On A Mission For Love: EQII

February sees the beginning of a flurry of holiday events in EverQuest II. We took a full month's break following the end of Frostfell in early January but this week saw the start of  Erollisi Day, Norrath's version of Valentine's Day.

When it comes to Norrathian holidays, a "Day" usually lasts at least a week. The Errolisi celebrations go on for twelve days. There's a short break and then very soon we'll all be seeing double during the equally misleadingly named Brewday, a two-week bender built around the earthly "holiday" of St. Patrick's Day (not really a thing where I come from). That runs directly into the Chronoportal event, for which our Earth can offer no equivalent.

No sooner (literally) than the Chronoportals vanish, Bristlebane, Norrath's Lord of Misrule appears. Trickster that he is, he somehow manages to persuade us all to celebrate his "Day" for a full two weeks around April 1st. The moment he disappears, out pop the Beasts for Beast'r, a relatively new and short holiday celebrating, yes, you guessed it, the Norathian version of Easter.

While all this is happening the regular, monthly City Festival and lunar-cycle Moonlight Enchantment events carry on as usual. It's a full calendar, to say the least. I'm sure we'll all be relieved to take May off before it all kicks off again in early June with the successive and lengthy elemental celebrations of Oceansfull and Scorched Sky.

All of these events are packed with quests, collections and achievements, some them looking fit to burst after fifteen years of stuffing. There was a time when I'd go all out on each holiday as it arrived, trying to do everything, often on several characters across different accounts but these days I'm a lot more selective.

There are still people who go all in on every holiday. You can occasionally hear their cries of distress on the forums as they bewail the unfairness of not being able to do everything on everyone. And each year it gets harder for completionists as the dev team strives to add something new to every festive occasion.

As Bart Simpson once said, they're damned if they do, damned if they don't. Some people find the sheer volume of things to do stressful but any holiday that comes and goes with no new content at all is held up as evidence that the game is dying.

Not that many anniversaries pass by unchanged. There's always something new, even if it's just something small and unremarkable. For this year's Errolisi Day we get the usual extra achievement (Over the Moon) and a selection of new things to make and buy, but the centerpiece is something much more substantial, not to say original: a series of five quests for the new Overseer system.

That seems quite significant. Potentially, it's game-changing. Prior to this, it hadn't occured to me that the Overseer feature could be meaningfully integrated into the metagame but on the evidence presented here it most definitely can. Indeed, it has been.

To get the quest you have to visit an NPC called Sister Marinah Highgleam in New Halas. She's standing there with a feather over her head just like any other questgiver and when you speak to her she has a backstory like any other, too.

Some pirate kidnapped her, then released her on condition she help him win the love of "a tall troll woman known as Deadly Rhedd". It's the traditional set-up that would normally have you agreeing to run all over Norrath collecting objects and killing monsters, which is precisely what needs to be done, only not by you. The modern adventurer has people to do that kind of thing for her.

Taking the quest doesn't write anything in your Journal. Instead it adds a new Overseer Mission "Thralg's Bejeweled Cutlass" to your list. The mission takes just half an hour. When it finishes it's immediately replaced by another, "Thralg's Mad Grobb Grog", then "Thralg's Trained Monkey" and so on. Each has a little story. All Overseer missions do. The conceit that these are quests which really take place inside the game is dutifully maintained at all times.

I'm currently on the fourth of five, "Thralg's Blessed Cologne". I'm doing them as I write this post because "doing them" entails nothing more than tabbing back into the game after thirty minutes has passed, picking up my rewards and clicking on the next one.

It would all just be a bit of fun (and it is that, too) if it wasn't for the fact that the rewards are potentially comparable to, or even better than, anything I can get for going out and fighting things. My Shadowed crafting book, by far the most valuable drop I've had in the expansion so far, came from an Overseer Mission and every day I get a few items comparable to those I get from solo quest rewards. Granted, the quest rewards are usually better, but only by a slim margin. And I have had some upgrades.

Now we have proof of concept that quest chains with narrative can be handled via the Overseer interface. That subverts the core gameplay loop. We're in a brave new world where we, the players, talk to NPCs via our characters then send those characters out to adventure at the NPCs' behest - and our characters then delegate the work to their own sub-contractors! By the time anyone gets a sword upside the head there are several degrees of metaphysical separation between the sword-wielder and the aggrieved party.

The way this all affects gameplay goes even further than that. As I type this I have a character camped at one of the graveyards in The Commonlands, waiting for the Errollisi Day Public Quest to begin. I've done it once already in the middle of writing this post. It's the quest I wrote about in detail last year, when I did it on two characters so I could get the Carina Cuddleblaze familiar.

At the time I was happy just to get a cute little dragon that would follow me about. This year I'm doing it because Carina Cuddleblaze is a Fabled quality familiar, which means she's extremely useful for reducing the Mishap chance on Overseer missions.

I'm also doing the "Familiars Wild" daily quest on the only three characters that can get it (my account is bugged, as I suspected, although my Berserker has inexplicably unbugged himself somehow so I remain hopeful for the rest). That's so I can build up a stable of familiars purely for Overseer purposes.

Next on my list of things to do is to hunt down or buy better Mercenaries and pay for them to be hireable anywhere, once again so I can use them to increase my chances of a bonus chest on Overseer Missions. There are changes to the system already up on the Test server which will give players access to all of the Missions they have unlocked, rather than having to take whatever the server gives them, and that will make the system even more central to gameplay.

