Real Tough Cat

 

What's wrong with this picture? I'll give you a moment. Anyone? Bueller?

Look at the health bars. A dwarf and his trusty cat, who's been with him since he was just a shaver hunting boars in Dun Morogh, putting down a named, an elite giant. worthy of an achievement, and not  a scratch on either of them? Isn't that odd?

Yes, well, I thought so. I was in Icecrown, failing to find the new pre-expansion invasion everyone's been talking about, when I noticed the pet didn't seem to be taking much damage. From anything.

We were in Northrend because supposedly that's where the new Scourge invasion is happening, only we couldn't find any sign of it. To pass the time I'd been questing for an hour or so. The dwarf had done a level, tipping him over into forty-six. The mobs, as per usual, were the same but they felt noticeably tougher than usual. They certainly took a little longer to kill.

There seemed to be no good reason why the pet wouldn't need a heal now and again. Or a rest between pulls. Only he didn't. Not once. Even with adds, of which there were plenty.

Belt but no pants. It's quite the look.

 

It was unusual enough that I noticed. I watched his health bars on a few pulls and coudn't see it move so I held the mouse pointer over it and watched as we fought.  He was taking one one or two points of damage, now and again. The most I saw his health drop by was five - out of just over four thousand.

Now I was really curious. I let him fight a couple of mobs on his own. It was slow. He didn't seem to do a lot of damage. But his health never moved. Still, not much of a test. 

One of the quests asked us to kill three named mobs. We'd already killed one before we knew there was a quest for it and it had been a very long fight. I hadn't been watching the pet then but it felt like it would be a bit more of a challenge for him so I took the pair of them back to do the mob again, only this time I sent the cat in and stayed well back to watch him.

He tanked the fight without visibly losing any health at all. Same on the other two nameds. Hmm.

As I'd been flying around Icecrown searching for any sign of a crowd gathering, without success, I'd spotted a lot of elites. I thought we might try some of those. We did. They didn't muss the cat's fur. I was starting to get ideas. What about the huge named elite I'd seen, stomping about the place, looking scary?

So we pulled him and we killed him. The hunter stood back, the cat tanked, the bird did whatever it does and the giant fell over. Up popped the achievement and a nice drop. I watched the pet's health closely. It was the same as on the regular mobs. Never lost more than five points at a time. Usually no more than three.

Compare my health with the pet's. I had to fd after about twenty seconds - he's full health after nearly five minutes.

 

The final test was unplanned. I was still thinking about it, trying to figure out why the cat, who I don't recall ever having been particularly robust, should suddenly have grown a steel-hard skin, when the hunter noticed there were about four or five mobs trying to rip his arms off. 

The cat might be virtually invulnerable but the dwarf very definitely wasn't. I feigned him at about twenty per cent health and sat back to watch what would usually be a slow but inevitable death for the pet. Only he didn't feel like dying.

He just kept fighting. It was slow but he worked his way through all of the mobs until there was only one left. It took him five minutes and his health never moved even in the slightest. With absolutely no support from me he whittled them all down and I got the xp. And the loot, when I finally stood up with a minute of feign death left and one half-dead dryad still staggering around being savaged by an indefatigable feline.

That was about where I left it. I still wanted to try the new pre-expansion event but it was beginning to look very much as though the version of Icecrown you get if you just portal there as a level forty-five (as he'd been when he arrived) isn't the same one all the level fifties get sent to for their big bash.

I logged in my shaman instead, she being the only level fifty character I have. Before the screen had even loaded, in came an urgent call from someone or other, telling her the plot was afoot and off we went on a merry chase, all through Orgrimmar, then to Crossroads and finally on to Icecrown.

This event is invite only.

 

She did all the quests, narratives and dailies, then flew around the map, trying to get to the bosses that pop every fifteen minutes and just barely managing it. After two extremely close calls she hearthstoned back to Orgrimmar because it was clear her pokey slow flying wasn't going to cut it. She'd never gotten around to training for the fast mounts even though she could have done it at forty.

Luckily, she'd never really spent any of the money she'd made while levelling up, either. She had six thousand gold left, which turned out to be enough. Just about. Then she went back to Icecrown and tried again - it was a lot easier that time.

On the third boss she got a purple ring that was almost double the stats of the ones she was wearing. I thought that would be a good point to stop so I went and had my tea and then came back to write this.

I'm left with a couple of questions for tomorrow. Firstly, is the unbreakable pet a thing, now? Is it just how hunter pets are, near the cap? (Because they certainly aren't like that for my vulpera hunter in the twenties - I nearly wore her heal spell out last night). Maybe it's a function of the new levelling process, in which case is it working as intended or will it get nerfed as soon as someone realizes what's going on? 

Maybe it was some kind of bug or fluke and when I log in next it'll be gone. If not, though, if it keeps on happening, do I want to keep experimenting with it or just carry on as though I hadn't noticed?

Performances every fifteen minutes, prompt. No refunds for latecomers.

 

Secondly, do I want to go even a bit hard on the Scourge events? There's a currency you can earn with dailies and a vendor that takes it for some armor that would be a big upgrade for either the shaman or the hunter (when he levels up to fifty and they let him join in). The dailies aren't too bad (Okay, the mushroom one's pretty bad...). I could fit them into the schedule quite comfortably.

Then there are the bosses. They spawn every fifteen minutes and the loot is potentially better than I'm ever going to see anywhere else. Plus I like big zerg fights. 

I haven't even decided if I'm going to buy Shadowlands, though. Daybreak finally opened pre-orders for Reign of Shadows today and I'm going to give them my money as soon as I finish this. Still no launch date that I can see but unless they push it into next year it's bound to clash with the WoW expansion at least somewhat and I know where my priorities are going to lie.

And anyway, as we all know, every catch-up reward from a pre-expansion event is going to be obsolete as soon as you get a few quests into the expansion itself. Is it even worth bothering? And if you aren't getting the expansion then what do you even need upgrades for? You're done, aren't you?

Yeah, but upgrades are fun even if they don't last long. And so are big events that get everyone all hyped up. I suspect I'll end up doing quite a lot of bosses just for the buzz, if nothing else.

