A Sense of Scale : GW2

Everything in Heart of Thorns is overgrown, overblown, overloaded. The heights are higher, the depths deeper, the undergrowth thicker, the monsters bigger than anywhere else in Tyria.

And, let's face it, Asura aren't big to begin with. We have trouble climbing the steps in Hoelbrak. Of course, so do the Norn, but only because they're always drunk.

Then again, whoever built these cities, the ruined and the golden alike, worked on a scale that even a Norn would balk at. If it wasn't for the endless stairways this would be a fine place for a stilt-walkers' convention. They'd never have to duck going through an archway, that's for sure.

This is country that demands heft in all things. No wonder the cities are the way they are. The trees, the cliffs, the canyons, you could hardly put up a bungalow and call it home. Shhh. Don't mention Bongo. We're not talking about him. Whoever he is.

Even Rata Novus is oversized for an Asura settlement. Then again, so is Rata Sum. It's Dwarven Architect Syndrome all over again.

In the end all you can do is embrace, go with the flow, cast yourself to the winds and trust them to bear you up. And if they don't, well, if an Asura falls in the jungle, who's going to hear?

Chin up. It's not like the Charr have it so much better. Although they do have that always landing on their feet thing going. I wonder how that's working out for them?

Ah well, at least we're not Sylvari. That's a thought to keeps you warm at night. Sweet dreams.

The Gang's All Here! : GW2

Almost from when I first began playing MMORPGs I've enjoyed reading and joining in with the free-rolling, wide-ranging conversations that fill whatever passes for open chat. It's a conversational platform that's sometimes derided, even shunned, often with good reason. There have been plenty of times I've had to switch it off for the sake of my own sanity and one of the first things I usually do in a new MMO is add a chat tab that doesn't include any of the open channels at all.

Nevertheless I've always found the background chatter of a million voices to be an integral part of the MMORPG experience. I'd no more go without it than I'd replace the in-game music with choices of my own or mute the obsessive chorus of NPC voiceovers. I've heard  people do that. Go figure!

The nature of what passes for conversation varies a good deal from game to game. WoW,  the MMO that has probably done most to bring the concept of freeform, unmediated player-to-player interaction into disrepute - it spawned the semi-generic "Barrens Chat" after all - can sometimes be unbearable. Alright, often. General chat in EverQuest these days tends towards the smug and cynical while EQ2, particularly in a couple of the game-wide custom channels I frequent, sometimes gets too twee even for me (and speaking as a ratonga with an apparent mental age of around five or six that takes some doing, let me tell you).

Guild Hall? Guild Island, more like.

Generally, though, most MMOs chug along pleasantly with a mix of question-and-answer sessions relating to the game itself, attempts at humor (some more successful than others) and the occasional very welcome flurry of surrealism or roleplay. GW2 has always been  particularly chatty in a mostly good-natured way and the arrival of Heart of Thorns has highlighted that tendency, with many helpful hints and observations scrolling through the little box in the lower left corner of the screen throughout most of the many hours I've played.

One thing others do have going on that I generally don't, however, is Guild Chat. The last time I was in a guild with enough people to get a conversation going was back in EQ2, getting on for four years ago, before GW2 launched. Even then there were fewer than a dozen of us and rarely more than four or five on at the same time. I'd have to go back closer to a decade before I hit the point where Guild chat was as busy as any open channel.

Heart of Thorns changed all that. GW2 has always allowed a player to be in multiple guilds at the same time. Five guilds to be precise. Until the launch of the expansion, however, to speak and listen in guild chat you had to "represent" that guild and you could only rep one at a time. For three years the virtual currency used to power guilds, "Influence", was tied to Representing so who you repped was often an issue.

Guild I.D.? Erm, I think I left it in my other robe...

Outside of a couple of stints raising Influence for a personal bank guild or two I have always repped the small guild made up only of my characters, Mrs Bhagpuss's and those of two friends, one whom only plays occasional weekends and the other, who gave up on GW2 after about three months. Not surprisingly, guild chat hasn't been much of a thing for the lifetime of GW2.

