Set Adrift : EQ2

Returning to The Isle of Refuge has given me a timely reminder of one of my personal touchstones for life: the unreliability of memory.  These days it's reasonably widely known and even grudgingly accepted by the set of people who browse the "Smart Thinking" section in bookshops and watch TED lectures on their iPads that memory is in great part a fictionalized, narrative construct. Knowing that you don't know what you know doesn't always help you to know what you do know, though.

Trying to remember the past with any accuracy at all, even the past you experienced personally, directly and physically, is already next-to-impossible. When it comes to the return of the Isle, add another layer of diffusion for virtual experiences. And another for the post-hoc recreation of the intangible environment in which they took place. Oh, and another for an admittedly inaccurate and approximate recreation, at that. It's a wonder anybody can recognize the place at all.

I used to remember things clearly. Then I took an arrow in the head.

Many of the players stepping down from The Far Journey onto the dock at The Overlord's Outpost or The Queen's Colony haven't seen those wooden planks for a decade or so. In a way you might think I have the advantage of them there, in that I saw the EQ2 starting experience through a number of iterations, probably all of them, from beta in September 2004 to earlier this year.

It turns out that having a deeper, more nuanced relationship with the Isle of Refuge is far from an advantage when it comes to trying to remember what happened when. I can't even recall the basic structure of the starting experience with any accuracy. For example, as Wilhelm reminded me, there was always a shared bank on the island. I could have sworn it was added later but no, it was there from the start. In the very month the game launched people were even complaining it was an exploit.

Wait, do I know you?

As my ratonga SK slashed and clubbed his way to level eight last night I was repeatedly surprised. Sometimes it was wonderment at things that appeared to me to be completely new, like the named ranger and his two named hawks I couldn't recall ever seeing before (although the more I think about it the more I seem to remember camping him in a group once upon a time...) More often it was nagging memories, things turning out to be different from how I remembered them, or going missing altogether.

In the way these things do, recollections began to reassemble, pieces began to fall into place. A picture began to appear of how things might have been. But how closely does that picture represent reality? To establish that I'd have to do some research. Do I really have time for that?

Now That's What I Call An Upgrade Vol 1.

I didn't think so. For the while I believed I was content enough to let a fuzzy image of the past coalesce. It would be interesting, to me at least, to compare it one day to the recorded history, available from many sources but probably most coherently and comprehensively here at the EQ2 Wiki but do I want to do that when I could be playing?

Well, apparently so, because here I am on a Saturday morning, doing it.

My first thought was that my personal version of the Isle of Refuge, the one I've been carrying around in my head, must be a later version. I'd forgotten there were ever two islands, one for Good characters and one for Evil. The one I remember was a single island where two Ambassadors, one representing Freeport, one Qeynos, competed for your character's attention.

There was a sequence of quests to perform for each of them that gave you an idea of the philosophy and culture of the two competing city-states. When you had made your decision and wished to leave you would give your decision to one of the Ambassadors and he would authorize your passage.

Here's a Ring Event I'd forgotten all about.

According to a comment from 2008 on this EQ2Wire thread, however, that version was the original: "There is no more Isle of Refuge. Today there are two islands, the Queen's Colony (13 quests) and the Outpost of the Overlord (13 quests)" The two islands we have back on the TLE servers would seem to be a later refinement after all.

I'm so confused. I probably need to make a Good character and run through the Queen's Colony questline to see how much of what appears to be missing is in fact over there. Perhaps the original content was largely split into two and parceled out accordingly? There's one quest I was never able to complete that I'd like to finish some day. Oh, hang on...didn't I finally complete that one with Milo?

And with that it occurred to me to log Milo in and check the Completed Quest list in his journal. He's the King of the Isle, after all. He even bought his own Isle and set up home there, although he still hasn't decorated. But looking at his Journal really doesn't help much at all.

Milo was born on February 11 2005. I wanted some peace and quiet from the guild I was in at the time so I made a new character on a different server and played him for one session on a Sunday. In that session he completed several quests, most of which appear in the Isle Of Refuge category when the Journal is sorted by zone (the rest, including the start of the old Archetype Selection series, are recorded under Hallmark Quests).