As for the indestructible pet, well, I guess if he keeps it up I'll just have to see how far I can push him. For science. And maybe for the loot.

The Buckboard Bounce

 

The plethora of pictures I posted a few days ago tells the story. I really enjoyed riding with the vulpera on their alpaca-drawn caravan. 

I liked the way the caravan moved, the heft of it as it careened around cormers, the roll and lurch. A landship crossing a desert sea. 

I liked the banter between the driver and the passengers, the humor and the wit. I liked the song.

Perhaps most of all, I liked the way my character was pictured, perched a little precariously on the boards at the back, looking out over the trail as it vanished into the distance. It felt oddly like travelling and I wished it had lasted longer.

Yesterday, my vulpera hunter found herself in Eastern Plaguelands. Or maybe it was Western Plaguelands. One plagueland looks much like another, as we've all discovered, to our misfortune, this long year. 

I'd had absolutely no plans to go anywhere so unpleasant. I'd been happily roaming around the traditional tauren hunting grounds in Mulgore, doing this and that for anyone who'd ask me, but I'd been a little too eager and the work had dried up. I had just one quest left in my journal, so I took it and somehow ended up exactly where I hadn't wanted to go, back in Orgrimmar.

From there, one thing led to another and somehow I found myself being shipped out to shore up operations against the remnants of the Scourge. Or something like that. 

Honestly, levelling up in World of Warcraft is now so insanely convoluted and tangled, often as not I genuinely don't know where I am or why I'm there. I know it sounds like an exaggeration but the combination of my normal playstyle, running off in all directions like an over-excited toddler in a playground, grabbing every quest I see, combined with the palimpsest of overlapping times and dimensions that is WoW after sixteen years of iterative design, does frequently leave me with no real understanding of what I'm doing or who I'm doing it for.

Which is fine. I do, in fact, like it that way. I prefer it, even. It means plenty of surprises.

Finding myself in the Plaguelands was certainly that. I have an indelible image of those zones as quite difficult and fairly dour. I did a fair bit there on my original run a decade ago and I was back for a while last year in Classic. I absolutely would not have thought to go there at level fifteen but, somehow, there I was. 

I'm very much still not used to the way levels work. I look at the map and see a zone flagged "10-30" and in my head I'm imagining it has mobs of all those levels, maybe mixed in together, maybe hanging out in different areas. It's not like that at all.

I think the way it works is this: whatever level your character is, the mobs are the same level. Exactly. All of them. Except that one time they were all one level below me because... no, I got nothing.

I think you have to stay inside the designated bandwidth. If you go one level above the upper limit for the zone the mobs go all Lost Boys on you and refuse to grow up any more. I saw that happen for a couple of levels the other day. It was nice. Nostalgic, even.

What happens if you go to a zone when you're below the minimum height to ride? I don't know. Let's find out, shall we? I just happen to have an unplayed level two hanging around. Meet back here in, oh, ten minutes?

Okay, that didn't go quite how I imagined. I logged in my level two Night Elf bank mule and he turned out to be standing on the Stormwind docks. I have no idea why. Probably the best part of ten years since I last had him out. Perhaps he got bored. Being a bank mule's not much of a life.

 

Since I was there, I thought I might as well take the boat to Borean Tundra, these days flagged for levels ten to thirty. (Unless you have Chromie Time running, in which case it looks very much as though all zones, not just the ones from the expansion you picked, get flagged 10-50. That's what my 45 hunter sees and I can't think why else it would be).

The night elf (yet another hunter although one as yet without a pet to his name) dinged on discovery xp just stepping off the boat. All the npcs were level ten and my guess was the mobs would be, too. I ran him to the gates, where the guards seemed to be involved in a pitched battle with a bunch of giant beetles. No idea why. I don't recall ever being here before. I had no idea what was going on. As usual.

I conned the beetles. As expected they were all exactly level ten. Having played a few mmorpgs in my time it immediately occured to me to wonder if I could leech xp by pinging a few arrows into a mob while the guards killed it. In many games, of course, a level three wouldn't even be able to hit a level ten, far less get xp from it, but you never know until you try.

So I tried. And I got xp. I got what looked very much like the xp you'd expect a level three to get from a level three mob. As I was standing there, one of the beetles decided to spit at me. I thought I'd be dead in a couple of hits but no, it barely hurt at all. I backed off until a guard aggroed on the beetle and then we finished it off together.

Thoroughly curious now, I began to wonder if I even needed to hide behind the coat-tails of the city watch. I picked a beetle currently unengaged and started to pepper it with arrows. It retaliated by spitting dark shadows at me and we exchanged fire for a few seconds until the beetle keeled over. I was at about half health.

I tried it again a few times with the same result. It seemed to be pretty much exactly as easy or hard as you'd expect fighting an at-level mob with a totally unequipped character in WoW to be. The number against the beetle's name said "10" but it might just as well have said "3".

 

All of which just makes everything even less clear than ever and makes me want to go out and run more tests. I'm not sure this is what the developers had in mind but it's my idea of entertainment.

Anyway, getting back to the plot...

So, there I was, happily questing away in the Plaguelands, which seemed to have been somewhat improved by the Cataclysm. Quest flow was certainly much better, everything was much easier to kill than I remembered and the whole enterprise seemed more entertaining than it had been. There were even some jokes.

My vulpera hunter happily quested through several levels, roaming from hub to hub, criss-crossing her own path often, generally doing whatever she thought might be fun. There was one quest she'd picked up right at the begining, go see what this party of three Alliance weirdos was up to, that she'd left in her book for later, and now it was later, so she started on that.

To cut to the carriage ride, after a whole lot of getting the gang back together, what did it turn out to be but another... oh, I kind of spoiled my own punchline there, didn't I? Oh, well, the pictures probably gave it away anyway.

I was delighted and also impressed. If anything this was a better road trip than Vol'Dun. The banter was non-stop and there were two of us hanging onto the buckboard. Best of all, when the carriage came to a halt it was only to take a break. I haven't don't the next part yet but it looks very much as though the journey carries on.

 

Now I'm wondering if there are more of these carriage quests out there. I have a faint memory there might have been something similar in the worgen starting area and this one was presumably added with Cataclysm. THere could be others. If I knew where there were others I'd go seek them out.