I'm finding all this quite strange. It doesn't just add a resource management mini-game to EQII, as I imagined it would. It opens up a whole new channel for character progression and now the dev team has thrown narrative possibilities into the mix.

Perhaps the oddest thing is how much I like it. It seems to run counter to the kind of things I say I want in my MMORPGS but then we all know how that goes. MMORPG players rarely play the way they say they wish they could, even when the opportunity arises. All too often they do the exact opposite, then complain bout it. 

In this case, I can see why I'm becoming increasingly drawn into using the Overseer system. For many years, solo endgame play in EQII has meant running instances repeatedly for the daily and weekly rewards. That takes too long and becomes too repetitive for my tastes. It's too much like hard work. The Overseer system is turning into a way to get much the same result, only with the tedium removed (or at least shunted offline, which is much the same thing).

At the moment the rewards aren't generally as good or as reliable as you'd get from instances but as my portfolio of Missions and Agents builds and I get full control over which missions I run each day, that could easily change.

I've just started the final Mission in Sister Marinah's questline. It will reward me with a pirate illusion and a title as well as a standard Overseer Mission crate. I've already received a new Agent, a plushie for my house, a vanity pet and four crates.

If Overseer Mission Questlines like this were to become a standard addition to holiday events I'd be very happy indeed. You wouldn't hear me complaining even if we started to get them outside of the holidays as general content updates, although I'm pretty sure that would cause some stirs of dissent.

There will always be those who rail against change but that's why we have Kaladim. It's not as though we don't have a choice. Somewhat to my own surprise, I come down heavily on the Retail side of the argument, to put things in terms a WoW fan would understand.

Oh, god. I've been corrupted, haven't I? Where did I put my principles? I'm sure I saw them a while ago...

Real To Irreal : Californium

For once, I did exactly what I said I was going to do. After I finished blogging yesterday I popped off to Steam to buy Californium.

Not! Of course I didn't. As soon as I hit "Publish" I forgot all about it and spent several hours futzing around in EverQuest II .

It wasn't until late in the evening that I remembered and finally went and did it. By then I only had time for a quick look. I played for about forty-five minutes. This morning I logged in again and played for a couple of hours.

That's not enough for a full review but it's plenty for a First Impresions piece. And my first impressions are very favorable.

Let's start with the best part: the art design. It's gorgeous. I've taken over fifty screenshots already. I'm seriously considering grabbing several hundred just so I can use them for randomized desktop backgrounds.

It's a good thing the art's as well done as it is because the game relies on it extremely heavily for gameplay, which consists entirely of spotting anomalies, while the narative relies almost equally strongly on visual contextual disparity. Some weight is carried by the soundscape but it's down to the art department to handle the heavy lifting.

The controls are just about the most minimal I've ever seen in a game. WASD for movement and left mouse button to interact. That's it. Oh, and sometimes you have to type the words you see on screen in a simulation of typing on a typewriter, which is how the game begins.

Absolutely nothing is explained extrinsically. You're left to work out for yourself what to do by context. It's not difficult because there are only a tiny handful of things you can do. You can walk around and look at things - and by "look at" I mean you, the player, can stare at the image on your monitor. Your character, a writer named Elvin, who analogs Dick himself, can't perform any of the typical adventure game tricks - no examining things, no picking things up, no interaction of any kind.

Except when you see something glitch. This, I think, is where the game really earns its right to invoke the name-recognition of PKD. All the gameplay I've seen so far consists entirely of noticing something that's not right and looking closely at it. That's something that drives the narrative in many of Dick's novels and here it's replicated beautifully.

Reality is not what it seems. As you pan the camera maybe something will flicker and catch your eye. Perhaps you'll notice objects juddering or changing place. There might be a glow where no obvious light source exists.

When you spot one of these you'll notice an icon. Left-click on it and hold and reality will change, overwriting the late-summer light of Summer of Love era California with a colder, bluer, altogether more 1950s aesthetic.

I wandered about, looking for glitches, opening holes in reality, listening to the rather good soundtrack. Once the phone rang and I listened to a message from Elvin's publisher. He didn't seem very pleased with his work. Then the television sputtered into life and started talking to me. When the static cleared all it showed were roman numerals. They turned out to be a countdown of the glitches I needed to find before I could move on to the next stage.

Eventually I found all the tears in reality and pulled them open. That in turn unlocked the door to my apartment. I moved outside to do the same in the street, the yard, my publisher's office, the local diner...

And that's all there is to it. Oh, except for talking to people. Listening, I should say. Elvin doesn't speak. He listens. And listening is a pleasure because the voice acting is very good. Up to radio drama standard, very nearly.

Once you leave the apartment you get to meet all kinds of folk; hippies, policeman, federal agents, store owners, draft dodgers. They stand around in the form of cardboard cut-outs, something that has a particularly Dickian resonance, although I think it's just a visual trope not a representation of how your character perceives them. Although, just as in a Dick novel, you can't quite be sure...

Californium claims to take its inspiration from both the life and the work of Philip K. Dick, which is why I was interested in playing it. From what I've seen so far it fulfills that promise quite convincingly although not everyone agrees.

Perhaps the author of that piece was insufficiently "familiar with obscure biographical facts from Dick's life", as he suggests players need to be if they're to get the most out of the game. Having read more than one biography of the great man as well as most of his non-SF works, several of which are semi-autobiographical, I thought it made a pretty fair fist of getting the existential nuances right, which is the hard part. Homicidal androids and funny talking doors, well, any game can manage those.