He was woken up again March, then again almost a year later in February 2006, by which time the quests appear under a different zone, Outpost of the Overlord. Milo then took a very long nap, not re-appearing until 2012, when he completed the sequence and retired until his unexpected resurrection at the gates of Freeport in 2013. (This, by the by, is a very representative example of how I play many of my characters -  I may not log them in often but they are always "in play").

All of which would seem like conclusive evidence that the original IoR disappeared sometime between 2005-2006, if it wasn't for the fact that Milo's journal shows one quest in the Outpost zone record on the same day as it shows another in the Isle of Refuge! In the end I just gave up trying to make sense of it and looked at the wiki, where it's all explained neatly and succinctly thus:

"Originally, all new players started on the same island, Isle of Refuge, but depending on which city you chose to start in the Isle would appear differently. Later they made two distinct islands...The original starting quests remain in the completed section of the journal for players who completed them. Those quests which were moved to Queen's Colony or Outpost of the Overlord also moved journal sections, and are listed on those pages".

I swear this used to be a longer sequence, not just the one quest.

So I could have saved myself the bother all along and just googled it, but then what would I have learned? Just the bare facts. Nothing about how memory and perception of memory warps and flows, adapting itself to new information without reference to any objective verification, creating a whole skein of inaccurate, misleading supposed personal experiences that are as subjectively real as, well, anything we can know.

The version of The Isle of Refuge that remains most firmly embedded in my mind seems to be the true original, the one where all the refugees arrived together and were sent on varying quests according to their alignment. Although I must have played through the later, discrete versions more often and certainly more recently it's the original that pertains.

What that means, if it means anything, I couldn't say. Other than never trust your memory even if your absolutely certain it's right. It won't be. But I knew that already.

I'm On A Boat! : EQ2

In a surprise move, expected by absolutely no-one, the new EQ2 Timelocked Expansion servers, Deathtoll (PvP) and Stormhold (PvE) launched smoothly, slightly ahead of schedule and without issue today.

Oh, wait, no...that wasn't the surprise...well, yes it was, but...

THIS was the surprise :

Having spent years telling us it was impossible, it turns out the devs have been playing a game of Chinese whispers all along, telling each other the code for the Isle of Refuge had been knitted into socks and could never be unravelled. Finally one of them decided to go and have a look down the back of the sofa and lo and behold, what did he find? A fully working Isle of Refuge complete with all the original quests!

Actually I'm far from sure which "original" version this is. I know it was changed several times but beyond that it's gone all fuzzy. It was a long time ago. I do remember this version, where the wyvern drifts past, sets the ship on fire and incidentally frees the caged goblin but I could swear there was a version with a much longer fight.

One thing that definitely was there right from the start is the execrable voice acting. It really is some of the worst I have ever heard. What those accents are supposed to be Mel Gibson only knows. Whoever's playing Captain Varlos even gets a line reading totally wrong - the seafaring term "swinging the lead" is clearly new to him and presumably to the director. He pronounces "lead" as if it rhymes with "deed" not "dead".  Some sea captain he is. And why does the dwarf refer to himself as "me" all the time, like Superbaby in a 1960s Bob Haney script?

Never mind, they might be the least convincing jolly jack tars on Norrath but somehow they muddle through. My little ratonga shadowknight  is safely ashore, literally and metaphorically wet behind the ears, ready to be indoctrinated in the ways of Lord Lucan D'Lere and introduced to the "culture" of Freeport.

I wonder what the weather's like this time of year?

Gone With The Winds : GW2

By chance, this month my desktop gallery has been serving up a selection from the hundred and more screenshots I took during the first appearance of The Bazaar of The Four Winds. That was almost exactly two years ago.

This year we got Golem Rush. And some people say there no such thing as progress.

The Best Defense Is a Good Defense: GW2

Here's something I didn't expect to see this week: our Garrison with a waypoint. What's more we have another at Lowlands on Eternal Battlegrounds. There's even a chance we might have a third at Dreadfall Bay later this afternoon.

What's unusual about that? Golem Week, that's what.

The special event kicked off, unexpectedly early for those of us on North American servers, at EU reset on Friday. It threw the last few hours of the NA league matches into total chaos and I missed the start because I was in the middle of writing a blog post. As people realized what was happening the borderlands began to fill up with golems large and small. Within minutes virtually every Keep and Tower had changed hands. They kept doing that. They're still doing it.