Well, it is now. With the launch of HoT Influence was retired and Representation was streamlined and simplified. Each guild you belong to now has a discrete, dedicated chat channel and you can hear and speak in all of them no matter which guild you are currently repping.

That still wouldn't bring the noise if the only guilds I was in were my own tiny one and a couple of single-account bank guilds, but just before HoT dropped, in anticipation of both the arrival of Guild Halls and the new Squad Commander system, I decided it might be time to ally with a larger organization. As it happened one of the largest WvW guilds on Yak's Bend was recruiting and as Mrs Bhagpuss was already a member, having been headhunted long ago for her tactical acumen, they seemed like a good choice. Also they let me in just for asking, which are the kind of entry requirements I like!

The opening cinematic is all I've seen of Lost Precipice so far.

As a result I've not only been able to follow the process of Guild Hall acquisition and upgrade but my chatbox is busy non-stop and not just with the usual guild gossip, either. Given that the guild has some of the more skilled and experienced Commanders and sPvP players around I've learned quite a lot.

The changes to the Guild experience have been instructive all round. Far from feeling disenfranchised by ANet's decision to set the practical lower limit for Guild Hall acquisition somewhere around five members I feel positively liberated by not having to bother with the onerous process for our small, personal guild.

There's an argument to be had that Guild Halls could have come in a wider variety of sizes but, given that they are currently only available in the giant mega-sized full map version, not having to grind the insane requirements for upgrades seems like a lucky escape. Being able to visit and explore the guild's home in Gilded Hollow as a lowly member of a large organization, chipping in towards its renovation and reconstruction in a manner that fits my available time and resources, seems like a good deal, not as some have suggested a slap in the face.

A jumping puzzle our Guild Leader made for Halloween. Only two jumps but a lot harder than it looks.

Meanwhile, our little guild and all our bank guilds have access to all the facilities we need in the sumptuous and entirely private setting of the guild-specific Guild Initiative Headquarters instance in Lion's Arch. We have everything we need there and it's larger than some full-size Guild Halls in other MMOs. We can't decorate it but you can't have everything.

As it turns out I would have been able to visit the Hall even if I hadn't taken steps to prepare. Long ago someone sent me a guild invite at some event or other and I accepted it. It was from a guild based on Sanctum of Rall that exists to run large-scale, cross-server events, not in a hyper-organized, elitist fashion but in a more down-home, turn up and pitch in kind of style.

I did one event with them and forgot all about it but come HoT and its five live guild feeds and suddenly there they all were, chatting away down in the bottom corner. They also have a Guild Hall and, sod's law, they picked Gilded Hollow too, so I still haven't seen the other map, Lost Precipice. Also, since both the large guilds of which I'm now a humble member play primarily North American hours, they both began their expeditions to reclaim the maps from the Mordrem just as I was about to go to bed, so I haven't done the fights either. I did stay up long enough to hear one of them wipe on the first attempt though. Heh!

So there we have it. Another of the heavily-hyped features of Heart of Thorns about which my pre-launch feelings were, at best, ambivalent, turns out to be rather a good addition to the game from my perspective after all. Confusing, isn't it? It's almost as though someone at Anet knows what they're doing.

Now that really is a disturbing thought...

Legion And The Great Outdoors : WoW

I'm no kind of a Blizzard fan. Indeed, WoW is the only Blizzard game I have ever played and I haven't really played all that much of that, so the annual BlizzCon bash for the faithful tends to slip past me largely unnoticed. If it wasn't for the reports on various blogs and news sites I follow I wouldn't really be aware of it at all. Even then I tend to pay only the most fleeting attention to the detail.