As for the plot, it's too early to say. There seems to be one. In the hippie reality Elvin has writer's block and his wife has walked out; in fifties fascist world he's a respected Patriot Writer but his wife, the same wife, now estranged, has just been arrested for terrorism. There's a third reality starting to open up. I don't know what that's going to be. But I'm curious to find out.

Clearly I'm enjoying myself so far but Californium does have its problems, the biggest one being an inability to save your progress when you'd like. You have to complete each level (the game actually calls them "levels") to have your gamestate retained at that point. If you quit before then, when you next log in you'll have to begin again from the start of the last level you didn't finish.

That's hardly conducive to natural play, particularly since it's far from clear when a "level" has ended. The television sets scattered around the locations keep a tally of how many glitches you've uncovered but sometimes there's more than one TV on the go.

Spotting the glitches can be quite challenging, too. They vary a fair bit in how they appear. The ones I find most convincing reveal themselves by some movement or lighting effect but others only show themselves momentarily as you pan the camera, emulating the sensation of catching sight of something out of the corner of your eye. They can be hard to spot. 

Then there are those that only appear when you mouse over them. Some only appear when you mouse over them while Elvin is moving. Some are concealed behind behind furniture, which glitches to reveal them, then covers them again. It's immersive when it works but frustrating when you've been wandering around for ten minutes without spotting anything.

That's adventure games all over, though. Which is why I always resort to a walkthrough in time of need. I'm playing to enjoy myself not to raise my blood pressure. 

I made it about two hours in before I got completely stuck. Fortunately there is a full walkthrough on Steam. It's in video form but given the nature of the game that makes sense. It means you could also watch it like a movie if you wanted. 

I might end up doing that but I think it's more likely I'll play all the way through. The way the layers of reality peel back is intriguing. I'd like to find out what's at the core. And I want to know who the sarcastic guy is who keeps talking down to me through the TV. And punch him in the throat.

A Secret Love Of Chaos

This post is something of a hymn to serendipty or the butterfly effect or maybe just the way one things leads to another. I can't really remember how it started even though I only began planning it a week or so ago.

I know I was thinking it was about time I did another music post, not so much because I imagined anyone wanted one but because I really enjoy doing them and it would be a fun thing to do on my week off work.

What peg to hang it on, though? With nothing much in mind I started thumbing through cover versions on YouTube, where I chanced upon a sliver of diamond:

Not only is it one of the most awe-inspiring JAMC covers I've ever heard (and I've heard a few) but the band is called The Caulfield Sisters. Now, I guess that could be a co-incidence but not when you consider this:

Back when I used to write and publish apazines, I had an occasional series where I would review books I'd found. Just the ones whose cover copy or blurb proclaimed them to be the spiritual successors of Catcher In The Rye in particular or J. D . Salinger in general. I hunted for them and found quite a few.

I wrote in the persona of an unnamed, ethereal entity, trapped unwillingly in an empty house on some transcendental plane. These texts would mysteriously appear for her; her only form of amusement or entertainment, her only relief from the close, unending stasis of her afterlife. She reviewed them for me. What else was there for her to do?

I never came right out and said it but it wasn't hard to work out that the girl in question was the spirit, the ghost, the transdimensional echo of Phoebe Caulfield, Holden's little sister. The fact that I used to publish my zines under the rubric "Another fit from The House of Phoebe" made the connection hard to miss.

I was in my twenties. Bite me. 

Three or four decades later I'm afraid to say I still think that was a cool set up. "Catcher In The Rye" is still my favorite novel and Salinger still my favorite writer, closely followed by "The Bell Jar" and Sylvia Plath in either second or third place depending on my mood. Yes, I am familiar with the term "arrested development", thank you very much. Good band, too.

I watched a bunch more videos by The Caulfield Sisters and I liked them so much I bought the MP3 album. Then I spent several hours bumming around YouTube trying to find enough Salinger-related tunes to put a post together.

It turns out a lot of people write songs about Salinger and Holden Caulfield and most of them aren't any good at all. Who'd have guessed? Well, I should have, for one. After all, I'm the idiot who bought a CD just because it was called "J.D. Salinger" and it was by a band called "The Wynona Riders". I mean, it had to be great, didn't it? Judge for yourself.

I did manage to find a couple of gems. Well, "gems" is pushing it. Songs that don't totally suck, that would be closer.

The one above has a superb title - "You're Not Salinger. Get Over It" and it's a good mosh pit filler. The band also get points for naming themselves after a somewhat Salingeresque and almost equally fondly-remembered T.V. show - The Wonder Years. Unfortunately, although there are literally dozens of live versions out there, every one of them seems to have been filmed from said mosh pit on a phone and they're all pretty damn close to unlistenable.

Maybe it's better not to get too carried away by a band's name. I certainly wasn't expecting much from an outfit calling themselves Retrospective Soundtrack Players. I mean, what even is that? But this is a pretty good tune and a creditable attempt to embody the spirit - and even the plot - of Catcher in a four minute pop song. Extra credit for wearing the Holden Caulfield hat!

While we're on the subject of band names that don't inspire confidence, give a thought to The New Hampshire Love Song Warriors, which actually sounds like one guy and a piano. The title, "I Want a Cornish Girl (& To Live Like JD Salinger)", misled me at first. I was wondering how Cornwall came into it but it turns out Cornish is a town in New Hampshire. 

