Not Waving But Drowning : EQNext

The comment thread following Massively's breaking news that Daybreak Games have cancelled Everquest Next runs into four figures. The blogosphere similarly resounds with the clangorous echoes of a mighty giant fallen. Wilhelm, chronicler of all things Norrath, is keeping a tally. I suppose we're all obligated to say something so here goes...

I agree one hundred per cent with Wilhelm when he observes that EQNext "was in its ideal state for a few hours after that first SOE Live presentation about it". It was a great presentation. One of the best I have ever seen for a game. It had verve and enthusiasm and punch. What it didn't have, as became increasingly obvious in the weeks and months that followed, was a game.

Actually, if all the team working on the project hadn't had at that point was a game, they would have been in a much happier place. After all, making games is supposed to be what they do. They could have come up with one in a year or two.

But it was much worse than just not having a game. They also didn't have a game engine or a voxel engine or an AI engine. They didn't have any of the basic infrastructure they needed to hang their game on when they made it.

It didn't stop there. In addition to having no game and no game engines they didn't even have a game plan. Instead they had "open development". That high-concept take on game-making amounted to not much more than a sporadic series of talking shops that asked questions that no-one cared about and didn't even listen to the answers to those.

There was a series of videos offering the unedifying spectacle of various staffers goofing with each other and sending up the project even as they were supposed to be promoting it. There was a whole beta application process, made hideously complicated and controversial by the involvement of PSS1, all for a product that had no earthly chance of entering any kind of beta in any reasonable time-frame.

Let's see, how about we put Qeynos...here!

And, of course, there was Landmark or, as it was initially known, Everquest Next: Landmark.

Landmark came as a total surprise. I never heard anyone claim to have anticipated or expected that SOE would simultaneously announce that they were going to make a new EQ MMORPG and a voxel-based, Minecraft inspired quasi-MMO at one and the same time, let alone that the latter would be available to play in less than six months.

They did, though, and it was. Or it was for those early adopters and curiosity-seekers willing to shell out the price of a triple-A release for what turned out to be a poorly-optimized tech demo.

The weirdest thing about Landmark and its controversial alpha-launch is that, if you go back and read the coverage from those first few months, it seems a lot of people were having a really good time. I was. I bought the most expensive pack for Mrs Bhagpuss as a birthday present and the cheaper one for myself so I could play too.

I have never regretted it for a second. I believe we got good value for our money. If you read my blog posts from back then you can see I was having a lot of fun. A couple of months of fun for the cost of a regular game is about what you'd expect. Of course, some of the supposed perks that were included in the price, like Early Access when the game launched and the ability to carry some of your work into release will never be fulfilled, but I knew then that I was paying a fee to get into the alpha. Everything else was just window-dressing.

I really enjoyed those first two or three months in Landmark. In many ways I liked it best back then, when it was rough and ready and there wasn't much to it. Over the years it has been smoothed and rounded and plumped up so that it's actually quite presentable, although that means it now runs like a three-legged dog on my aging PC.

I'm not so pessimistic as some about Landmark's upcoming launch. It's always been a fun...toy. It's not really a game. At $9.99 it could be a bargain. I'm looking forward to playing it again, whenever I finally upgrade to some tech that can handle it.

Wherever there are Combine Spires there'll always be Norrath

Landmark wasn't only (many would say "even") a "game" in its own right. It was also supposed to be the test-bed for the systems that would drive EQNext. And it was, controversially, the crowd-sourced sweatshop for some of that putative game's actual content.

Landmark players were set contests to design and build what were intended to be the cities of Norrath's future. I forget which ones they got around to doing - Neriak was one. The prize was supposed to be seeing your work immortalized in EQNext; to be part of Norrath, forever.

Now there won't be a new Norrath. Of course, it was actually going to be a very old Norrath, a Norrath from the deep past. Another swirl in the mist of confusion that  obfuscated everything about the project and made it harder and harder to explain or sell as time wore on.

There won't be a new Norrath in Landmark. Officially, that is. The precarious thread between the two has finally been broken. When the game launches you should, as always promised, be able to build whatever you want. I'm betting now that someone, probably a lot of someones, will build Norrath. Just because.

So, we'll have Landmark, if anyone wants it. We won't have EQNext. I'm glad about that. Let's be honest, it looked awful. Other than that jaw-dropping first presentation, when did anything about the project inspire excitement or anticipation from anyone with a strong affection for the franchise?

EQNext was going to be a bright, brash technicolor ARPG in which cartoon characters bounced Tigger-like across frangible landscapes with all the subtlety of a runaway wrecking ball. It would have been a center-targeted, left/right mouse button hammering, console-favoring experience that bore little or no relation to any previous version of Norrath's story.

I would have played it despite almost all the features Dave Georgeson and Jeff Butler crowed over, not because of them. Just because it would, in some peripheral sense, have continuity.

They call this place The Graveyard of Dreams.