That said, there was a time earlier this year, when I was toying with the idea of buying the next WoW expansion, Legion, when it arrives so I have been paying slightly more attention than I normally do to the news coming out of Anaheim. The timing of Legion's arrival has been the subject of some speculation as expansion dates, especially WoW's, always are, but the pleasure of reading the runes has been rudely curtailed by the announcement of something close to a launch date. A launch season, at least: Summer 2016.

Along with the date comes a modicum of hard information about the content and to this curious outsider some of it looks more appealing by a margin than anything in the last two expansions, neither of which tempted me for a moment. Take this, from the MassivelyOP summary of the Legion panel:

"An open world to explore, no set path beyond ending in Suramar. All four zones scale flexibly."

Or this:

"The whole world will have constantly changing world quests and objectives"

Or this:

"Expect minigames, gathering skills, garrison-style missions for players, reputation objectives, PvP objectives, world raid bosses, profession missions – the idea is to give insane amounts of variety. “Freedom without press or obligation.” They’re calling it “outdoor endgame.”

And on it goes. People a lot more familiar with Blizzard's oeuvre than I are comparing it to Diablo III’s adventure mode but to me it sounds an awful lot like what other MMOs, particularly GW2, have been offering players for several years now: choice and self-determination.

Whatever the inspiration behind the change, on paper, at least, it looks well-tailored to fit my personal preferences. The expansion comes with the now-traditional leg-up to the new de facto starting level of 100, leaving ten levels to gain, supposedly, by exploring the new continent in any way that takes your fancy.

Well, that's right up my alley, that is. Of course, I'd do it my way, anyway, whether the game systems support it or not, but the journey's always smoother going with the grain. Some of the statements on the mechanics do puzzle me a little, though. Whereas GW2 scales the player down to the zone, for example, Legion will apparently scale the zone to the player.

Ten levels will positively fly by. Not just metaphorically this time I hope.

Questions have been asked about how this will work for, say, a duo where one player is level 100 and the other is 108. I haven't yet seen an answer although there has been much speculation on phasing, a technique used extensively in WoW and a few other MMOs I've played, and one which I generally dislike. On the other hand, its only ten levels. Maybe the difference won't be that noticeable anyway. Beta starts "soon" so I guess we'll find out more then, NDA permitting.

Tobold, who isn't impressed by any of it but who has nevertheless already pre-ordered, mentions that the Level 100 character, access to which is available immediately, comes with a Level 3 Garrison. Given the numerous bloggers I've read who found the maintenance of Garrisons onerous over time and the widespread opinion that it was a one-expansion idea that Blizzard would allow to die on the vine, that sounds like a decent bonus in itself for new or returning players who skipped Warlords of Draenor.

Although I guess you get WoD bundled in with Legion so how the garrison grind on alternate characters that broke so many will figure come next Summer remains to be seen. Honestly, I don't know enough about how WoW works even to take a stab at how that might go. Just thinking aloud here...

Didn't I see something about the Tauren featuring in Legion? I wasn't really paying attention.

Returning to the point, such as it was, as a result of all this new news, Legion is back on my radar and the possibility of my playing WoW next year has improved. In the end, though, whether I do or don't will most likely depend a lot more on what else is going on around the time it comes to market than in the specific qualities of the expansion itself.

For all the supposed malaise of the genre, there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of new product. It's hard to predict what might catch fire and what might crash and burn. For example, I never expected to be so completely taken over by Heart of Thorns that I'd literally play nothing else for two solid weeks after it launched, with no slow-down of interest yet in sight. Come Summer 2016 who knows what might be holding my attention hostage?

With the recent announcements, though, Legion is definitely in with a shout. I do like me some open-world gameplay and leveling up!

Lost In Translation : GW2

There's an interesting thread on the GW2 official forums, in which "a high school Spanish teacher and a frequent visitor of Mayan ruins in the Yucatan Peninsula" observes that "there are several Mayan symbols used in the HoT mastery lines".

The OP goes on to say that he (or she) has "spent a few hours doing some research and I have compiled a few translations". Sadly the results of this research remain a mystery and the "thread" has so far failed to garner even a single reply.