The whole idea of a post based around popular songs based on Salinger and his works wasn't really going anywhere so I put it to one side. Then Everett True just happened to put up this about Grrrl Gang, a C86-obsessed trio from Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Everett seemed surprised and delighted that twentysomethings in Indonesia would be obsessed with Heavenly and Talulah Gosh but from what I've seen online there's a big twee/indie scene in that part of the world.

Grrrl Gang are excellent, as I found when I flipped through their back catalog, where one of the first things I came across was the provocatively titled Guys Don't Read Sylvia Plath (patently untrue although maybe not in Indonesia).

That put me back on the trail of author-inspired songs I could hang a blog post on. It occured to me immediately that the names of certain authors would be far more prone to theft or inspiration than others. I didn't think there was much chance of my finding some of my favorites - Ysabeau Wilce, say, or Robert B Parker - immortalized in song. And I was right.

I thought I might get a result with another of my top three all-time favorite authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but no such luck. My search wasn't helped by some prat called Scott Fitzgerald, who represented the U.K. at the 1988 Eurovision song contest. And came second. By one point. To Celine Dion. Singing for Switzerland. I'm not making this up. I wish I was.

Zelda Fitzgerald, however, is a different story. Unsurprisingly, her doomed, desperate grandeur still resonates down the years. Maybe one day I'll read her only published novel, Save Me The Waltz. If I don't, God knows it won't be for lack of trying. I must have started it half a dozen times.

Whereas I think most of the authors mentioned in this post would be either mortified or driven to homicidal rage by the songs bearing their names, I suspect Zelda would have enjoyed this one, if only for what has to be the most hipster video I've ever seen. The Fitzgeralds had a lot of hipster in them.

That was My Kind Of Karma. Well, it wasn't. It really wasn't. That's just what they call themselves. Bands, eh? Hipsters, eh? What are they like?

Much safer to dress down and name yourself after a children's T.V. show. It worked for Belle and Sebastian. I love them, even if they are the indie equivalent of National Treasures. When I saw they'd namechecked Sylvia Plath (yes, we're back to her again) I knew we were in safe hands.

Not sure about that keytar though. Or the hat.

If Belle and Sebastian and Sylvia Plath seem like a natural fit, this next one comes from somewhere to the left of left field. (Not Leftfield. I don't think they ever worked a quote from The Bell Jar into their prog house/trip hop ouevre). 

That said, rap and Plath's poetry share considerable common ground. I wish there was a completed version of this on YouTube. And I wish it was Ted Hughes chanting "You may be crazy but I love you baby". I'd pay good money for that.

Another obvious candidate for lionization in song is Jack Kerouac. Any of the beats, really. I've never been a big fan. I did read most of On The Road but that's about it. And I never quite finished it.

I also never got far with 10,000 Maniacs. On paper they're the kind of thing I ought to like and I do, a bit. Just not all that much. This is good, though. I wonder if it was her idea to start with the reading? She seems quite uncomfortable about it.

Sonically, I prefer the next one, by Madrugadas, which means "early mornings" in Spanish according to Google Translate. I have no clue what it's about but it's called "Kerouac". It sounds like three songs stuck together and I'm not convinced the last one is even supposed to be there.

Which brings us to our finale. When I was a teenager, before I discovered Salinger, Fitzgerald and being pretentious, my favorite author was Philip K. Dick. He's still in the top five. Or thereabouts.

I took a punt on his name turning up in a few song titles and boy, was I right! He would have hated it. He liked classical music, mostly; a bit of jazz. Maybe The Beatles at a push.

Some of the horrors perpetrated in his name would have appalled him, I'm sure, and this, by the oddly-named Barn Owl, in particular. Perhaps he'd have been mollified by their evident close reading of the text. Dick in later life believed a number of unusual things, including that history ended in 50 AD, everything since being a simulacrum. The title of this one is "Philip K. Dick's Nightmare (The Roman Empire Never Ended)" and you can't say fairer than that.

It's a good title but it can't compete with Man or Astroman. Few can. Today's final entry is the magnificently named "Philip K Dick in the Pet Section of a Wal Mart". Don't you want to hear that?

Naturally, being who they are, it's an instrumental. Except, wait, what's this? A fuzzy version with vocals, ripped from an old tape and put up by one of the band themeselves. They've lost the DAT master because of course they have.

We're lucky to have even this barely audible fragment and happily the lyrics are in the description. It really is about running into the visionary author in the animal foodstuffs section of a supermarket: "I was startled by the sight Of Philip K. Dick browsing at... The Hamster Turrets". Well, you would be, wouldn't you?

So there we are. Just a skim off the top of a very deep pond. Except for one more thing. Not a song this time. It's a game.

As I was scrolling down the search results from "Philip K. Dick Music" my eye fell across this:

It's a walkthrough for a game called Californium, based on the works and ideas of the man himself. I took a quick glance and it looks intriguing. And bright. Very bright. 

I checked and it's on Steam. I still have my winnings from last year's IntPiPoMo in my Steam Wallet. As soon as I finish this post I'm off to buy it. If it's any good - and even if it's not - no doubt a post or two will follow.

And that's how we get here from there. Serendipity. All you need is a seed.