Inside an hour or two even those, like myself, who'd been looking forward to the event, were beginning to have second thoughts. The majority of WvW regulars were talking about taking the week off and finding something more amusing to do like household chores or yard work. Mrs Bhagpuss, an inveterate defender, scout and strategist, was highly disgruntled. It seemed none of those qualities would be required while the event lasted.

The underlying concept - doubling the run speed and damage of the asuran power suits while making them free and instantaneous to create - was always a risky proposition. It was always likely to favor attackers, very heavily, over defenders. Coupled with a slew of bugs that, among other things, permitted golems to use summoned weapons and be duped at no cost whatsoever, the whole thing looked set to become a total disaster.

Someone has too much time on his hands.

Certainly that was and largely remains the opinion of most posters on the merged Golem Rush Feedback Mega-Thread, where,  at a rough estimate, more than 90% of all posts are highly critical of either the concept or the execution or both. WvW players are almost unanimous in their contempt and derision for the event. The few positive opinions come from the occasional PvE player that happens to stumble on the thread.

If more PvE players visited the WvW forums the story would be very different. For PvE players with a casual interest in WvW it's rather a fine event. There's a phenomenon in GW2 known as Karma Training (KTraining for short) in which gangs of players from each team run around maps avoiding each other while battering down gates to capture undefended structures. Each capture gives large spoonfuls of regular xp, wvw xp, karma, loot and who knows what other goodies.

It's the very definition of reward without risk and like all such opportunities it's wildly popular with a certain demographic. The home of the KTrain has long been the Edge of the Mists map, which ANet added a long time ago as a kind of waiting-room with magazines for people queuing to get into the real wvw maps but which almost immediately became the domain of PvE players looking to level alts at a breakneck pace.

The current event not only comes with its own xp bonus but it takes place in some nice, flat maps (you can easily fall off the narrow walkways in EOTM) and the objectives are much closer together (there's a lot of running in EOTM), making it a more attractive alternative for trailing around and around in a circle sucking up xp for an hour or six. That's exactly what happened from the moment the rules changed and it's very likely what's happening on most servers and in most matches right now.

Let's be honest. On Yak's Bend every week is Golem Week.

It's happening in our match too but thankfully it's not all that's happening. Yes, there are KTrains running almost non-stop. I took advantage of one this morning, along with the good old World Boss Train, to finish the last ten levels on my Asura Warrior. He dinged 80 taking a tower in EBG with his bags too full to collect his loot. Inbetween stations, though, he hopped off to answer several map calls, defending the two Keeps we've so far, somehow, managed to hold long enough to fortify and waypoint.

We are, after all, Yaks Bend. Roundly criticized from all directions for siege-humping, known as the Home of The Superior Arrow Cart and, ironically, infamous for our golem rushes, it's sometimes forgotten that there's a reason we love our siege: we're defense obsessives, the lot of us. Somehow, even in the face of a set of rule-changes seemingly designed to render defense completely pointless, we have managed to develop strategies to Hang On To Our Stuff.

It's led to some amazing fights. The successful defense of Lowlands a few hours ago, when FA arrived with what looked to be at least two dozen Omega golems and as many ground troops, was one of the most exciting I've experienced for months. I answered a map call and arrived, in the guise of one of my two elementalists, to find the Lord down and the ring two-thirds complete.

I made the mistake of running in to contest and was insta-killed by a wall of spinning FA Omegas spitting double-damage fire like erupting volcanoes. Like every other Yak's Bender on the map I immediately ran back to throw myself into the fray again only this time I danced around out of range of the golem apocalypse and rained my own fire down on them instead.

The Golem "Dance"

The battle lasted what seemed like an age but was probably less than ten minutes. I was downed repeatedly but always rallied, or was revived, before I fully died. The ring remained stubbornly at 70% while we slowly whittled away at the FA Omegas, our own golems standing and spinning among them while the rest of us picked off the downed and chipped chunks off the metal men.

At some point Mrs Bhagpuss arrived, also on one of her elementalists, but the fight was so manic I didn't spot her until all the FA golems were destroyed, the ground troops killed or chased out and the Keep Lord revived and back in control. This was the kind of battle I'd hoped for when this event was announced.