This is a shame but sadly such lack of interest in the detail of the rich language lore used in GW2 seems to be par for the course these days. Back when The Consortium made their first appearance in Lion's Arch prior to their ill-fated and irresponsible junket to Southsun Cove there was a positive frenzy of interest in the writings on their walls.

Their posters and fliers were translated and pored over in the hope of discovering something about the upcoming major event. Then the Karka came and no-one seemed to care much after that.

When New Lion's Arch appeared to lift the veil on at least a few of the secrets The Consortium a Reddit poster did translate the various banners and post-it notes around the office from what is apparently New Krytan. Unfortunately it turned out to be no more than some Scott Adamsesque "humor".

 There's a lot of text in imaginary foreign languages scattered through GW2. I have difficulty even working out which are in the same script let alone deciphering even the dimmest glimmer of meaning. But I'd love to know what it all means.

Asuran architects seem to be extremely fond of incising hundreds of lines of verbiage into every flat surface. Every time I wait for the Fire Elemental to appear in the ruins of the Thaumonova Reactor I idly ponder the meaning of the words beneath by feet.

A few days ago my necromancer found herself in an ancient, secret Rata Novan laboratory, surrounded by mysterious consoles, still active after decades, perhaps centuries of neglect. The screens said something. Perhaps if she could have read them she'd have known what to buttons to press to make something happen.

You might think an Asuran, a Snaff Prize Winner no less, a certified genius that's to say, might be able to pick her way through her own language, ancient or otherwise, but no. As for the reams of writing apparently burned onto rough wood panels in the Maguuma Jungle with a magnifying glass, it would be something just to know what language it is that we're looking at.

If there's anyone still out there translating this stuff I'd love to hear about it. I could be missing out on vital information here. Then again it's probably just some more bad jokes. Maybe it's better not to know.

In At The Deep End : GW2

Underwater exploration has always been something of a Marmite topic for MMORPGs although it's probably fair to say there are a lot more players feeling the Hate than the Love. My own first introduction to the concept came in EverQuest, where at the time I began playing the one underwater dungeon in the game, Kedge Keep, was considered by some to be the most difficult in the game.

When I finally made it to Phinagel Atropos's stronghold, well past the peak of his reign of terror, it turned out to be a confusing, disorienting, nerve-wracking yet not entirely unpleasant experience. Perhaps it's because of that baseline that I've found almost all underwater zones since then to be relatively enjoyable.

I certainly wouldn't claim underwater as my favorite environment but it's a lot better than some. For one thing it offers the same full and free movement in three dimensions as flight without any risk of death from falling damage. Okay, you can drown, but that at least takes a while and you can usually do something about it before you take your last gasp. And unlike lava water doesn't burn.

Of all the MMOs I've played a lot I think EQ2 probably has the worst underwater environments. Not only are they largely bland and undetailed but someone thought it would be a great idea use thick "fog" to limit visibility to a few yards. I never go underwater in EQ2 unless I absolutely have to.

Rift had some nice underwater environments but the best by far that I've seen are in GW2, where the visuals below the waterline match anything above. Everything there conspires to make you feel as at home as you can be when you're so far out of your element. There's no restriction of vision, your "waterbreather" snaps to your face as soon as you submerge so you never need worry about drowning and best of all movement feels as easy and natural as it does on land. Combat isn't exactly a joy but it's perfectly functional, with some classes shining and others just getting by.

In the long run-up to the release of Heart of Thorns underwater content barely got a mention. Back in May Dragon Season took a look at the prospects. It had to be a speculative assessment because, as they pointed out, "ArenaNet hasn’t told us anything about underwater combat in Heart of Thorns."

Well, HoT is with us now and as far as I know ANet never did say anything about their plans for underwater content, other than briefly confirming there would be none in the new WvW Desert Borderlands. I wasn't expecting to need my waterbreather at all.