Or maybe I wouldn't. The joy is in the surprise, I guess. And in how these pick-ups remind me of my hitch-hiking days. Although, I never managed to hitch a lift with a horse-drawn carriage. More's the pity.

Tomorrow's the Scourge invasion (oh, hey, them again) so I guess I might be busy. Better get that carriage rolling while there's still time.

Feet On The Ground, Head In The Clouds

These past few weeks, I've been playing various characters at widely differing levels across many of World of Warcraft's continents and expansions and one of the more surprising discoveries I've made has been the sheer, overwhelming scale of the landscape. Not just the number of zones which, while substantial, doesn't come close to matching the many hundreds I'm theoretically familiar with in the two EverQuest games, but the breadth and sprawl of the geography itself.

These are huge zones by the standards of just about any mmorpg I've ever played. I commented last year, as did several other bloggers, on the time it takes to travel on foot from one end of the Barrens to the other but I'd been thinking of that in the way I think of West Karana or Eastern Wastes in EQ, exceptions that put the rest of the zones into context.

Based on recent experience, I'm not sure the Barrens is anything out of the ordinary for Azeroth or its related planets, dimensions and time periods. I have to put it that way. I've taken so many portals of late I'm never really quite sure where I'm supposed to be at any given moment.

Every zone seems to extend for virtual miles in all directions, out, around, up and down. The in-game meter that ticks off the distance to your current destination is calibrated in yards but the experiential effect is orders of magnitude larger. I know what a view of a few hundred yards looks like and it normally doesn't come with a horizon.

You might be thinking this is all a combination of playing lower level characters and Blizzard's decision to limit flying in later expansions but, counter-intuitively, I've found it to be the exact opposite. Yes, it takes quite a while to cross zones on a ground mount but it's not until you take to the skies that the true extent of the distances you've been covering becomes apparent.

The view from above is stunning. I've flown in plenty of games but I'm not sure I've seen anything that so convincingly expresses a sense of scale. The forests, from above, display a dense, impenetrable canopy that, should you be foolish enough to attempt to fly through it, turns out to be every bit as vision-impeding as you'd expect. WoW has some of the more visually convincing forests in the genre even from the ground but in the treetops the impact of such a weight and volume of foliage is overwhelming.

 

As for cityscapes, again I can't remember ever seeing anything quite like it. Cities in mmorpgs have grown over the years from small clusters of buildings, a few streets that would barely make the grade as a county town, to mighty citadels, filled with soaring towers and sweeping bridges. In Azeroth and related environs, though, spectacle frequently gives way to density.

The architecture may not be as spectacular as in other imagined worlds but the urban sprawl makes up for it. From above, Stormwind reveals itself to be a rats' nest of alleys and avenues, squares and parks, a place where it's all too easy to imagine losing your way, finding yourself back where you started, something that happens to me almost every time.

As well as making for some fine photo opportunities, all of this has made me think differently about the concept of flying in mmorpgs. I've long been an advocate of free flight as a travel option in these games, becoming a convert when I got my flying mount in Vanguard. It altered the entire nature of the  game, changing it from something I loved playing into somewhere I loved being.

Being able to fly fundementally changes the sensual envelope. The barrier between game and virtual world dissolves, giving way to something much more fluid and self-propagating. I love flying in every game that allows it. I take full advantage of whatever version of flight I'm offered. Even so, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the argument that letting players fly too freely, too soon, diminishes the impact, effectiveness and immersive grip of the content flying lets them skip.

It's certainly true that being able to take off like a vtol fighter jet, avoiding any and all obstacles in your path, before plummeting down to land on a handkerchief beside your quest target does cut to the chase. Arguably, it renders the very concept of the chase moot. I ought to know. I do it all the time.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. As I found when playing a stealth class in Star Wars: the Old Republic, avoiding fights much of the time can also mean avoiding experience, loot and entertainment. With Classic last year and Retail this, I've written a lot about how much fun I've had. Much of that fun has been rooted in exploring the environments in which my characters find themselves. Skipping over or past it isn't doing myself any favors.

Limiting and restricting access to flight is one way that developers try to make sure players don't do themselves out of a good time in games that purport to maintain some degree of virtual worldliness. Of course, the problem is that there are plenty of players who wouldn't describe the content in question as being much of a good time in the first place.

And sometimes it really isn't. I would very definitely agree with those who object to having to fight their way through scores of annoying and inconsequential enemies just to get to an objective. I can feel my blood pressure rising just thinking about the frustrating, infuriating and ultimately miserable experience of traveling anywhere, for any reason, in Guild Wars 2's dismally difficult and overcrowded Path of Fire expansion zones.

WoW doesn't seem to me to have that problem. Mob density is mostly reasonable and not too many enemies employ crowd control effects. Leash distances are relatively short and few, if any, creatures seem to run faster (or even as fast) as a basic ground mount. If you keep running you'll usually be fine, especially since getting dismounted is a rare event.

Playing these last few sessions, I've found that even with characters whose mounts are able to fly, I don't always choose to unfurl the wings. I like that I have the option but I don't feel I have to use it all the time. Whether I'd be making that choice were I not coming off the back of fifty levels of very enjoyable but enforcedly ground-based fun with my shaman, who can say? 

Flying is so convenient, after all. Can anyone resist the temptation for long?

 

Which, I think, is a good reason for the kind of compromises being made nowadays. Compelling people to cover new ground, literally and metaphorically, before they get to fly past it, ditto, is probably a good decision for the long-term heath of the genre. We could all exert some self-discipline and discretion and choose not to fly but, realistically, would we?

The argument that denying flying is paternalistic has weight but these games are by their very nature coercive to a degree. Many, many opportunities are gated by level, class, gear, faction, reputation and a score more flags and markers. Why pick out flight as being any different?

In the end, as with boosts to the cap and similar content skips, there's an existential question to be asked: why do players pay (or grind) just to be able to avoid the very thing they're supposedly there to enjoy? If the content was sufficiently entertaining, surely no-one would pay extra or jump through hoops for the privelige of being allowed not to play it.