How many similar fights are happening around the NA and EU leagues I have no idea. I'd guess not many. Was the golem event a good idea just because we've managed to make it into something a little more than a KTrain festival? No, it wasn't.

It was, as so many are complaining, both ill-conceived and ill-executed and if, as some suspect, it points to a future direction for WvW that ANet wants to pursue then that's a very ominous prospect indeed. I count myself very lucky that not only am I on a server that cares about defense but also that the event arrived when our server happens to be particularly strong and is able to enforce its will to some degree even against stiff opposition. On most servers and in most Tiers I would guess normal WvW is effectively on hold for a week while PvE has its head.

There was quite a lot of talk earlier this year about how Heart of Thorns would make defensive play and holding territory more important in World vs World. I hope that remains the vision and this week is no more than an aberration. As with almost everything about HoT, we won't know until it's here. And we still have no idea when that might be. This event does not instill confidence and that's putting it mildly.

If nothing else, though, at least I learned that Golems can dance.

The Horse Is Both Alive And Dead: WoW

Well, that was a surprise.

I'd long ago written-off my old WoW account as lost for good. By co-incidence, I cancelled my sub just as Blizzard mandated a BattleNet account to play and, although as far as I remembered I'd done the necessary to convert or combine or register or whatever the instruction was, whenever I tried to take advantage of one of the "Come back, we really miss your money you!" offers none of the log-in details and passwords I had written down were recognized.

At one point I went so far as to open a support ticket about it. After an exchange of emails in which I quoted not only my account details but even the registration codes from the original box I was told categorically that there was no record of my account ever having existed. At that point I gave up any hope of ever seeing any of my old characters again and made a new account instead to take advantage of WoW's excellent F2P until Level 20 scheme.

That was where things would have rested had I not been flipping through some old papers earlier this week, looking for something else entirely, and happened on Mrs Bhagpuss's old BattleNet login information. Once I'd blown the dust off I thought I'd just give it a try and see if it worked. Yes, EULA violation and all that. All in the name of science so it doesn't count.

Well, the experiment kind of worked and kind of didn't. The log-in information was accepted but another registration window popped up. Odd. At that point I thought I'd better at least ask Mrs Bhagpuss if she wanted her Battlenet account re-registered before carrying on so I logged back out. The more I thought about it, though, the more I couldn't remember ever getting a window like that when I tried entering my own details.

I dug around some more and found my old WoW login and password and tried those instead. Stap me if the same "what ridiculous pseudonym would you like to be embarrassed by in years to come?" window didn't appear. So I made up a name, clicked the button and there it was in front of me - my old account.

At first I didn't realize it what had happened. I thought I'd made yet another new account because the character select screen was blank. I made a dwarf hunter and then, as I was about to log him in, I noticed he was on some RP server I'd never heard of. Miraculously, instead of shrugging and carrying on, I thought to go to server select and scroll down the list and there against my old server was the number 9.

Which is how I come to be playing WoW again. All my old characters are there, every one with a bunch of random letters stuck on the end of their name from some Blizzard name-purge, one with a nose-ring I definitely don't remember choosing at character creation, but otherwise as good as new. I recognized about half of them, mostly the ones that were too high level to log in, naturally.

Along with the scatter of throwaways in single figures, below the threshold I found a level 11 warrior and a level 13 druid. The druid is a night-elf (what was I thinking?) so she was out. I logged the warrior (human) in to find she was in Ironforge. Why, I have no idea.


After jogging most of a full circuit of the oddly featureless Dwarven capital trying to re-orient myself, I passed the gateway to the underground tram, one of the things that most impressed me about WoW back when I first played and which has always stuck with me. Couldn't resist another trip. One jolting, exhilarating tram-ride later and there I was in Stormwind again.

I trotted through the cobbled streets, soaking in the nostalgia. Jogged past the long-suffering schoolteacher and her bored and fractious pupils on their educational trip to the big city until I came to the gates. For a moment I stood looking out at Goldshire. It's just amazing how it all comes flooding back.