I'm very sorry so much time and energy and effort and money was wasted on such a hubristic project. I dearly wish they'd stuck with whatever the first iteration of EQ3 was, all those years ago, before they scrapped it, what was it, four more times? If they'd just have aimed squarely at their core market we might have been playing EQ3 for five years now and I could be writing a piece today speculating on when we might see EQ4.

This is the problem with MMOs. It's great to have a franchise. It's great to have a loyal core audience that wants more of the same. But, unlike a franchise in movies or novels or comics you can't just keep churning them out and selling them to the same people because when it comes to MMOS those same people are still playing your last franchise game.

All that happens if you try to sell them another one is that your same  audience splits into smaller parts. Which is why, instead of making new MMOs you make expansions and stack them on top until the whole thing teeters and totters and anyone not already on the top floor gets a stiff neck looking up at what she'll have to climb to get to where everyone else is supposedly having the time of their lives.

That, I guess, is why Smed and Smokejumper and Jeff "No Gamer Name" Butler were so keen to break out to find a brand new audience. They must have known as well as anyone that all their core audience really wanted was EverQuest with better graphics. That's all the core audience ever wants (although the evidence from EQ's various graphical overhauls suggests that even when they get it they don't like it. Then again, that sums up the average EQ or EQ2 player's response to everything).

Well, the dream of growing the EQ franchise into a new zeitgeist and a global brand is over. It was never more than a pipe dream, at that. The people behind EQ already changed the paradigm once, when they laid down the framework for Blizzard to follow as they made World of Warcraft. You don't often get to change the paradigm or dictate the zeitgeist twice in a career and never by doing the same thing over again.

DCUO: doing much better than clinging on by its fingertips.

What the fallout from this admission of defeat will be remains to be seen. I thought Russell Shanks' statement was quite informative, especially if you read between the lines, as I always try to do. He as much as says that they bit off more than they could chew and that's a lesson SOE never, ever learned. If all that comes out of the fall of EQNext is a realization at DBG that projects need to be proven to be practical, realistic and manageable before work begins on them, that will be a fine legacy.

I believe the EQ franchise has been better-served under DBG than it was for many years under latter-day Sony management. The games run well, get regular updates and new content. The small teams working on them are doing a stellar job. GW2 players can only wish they were getting the same level of service from ANet's vastly larger workforce.

It may be over-optimistic to hope that EQNext going down the pan will free up some extra resources for the older Everquest titles, let alone that we might actually see a new, less insanely ambitious EQ game announced at some point. More likely the individuals not required to work on EQN any longer will be re-assigned to DBG's now-flagship titles, which would be the twin H1Z1s and DCUO.

Whatever happens, though, I am sure it will be better either than the endless silence and suspicion of an unreleased EverQuest Next or the inevitable media car-crash that would have ensued should that unhappy game ever have seen the light of day.

Goodbye EQNext. We never knew you and you won't be missed.

The Bloom Comes Off The Rose : Black Desert

Last night I logged into Black Desert with a plan in mind. I was going to build myself a boat. Well, a raft, anyway.

I got the idea after my arduous trip to Luivano Island the night before. I had this quest to catch an octopus and the quest marker wanted me to stand on some lump of rock a hundred meters out to sea from the Veila coast for it. I fished for a long time.

I didn't get an octopus but I caught a Conger Eel and a couple of other rare fish. My bags were full of them and they looked to be quite valuable so I thought I'd sell them in town.

I already had a rough idea how the "Node" system works but I wasn't looking to get a big mark-up for selling my fish some great distance from where I'd caught them. I was happy to take the regular price in Velia. Only, when I got to the Trade NPC that handles this kind of transaction I discovered I hadn't caught them in Velia at all.

The rock I was fishing from turned out to be in the jurisdiction of Luivano Island. After a bit of googling and a close look at the handy map at BDOTome I worked out where that was, which just left the question of how to get there. Hobson's choice, really. I had to swim.

I'd already discovered that when you swim it depletes some bar that has no tool-tip but is presumably related to your stamina. If that gets low enough you begin to lose hit points and eventually you die. It's not drowning - there's different bar and a different death for that.

The hundred meter swim back from the rock almost killed me so swimming a mile or two out to the island was a daunting prospect. With the help of Google, once again, I learned that you can swig health potions as you swim to counteract the damage you're taking. I had about sixty on me. Surely that would be enough?

I worked out that the shortest sea crossing was from the peninsula to the north of Velia, where the brooding Crone Castle dominates the skyline. What I didn't know until I got there is that it's occupied by hordes of highly aggressive purple con soldiers.

Running back a second time, I managed to avoid them all. I scrambled down the cliffs, got as close to the distant island as I could and swam for it. It took me a few minutes and about a dozen potions but I made it safely. Onshore I found the Node Manager flaked out on the sand. Apparently he was in the grip of the existential ennui of the near-immortal (seriously).

Even though he had lost all will even to sit up straight he was still trading and he gave me the full price for my fish. It was then that I noticed a crude log raft pulled up on the shore nearby, beached by a player more advanced than I. Well, not for long, matey!