It's an easy question easy to ask but a much harder one to answer. Even the obvious explanation - that levelling and endgame are really two unconnected playstyles that should never have been joined together - doesn't tell me why I like both flying and level boosts so much, myself. Maybe it's that all these things offer their own kind of fun and it's possible to want different things at different times.

For now, it's been refreshing to be reminded that there's plenty to see and enjoy both on foot and from the air. I'll try to do my best to appreciate both viewpoints from now on.

In The Phone Booth

 

I have an odd relationship with DCUO. In one sense, I've been playing it since beta but it would be more accurate to say I don't really "play" it at all. 

Mostly, I log in when I notice there's free stuff. It's a game that gives away quite a lot of nice things. Sometimes you have to do something to earn it, a mission or some quests, perhaps (Do superheroes do quests?) but more often than not all you need to do is log in.

Of late, I also try to remember to pop into the game as each new Episode arrives. Some time ago Daybreak (or whatever the new spin-off company's called... hang on... I should know this... no, it's gone) changed the way the regular content updates work. Instead of only being relevant to veterans there's now a limited period when the new content appears in an "event" version which anyone can enjoy. (Okay, anyone over level fifteen, but you can get to level fifteen on your first day. Probably. Don't make me go prove it).

Unlike others, I wasn't all that taken with the last update, Wonderverse. I'm not much of a Wonder Woman fan and I found the open world area quite confining and claustrophobic. I love the idea of open world raidlike bosses that never stop popping and which you can zerg down. I just didn't much like that particular implementation. 

I had higher hopes for this latest update, which follows much the same format, not so much because I'd heard the devs had iterated for user-friendliness but mostly because it's set in the thirty-first century and stars the Legion of Super Heroes.

I love the Legion. As I may have mentioned. I was looking forward to meeting them and taking a good look around their version of Metropolis, maybe getting a peek inside the clubhouse. I don't imagine they call it a clubhouse any more, come to think of it. They're all kind of grown up, now. Well, compared to the thirteen-year olds they appeared to be in the 1960s stories I grew up with. Although not as grown up as the magnificently cynical and jaded thirty-something Legion Keith Giffen gave us. 

Yeah, okay. Point taken. If I start critiquing the comics this is going to run long. Longer. Stick to the game.

This afternoon I ran all four of the big boss fights, some of them several times. I also did all of the daily and weekly missions. I haven't yet done the instanced mission, set in the Legion's headquarters. 

I was going to do it before I wrote this, for completeness sake, but then Mrs. Bhagpuss came in and asked if I fancied some sausage rolls and we had a cup of tea and watched an old Only Connect on YouTube and then she casually dropped into the conversation that Biden had won Pennsylvania and by the time I got back to my computer it was getting to be too late to do the instance and write about it tonight so I thought I'd leave it for tomorrow. Maybe it'll deserve a post of its own, although I doubt it.

What I've seen of the DCUO version of the thirty-first century so far I've enjoyed but I can't say it feels much like the future. It doesn't look an awful lot like any version of the Legion's Metropolis I've seen before, either. There's always the caveat that I haven't read any comics featuring the LSH that were published after the turn of this century. Last I heard, the entire Earth had been destroyed anyway, so you can see how far out of date I am.

For all I know, the current official take is that every building in Metropolis a thousand years from now is panelled with jade. The ones in DCUO certainly appear to be. They look very pretty. Not particularly fututristic but, hey, how would we know? 

There's a minor controversy on the forums over the phone booths. For some reason that particular form of street furniture, already archaic in 2020, has become an essential part of life again a millennium from now. They even feature as a key part of one of the quests. While it's obviously a cute nod to the origins of the Legion as an artefact of the 1950s, the time when Superman still looked around for a handy phone booth to change out of his Clark Kent duds, it does seem kind of hard to imagine exactly what the functionality might be.

The phone booths confused the hell out of me for an entirely different reason. I was fighting Validus when I happened to notice my character looked absolutely nothing like herself. She had somehow acquired a form-fitting body suit and a full-face helmet, neither of which I'd ever seen before. 

I spent a few minutes playing with the options but I couldn't work out how to change back. I wondered if it was something that some villain had done to me in the fight. After all, both the Emerald Empress and a mind-controlled Saturn Girl were running around Metropolis. Either of them could have mesmerized me into thinking I was a chicken if they wanted so no doubt they could convince me I'd changed my wardrobe.

 

Eventually (and I'm talking about twenty minutes later) I worked out I'd done it to myself with the phone booth quest. If I'd bothered to pay attention I'd have seen the line in the description that told me to use the booths to disguise myself as a Legion trainee. This is how they dress, it seems.

The big fights were fun although as usual I suffered from playing the wrong character. I really should re-roll or respec or something. I have several characters but the one I like to play is basically a brawler. She likes to get up close and hit people, repeatedly, with a big stick. Occasionally she kicks someone up in the air for a change of pace. 

As a tactic this does not fly when fighting open world raidlike bosses as a level 26 with a CR of 310. As soon as the big AEs go off, down she goes. I'd be a lot better off playing one of those super-types who stands a hundred meters back, channelling beams of colored light. I saw plenty of those. My character does have a ranged attack but it's pretty feeble and I have to keep hammering the right mouse button which makes my hand cramp.

Even so, I had a good time fighting two-fifths of the Fatal Five and the corrupted versions of the three Legion founders, Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy and Lightning Lad. The fights were fun (we didn't win all of them, either), the loot was good (I got several upgrades and some nice furniture for my Lair) and I dinged twenty-six. I'll try and remember to run the sequence a few more times before the open access goes away. Maybe I'll even get to thirty, which is the cap for actual levels, after which it's the infinite CR hamster wheel. 

While I was playing DCUO something else good happened. By sheer chance it happened to be the day of the Extra Life Twitch fundraiser (I have it runing in the background as I type) and there were gifts. Very nice gifts, incuding an awesome flying pet and some great "postcards" that turned out to be enormous posters to put up around the walls of my base.

I probably spent longer fiddling with that than I did fighting baddies. It's the housing options that have kept me logging in these last few years, if I'm honest. I like the combat well enough and I'm always curous to see the various familiar characters but DCUO is not what you'd call a narrative-driven game. I don't think anyone logs in for the stories. There'd have to be something more to hold my attention and base-building is that something.