A Younger Version Of Myself: Dark Age of Camelot

When Broadsword announced they'd finally gotten around to making Dark Age of Camelot Free To Play last November, after what seemed like years of promises, I knew I'd have to try it - eventually. I have a certain amount of history with DAOC, not all of it good by any means. I had mixed feelings about a return but it was inevitable that curiosity would get the better of me in the end.

In practical terms, what was putting me off most was what always puts me off in situations like this: paperwork. It may all be ones and zeros in this digital world but it's still the same old paper trail - passwords, account names, secret words...

Luckily, I never throw anything away. When I decided a few days ago that since I had the week off work I might as well do something completely pointless with the time, I was able to find my old login details almost immediately. Getting them to work took a little longer.

I haven't really been keeping up with the soap opera of DAOC's ownership these past few years. When I last played it was still owned by Mythic. I vaguely remembered it had semi-recently been spun off to some subsidiary called Broadsword Online Games (another unfortunate acronym) in a move reminiscent of Turbine's disbursement of Lord of the Rings Online to Standing Stone but I seem to have completely skated over Electronic Arts involvement in the whole affair.

The longer this genre goes on, the longer the games persist, the more convoluted and confusing the history becomes. Not that it was ever straightforward. As far back as the turn of the century I remember the arguments in /ooc raging over who really owned EverQuest; was it Sony or Verant or 989 Games...

I already had an EA Origin account for some reason I've long forgotten. I used that to log in to... something... then linked it with my old Mythic Account. That was a longer and more convoluted process than I'm making it sound but I've already purged the tedious details from my mind.

The important part is that it worked. The annoying part is it was only the first step in a much longer process. There followed a lot of rigmarole involving making new IDs and User Names and suchlike. Several times I had to google search or read forums or FAQs to work out what to do next. Intuitive it was not. At times it almost felt as though someone didn't really want people to play the game for free...

Once again, the important part is that it worked. Yes, there were a lot of hoops to jump through but at least there was solid ground beyond.

Eventually I had all of that set up and ready to go. I downloaded the game, which took a shockingly short time, typed my account name and password into the launcher and hit Play. Whereupon I was informed my account was Closed and I'd have to subscribe if I wanted to go any further.

That didn't sound an awful lot like F2P to me. So off I went on another round of reading terms and conditions and forum posts. At one point I logged into the Account Management section of my EA account, where I was able to find all my old characters listed, together with their old server names.

I was very surprised at how many I had. I clearly remember one set of characters, the highest level of which were an Albion Mercenary and a Midgard Skald, both in the low 40s. I'd completely forgotten another set of characters on a different server, one of which was actually the highest level of them all.

There were quite a few more onother servers, too. I only played for a year or so. I'm amazed I had time to level up so many, especially since I recall levelling after the teens being grindingly slow even by the standards of the day, which is why I never got anyone much past forty.

As far as I could tell I fully met all the criteria for Endless Conquest. My account hadn't been played recently, I had characters over Level 15 with more than one day's played time and so on. But the game didn't want to let me in.

I was more than half inclined to leave it that. It's not as though I was particularly keen to pick up where I left off. Or indeed to go back to Camelot at all. I was mostly thinking of getting a blog post or two out of it, along with a mild nostalgia hit. Nothing worth making too much effort over.

Still, I was a bit miffed that I couldn't get in. You know what it's like. You don't want to go to the party but you want to know you were invited. I looked at the Customer Service option and it seemed to be very old school. Just an email address. No tickets or Live Chat or Discord. So I bashed out a quick email detailing my problem and waited.

I got an immediate automatic response telling me my email had been received and that if it was an Account or Billing enquiry I could expect a reply within 72 hours. That was a couple of days ago and I haven't heard any more yet.


But... now I can log in just fine. I tried a few hours ago just to see if anything had changed and the Launcher worked perfectly. No more nonsense about paying.

I was offered a choice of servers, all with the same name, one I didn't remember. Luckily, all the research I'd been forced to undertake meant I knew what was going on. I couldn't explain it. I wouldn't claim I understand it. But I could deal with it.

My prior knowledge also meant I knew what was going on when the first character I logged in appeared in a Housing Zone I'd never seen before. NOt that I would have expected to - DAOC didn't have housing when I played.

All my old characters, waiting patiently in storage from back when servers had individual names, had been shunted off to a holding bay, namely the Housing area for whatever server they were on. The idea is that you log in there, then transfer your character to one of the numbered Ywain Realm vs Realm servers or to the single Gaheris PvE/Co-Operative server.

There's a guide for that. There are FAQs and guides on the Broadsword website for everything. There are so many of them, in such numbing detail, all in  hideous, soul-eating khaki-and-black, that my brain refuses to comply. I recommend Yeebo's DAoC Guides for a much clearer and more readable experience.

I walked about the housing area for a while. I fiddled with options and changed some settings and keyboard shortcuts. I took some screenshots. Then I decided I'd be better off making a brand new character and starting from scratch.

I thought about it and decided I'd try the PvE server. I know RvR is the whole point of DAOC and I know I really like that kind of PvP but realistically all I'm ever going to do in Endless Conquest is run around, kill a few mobs, revisit some old haunts, take a few screenshots and leave. That's going to go a lot more smoothly if only mobs are trying to kill me.

I selected Gaheris from the drop-down menu, logged in to create a character and found I already had one. I do now just about remember creating her back when Gaheris was invented, just to see what it was like. Maybe there was a free login weekend or a free trial or something. I know I never re-subbed.