Black Desert reminds me of Vanguard in a number of ways. The Amity mini-game is like a pale shadow of Diplomacy and the clutter of sailing ships at the Velia wharf recalls the jumble along the harbor walls at Khal. Acquiring and sailing a sloop in Vanguard is one of the fondest memories I have from all my years of gaming. Anything that might give even a faint echo of that sense of satisfaction and sensual pleasure has to be explored.

When I say "explored", of course, I mean "googled". I'm not sure how far along in Black Desert I'd be if I was relying entirely on in-game information. Probably still just outside the first village, killing weasels. Working out how to make a raft took me about an hour, several guides, a couple of forum threads and three videos. I recommend the YouTube tutorials by Pvt Wiggles.

Even then I misunderstood how the Housing system works. I went to the Shipyard in Velia but because I didn't get a pop-up to buy it I mistakenly assumed it wasn't available. That's how I ended up on Iliya Island.

Iliya is an island city a lot further from the coast than Luivano. It has a Shipyard. I thought that might be available but there was no way I was going to swim there. Luckily there's a ferry (Google told me that, too). Waiting for it at the wharf gave me an EQ flashback - standing in Butcherblock, fishing off the dock, chatting to pass the time, hoping the boats weren't broken again...

The ferry in BDO is a lot more efficient than that. There's one every ten minutes or so and it moves smoothly and safely. It's a free service and you can fish off the side as you travel, so instead of it costing you silver you actually make money as you go.

It felt like it took about ten or fifteen minutes to get to Iliya, which suggests there's more than one ferry covering the route. I wasn't really paying attention because a) I was taking screenshots b) I was fishing and c) I was eavesdropping on an interesting conversation between two players (and trying to work out how they were talking in local).

Iliya turned out to be a mountainous island with one small port and a scattering of tiny hamlets and camps. By this time I had watched a video on Housing and realized that I was doing it wrong. Other than for a Residence - the house you can decorate and live in like a regular MMO home - you don't need to go to the building at all. You just buy it from the map.

To get a Shipyard I had to buy the two houses it was connected to. Don't ask why. Especially don't ask who puts a Shipyard at the back of the town, half way up a mountain, on the second floor of a building!

Once I'd bought my three houses, two of which I didn't need or want, for a total of seven Contribution points (which, fortunately, I will get back when I sell the Shipyard later) it had to be converted for use. That took two and a half hours, which gave me more than enough time to do every quest on the small island and chop enough trees to get the twenty-five logs you need to make a raft, plus twiddle my thumbs and alt-tab out. A lot.

I also hired a worker and then spent twenty minutes trying and failing to get him to do any work before I realized he wouldn't get off his fat, Giant behind until the Shipyard was up and running. By the time I was ready for bed I had a functioning shipyard, a worker and all the wood I needed. I was still missing three black powder but I figured I could buy those from the marketplace back in Velia.

All that was left was to give the order to start processing the logs, switch off and go to sleep. Oh, no. Oh, very much no. No, no, no, no!

If you want to make something in Black Desert you have to be there. Your character doesn't necessarily have to do anything. You, the player, don't have to do very much. Just give an order or two every so often. All the imaginary work is done by your workers. But that doesn't mean anything is automatic.

Remember those twenty-five logs that have to be prepared in some undefined fashion before they can be fitted together to make a raft? Each log takes twenty-five minutes to process. You have to give each processing order separately. If you log out the whole thing stops. If you go afk the whole thing stops as soon as the log your worker is working on is done.

It takes almost eleven hours to make a raft. I have made one of those rafts in real life. I lived by a river as a kid and we used to make them in the summer holidays sometimes. As a nine-year old boy I could make one of those rafts in an afternoon. It did not take me eleven freakin' hours and I did not have a ten-foot tall professional workman and fully-fitted freakin' shipyard standing by!

Watch Pvt Wiggles video on how to make the largest sea-going vessel currently available in the Western version of Black Desert, the Fishing Boat. He begins thus: "Be warned, building this boat was the most stressful time I've had since beginning to play Black Desert". Take that warning very seriously indeed. Granted, by the end he's gushing about how satisfying and thrilling it was when he finally got to plonk the thing in the water and sail away but I take all these "it feels so good now I stopped banging my head against the wall" stories with the barrel-full of salt they deserve.

Suffice it to say that, having made two of the twenty-five required logs, I was thinking wistfully of GW2, wishing I'd spent the last three or four hours wrecking around in WvW, not wasting most of an evening setting myself up for another ten hours of tedious busy-work the next day. As a harbinger of things to come it was a black stormcrow indeed.

The simple fact is this: I'm not interested in any kind of imaginary "job" or "craft". I have never in my life yearned to run a virtual business or spend hours pretending I'm an artisan. If I was going to spend hour after hour doing something like that I'd rather switch the PC off and go do it in real life, where I might make things I could actually use or money I could actually spend.

I love crafting in MMOs but what I love are the "mini-games" and the progression. I like to level up my crafters for the exact same reason I like to level up my adventurers; because it opens up new possibilities but, most importantly, because it's fun while I'm doing it.