 

We'll see if this turns out to be my bi-monthly visit done or if the lure of the Legion pulls me back a few more times. I guess if they can't do it, no-one could. I did get a trinket that procs Quislet as a combat pet and I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. I ought to give that a go.

Come to think of it, that means I got two different flying, silver metallic drone pets in the same session. That's kind of weird...

Anyway, if anyone wants the Extra Life freebies (there are a lot of them and they're good) they just said on the stream that they'll be available in-game until the end of this month. The Legion episode is available in its Event version "for a limited time", which probably means until the next Episode, which certainly won't be until next year.

Don't miss out!

I Am The Fox

 

Yesterday, sometime around eight in the evening, I finally got to make my World of Warcraft fox. Depending on how you count, it took me anything from a couple of minutes to a year and a half.

In the most practical sense I guess it took just under two days. I did a /played the moment my shaman completed the final access quest that unlocked Vulpera as an allied race for the Horde on my account. It read 

I'd guess you could reduce that by maybe ten per cent to account for the times I was afk doing something unrelated to playing the game. Mostly, though, when I was "Away" I was actually looking up how a quest worked or how to get to somewhere I couldn't find on the map. That definitely ought to count towards the time it took. 

However you tally it, I went at this thing pretty hard. Most of the time I was playing I really was playing. So, let's say about thirty hours to go from character creation to level cap and then a couple more hours to do the Vulpera unlock quests themselves. Pretty close to Shintar's one-to-fifty tally of twenty-six hours but quite a bit longer than Rohan's twenty. 

All of those times are a long way short of the Icy Veins estimate. They suggest "it should take average players 9-10 hours" to do the first fifty levels. They're assuming you'll be using several Add-Ons designed to make levelling smoother and faster as well as any and all available means of boosting xp gain, not that Blizzard seem to have left many of those in the game in the run-up to the new expansion.

For once, I didn't use any Add-Ons at all, which is somewhat unusual. I'm no fan of out-of-game tweaks and I always prefer to use the stock UI and systems in any MMORPG, but even I usually have three or four simple mods running when I play WoW. 

This time, for no particular reason that I can think of, nothing seemed to annoy me enough that I felt I needed to do something about it. The quest text, whose color and font choices usually irritate the heck out of me, seemed perfectly acceptable this time around. The mini-map worked just fine. No-one tried to duel me so I didn't have to go get an Add-On to auto-decline. 

I did toy briefly with the idea of re-installing the Add-On that modifies the UI to look as much as possible like Guild Wars 2, including re-doing every quest dialog to appear center screen with the NPCs talking in single lines like an actual conversation instead of presenting as a flat page of text, but I haven't been playing all that much GW2 of late and the idea didn't seem as appealing as it used to.

I also thought about switching on War Mode, which gives an xp boost that varies from ten to thirty per cent depending on how over- or under-represented your faction is. I'm very comfortable with PvPvE settings these days so the idea of the occasional run-in with an Alliance player or several didn't bother me but in the end it just felt like one more unfamiliar system I'd have to fiddle about with and get to know and I kind of had enough of those to deal with already.

The only xp boost I did have running was the 16%  sixteenth anniversary buff, which I think kicked in when my shaman was somewhere in the thirties. I felt the xp rates were pretty comfortable on the whole so I wasn't scratching around for ways to speed things up. 

It did slow down a little in the forties but really not by very much. Compared to levelling curves I've been used to from games like WoW Classic or even modern EverQuest, where you begin a very steep incline somewhere around the mid-game, there seems to be precious little rate-of-gain difference in each decile after the second. 

Of course, when I made my goblin shaman I was never intending her to go to the cap. She was created to test out Exile's Reach and knock out the unlock quests, after which, as I erroneously believed, I'd be able to park her and swap to my brand-new Vulpera. If I'd know I'd be doing fifty levels I would not have chosen to do it as a shaman, a class I've never played and which does not make Icy Veins' list of preferred classes (Demon Hunter, Druid, Hunter, Mage in case you're interested, although they do stress that what class you play is one of the minor factors in any speed-run up the levels).

You can probably put the real reason it took me three times as long to hit fifty as the ten-hour estimate for the "average player" down to the fact that I read just about every word of quest text, watched every cut scene and listened to every word of spoken dialog. That in itself probably added several hours.

Then there were all the times I didn't know what I was supposed to do or where I was meant to go. If I'd used the recommended Add-On Azeroth Auto Pilot I imagine that alone would have saved me several more hours, not including the story skips.

Yeah, but what would be the point of that, really? If I hated levelling, like Kaylriene , and just needed to get a character to end-game as fast as possible, for some reason, then yes, I could totally see the point of having the first fifty levels basically play themselves while I waited for it all to be over. It would be the equivalent of fast-forwarding through an extremely long and tedious cut scene before the actual game began. 

To me, however, the so-called end-game is more like an extremely long and tedious coda appended to the main game itself. Or maybe one of those annoying series of false endings you get with some movies that don't know when to stop.

Of course, loving the levelling process for itself does have one obvious disadvantage, as Wilhelm pointed out in his recent post about capping out in Pokemon Go

"But then there is the inevitable realization that once you’re at the top of the mountain, the climb is done... after all the time focused on one primary aspect of the game, you’re done with it and left feeling a bit empty as your goal is suddenly reached".

I get that a lot. Well, I do these days, when hitting the level cap in MMORPGs is something I expect to do when I make a character. Time was when the cap was a distant peak you could maybe just about make out, hazy and indistinct, looming far behind a seemingly-endless series of lesser peaks you'd have to scale just to get to it. What to do with your character when they reached the cap was never much of a problem when the cap itself always seemed to be receding into the distance faster than you could ever hope to catch up with it.

This time was different from most in that I was levelling for a specific reason: to get that Vulpera
unlock. That in itself made the final result somewhat unsettling. After I finished the surprisingly complicated and lengthy unlock questline, involving a number of trans-continental flights and many, many kills, I went straight to character create, made my fox and...

...and then what? When I began all of this a couple of weeks back I hadn't played WoW at all for over a year and Retail WoW, beyond the free trial, not for several years. It was all great fun, it felt fresh, there was a ton of new stuff going on. Plus, everyone was talking and writing about it. I was enjoying myself a lot.