Not that having a character there did me any good as far as the Endless Conquest went. She's Level 6. I imagine her played time is a couple of hours at most. The qualifying bar is low but she effortlessly slides under it.

So I made a new character. A Norsewoman Valkyrie. The choice of free classes is limited. Then I logged her in and did the Tutorial. It took me a couple of hours and it was... well, let's say it was old school as well. I haven't done a Tutorial quite like it in a very long time. I was going cover it in detail but really this has gone on quite long enough already and anyway I'm sure everyone can imagine exactly what it was like. It was a Tutorial.

At the end my Valkyrie was Level 10, wearing a full set of armor, wielding a decent sword and shield, with a selection of alternative weapons in her packs. A helpful NPC teleported her off the generic starter island to the original Midgard starting village on the mainland.

I recognized it immediately. It hasn't changed in nearly twenty years. It gave me the first proper hit of nostalgia in the entire process so far. If it hadn't been well past my lunchtime I'd have taken a stroll  around the old neighborhood.

I have absolutely no intention of playing Dark Age of Camelot regularly again. I don't even plan on playing it casually. At the very most, my ambition would be to see a few of the old leveling spots, take some pictures to replace the ones that got lost years ago and, of course, to get a few posts out of the experience.

As for leveling again, I think I'll be giving that a miss. Just doing the Tutorial reminded me how unbelievably slow and fiddly combat is in DAOC. I remember now that that was the thing I liked least about the game, particularly on melee characters. I probably need to move a couple of my old casters across. I seem to remember I had more fun with them.

And isn't it astonishing that those characters are still there? I remember when we were all terrified to let our accounts lapse even for a month because MMORPGs would wipe unplayed characters. Or they said they would. The evidence of history suggests otherwise.

If someone had told me in 2001 that in 2020 I'd be able to log in to the games I was playing for free and still find all my characters waiting for me, even if I hadn't paid or played for a decade or more, I'd have thought they were completely nuts. Change isn't always bad, is it?

Of course, the really unbelievable thing would have been if someone had told me I'd still want to...

When You Close The Door... : World of Warcraft

As the alert reader will have noticed, I haven't posted about World of Warcraft Classic for quite a while. The last time it got a post all to itself was back in mid-November, when I explained why I'd stopped playing.

I ended that post by saying "I am still going to get to 60. And I will certainly be back when Battlegrounds appear." Well, I haven't and I wasn't. And it doesn't look like I will be.

It took me a couple more months before I decided to pull the plug. I have a habit of letting subscriptions run on even though i'm not using whatever it is that I'm paying for. Then one day I found myself looking at a £5.00 sub for an Amazon Prime channel and wondering whether it was worth it...

So last week I cancelled my WoW sub. It seems a little ironic, after all the angst over Blitzchung and the boycott. Actually, in light of the lukewarm reaction to Patch 8.3 and the savaging of the Warcraft III reforge, it seems Blizzard need no outside help in dragging their stock price down.

In the end it was a fairly easy decision to make. There really hasn't been a moment since I stopped playing when I thought to myself "I miss Classic" or "I really should get back to leveling my Hunter". On the odd occasion when the game crossed my mind it was with something of a mental shudder.

The reasons for that are... strange. While it's certainly true to say the thought of grinding out those last half dozen levels in the fifties held very little appeal, what put me off the most was thinking about what the game looked like.

Which makes very little sense. I always thought WoW was a pretty good-looking game, even on the "Classic" settings I was using. I've taken a phenomenal number of screenshots as I roamed around Azeroth, most of them because I very much liked what I was seeing.

And yet, after a couple of months of EverQuest II, my eyes seem to have adjusted. It's not the greatest-looking game in the world; lots of people think it's downright ugly and in places it can be. But I'm attuned to its beauty. The very thought of staring at the different textures and surfaces of Classic for any prolonged period of time oddly set my teeth on edge.

That's just stupid and I know it is. I also know that if I logged in the feeling would dissipate and vanish in nano-seconds. But when you already don't especially want to do something, even an irrational reason adds considerable weight to your determination not to do it. Well, it does to mine...

I was more tempted to log in some of my characters in the Live game (are we still calling it "Retail"?). The graphics there are different. They wouldn't be a hindrance.

No, the bouncer on the door of Retail is the gameplay. Last time I tried to level my Hunter in the 90s it wasn't the graphics that stopped me. It was the boredom. He was trying to make some progress in the Legion expansion, which I hear is reckoned to be one of the good ones, but the quests were beyond tedious. I couldn't make myself care about any of it so I stopped.

I had a bit more luck with my Warlock in his forties or fifties (I forget which) but if I'm going to level a Warlock in that bracket I might as well go back and work on the one I left in Classic.

And then there's that superginormous elephant taking up the entire room: the Level Squish. What on earth is the point of leveling any character in Retail right now, when you know that in a few months you can do it on fast-forward, and in an expansion of your choosing? I have a vague idea I might re-sub then and level my Panda monk up in Mists of Pandaria, which everyone seems to agree is one of the best of all the expansions.

There's very little chance of me buying the Shadowlands expansion, of course. Just look at how much play I got out of Legion. It took me two years after I was given it to even log in and then I didn't like it.

I did very much like the Legion pre-events, though. They were  great. I re-subbed just to do them. If Shadowlands can come up with something as good I might do the same - and then carry on long enough to do the Pandaria thing.