Vanguard's crafting system, the best I have ever seen in an MMO, was a full RPG experience in and of itself. EQ2's is another. I can spend hours, days, weeks immersed in either of them. In WoW or LotRO or Rift even GW2 crafting doesn't have that degree of complexity but it has some, and what it lacks is offset by the benefit of being simple and swift. Yes, there can be a lot of repetitive grind along the way but it's the kind of repetitive grind I find relaxing and enjoyable.

Black Desert seems to me to fall heavily between two stools when it comes to crafting. It has none of the deep creative aesthetic of a game that permits full-scale, open world construction, like Wurm or Landmark, yet it requires a similar degree of time commitment just to perform tasks that are not in and of themselves either involving or interesting but exist only as a means to an end. Even at this early stage, the more I see of BDO, the more I suspect that will apply to most of its systems and gameplay.

The learning curve is so steep and the visual representation so impressive that the initial impact is overwhelming. It feels as though it's a game of vast depths and infinite possibilities. Once the shock wears off, though, it doesn't take long to wonder just how deep it really is.

With no interest whatsoever in the PvP end game, no desire to run any kind of trading operation and finding crafting off-putting almost before I've gotten started, it does make me wonder what I'll find to do once the intellectual stimulation of figuring out how it all works begins to falter. There's the world to explore, naturally, but with everywhere looking surprisingly similar thus far, even that is beginning to look a less appealing long-term project than I first thought.

When I went to log in this morning and found the servers were down for five hours I felt oddly relieved that at least I didn't have to do any more work on that blasted raft. That can't be a good sign.

Trust Me - I'm An MMO Dev: Black Desert, GW2

2016 is turning out to be a surprising year for MMORPGs. At the end of last year it seemed that no-one was expecting much from the coming twelve months beyond another WoW expansion and not many people seemed particularly excited about that. After the tent-pole launches of 2014 - TESO, WildStar and ArcheAge among them, 2015 was a fallow year and 2016 looked like less of the same.

Then, in just the first quarter, seemingly out of nowhere, we suddenly find ourselves with three major AAA contenders: Blade and Soul, Black Desert Online and The Division. What's more, all three seem to be getting a warmer welcome than most new MMOs have had for a very long time.

Perhaps it helps that the first two have already long since been launched in other territories, meaning they arrive loaded with content, finished and polished in their systems and stable in their infrastructure - even if the localization leaves a lot to be desired. Still, successfully re-launching an MMO in the West after a less-than-stellar run in its country of origin is an achievement not to be taken lightly. Trion certainly made a dog's breakfast of it with ArcheAge and SOE failed completely with both Wizardry and Dragon's Prophet.

As for The Division, even though this is a genuine first launch, it's been in development so long I guess you might expect it to be ready by now, although precedent would suggest otherwise. For once, by most reports, all that extra time devoted to "polish" seems to have been well spent. It sounds as though the game's a lot of fun although I can't comment from personal experience because, while I'd quite like to give it a try, my PC would burst into flames at the first firefight.

There's more to come. Waiting in the wings are several triple-A titles from majors, including Bless and Lineage Eternal plus a whole slew of smaller but well-known and widely anticipated projects from independents that might just about see the light of a screen sometime before next Christmas. As ChaosConstant puts it over at Occasional Hero "So Many Games, So Little Time" - and he's only playing the old ones!

When was the last time you saw puddles in an MMO?

I started to think about this while I was running along the muddy roads of Serendia in BDO last night. If there's one thing you can safely say about Black Desert it's that it's going to take some time to come to grips with it. It's hardly the sort of MMO you can dip into for a quick half hour here and there. It sucks you in and holds you fast.

Blade and Soul, contrarily, works very well in bite-size portions. It's filled with neat, complete quests that take a few minutes and tidy, instanced dungeons that don't last a lot longer. It has bosses that pop conveniently, quickly, almost on demand. You can make solid progress in an hour or less.

GW2 used to be like that. It still is and yet it isn't, too. All the old pick up and drop content based around dynamic events and Hearts is still there but the direction of travel both pre and post Heart of Thorns has all been about commitment to lengthier session play. It started with the 40/20 hourly cycle in Dry Top, way back at the start of Living Story 2 and spiraled up from there until it culminated in the epic two hour, hundred player tour de force that is Dragon's Stand.

Wait a minute...why did I come this way?

The next, big quarterly update, due sometime in April, is intended to address this mission creep. Supposedly there will be a return to a more manageable, shorter, and, yes, more casual approach in future. Whether that is the cause or the consequence of Colin Johanson's departure we will probably never know. It seems counter-intuitive, however, given that the main thrust of development remains, for now at least, the intense, fiercely hardcore, highly time-consuming addition of extensive raid content to the game.

Perversely, perhaps, as a self-defined casual-by-attitude, I really like the lengthy sessions encouraged by HoT. All the major set pieces - the endless Day/Night cycle in Verdant Brink, the long build up and short release of Auric Basin and Tangled Depths and, most especially, the movie-length drama of Dragon's Stand - seem to me to offer a great combination of dip-in/dip-out casual play and full-session satisfaction.