By the time the shaman dinged fifty, though, I'd played more Retail WoW than I've played since the Legion pre-events. I'd levelled a new class all the way from creation to current max level, I'd taken a druid to the new free-to-play cap and I'd put several levels on my previously-highest character. All in a couple of weeks during which I played far more WoW than anything else.

Obviously I'm not burned out. I mean, come on! I'm scarcely even singed around the edges. But I'm not sure I want to jump immediately into levelling another character from character creation to end game. I might need a little bit of a breather before I do that.

Creating the fox wasn't quite as much fun as I'd expected, either. Not because I've lost any enthusiasm for the project, far from it. More because there aren't very many options. I don't know what I was expecting, exactly, but I thought there might be a few different tails, at least. I mean, it's a fox!

I was also surprised to get no option on where to start. I was expecting to get a choice between Exile's Reach and... well, I don't know where, now I come to think of it. I knew there was no Vulpera racial starting zone. I guess I thought maybe they could start in Orgrimmar or something.

And they can. They do. They have to. There's no choice at all. Exile's Reach is out because Vulpera begin at level ten. I guess the logic is that since you have to have a level fifty character before you can make one you really don't need a tutorial. 

Which is fine, except that I actually completed the entirety of the long introductory quest for BfA, the one where you break the troll princess out of the Stormwind Stockade while slaughtering hundreds of people and setting the city on fire (which, by the way, is one hell of a way to welcome a cute and cuddly, free-spirited, happy-go-lucky race to the Horde) with almost no spells or abilities on my hotbar. If you're going to start the character at level ten and remove the tutorial you could at least auto-populate the bars with the basics!

Once all that was out of the way I stopped and thought for a while about what I might want to do next. Chromie was keen to send me into the past and the Warchief or whatever it is the Horde call the boss had plans for me too but I wasn't sure I wanted to be organized. In the end I took the portal to Thunder Bluff and sat on the edge of a cliff, looking out over the green meadows far below.

I think I might just set out and wander, see where it takes me. I made my vulpera a Hunter, yet again, and hunters are made for wandering, although that's not why I went with the class this time. It was more that, after fifty levels with the shaman, the one thing I remembered hearing myself say most often was "This would be so much easier with a pet". 

Speaking of which, whose bright idea was it to give the Vulpera a cobra the size of an elephant as the default starter pet? I can see it being a snake. The Vulpera are desert foxes and the desert is stuffed with the slithering reptiles. There's even a quest in Vol'Dun where a vulpera lends you a flute so you can go and recover a bunch of lost cobras they were supposed to be training. 

So it's cultural, I get that. But why so huge? Honestly, every time I catch sight of it I think it's going to swallow me whole. I think the first order of business might be to go and tame some alternatives. What would go well with a fox? Do they have tameable badgers in Azeroth?

Before my subscription runs out I've also got plans for several other characters, too. I was enjoying the Alliance's BfA storylines in Kul Tiras on my Worgen druid. I'd like to get back to those. And my old dwarf hunter needs to get to forty-five so he can open the hundred or so Legion pre-event chests he has clogging up his bank - although now the cap is fifty (soon to be sixty) I'm not sure there's much point to that any more.

Then there's pet battles. I've never done those but I have a dozen or more pets. You can't battle on a free account so maybe I ought to give it a try before the sub ends. And I really should see about transmogging a final look for my shaman now she's not getting new quest gear every five minutes. 

It's not as though I'm short of ideas or enthusiasm. It's just that I did kind of start all of this so I could play a fox. 

Oh, well. At least now I can.

C.O.N.F.O.R.M.

I just finished reading a lengthy and quite fascinating article at Gamesindustry.biz entitled "Ten risks associated with the new EU Digital Content Directive". It has some potentially major implications for the kind of games I play and blog about, although I suspect it's a potential that will mostly go unfulfilled. Which is probably just as well.

The proposed directive, due to be implemented in the individual member states of the EU by July next year, primarily exists as a piece of consumer protection legislation. Some of the issues it seeks to address, like "Not delivering on advertised and publicly communicated qualities and features" are very familiar from other aspects of consumer law.

That stuff neither surprises nor bothers me. As described, at first it all just sounds like typical consumer rights stuff:

"The Directive requires suppliers of digital content or digital services to comply with certain objective requirements for conformity. Such objective requirements include that the digital content or digital service shall possess the qualities and performance features, including in relation to functionality, compatibility, accessibility, continuity and security, normal for digital content or digital services of the same type. In other words, a game that does not function as it can be expected by the consumer does not meet the requirement".

But note the inclusion of the word "continuity", soon to be joined by another c-word: "conformity" . As the post goes on to explain in some detail, this means producers of a game that operates as a service have to notify customers in advance of any change to the nature of the game that would cause it to cease to conform with established expectations. 

Following such a deviation from conformity, players will be entitled to refunds for the portion of time for which the game has deviated from the norm. So far, so good. Your game introduces a major change. You don't like it. You ask for your money back. They re-imburse you for the period from when the change happened to when you told them you didn't like it. 

Presumably there will be some reasonable period after which, if you go on playing the game without asking for a refund, you'll be deemed to have accepted the change. Otherwise we could all play for years then say we didn't much like that feature they added three expansions ago so we'd like six years of our sub-money back, please.

 

Let's leave the fine detail to the lawyers and anyway it's not the money-back if no longer satisified guarantee that intrigues me. It's the concept that a change you don't personally welcome can be reverted - not just for you but for everyone. 

Instead of just demanding a refund because the game has changed in a way the player doesn't like, the player can instead demand the change be reversed:

"Such a claim would require the game company to remove unpopular modifications again.

Players can demand this unless re-establishing the original state of the game would be impossible or would impose costs on the game company that would be disproportionate, taking into account all the circumstances of the case including:

1. the value the digital content or digital service would have if there were no lack of conformity
2. the significance of the lack of conformity"

There's probably enough get-out clauses in there to justify replacing all the expensive character models with stick figures but let's stick to the underlying assumptions rather than the practicalities. Should players really be entitled to have their games reflect their own personal tastes as a matter of right? After all, as Wilhelm often observes, every removed or replaced feature was alwayssomebody's favorite. 