For an hour or so I pottered around among the trees questing and complaining to myself about the lack of bag space. Some things really do never change. It all seemed just as I remembered until I crossed the bridge into Westfall only to walk right into a homicide investigation. Not just homicide...horse-icide. Old Blanchy lay dead, crushed beneath the wheels of his own cart.

I remember Old Blanchy. I should - I've been using his feed-pouch as a rucksack for five years.

At level 16 now, my warrior is deep in the investigation. Horse-murder is the least of it. We're on the trail of a mysterious Shadowy Figure who seems to be working to bring back the Defias bandit clan. I didn't even know they'd gone. I still can't get used to all the homeless beggars sleeping by the roadside. This is what happens when you have a Cataclysm. Everything goes all to rack and rooney.

Another four levels and the warrior will lock, which, since levels seem to come at the rate of one or two an hour, is going to be a problem if I'm to get to the bottom of this whole mystery. A problem that may have to be solved by the judicious application of money. Yes, it's more than possible I may re-subscribe, not to get a Garrison but just to see how the new old world has changed. And bring Old Blanchey's killer to justice, of course.

Or I may be distracted by some other new shiny and wander off, leaving my characters to idle away their time in loading screen limbo for another few months or even years. It feels good, though, to know that I have that choice again.

Alone Together Or

Ravious has a very interesting and thought-provoking post up at Kill Ten Rats concerning the desirability, necessity even, of player interaction in MMORPGs. He references something Turbine producer Jeffrey Steefel once said that rings very true to me:

"Players don’t want to ‘play’ with thousands of people, they want to play with a small group in the presence of thousands. It’s like an old-school arcade. You don’t want to play pinball with 10 people, but playing by yourself in a crowded room is a lot more fun."

I hadn't happened upon this quote before but I've expressed those sentiments countless times. This, often, has been the experience I've looked for, playing MMORPGs. Over the past decade-and-a-half and more it's been an experience that I've, sometimes, been lucky enough to find.

The analogy I've tended to use is of reading at a pavement cafe; one of the finest, most complex experiences to which a human being can aspire. It's one of those magical hinterlands, where awareness fades towards the ineffable as inner and outer worlds move tectonically against and through each other, building up layers of sensual, intellectual, imaginative and creative involvement, hallucinatory in their intensity.

The play of sun and wind on the skin, the ambient sounds of the street, snatches of conversation with their flurried undertows of emotion, rubbing up against and abrading the mind's firm determination to recreate the imagined world of characters, themselves acting out the creative imaginings of an author both absent and present: at the best of times, under these assaults, my sense of self breaks down and for a glorious moment I lose myself in who I am.

Reading alone at home can be deeply moving, intense, absorbing, memorable, life-affirming, all of those things readers so often claim for books, but it remains deeply solipsistic. It can't begin match the humanity of reading in the presence of others. Similarly, playing video games alone sacrifices the outer for the inner, gains focus at the expense of scope.

I still read alone but playing MMOs broke offline games for me. Maybe forever.

Looking back, playing video games alone seems like an aberration, anyway. Gaming has always been a social activity. My first time was in a pub and for a few years that's what gaming meant - drinking, talking, laughing, playing, all together.

Playing Space Invaders, Breakout, Frogger, Galaxians and the rest, it was as much about being with people as pixels. More. Even in the home that was understood. The Atari 2600 I owned in the early 1980s came with two joysticks. The increasingly sophisticated consoles of succeeding generations found their place in the communal, shared, family rooms as much or more than they did hidden away in bedrooms or studies.

The migration of digital entertainment to the internet attenuated, stratified and confused the simplicity of that shared experience, though it continued and continues. So many anecdotal nostalgies of days and nights spent playing Everquest or World of Warcraft stem not only the distant togetherness of raiding with guilds made up of members from all around the world but from the intimacy of sharing a dorm room or a bedroom with another addict.

It's hard to disentangle the emotions and the memories. Did we love the games because of the friends we made in them or make the friends we did because we loved the games? Was life better before Trammel, before PoP, before the NGE, before Dungeon Finder, because the games were better then, the interactions closer, more meaningful, more real? Or was it just because we were younger, less worn-down with responsibility or failure or ennui or cynicism?