Playing Black Desert, it's begun to dawn on me that I rather like a structure that allows for plenty of individualism and freedom of action and yet encourages me to spend dirty great chunks of time in game without really noticing the hours tick past. It is, of course, a famous feature of sandbox gameplay, be it PvE or PvP.

They also serve, who only stand and watch.

World vs World, for example, offers it on a grand scale. Night after night I "just pop in to see how we're doing" and end up following a Commander I like for a couple of hours. I can run with the zerg, in or out of squad, I can roam, I can scout or tag siege or just sit in a keep and watch the ebb and flow on the map. I can be useful and effective or useless and ineffective and yet if I'm the former I can still drop out at will and if I'm the latter no-one notices or yells at me.

What all these systems - open world dynamic events, realm vs realm warfare, sandbox exploration and trading - have in common is ease of exit. In a Raid or a Heroic Dungeon or even a segment of your solo Personal Story you have to see things through to the end. Quit half way in and you either let down your friends and guild-mates or lose the progress you've made and have to start over another time.

With so many, so very many, interesting, exciting, enticing, tempting new MMOs to explore the one immutable factor is time. Even if you're willing to sacrifice every single other aspect of your life on the altar of the hobby, (which, fortunately, very few of us are) it's still utterly impossible to do any kind of justice to more than a handful of games.

This is why I feel that, to be successful in an increasingly competitive market, MMO developers have two, contradictory options. They can attempt to coerce players to stick with their game and only their game by heavy use of time-limited or gated content, progression that relies on constant repetition and the imposition of a subscription fee, or they can trust that what they have to offer is sufficiently entertaining and involving that players will become caught up in it and stay because they're having too much fun to leave.

Both methods have been proved to work but I know which model I'd prefer to see succeed.

First Impressions : Black Desert Online

Where to begin? At the very beginning, I guess. Buying, downloading and installing Black Desert Online was exceptionally easy. Like all modern MMOs it has a huge footprint but in not much over two hours the 30+ GBs were tucked away on my hard drive and I was staring down the barrel of the Character Creation screen.

I'd heard about this one. I knew Daum had released the thing as a standalone long ago. I'd seen videos of people playing with it and read whole blogs about how great or not-so-great it was. Well, I'm not all that much of a one for over-complex character creation systems. I prefer to be in and out in under ten minutes.

The final version in Character Creation. Of course she arrived wearing something entirely different.

Tough luck. Not happening. It took me about an hour and that was trying to hurry it along. There are a lot of options and, very annoyingly, no randomized choices that I could find. I got particularly hung up on the eyes. Must have spent twenty minutes on those alone.

In the end I got something - someone - I was happy to look at long-term. While the game downloaded I flipped through the mostly useless, exceptionally vague class descriptions on the website and read a few basic class "guides", which weren't much better. They couldn't even seem to agree on what the classes were called, far less how they played.

When in doubt go for a pet class or a warrior. I went Tamer. At level ten, as I was when I logged out last night, she still doesn't have a pet but it doesn't seem to be slowing her down any. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Is there a good optician in this town? My peripheral vision's gone all blurry.

Visually everything looked slick and smart in the creation screen but that soon fell apart when I appeared in the world. Following Aywren's lead I went for the Orwen server, Calpheon II channel. Even though it was flagged as Crowded it let me join and I popped out into the starting village, the name of which escapes me.

One of the key reasons I ended up buying BDO when I'd really not planned to was something Syl said about the city of Heidel : "It is an incredibly well-designed site as far as an authentic medieval-feeling city goes and I have been to a fair few in real life." So have I and I love them. That promise and the gorgeous screenshots were what tipped the balance.

OMG! It's getting worse! Someone check my pupils - I think I might have a concussion!

Unfortunately, the thing I forgot to do was check the minimum specs. My PC is elderly. I forget how long ago I bought it but it must be at least six years now. I last upgraded it significantly about four years back. I've been meaning to buy a new one for two years but the plain fact is that it runs everything I play really well so I haven't gotten round to it yet.

MMOs generally aren't very demanding, even the newer ones. Blade and Soul, for example, runs perfectly and looks fantastic. Black Desert...doesn't. The prime reason for that is the textures. The game would prefer I leave them set on "Low", which looks abominable. It tolerates "Medium", which doesn't look much better, but if I try to move to "High" it throws up dire warnings about my video card having insufficient memory.

On the other hand, at night it doesn't really matter how bad the graphics are - you can't see them anyway.

I struggled along with the recommended default settings for a while, wandered around, started the tutorial quests, killed some weasels, took some screenshots. Not good. By the time I'd graduated from slaughtering wildlife to murdering Imp Soldiers for their hats night had fallen and I literally couldn't see what I was doing.

I stopped, took a look at the screenshots, which were generally dreadful, when you could make out what they were at all, and went back to GW2. Several hours later, when Mrs Bhagpuss had retired to bed, I went back to try again.

Okay! This is looking better. That's a fox, isn't it?