I'm assuming the Level Squish will be available for everyone, whether they buy Shadowlands or not. It would be a bit weird if it wasn't, although I think I remember someone confirming that you would still be able to level the old way if you wanted to. Although presumably not at the old speed...

Anyway, I'm still subbed into early March so I could pop in for a run around before the doors swing shut. And after that I can play my under-twenties on Retail if the mood takes me. Maybe just writing this post will put me in a WoW mood. It's happened before.

For now, though, it's goodbye to Azeroth. It was fun until it wasn't, which is about as much as I expect from any game.

Between Thought And Expression

I wrote a long post that took me most of this morning and some of this afternoon. I gave it a title that turned out to be prescient: "Overthinking It". Then I read it back. It's in the bin, now.

Instead, I'm going to try and say the one thing I really wanted to say, only in about a tenth of the words. It's not a statement; it's a question: am I even playing any more?

It's been itching at me for a week or two now. When I log into the two MMORPGs I'm currently focused on, how much of what I'm doing can I really call "gameplay"?

I won't re-iterate all the mind-numbing detail of what it is that I actually do when I "play" (that's one of the things that made the failed post so bloated). Anyone who reads this blog must have a fair idea what that would entail. You're all probably doing something very similar.

Dailies, missions, tasks, rep grinds, achievements... all the paraphernalia of the modern game. Is any of it actually gameplay? Do we even have any clear understanding what "gameplay" is any more?

I'm not convinced that spending two hours or more every day, which is what I do now, sending notional NPCs on missions that are imaginary even within the context of the gameworld (EverQuest II) or performing certain tasks for the sole and only purpose of earning coin (Guild Wars 2) conforms to any functional definition of either "play" or "game".

Even some of the less abstruse things I find myself doing, things that use the mechanics of "questing" and are ostensibly conceptualized within the context of the game, come unmoored from anything I would once have recognized as internal logic, let alone narrative. They exist solely to provide a mechanism to deliver a reward. They have no before or after, no beginning or ending. They just are.

What I'm finding myself wondering is whether this is anything new or whether it's just that I can see it now. Is it the same skeleton that was always there beneath the surface, made visible as the concealing skin sloughs away? Or are these excrescences, parasites, carbuncles clinging to the worn and damaged carapace of an aging behemoth, too weak to scrape them off?

I always struggled with the word "game" in the acronym MMORPG but increasingly it appears to me that games aren't games any more. The best of them are stories. The rest just sets of actions to be completed, like setting a table for dinner or putting all your books into alphabetical order. We could call those things "games" if we wanted to: they have both rules and win conditions. We don't, though.

A while back there was much talk of "gameifying " real life to make doing chores feel more like play. Sometimes I wonder if what's actually been achieved isn't the exact opposite.

Tunnel Visions: GW2

Reviewing each episode of Guild Wars 2's Living Story as it appears has always been something of a tradition here at Inventory Full but I was thinking it might be time to bring that tradition to an end. Who even plays GW2 any more, anyway? I barely play it. These days even posts about EverQuest II seem to draw more interest.

I was certainly feeling that way after I'd played through the first few sections of the new story drop a few days ago. The overwhelming feeling of sameness was stultifying. The latest chapter of The Icebrood Saga, Shadow In The Ice, takes place in the same map as the previous one. A hitherto unrevealed part of that map, sure, but it soon transpires that one end of Bjora Marshes looks much the same as the other.

In some ways that's a good thing; I said some very complimentary things about ArenaNet's art department in my original assessment of the marshes and standards haven't slipped. Even so, as impressively as the team evoke the overpowering desolation of eternal winter, some of the impact inevitably dissipates with familiarity.

Seen one set of fallen arches, seen 'em all.

As I plodded through the narrative (and yes, there will be spoilers) that sense of déjà vu grew until I was seized by an overwhelming ennui. We've not only been here before, we've been here many times. So many times...

A subset of the regular cast bicker and kvetch about personal issues while trudging across a wilderness in pursuit of a distant quarry. A disembodied voice, laden with distortion, maintains a fractured and fractious dialog with the player character, while in the background looms an existential threat in the form of yet another a dragon.

In principle I don't have a problem with repetition. I certainly don't have any issues with thematic focus. If the core of the game's story is dragons and their metaphysical relationship to the continued existence of the world and everything in it then I'm down with that. Or I could be.

Only does it have to be so pedestrian? So lacking in urgency? So quotidian?

Now that's what I call an interstitial!

We have reached the stage in the narrative where slaying elder dragons is just what our characters do. Dragons and gods. Even characters we meet for the first time now take it as a given. "Oh, I know who you are. You're that guy who kills dragons".

Any story that makes dragon-killing into a day job is in trouble, even if we do kill the odd god on the side, when the dragon-killing goes slack. Still, it is what it is. And I can't complain, or I shouldn't. I was one of those who advocated getting back to the main plot all through that long and tedious digression with Palawa Joko, after all. If dragons it must be then let's get to it.

Except, of course, we don't. We don't get to killing dragons because in Tyria dragonslaying is always and inevitably preceded by a plethora of busy-work. Busy-work and talking. Which we call "preparation".

For the new Saga-shaped iteration of the Living Story, ANet have done away with Hearts once again. We had them in the base game, then they went away for years, then they came back. Some people liked that, some didn't. The current version seems like an attempt to please, or at least not annoy, both factions.

Yeah, yeah, I heard it all before.