Did we talk to strangers as we waited for spawns at the Splitpaw spires or between pulls in The Deadmines because the pace was slower and we had more time or was it because our minds were more open, then, to new experiences? At the turn of the Millennium, for many of us, being online, not just talking to someone in Sao Paulo, Seattle or Singapore but seeing his avatar moving, acting in real-time there in front of us on the screen, in our own house, how could we not respond to that? It wasn't merely magical; it was actual, real magic.

And now it's not. Everyone does it. Without thinking. There's nothing magical about the internet any more. It's in your pocket, in your car, in your office, in the air, everywhere. There's nothing amazing any more in joining with dozens of people of all ages and races and genders and religions separated by thousands of miles and an infinity of experiences, coming together to imagine killing a giant dragon or a destroying a titanic spacecraft. Happens all the time.

The experience of playing alone together in MMORPGs always lacked the physical, sensual layers that can make reading a novel at the table of a pavement cafe so overwhelming but for a while it had instead a vast and mesmerizing sense of wonder that worked as well in the annihilation of the self. That's gone and it's not coming back.

What's left? With what can we replace that which we have lost? Ravious, pushed out of his comfort zone by connections and friendships, finds a faint echo in the unfamiliar experience of rolling a character on an RP-PvP world in WoW. After a sequence of unexceptional, predictable encounters he says:

"None of that would have happened if I had not been on a PvP server. Except for my one foray into the dungeon finder, I would have had virtually zero interaction with other players. There would have been no story for me to tell except “I did the quests in three zones, and it was what you would expect.”

Of course it's true that none of that would have happened. But something would. Whether he'd have had a story to tell us about it would depend entirely on how good a storyteller he is. A good storyteller can keep an audience spellbound with a description of a single character in an empty room. The tale is in the telling, always.

The last half-decade and more of MMO history is characterized by developers' attempts to mechanize human interaction in MMOs, to codify and commodify it. From Warhammer's Public Quests through Rift's eponymous planar incursions to GW2's Dynamic Events, from Dungeon Finder through Instant Adventures to LFR, they seek to find that magic, bottle it and sell it back. It can't be done.

Here's what happened. We got older. We lost patience. We gave up. A whisper from a stranger, new to the game, new to the world, lost and looking for someone, anyone, to help, ceased to seem like a chance to show off our experience and expertise. After fifty or a hundred times, who wants to answer the same old questions? Isn't it obvious? Go read the wiki or just google it ffs! You must know how to do that - you're playing this game on the frickin' internet, aren't you?!

I used to abandon plans just because I saw someone having a tough time. They wouldn't even need to be asking for help. I knew things and I wanted to share. I had a Chipped Bone Rod and I knew how to use it and what's more I knew where to take you so you could buy one too. I knew how to get to the sewers under Qeynos and I knew how to get out the other side. I knew barbarians couldn't see in the dark, while my half-elf had infravision, and even though I'd only just met you I trusted you to give me back my Greater Lightstone at the end of the tunnel to Blackburrow because otherwise what were you going to do? Stay in Everfrost the rest of your life?

That was when we were all living a shared imaginary life in a shared imaginary world. Before we all started playing games. How long did that last, really? That it took years to wind down to an ending is maybe the most amazing thing of all.

And we miss it so much. Perhaps that's why we chase every new game almost before it appears, hoping we'll catch the unicorn by the tail and swing back astride before it vanishes around the corner, yet again. All we get are a few strands of silver that quickly lose their shine or, worse, a thumping kick, a humiliating stumble, a painful fall.

So, I don't hold out hope that imposed PvP rulesets or autonomic grouping systems or any clever, mechanical intervention can bring back the wonder. Our friends lists won't refill with all those people with whom we shared formative or traumatic or hysterical moments, one night, one session, out of the blue. The MMO experience has moved on. It's no longer about wonder and awe and strangeness, just dailies and achievements and gear.

And that's okay. Those aren't bad things. Just not the same. Nothing stays new forever. Let it go. Love it for what it is, not what it was or what you wish it would be. Then maybe, just maybe, if we remember once in a while to answer that question in map chat or send a tell, a little of the magic might flicker on again.

At the pinball table or the pavement cafe, when someone asks you for a light for a cigarette, you don't always have to tell them you don't smoke. Maybe you could even carry matches, just in case.