This time I spent the best part of an hour going through the Options. I switched off all the incredibly annoying blurs, fuzzes, fades and camera tricks that are supposed to improve your screenshots but which actually make them look like you have no idea how to hold a camera, much less focus one. Then I overrode the nannying voice with its over-protective concerns for my video card and risked the dizzy heights of "High" textures.

Eventually I arrived at a compromise that, even if it's not the gorgeous visuals I was expecting, is at least not actively painful to look at. The screenshots look better than the same views in game but the game looks...okay. If I want anything more I'll have to buy a new computer and I don't think I'm going to like Black Desert that much.

And I think that's a cat. It's so badly-drawn it's hard to tell. Especially with that giant chick throwing off the scale.

But I do like it. It's surprising, because one heck of a lot of things about the game are annoying me already and I've only played for about three or four hours. Still, it definitely has that hard-to-define quality that means I want to persist and overcome the annoyances rather than just write it off as a bad decision and move on.

The world is very worldly, just like everyone says. It's also set in that low-magic, quasi-realistic, pseudo-high-medieval milieu that hits my personal sweet spot. For an explorer archetype with my particular aesthetic it's close to a bullseye.

We have this darling little place in Tuscany...

Of course, being a game, it's also crazily, ridiculously unconvincing as a working environment. All those people walking the road with their gigantic backpacks, far from adding authenticity, look about as realistic as the forty or fifty foxes milling about next to the forty or fifty wolves just after the forty or fifty weasels, all romping aimlessly together in the shrubland a hundred paces from the center of town. Anyone who thinks this is a proper virtual world needs to re-calibrate their suspension of disbelief, pronto. It's running wild.

As an MMORPG, though, I can see it has promise. I know it's getting all the big praise for its sandbox gameplay, all that trading and taming and farming and such, but I have to say that none of that interests me in the slightest and yet I can still imagine enjoying Black Desert for a while.

Why, Grandma! What big teeth you have!

It has a plot that's not entirely uninteresting, for a start. That disembodied presence with the teeth is a wrong 'un if ever I saw one. What's up with that? It's like I'm playing a character that comes complete with her own psychotic episodes. I don't know where this is going but I'm curious to find out.

Then there are all the races. I was miffed that the only playable choices seem to be big human, normal human or elf (aka human with big ears) but I was mollified to find even the first village a hotbed of multiculturalism. Goblins, dwarves, creepy Midford Cuckoo children, even creepier guys with antlers... If this is rural life I can't wait to see the big city.

Tell me about it...

So far in this sandbox game my experience has been largely indistinguishable from what I'd be doing in a supposed themepark but I think that has more to do with how I approach MMOs than anything else. They really are all quite similar from my perspective. So, as yet, BDO doesn't feel a lot different yet to Blade and Soul or ArcheAge or GW2 or FFXIV.

It is, however, a lot less comfortable to play, from a technical point of view. The UI isn't terrible but it's not great. The screen looks quite cluttered even after I've switched off virtually everything that can be switched off. I really don't like the way the whole thing plays in a letterbox frame. It constantly draws my attention to the fact that I'm looking at a screen, not a world.

I don't even...

I was very apprehensive about the combat in BDO but after doing really quite a lot of it, it seems okay for now. As several people said it would be, it's just button-mashing, at least at this stage. There's a whole lot of guff about combos the game tries to teach you but just hitting left and right mouse button and a few random keys once in a while for variety seems to do the job just as well. At level 10 I haven't died yet and that includes many yolo runs into swarms of imps running into double figures. J3w3l suggests it gets harder in the 30s, as I guess it should, but I'll worry about that when and if I get there.

No, the thing that I'm finding most difficult to deal with isn't combat. It's movement. For a start I purely hate having my mouse pointer withheld from me. It's like trying to do up a bow tie wearing boxing gloves. What is the point? Can developers really not program a UI that allows simultaneous use of center-screen targeting and the mouse pointer? Really?

A minute ago there were about a dozen imps here, performing some kind of ritual. They got in the way of the shot. So I killed them

I'm constantly wanting to swap between the two things, especially when moving around town. It drives me crazy. Added to that there appears to be some kind of inertia factored into character movement. I am constantly overrunning my destination because my character keeps on going after I lift my finger from the W key. It's like I'm driving a vehicle not directing a person.

Even worse, there seems to be a short delay at the end of every combat that disables all movement in any direction. I have to count a beat of two before I can move. It's infuriating. At one point I was so irritated by all of this I went so far as to enable "Move by Mouse". That works very nicely but unfortunately whoever programmed it thought it would only be used by idiots and tiny children so they plonked a six foot high glowing flag at the destination click, making it visually unbearable.

I move faster the less I carry.

And yet, with all these structural drawbacks, I'm still itching to finish this post and get a few more hours in. The world is inviting, the storyline is intriguing and the learning curve is satisfying. I especially want to understand the Conversation system, which is the first thing I have seen in any MMO that reminds me, even a little, of Vanguard's much-missed Diplomacy gameplay.

And I guess at some point, as a Tamer, I probably ought to tame something. So much to learn. At this early stage it's impossible to judge the stickiness but I think I'll get the box price out of this one, at least.