And even if we excise individual refuseniks from the legal mix that leaves plenty of potential mass revolts. I can immediately think of several examples where changes to a game I play were deeply unpopular with a commercially significant number of players. It's very easy to imagine a sufficiently large and motivated group organizing for pushback, using this legal right, to have unpopular changes removed from the game. 

The imposition of the desert borderlands for world vs world gameplay in Guild Wars 2 or the removal of PvP servers from EverQuest II would be two examples. I'm sure everyone reading this could come up with examples from their own experience in pretty much any MMORPG ever because if there's one thing a long-running "game as a service" can be relied upon to do it's to piss everyone off over something, eventually. 

We've all seen many player protests over the years, ranging from in-game marches and sit-ins to forum wars and ddos attacks. Some of those have been influential. Changes have been reversed, the aforementioned desert borderlands debacle being one of them, but by and large companies tend to sit tight and wait for things to blow over. Whether the addition of a theoretically enforceable legal right will change that is hard to say. It depends just how enforceable it turns out to be. 

In the end, it's not whether or how much this directive might materially affect the games we play that interests me so much as the underlying assumption that what the players are entitled to expect from their games is "conformity". Not just conformity to a general, acceptable standard of purpose-worthiness, something upon which you'd think we could agree, at least until someone raises the awkward question of Early Access or Paid Alpha, but the idea that, once begun, an online game should continue in the same direction of travel forever, without deviation or digression. 

I'm not at all sure that's what I think I'm paying for when I renew the direct debit on my annual subscription to Daybreak's All Access or my occasional monthly sub to World of Warcraft. Yes, I want the games to remain recognizeably the same ones I originally purchased but I also want to see innovation and change, even if that change is controversial. 

For example, the introduction of mercenaries to EverQuest and EQII incontravertibly altered the fundemental proposition of those games. It was no longer necessary to team up with other players in order to complete content that had until then required a group. Some people loved that. Others loathed it.

Flying mounts, too, have been considered game-making or breaking propositions in various MMORPGs, as has the removal of the automatic right to use them in later content, once introduced. Changes to the extent or nature of PvP have caused uproar in several games, most recently one that hasn't even launched, Amazon's New World, although in that case, since the game had yet to take any money from anyone, perhaps it didn't count. Or perhaps it did...

"The directive also applies where the consumer is not required to pay a purchase price for the game but instead provides or undertakes to provide personal data to the trader. With this requirement, the Directive targets business models where the consumer "pays" with personal data instead of money."

Not that I'm suggesting Amazon would want our personal data or have any use for it if it could get it...

As I suggested, I don't really think much is likely to come of this directive in a purely practical sense, although where the EU regulators are involved you can never quite be sure, but it does seem to pose some existential questions about the nature both of games as a service in general and massively multiple role-playing games in particular. The law of unintended consequences lies beyond the remit of any court in the EU. Or the universe.

The Simple Secret Of The Plot

Here's a surprise. The questing in World of Warcraft (Retail) is pretty good. Maybe you already knew that. I didn't.

I first played WoW in the Wrath of the Lich King era, a period considered by many to be one of the game's high points. I did a lot of questing then and some of it was okay and some of it wasn't. Most of it was just kind of there, I guess.

Over the years I've revisited the game a few times, mostly repeating sub level twenty content in the original racial starting zones or working through the opening storylines for the newer races. The older quest content seemed much the same as in any MMORPG, possibly because most other games modified or modeled their quest content to fit WoW's style, although looking back at the original quest content in EverQuest II, which launched almost exactly contemporaneously with WoW, questing in the two of them always seemed very similar.

I did notice a difference in the newer starting areas, especially the Goblins', but it's a truism of MMORPGs that more work goes into the starting experience than anything else before the end game. It can be unwise to draw conclusions from what you see in those first few levels. By comparison, it's all too often the case that leveling in the mid and upper levels feels rote and uninspired in contrast to the opening rush.

Last year I re-subbed to play Classic. I had a really enjoyable time for several months. I found the most worldly of Azeroths, rich with incident, deeply immersive. Almost none of that had anything to do with the questing.

In Classic I did quests almost purely for the experience and the rewards. I read the quest text and followed the plots but most of them didn't amount to much. Partly it was that I'd done most of them before but mainly it was that they weren't all that interesting to begin with. And even when the storylines were able to hold my attention the flat, uninflected writing did what it could to lose me again.

I must have seen this quixotic plot half a dozen times in games but there's nothing wrong with a good cover version.

 

I have noticed a tendency over the years, as new expansions launched and blogs briefly flared with tales of adventuring through the added zones, for people to compliment the storytelling. I think I first remember praise being, if not heaped, then gently spooned over the main storyline of Mists of Pandaria. 

That expansion, widely treated with suspicion at first, seems to have acquired a solid reputation for quality over time but later additions like Warlords of Draenor and Battle for Azeroth, less well-received overall, also seemed to hold up the flag for good storytelling. It almost seems to have become a cliche for people to praise the storylines in the new zones even while dismantling every other aspect of an expansion.

When I resubscribed it was purely to get access to the Vulpera race so I could make myself a fox. If Blizzard had simply sold the race in the store for a reasonable price - anything under $20, really - I'd just have bought it and that would have been that. I wouldn't have needed to subscribe at all. I could have made a few fox characters, played them under the new level regime to the old equivalent of the mid-40s, scratched that itch and moved on.

Blizzard, like a lot of developers, seems oddly unwilling to sell off the game in pieces. It's about the one part of the change in payment models that came when we moved, ostensibly at least, from subscriptions to free-to-play that I don't understand. 

My favorite MMORPG business model of all time was Sony Online Entertainment's original post-F2P transition, when they offered Bronze, Silver and Gold memberships and put a wide range of options in the cash shop. For a few years you could play a very limited version of the game for free or all the game for a subscription but you could also buy a wide selection of intermediary options for cash in the store.

This one deserves an explanation. Maybe another time.

 

I loved being able to buy races individually (well, in packs) and being able to buy individual unlocks for higher-tier armor or spells at need. The prices were cheap and the functionality was fantastic. Some months, for example, I might only need a couple, of pieces of Fabled armor and one Master spell, which might cost me a couple of dollars in the cash shop. 