There are no Hearts as such in Bjora Marshes, old part or new, but the storyline uses beats that are functionally indistinguishable. Before we can pursue the renegade Charr leader, Bangar, or mount an attack on elder dragon Jormag's champion, Drakkar, first we have to go do this and that, here and there, all around the new map.

Instead of completing tasks to fill a Heart we have to participate in Dynamic Events. Or, as some would far more accurately be called, Static Events, given they take place in a fixed location and have a visible on-screen timer telling you when to expect them. Participating fills a green bar in the top corner of the screen. Green bar, yellow Heart. Same difference.

I won't go over the details of what the events are or how they work save to say that they're simple to complete and only mildly irritating. I was consumed with a palpable sensation of box-ticking as I knocked them off, one after another. High adventure it was not.

Once again, I feel it would be churlish to complain. After all, I made it quite clear I'd had more than enough of the more "challenging" requirements of previous Living Story seasons. This approach is unarguably much closer to what I said I wanted. Maybe I've just seen it too many times, now. It's been more than seven years. Familiarity takes its toll on enthusiasm.

Pretty much what you'll be looking at for the next thirty minutes.

With the outdoor prep done it's off to the instances we go; a series of tunnels and caverns that conspire to be unremarkable and visually appealing at one and the same time. ANet's artists are very good at ice but ice can only hold your attention for so long.

Progress through the ice tunnels goes as you might expect. The Commander (as the player character is known, by dint of a military appointment that can surely only be honorific at this stage, since the last thing we ever do is command anyone to do anything - or, if we do, to have them actually do it), accompanied by Rytlock, Ceria and Braham, push on past various icebrood minions towards this episode's Big Bad.

Pacing here is decent. Waves of low-quality grunts attempt to swarm the team and are summarily dispatched. Stronger cannon-fodder follows and meets a similar fate. Finally a Champion appears for a fight that lasts a minute or two.


Real story spoilers next - look away if you might play.


I did wonder for a second if that was it but no. This is an episode with multiple endings. It's also almost an homage to endings we have loved (or loathed) from episodes in the past.

When you can switch the UI off and stand in melee range to screenshot the sub-boss's big attack...

There's a dragon whispering in the ears of the weak - and indeed of the strong - threatening to turn friend into foe. And succeeding. There's a dragon's champion visible only as a disembodied head poking through a wall. There's a segment where The Commander has to fight and defeat a vision of themselves.

Seriously, it's like a Greatest Hits compilation, although it's a lot better than that sounds. It's like a cover album of the greatest hits of a band you never much liked but done by a bunch of bands you like a lot more. And best of all they all only do one verse and a chorus then it's on to the next number.

It motors right on through, in other words. None of the dismal rule-of-three that made previous seasons such a misery. Best of all, even though the baddies still paint the floor with every kind of circle and splodge, even though they spew balls of light and columns of ice and bolts of lightning and blue fire, none of it really does much.

The dark blue one that looks like a slug is Jormag's Whisper. The skeletal head sticking out of the wall is Drakkar. Dead Drakkar. We just killed him. We just killed him. Bangar did not kill Drakkar. Let's get that straight right now!

You can dodge it if you find dodging exciting. I did for a while. Then I stopped and just stood there and it made precious little difference. I barely ever went under three-quarters health.

Some people will surely complain that this is insulting to their great gameplaying skills but I find it entirely appropriate for solo storyline instances in a casual MMORPG. It took them a long time but ANet finally seem to have realized who their core audience is, for the narrative at least.

If that was all there was to Shadow In The Ice I might not have bothered writing it up at all. I might have let this be the breakpoint that ended the tradition. But then something happened, right at the end, and it surprised me. The story took a turn I didn't expect.

Why, you devious little...

In the last few minutes, most of which comprises in-game conversation between NPCs and some rather well handled uses of the game engine, two or three things happened that caught my attention and re-engaged me with the narrative.

After a sequence of fights and a plethora of false endings and minor set pieces, Jormag's champion Drakkar is down, Jormag's Whisper (don't ask) is at death's door and everything looks set to resolve itself satisfactorily. And then, out of nowhere, Bangar and Rytlock's son, Ryland Steelcatcher, appear. The very two renegades we were chasing across the marshes. And between them they kill the Whisper, nearly kill The Commander and leg it out of the caves to take full credit for everything the good guys (that's us) have done!

I definitely did not see that coming. Neither did I foresee the coda, where my character wakes up in a refurbished Hall of Monuments, now re-purposed as Aurene's Lair. At least, I think that's where it was. It certainly looked like it. Didn't see my stuff there but still...

I like what you've done with the place, Aurene.

To cap it all off, Aurene then posits the idea that Jormag, whose insidious draconic blandishments The Commander has been exhorting his colleagues to be firm of spirit and resist throughout, may actually have a point of view worth listening to. Can you ever trust a dragon? Even Aurene?

According to celebrated data miner that_shaman, as reported by MassivelyOP, we may be in for "six more episodes with a two-month gap between each, leading to a year’s worth of content" . If it's all of a kind with this latest chapter I guess things could be worse. Eight weeks between drops would be just close enough to maintain momentum; the gameplay, while scarcely riveting, is demonstrably more to my taste than in previous seasons and I am at least mildly curious to find out what happens next.

I'll give ANet a pass on this one. And I guess I'll keep on doing the episode reviews. For a while longer, anyway.