I Knew This Was Going To Happen : BDO

Oh, what the hell. It's not like I have anything else to do...

Which server is everyone on again?

Gotta Play 'Em All : Blade and Soul, Black Desert Online

Some days it seems like everyone and their donkey is off playing Black Desert Online, while here am I, stuck with last month's seven-day wonder, Blade and Soul. When I'm not playing that other game no-one plays any more, that is.

It's fair to say I never expected to play Blade and Soul for more than a couple of sessions. I thought I'd take a few screenshots, get a blog post or two out of, then cast it aside like all the rest of the imported MMOs that don't find traction with me. Hasn't turned out that way.

I've played Blade and Soul almost every day for a month now. My Summoner is level 30 so I'm averaging about a level a day. It's just a fun MMO. It isn't very deep or complex or  sophisticated or subtle - it's just fun to play.

Sometimes you just want to run!

It's also easy, at least as far as leveling goes. Due to some bizarre and baroque design decisions, gearing up a character is an odd experience, as I mentioned before. At level 30 I have just four slots filled with gear that affects combat performance - my weapon and three pieces of jewellery. For a while I thought maybe I'd get drops or quest items for the other slots but so far nothing has appeared. I'm not even sure those slots give stats - they may just be for looks.

The four items I do have can be upgraded all the way to the level cap, which I believe is 45, but they have all maxed out for now at level 10. Further progress is gated behind certain specific items that I have yet to acquire (or even look for). The weapon is particularly awkward, upgrading only from a dungeon drop that's both semi-random and open for bids among the group when and if it appears.

You and me both, Suki.

All of which sounds off-putting and would be if it wasn't for the fact that none of it makes any appreciable difference whatsoever to my character's ability to do everything she wants to do. It's like a one-inch high roadblock you just drive right over without even feeling the bump.

At level 30, using my level 10 gear, I can do every quest I'm given with comfort. More than once I've found myself running so far ahead of the expected curve that progress on the main quest has had to to take an enforced break while my nominal level catches up. Presumably there is content somewhere that requires the use of level appropriate gear but I haven't run into any of it yet.

With the usual motivator of gearing-up absent from the leveling process there must be something else driving me to keep climbing that ladder. Mostly it's the old "what's over the next hill" curiosity. Blade and Soul may not be as quasi-realistic as BDO but it's gorgeous all the same.

Let's just see where the road takes us.

The map is excellent at teasing the reveals and opening each new location is a great motivator. The world seems very big and filled with variety. There's always something fresh to see. I'm particularly encouraged to press on when I consider that so far I'm only about three-quarters of the way through the first of two continents.

Then there's the story. It's utter nonsense but it's entertaining nonsense. The English translation remains uniformly excellent and either the voice acting has improved a little or my standards have slipped. The ever-present humor isn't going to give Nora Ephron or Woody Allen any competition but if you like puns and post-modern irony then there are some genuine pleasures to be had.

See, Yehara has this fan she fights with, and there are these impressionable young women that idolize her and they form a club...oh, you got it already?

You do need a significantly high twee tolerance. Especially when it comes to Ploggles. As best I can tell, the Ploggle is an unholy cross between an FFXIV Moogle and a GW2 Quaggan. Unlike Moogles and Quaggans, the good news is you can kill them.

The real surprise, though, is the combat. Playing Blade and Soul as a traditional hotbar MMO works perfectly. It's a long time since I had a selection of icons on my screen that I understood this clearly and used so intuitively after what's really only a few hours of play.

There are a whole load of combos that can fire and each ability can have multiple status effects but I'm finding I don't need to think very hard about any of that. Much more importantly I know where my heal is, my snare, my knockdown, my de-aggro...Soloing in Blade and Soul feels very natural and familiar and oddly old-school.

We'll take it!

One thing that BDO has that B&S lacks, of course, is housing. J3w3l just bought a place in the city of Calpheon that looks highly reminiscent of my old house in Vanguard. I could go for some of that.

Like GW2, Blade and Soul teases with sumptuous NPC accommodation that would make a wonderful home for my characters. I'd be more than happy with a rented room at Yehara's Mirage, where the desert sun filters through stained glass to magnificent effect. Instead we end up sleeping on scrub grass in the shade of an awning, if we're lucky.

Even as I type this I have the Black Desert Online website open at the order page. Only two things are holding me back from clicking the "Order Now" button. Firstly, I do not have time to play any more MMOs. Secondly the combat in BDO sounds horrible. In the end, though, neither of those drawbacks is likely to outweigh my curiosity.

I guess it's just a question of how long I can hold out.

My Beautiful Balloon : Ninelives

It's going to be a fair old while before I experience Virtual Reality in the comfort of my own home, I imagine. I've never been much of an early adopter when it comes to technology. I'd rather let someone else pay ten times the eventual price to road-test kit that's a tenth as good as the eventual mass-market breakthrough version is bound to be.

My feeling is that some form of VR will, eventually, achieve widespread public acceptance and, in time, a great deal of popular entertainment, both factual and fictional, will be produced and consumed. At which point we'll all stop thinking and talking about the tech and just get on with enjoying whatever it is that we use it for.