Fortunately its always with me whether i think I'm going to need it or not. Yesterday, while I was exploring the third new map, Tangled Depths, I found a sinkhole somewhere to the south east of the Decayed Hive. Diving deep I discovered a vast network of flooded tunnels that appear to extend beneath the entire zone.

It was busy everywhere all day in every HoT map I visited but I had these tunnels largely to myself. With a bunch of xp boosters running, the tuna, gulpers, armored fish and thundershrimp that had been minding their own business unbothered for a good while gave excellent bonuses.

It's hardly surprising they hadn't be killed in the previous few hours. There's not a lot down there to draw a crowd. There was a bit of business with some Exalted magic without which instant death ensued. Didn't really get what that was all about but it was interesting at least.

The best part wasn't in the water at all. One apparent dead end emerged into a towering flue that turned into a really magnificent glider ride requiring a series of tight turns into updrafts to gain the top of a towering flue. Other than that I didn't find much. Oh, there was a Hero Challenge down there somewhere. That was a bonus.

Even if they haven't been fully developed to their potential it's nice that the tunnels are there as evidence that underwater gameplay hasn't entirely been forgotten or abandoned. Who knows, maybe when Bubbles the Elder Sea Dragon gets his turn at bat we'll get a whole expansion under the waves.

No, that would be commercial suicide. No developer would ever think of doing something so crazy.

New For Old: Hunting Hero Points Aross Tyria : GW2

When ANet announced a reduction in the number of Hero Points required to complete the new Elite Specializations I was mildly interested. The option to add a new weapon type to each of my characters and strut about calling myself a Dragonhunter or a Herald might be fairly low on my list of Things To Do When The Expansion Arrives but at least it's on the list.

The fuss and fury over the 400 HP requirement was frenzied for a while. It would have been almost impossible to play and not at least be aware there was an issue. Still, I hadn't really given much thought to what it would actually be like to try and get those four hundred points. More specifically, it hadn't hit home to me that the 400 came in addition to the 398 required to complete all the skills and specializations in the main game.No wonder people weren't happy.

Theoretically, those of us who've been paying attention have known for most of this year that we'd need all the Hero Points we could get when Heart of Thorns arrived. We've had the best part of nine months to go round all the maps, doing all the Hero Challenges and filling everything out. Unfortunately, doing that would have gone against all my instincts and preferences; so I didn't bother.

I have asbestos pockets. I don't like to spend anything unless I have a very good reason. I'd always rather have money in the bank and that attitude transfers to just about any and every kind of in-game "currency". As I level my characters in any game I tend to look at what they have to have to progress and leave it at that. I see spending any points on skills or traits I'm not using as a waste even though in practice those points rarely have any other function beyond being spent on a set range of options.

Consequently I came into HoT with a whole load of level 80s that appeared to be sitting on a pile of unspent points. When the requirement for Elite Specs was reduced to 250 several of my characters were there or thereabouts already. So I thought.

The extremely salient fact I'd overlooked, of course, was before you can start spending the 250 points on the Elites you must have spent the full 398 points on all the other stuff. That came as a bit of a shock, particularly since I only worked it out when I went to spend the 250 points I had in the bank. In a bleak moment of clarity my Ranger went from job supposedly done to finding himself still well over a hundred points shy of becoming a Druid.

Hero Challenges in Heart of Thorns maps are worth ten Hero Points each (Core Tyria challenges give just a single point per) so on the face of it that doesn't sound so bad. In practice, though, it's not as easy as it appears.

It's not entirely because of the supposed difficulty of the challenges themselves. It's true that some of them do spawn Champion mobs that are unlikely to be within the capabilities of most soloists but as previously discussed you generally aren't alone in GW2 even when you do solo. Someone will usually be along to help within minutes at worst. And in any case many, perhaps most, of the "Challenges" turn out to be "Communes", which require you to do no more than press F and wait for a few seconds.

