgrades that are very noticeable improvements but to completely new abilities. It goes a long way to explain why people who developed their understanding of what MMORPG gameplay consists of are so strongly attached to the leveling process.

I always meant to ask you, Tillin. What do you do with all these gnoll teeth I give you?

These days, even on Ragefire, you get access to something new every time you ding. If this was really 1999 you'd have to wait four full levels between each new set of spells. Four levels could take a week to do - or a month. By the time you were approaching that threshold the last lot of spells would be almost too weak to allow you to kill the creatures you needed to kill to progress.

Conversely, each time you'd struggled over that four level line and found an NPC who'd sell you your spells (often entailing some long and dangerous excursions to towers on obscure islands or unfriendly guilds of other classes) and completed the lengthy process of scribing the spells into your spellbook, for a level or so there, you felt like a boss. Well, a mini-boss.

And then the cycle would start over. I loved it. I loved having to explore and travel to find spells. I loved the way some spells could ostensibly only be made by players through the Research tradeskill but that that barrier could be circumvented by knowledge if, for example, you knew that another class got the same spell as of right. Shadowknights, for example, use some of the Necromancer pets that Necros are expected to research but, being too dim (as we always claimed) to make them for themselves, are allowed to buy them from their guild vendors. In Everquest knowledge is always power.

What's that strange, wailing sound?

Everquest doesn't really do convenience and never less so than in Classic. It's not just that player-friendliness wasn't much of a thing in 1999, although as EQ's longtime strapline "You're in our world now" always suggested, it certainly wasn't. It's more that convenience was intentionally designed out in the belief that having everything your own way isn't much fun, whereas struggling against the odds is.

As WoW profited by demonstrating, a lot of people don't share that attitude. I would have said I didn't either and aspects of it certainly chafed back in those supposedly golden days, when there were, without question, far more players complaining about the difficulty and inconvenience than were willing to stand up and defend it. I have to say, though, revisiting it once again, if in an ameliorated dosage,  it really is the irritation and frustration that makes the pearl when it comes to leveling.

I think the great reason leveling is now looked down on by many as an annoying speed-bump on the way to the real game is that the leveling process has become so bland and meaningless. And, yes, easy.

If I was old Van there I'd spring for a Name Change potion.

When people talk about MMORPG gameplay being all about journey it's often assumed they mean it literally - that it's the exploring and the sightseeing and the going out and about in the world that matters. That's true enough as far as it goes but what really made leveling in Everquest and its ilk so sticky was the way the journey always felt like you were getting somewhere.

It wasn't a journey in the sense of getting on a plane in London and stepping off in New York with no sense of having yet been anywhere at all. It was a journey like Laurie Lee's, as he walked out his front door one morning to walk from The Cotswolds to London and eventually found he'd walked all the way into the Spanish Civil War.

I'm a firm believer in the leveling game but to mean something it has to have far more structure, purpose and weight than it's been allowed these last few years. GW2, much though I love it, began with a very weak leveling game and then watered it down because focus groups and metrics showed it was too hard.

Convenience is all very well and I'm not advocating awkwardness for awkwardness's sake, but in the end each task you undertake needs to matter, somehow, and what's more it needs to matter at the time you do it, not as a mere marker on the road to something further down the road. This is a balance that, from all accounts, Vanilla WoW got exactly right. I wish now I'd been there to see it.

Dora The Accidental Explorer: Dragon Nest

My love affair with Dragon Nest: Oracle continues. I came home from work on Sunday (yes, Sunday, grrr!) to a lengthy and intense evening of World Vs World in GW2, mostly spent defending our borderland as Fort Aspenwood attempted to recoup an unexpected and heavy points deficit inflicted by forty-eight hours of sustained pressure from Yaks Bend.

As bedtime approached I was about ready to play something relaxing to wind down. My first thought was a little light leveling slaying gnolls on Ragefire. As I sat looking at the wealth of MMO icons on my desktop, however, the mouse pointer seemed to move as if of its own volition to the Dragon Nest symbol.

I haven't played DN:O for a few days because of an annoying bug that hangs the game every time you try to pass through a portal. Since you have to pass through a portal to do pretty much anything that tends to put a bit of a damper on things. It's a beta though so these things happen.

This time everything was fine. Dora was able to continue her search for the snarky apprentice sorceror who stole the communication device she needs to speak to her even snarkier sister fifty years in the future.

DN:O has a complicated plot that I am struggling to follow, not least because much of the translation is almost incomprehensibly bad. And yet I find myself involved and interested. It may even be that the fractured dialog enhances the mystery. It's as though I'm adventuring in a foreign land where my grasp of the local language is barely sufficient to make myself understood.

Dragon Nest has a lot of plot and a lot of quests. A good proportion of them are funny enough in the terrible translations to suggest they may be genuinely witty in the original. The following sequence in which long-suffering storage operative Warehouse Keeper Rupert finally blows his stack made me laugh out loud. Recognition humor at its finest.

There's so much going on in that sequence that speaks to why I appreciate DN:O so much. It has an attention to detail and a delight in nuance that few Eastern F2P's I've played can match, with the exception of the much-missed and wildly under-appreciated Zentia. Everything, from the choice of a word like "meiosis" to the spot illustrations suggest writers and creators who are genuinely invested in their work.

I love the hyperbole Rupert uses to try and get his point across; the way the writer pre-empts what should be Dora's option to respond with a description that suggests Rupert is ranting so hard she can't get a word in edgeways. Best of all, when he finally runs out of breath, all she can manage is a helpless ellipsis because, y'know what, he's right and she knows it!

That's not even all he had to say. It's about a third of it! He was really stoked. Rupert's was a truly exceptional rant but almost all Dragon Nest NPCs have a lot of dialog and I'm having a great time reading it, even if I sometimes have to wrestle with it to get it to make sense.

The humor extends well beyond the quest dialog too. In the screenshot above my character is proudly displaying the title she earned when she bit off more than she could chew, dying to a boss much higher than her, in an instance well above her level. He jumped in the air and came down heavily on top of her and up popped a "hidden" achievement that gave her the right to use the title "Squished". Which she does. With pride.

She was apprehensive that something similar (the dying part, not the getting an amusing title thing) might be coming up when she was tasked with chasing down a Minotaur Boss that the head of the Adventure's Guild himself seemed unwilling to tackle. Send a little girl to do a Big Man's job, why don't you?

I nearly fell off my chair when I passed through the portal and the Minotaur spawned in front of me, started up his crazy sound-system and challenged me to a dance contest. Which, somehow, I managed to win, two dance-offs to one.

It goes on like this. It's hyperactive, silly, imaginative and just downright fun. Played on "Normal" the fights are unchallenging, which is how I like them, but you can crank that up several notches if that's the kind of thing you go for. Even at the default setting the fights are too fast and frenzied for me to take screenshots. I did try but all I get are close ups of the back of my head or the inside of some monster's barrel chest.

The evening's entertainment ended soon after I curiously clicked on an NPC near the airship. I'd been running a series of quests for Airship Engineer Hubert which had left me under the impression that the airship had been out of service since little Kevin tried to take it for a joy-ride and snapped off the starting handle, so I was mighty surprised when a cut-scene fired up and the airship transported me to the capital, Saint's Haven. 

That was all a bit too much for after midnight so she found a quiet corner and camped out for the night. What will happen to Dora next? I have no idea but I'm willing to bet it'll be good for a few laughs.