That singularity is still a long way off. Isn't it always? There have been predictions of the imminent arrival of A.I. for most of my adult life and yet the stilted versions that have so far gained the widest public use and acceptance, Siri, Cortana and their like, with their emphasis very heavily biased towards the "artificial" rather than the "intelligence", bear small resemblance to the idiosyncratic, self-aware digital entities we were promised or warned about.

V.R. seems, at least, to be doing better than that and, with the buzz in the air, wandering through Ninelives last week I couldn't but be aware of what it might feel like, one day, to be exploring such a delicious, delightful new world in the round. After all, even without the benefit of 360 degree vision, the tiny team behind the game have done a stellar job of creating an atmospheric, absorbing three-dimensional world on a flat screen.

For the current alpha two character slots are available, which is handy, since there are only two classes at present, Blade and Mage. There are four races, Humans, Goblins, Ogres and Nightbreeds. The racial choices, along with the music, soundscapes and textures, are a large part of what reminds me so strongly of City of Steam in its alpha days.

Over time, that game veered away from its complex, nuanced, fascinating world, choosing instead to promote a garish, fairground experience, reliant on countless mini-games and shills. Once upon a time I was sufficiently engaged with CoS to imagine making many characters just to explore fully the racial backgrounds and stories of the divergent branches of  Greenbloods and Riven.

In the end the only character I played seriously was a goblin. This time, in Ninelives, I thought I'd best expand on that a little, while the choice still seems worth making. So, I rolled a Nightblood Mage.

It's a quick process since there's no character customization at present. Neither, so far as I can tell, is there any particular difference in the content available. Despite that, playing a female Nightblood doesn't feel very much like playing a male goblin at all.

Appearances matter, for one thing. Roaming the world as a six-foot tall shock-haired woman in a robe is an entirely separate experience from doing exactly the same as a five foot male goblin in a leather harness and furry boots. Similarly, speaking to NPCs who talk about the cursed history of your own imagined race has a frisson that's absent when they tell you exactly the same story about someone else's imaginary race.

There's also the nuance that comes from doing something for the second time, yet not in exactly the same way. When I first approached the great city at the start of the game, as a goblin it was a moment of awe and wonder. Everything blurred into an imagistic reverie. The statue of the stag, the smoky barroom, the hot air balloon above the towering rooftops, it was all too much to take in for a small, greenish goblin who'd just woken up in a stream.

Striding up the hill as a confident magician with a fair idea of what lay ahead, however, I found I was able to take much more on board. Discovering that the stag represents the curse of my race and that the great city of Crimson Crest was founded and built by Nightbloods after their escape from the desert and their own terrible error, brought the world into a focus it had previously lacked.

All of which is a lengthy preamble to explain how I came to notice, as I jogged along the road north of the city, that the hot air balloon I'd thought to be no more than an excellent piece of atmospherics was actually descending towards a landing platform not a hundred meters away. I dropped my immediate plan of re-heading scarecrows and instead scrambled up the slope to meet the airship as it arrived.

I had FRAPS running so I hit F9 to record the whole thing. I'd already spoken to an NPC in the city who'd told me about balloon flights to another city being suspended because of some outbreak of conflict, so I was aware the game might have some method of supposed aerial transport. I imagined it would be enabled at some future stage of testing, when more maps came on line.

What certainly never occurred to me would be that the balloons, when they were running, would be physical objects in the world; craft onto which you could clamber and stand and be carried as they rose and flew. I'm racking my brains to try and remember if I've ever encountered this in an online game before. I haven't come up with anything yet.

EQ2's Moors of Ykesha expansion has balloons as the intra-zone auto-travel option and I seem to remember that World of Warcraft has air balloons as the Horde's equivalent to griffins, but in both of those cases the mechanics are entirely different. You interact with an interface that effectively renders your character an integral part of the vehicle. Thus you remain until either you reach your destination or you cancel your connection by jumping off.

What you don't do is clamber into the basket as it rests, briefly, on the ground, then see yourself taken up by the balloon as it rises. You don't stand, free and clear, able to walk from one side to the other, turn, take in the view. You don't have the vertiginous sensation of balancing precariously on a floating platform that moves and changes direction against your own inclination, aware that a false step could send you over the rail. You don't get the thrill.

It was as the balloon took a long, sweeping curve high over the city that it occurred to me to wonder how this might all feel if I was encompassed in V.R.. It felt immersive enough to bring butterflies to my stomach as it was. For the first time I was able to imagine an application in a game I actually play that might benefit from the new technology we are all, most likely, going to have to come to terms with eventually.

At this point I'd love to be able to post the video, which would give some small impression of the event as I experienced it. Unfortunately, FRAPS, usually so reliable, decided to give up the ghost just after the balloon left the ground and all I was left with was a corrupted file the size of a small MMO.

I could go back and try to shoot it all again but why bother? Ninelives is free. It's a small, fast download. It takes seconds to register an account. Go see it for yourself. It's worth the ride.