No, the main problem is finding the darn things. Exploring in the new maps is incredibly good fun in and of itself providing you are doing just that and that alone - exploring. Set out to get to a series of specific objectives with anything like comfortable efficiency, however, and your patience can wear thin. Not only is it hard using a two-dimensional map to traverse a three-dimensional space but many of the locations require specific Masteries to reach, some of which I don't yet have.

Also, I'd already picked off most of the readily-accessible ones as I wandered about over the preceding few days. I spent about four hours hunting HPs I'd missed across all four maps on Saturday with some success but come Sunday morning I was still fifty-five points short. Diminishing returns had kicked in and I rationalized that it would be faster to find fifty-five single-point challenges in the Old World.

Which is how I came to spend eight hours in Orr. Over much of Sunday my Ranger found and completed every Hero Challenge in Straits of Devestation, Malchor's Leap and Cursed Shore. He'd done a few already but it still clocked in at nearly forty. And it was a real pleasure.

Orr may have been a nightmare in the old days but now it feels like a holiday. With time to stop and admire the scenery it becomes unmistakably clear that these are heart-stoppingly gorgeous maps, something Jeromai tried to tell us long ago. The art design is as good as anything in the game, which means as good as anything in gaming I'd say. Just stunning.

I took over seventy screenshots as I roamed and I could have taken 700. Or 7000. After a while you realize there's just no point - the wonders are never going to stop. When the HPs ran out I flipped around a few more maps and cherry-picked the ones near waypoints until I had my 250. Since that character had barely 40% map completion even after Orr there was no shortage of options.

So now he's a Druid, which seems fun so far. In more than three years I've never felt the least need or desire to work on map completion and I don't plan on starting now but the coming of Heart of Thorns has perversely kick-started a fresh desire to see more of the maps that came with the base game.

Just as well. I have half a dozen more level 80s lining up to be next and a couple more wannabes behind them. What with that and all the new collects and crafting it looks as though ANet's plans to keep the original maps alive has legs. And, as a result, the whole game feels more solid than it has for an age.

November Is Golden : #IntPiPoMo

November is here, bringing with it, amongst other things, Bonfire Night, my birthday and NaNoWriMo. It was at Beau Hindman's now-defunct Spouse Aggro blog where I first came across the National Novel Writing Month. He was planning to write a novel featuring his Vanguard character, a Raki disciple. That being my favorite MMO class of all time, naturally it got my attention.

Beau went on to complete that project and now he's a professional writer, a published novelist and soon to be the author of a book on MMORPGs. Over the years plenty of bloggers I follow have had a bash at knocking out the 50,000 words, a tradition that continues, and the whole thing has always been linked, not entirely rationally, with blogging in my mind.

I've thought about giving it a try but November is a very bad month for it. Working in a bookshop, this is the start of the busiest time of the year for me. We aren't even allowed to take any days off from the middle of November through to the middle of January. If it was MarNoWriMo that might be better.

I did finish a couple of short, novel-like efforts immediately before discovering MMORPGs back in 1999. It was hard work. I have a serious problem with plots - I can't think of any! Without something to write about it doesn't really matter how easy you find it to get the words down in the right order.

So, I won't be doing NaNoWriMo this or any other year. #IntPiPoMo, the International Picture Posting Month, though, that I can do! I only heard of this blogging initiative last month, through the auspices of Chestnut at Gamer Girl Confessions, who is curating the project for 2015. She explains its history and origins and describes it succinctly thus :

"NaNoWriMo is about writing 50k words throughout the month of November. If a picture is work a thousand words, that would mean we'd need to post fifty pictures!

These can be screenshots from any game, or even photographs you take in real life and want to share on your blog."

Well I can do that! I post more than fifty screenshots in a week some weeks! It's certainly going to be a lot easier than Blaugust, that's for sure, let alone writing an entire novel in 30 days.

Chestnut is running a friendly competition with prizes and she has a handy FAQ and sign up details laying out the very simple details.

And that's enough words for today. Let the pictures do the talking.