Why pay five times that for a subscription that would let me have theoretical access to unlimited Fableds and Masters, few which I'd never actually see in the game? Yes, okay, technically I did still pay my subscription, but only on my old account, which I rarely played. I made a new, unsubscribed account to play on the free to play server, Freeport, and that's where I spent almost all my playing hours until Freeport finally merged with the pack and the great Free to Play - Your Way experiment came to an end.

Over the years SOE, followed by Daybreak, pulled back from that model, focusing cash shop sales on min-maxing raiders and loading everything else into an increasingly not-that-optional subscription. I'm happy enough with how that works but, like those WoW players who came back in their millions to give Blizzard fifteen dollars a month so they could have a far more limited experience with far less content than they could have been having all along if they just played the Live game, I'd happily pay an extra subscription to go back to the status quo ante - in this case as it pertained not long after Freeport launched. (Not right at launch... they did need to tweak it a couple of times to get to the sweet spot).

All of which is a long preamble to say you don't always get what you want but sometimes you get what you need. Because I couldn't just buy my Vulpera I had no choice other than to subscribe. And because you need to be level fifty to unlock the race I've had to play through a lot of content I otherwise might not have seen.

I'm the cobra, by the way.

 

And it's good stuff. For perhaps the first time I can almost see why people feel they want to "finish" a zone before moving to the next. Yeah, okay, that's a stretch. I still don't quite get that. I do, however, understand why someone would want to see how a storyline plays out.

It's not as though I haven't had that sensation in other MMORPGs. There have been individual questlines I've wanted to see through to their conclusion in several games. Even when I'm doing that, though, I often find I have to make quite a few allowances for the form.

When it comes to quality of writing in the genre, around here we often refer to The Secret World as the gold standard. I've done it myself, even while undercutting my praise by qualifying it with comparisons to middling independent movies or graphic novels. And as with those, it was always individual characters or performances or set pieces that stood out. I don't think I ever talked much about the plots in TSW. 

What I'm finding with the questing in the later WoW expansions is rather the reverse. The characters and the writing, in terms of the overall prose style and musicality, tend to feel a little subdued. There's a peculiar house style that pervades everything and it has a curious, presumably intentional, distancing effect. What characters say often has the feel of reported speech even though it's not. Plans have the sense of debriefings. Even regular recourse to demotic and slang can't shift the formal tone.

But as the dialog stands back, the narrative leans forward. Where I think these newer WoW quests differ from what I expected is in their clarity of purpose. I'm used to quest writing losing focus. How often are we pulled out of the moment by an odd request to go gather some seemingly irrelevant items for some unrelated purpose? How many times will a questline take a sidebar to go do something for someone new with no discernible connection to the plot?

An attempt to imbue character. Unsuccessfully.

The quests I've been doing in Pandaria and Zuldezar and Vol'Dun tend not to do that. They're not aggressively linear but they keep moving steadily in the same direction. When I'm told I need to go fetch something or kill someone the reason is usually clear. Yes, there might be other ways to achieve the same ends but the necessity of those ends being somehow achieved is not in doubt.

Similarly, it's rare for any actor in the narrative to slip out of character. Those familiar moments, when the player sits back and asks the screen "Why? Why would you do that?" are vanishingly few and far between. The characters frequently don't do what my character would in that situation but they do behave consistently with what I've seen them do thus far.

This coherency is unusual, I think. Although I'm not sure. I have a feeling, perhaps, that the quests in Star Wars: the Old Republic or Elder Scrolls Online may be of a similar intensity, but  there's a crucial difference. Those are fully voiced.

I like voice acting in video games but it is distracting. How much time do I spend listening (or more often trying not to listen) to the wayward accents? How many times do I find myself querying the line readings or the direction? And when the acting is good, how much attention am I paying to the story and how much to the performance?

WoW has plenty of voice acting but generally you don't hear someone reading out the quest text you can see in front of you. That concentrates the mind and brings the plot to the fore, I find, although I'm aware for others it will have the exact opposite effect.

The absence of voice doesn't mean the NPCs don't talk much. Gods, no! They talk all the time. No journey with an NPC, however long or short, takes place in companionable silence. They chat and sing and declaim without taking a breath, or so it feels. And it all happens in speech bubbles. I find it endearing and amusing. Mostly.

If the NPCs never stop yakking, the player character never starts. There's a complete absence of participation. We talk about the "silent protagonist" in many games, famously nodding or standing idly by, but in WoW your character just gets talked at. There's absolutely no pretense of involving them in the conversation. Every quest NPC monologues for a while then sends you off to do whatever they told you to. And you go. Quietly.

Those are not natural speech patterns. Especially in a child.

It works, too. Or it's working for me at the moment, anyway. I'm starting questlines, carrying them through, finishing them up and moving on to the next. And I'm enjoying it. A lot.

It's like reading a book of related short stories. Sometimes the characters overlap. One story leads you into the next. Situations recur or reverberate. Above all, it makes the leveling process tick along beautifully, which is, I can only imagine, what it's intended to do.

At this level, WoW is that polished machine we used to talk about. The flow is exemplary. Without effort, scarcely noticed, the game moves you from location to location, waving you goodbye while handing you over. 

The mysterious and invisible phasing means that as you move through the world affecting change, so that world changes for you. Someone you meet in one place moves to another after you've done something for them and you no longer also see them back where they were, waiting for the next in line. I imagine that causes no end of problems for people attempting to quest together but for a lone adventurer it helps keep the illusion.

How much of this I can take and carry on enjoying it remains to be seen. At the moment it feels not dissimilar to watching episodes of a long-running, episodic TV show, something like Kung Fu or The Littlest Hobo. (Ancient examples. I'd use something more up to date but I'm not sure they make those kind of shows any more). 

There's a new setting and new characters each time but the problems the protagonist faces are much the same. The best you can hope for is a twist on how the story is resolved.

In time it may become more repetitive than I can take but for now, and for once, I think I can say I'd rather be questing for my levels than going on a motiveless murder spree. 

Not that there isn't plenty of killing, of course. It is still an MMORPG, after all.