Work In Progress: VGOE, Project:Gorgon

I'm always slightly nervous of mentioning the VGOEmulator project. It's Telon's last, best hope and I'd hate to do anything to jeopardize the amazing efforts the volunteer team is making to pick up an entire world that fell down. I'm never quite sure whether they welcome the light of publicity or whether they'd rather keep to the shadows.

With the recent legitimization of Project 1999, however, the skies seem bluer than ever before for true labors of love like these. Also, judging by Daybreak President John "Smed" Smedley's generally uncompromising attitude to internet black hats, it seems reasonable to assume that we'd know about it by now if he disapproved.

As far as I can gather from VGOE's forums tentative contact has been made to see if Vanguard can gain some kind of recognition, if not actual endorsement, from its owners and erstwhile operators but so far the response has been silence. No news, sleeping dogs and similar old saws apply.

It's been a few months since I last logged in to see how things were getting along. The old launcher no longer works. It's been replaced by a smart new one. With it came a wipe of all existing accounts. That's not a big deal at this stage because, as yet, there's no character progression. There is, however, some marked progression in the starting state of the characters themselves and that of the world into which they are reborn.

I don't actually remember these mouse-over windows from the original. Maybe they're new?

When I remade my raki disciple he was able to choose between starting on the Isle of Dawn or his original starting town of Ca'ial Brael. His details also now correctly show his race, class and level and he arrived fully kitted-out with a set of starter armor, most of his spells and skills already on his hotbar and a lunch of fresh berries in his backpack.

The world renders flawlessly - well, as flawlessly as it ever did in the Official Version - and the server is stable. You can explore the whole world at will. NPCs have had default speech clips and a generic "Welcome to Telon" window for a while but now the merchants also have stock and the trainers have skills and spells for sale.

There's some wildlife too but currently there's no real combat system. You can attack and see the animations but even though damage numbers appear your target just stands there unconcerned and unhurt. Combat is still a ways off according to the notes on the forums, where a very impressive list tracks features already implemented.

Personally I'd forego combat entirely if we could just have Diplomacy up and running. A fully-explorable Telon with no aggressive monsters but a full implementation of the unique faction card game would pretty much work as a standalone MMORPG for me. Looking at the determination and enterprise of the folks behind VGOE, though, I don't for a moment believe they'll settle for anything less than the complete, working virtual world we used to have.

They're going to get there, too. Count on it.

Another stubbornly determined, quiet force of nature is Eric Heimberg of Project: Gorgon. The failure of two previous Kickstarters hasn't even slowed him down. The game - and it very much is a game already - has continued to grow all year. It patches often and the content of the game is already quite impressive. There are, for example, fifteen dungeons ranging in level from 1 to 50.

When I logged in today, again for the first time in a good while, I noticed my character's animations seemed a lot more fluid. The world also looks more detailed. There's been a revision of stats, and although I couldn't say what's been revised or how, my character did feel more powerful.

That might have been because I didn't stray far from the starting area but even so I was mobbed on several occasions (mobs in P:G very much follow the "Hey! Get your paws off my buddy!" social etiquette of early Everquest). In previous sessions an add meant death but this time I was able to fend off, albeit by a whisker, several pigs and a trio of spiders (not all at once, although they do seem to have some kind of fraternal inter-species mutual protection pact going on).

Square! Square! Square!

The one thing about P:G I'm not quite so impressed with is the new, harshly angular GUI. It seems more appropriate for a science-fiction setting than a fantasy MMORPG. It's very easy to use though and I'm sure it will change out of all recognition by the time the game finally launches, if that day ever comes. After all, the version we're seeing, for all that it out-performs on a number of fronts quite a few similar efforts that are already taking customers' money, is still only in early alpha.

In terms of playabilty and entertainment value Project: Gorgon is very definitely moving briskly in the right direction. I'm not sure it'll be enough to guarantee success in the proposed third Kickstarter but it deserves to be. I'll be backing it again and I hope this time Eric gets my money.

Both these projects are open to anyone who's interested enough to drop in and check them out. That's something very definitely worth doing. I plan on keeping close tabs on each of them until their considerable promise is fulfilled. Good luck to everyone involved and keep up the good work!