Another Year, Another Beer

I could have written at least three lengthy posts based on what I did yesterday and today in Valheim. The game continues to generate stories (or, if you prefer, anecdotes) at an astonishing rate. It also kicks up any number of discussion points concerning the mechanics, the gameplay and the design.

My problem with posting about Valheim remains the same, however: I'd rather play it than write about it. And I love writing about it.

Also, all Valheim and no other games make Inventory Full a dull blog. And I am still playing other games, when I can force myself to stop building and exploring. 

To be strictly accurate, I'm down to two other games most days: Guild Wars 2 and EverQuest. In the first I manage to get two sets of dailies done every day, pretty much, which takes between fifteen minutes and three-quarters of an hour depending what the randomiser spits out. 

Not infrequently I'll end up staying longer to do a world boss or defend a keep. World vs World continues to be vibrant even though there's absolutely no reason it should be and many why it shouldn't. 

GW2 in general seems to be as busy as ever although I have no idea how well the new stuff that we're all supposed to be working on is going (recruiting allies for the next big dragon fight, I think it is, although I'm really not up with the plot). I only ever see the zones that have dailies in them but those are always very well-populated.

 

My participation in EQ is limited to farming the Overseer quests for crafting mats to sell in the Bazaar. I was doing it every day without fail but since Valheim took over every waking moment that's slipped to as often as I remember. I'm still managing better than every other day, though.

The game I imagined I'd be concentrating on in the opening months of 2121, EverQuest II (the one I bought a new expansion for just before Christmas) has almost fallen off the playlist altogether. It's frustrating in a way because I did for once have some plans there. That'll teach me.

I do keep track of what's going on and I'm making an effort not to miss anything new. I logged in last month to do the new Errollisi Day quest and today I forced myself away from Valheim for long enough to run my berserker through the new Brewday quest, "Yours, Stein and Ours".

Brewday, as I've mentioned more than once, is not my favorite Norrathian celebration. It's based on a holiday we don't really celebrate where I come from, St. Patrick's Day, and it has the increasingly uncomfortable theme of heavy drinking.

I'm no longer as puzzled as I once was by the quasi-religious fervor with which some players and developers regard the simple act of getting drunk but it still unsettles me a little. I always felt it was cool to drink, uncool to talk about how much. To be strictly fair, it's by no means an attitude unique to gaming. I've encountered it often enough elsewhere. Wherever it turns up, I always find a little awkward.

Brewday is all about drinking too much. It's also the official feast day of Brell, the Duke of Below, god of all who dwell in the Underfoot but especially god of Dwarves. Everyone knows dwarves like a drink so it makes sense.

 

Over the years I've done all of the Brewday quests and activities many times over. Some of them are fun. Some are very annoying. I've never liked the way most mmorpgs attempt to represent drunkenness by futzing about with the graphics. The sensation of having the room spin around you was always one of the worst side-effects of drinking too much in real life so why anyone would want to replicate it in a game beats me.

Thankfully the new quest involves nothing like that. It's another by-the-numbers instance that follows the well-trodden path of many similar holiday quests before it. Which, as I said about the new Erollisi Day quest, is absolutely fine with me. I don't come to EQ2 for cutting-edge innovation or out-of-the-box thinking. I come for what I know.

What I said earlier about people treating drinking as a religion was metaphorical but for this quest it's nothing more than the simple truth. The questgiver, Acolyte Kosma, is a priest of Brell and she's lost some special steins that were destined for the Brewday festivities. Actually, they've been stolen. By Brownies.

I get the feeling someone at Daybreak (and before them at Sony Online Entertainment) thinks brownies are the same as leprechauns. Or maybe they're just the nearest Norrath gets. Leprechauns would, naturally, be just the thing for a holiday based on St. Patrick's Day (although I don't imagine St. Patrick himself would have been any too pleased with the association). Since we don't have any, Brownies will have to do.

 

Acolyte Kosma, who I was delighted to see is a ratonga, ratonga also being children of Brell (although my own ratonga berserker is a follower of Rallos Zek, God of War) is skulking in a tent at the Highland Outpost in Butcherblock. She's scared to tell her boss, Steinsister Daglara, that she's lost the steins. Naturally, my ratonga volunteered to help. Ratonga solidarity - it's a thing.

The brownies hang out in Lesser Feydark. They were there in EverQuest twenty years ago, when they made many a poor adventurer's life hell, zipping out of the undergrowth at Spirit of Wolf speed, too small to see let alone target. I was surprised to find there's no Fast Travel option for Lesser Fey. You'd think it would have a druid ring if nothing. Fortunately Kelethin is only a few moments away by flying mount. 

When I got there I almost missed the entrance. If I hadn't had copied in the waypoint details from the wiki I hate to think how long it might have taken me to find it. As it was I ran straight past it in the tunnel and had to come back.

Once inside everything was fairly straightforward. I had to find eight of the missing steins, easy enough since the brownies had just left them lying  in the middle of the path. I also had to arrest six brownies, even easier since they all just stood there like dummies and let me cuff them. Well, click on them.

The only slight hitch was finding the explosive to blow up the crystals blocking the pathway. The combusti-ball needed pops out of the crate you open and lies there on the ground. I didn't spot it right away. Only delayed me for a moment.

Finally there was the pot of gold. Two pots, actually. It is leprechauns who have those, isn't it? 

I picked them up and the boss of the brownies (well, the bigwig of this bunch, anyway) appeared. His name is Lugharcan, which is a Leprechaun name if ever I heard one. After some strong remonstrations involving my berserker beating Lugharcan viciously about the head and body with a two-handed sword, the bad brownie surrendered, albeit with very bad grace.

As he pointed out, the gold was his, so we didn't get to keep it. Forget that my berserker is supposed to be "evil" by faction. In Norrath being evil just means you wear your boy scout badge upside-down.

The rewards, when I got back to Acolyte Kosma with the repentant brownies and the stolen steins, were sweet. Good enough, in fact, that I struggled to choose between them. Well, two of them. I wasted no time rejecting the Root Worm Larva Plushie. I have enough wiggling worms in my house already.

The others, though, were highly desirable: a replica of Brell himself, wearing the very hat my berserker wore for years, the mining hat with the candles, or an excellent appearance item, a shield that looks exactly like the lid of a barrel, complete with spigot.

In the end I went for the replica god but I like the shield enough to go do the quest again with someone else. It only takes about a quarter of an hour and Brewday runs until March 19th.

Even taking Valheim into consideration, I think I should be able to fit it in somehow.

No Solid Ground

At the end of my first month in Valheim I find myself at something of an impasse. I've mined about as much iron as I need for the moment. I've made plenty of poison resist and healing potions. I've bought everything Haldor the Dwarf has to sell and there's plenty of gold left over. 

I'm not short of things to do: upgrades to work on; huge swathes of the map to explore; construction projects  that could fill my time from now until well after Easter. I haven't run out of ideas. It's just that I know there's something I ought to be doing at this point: killing the third boss. 

I don't have to do it. Valheim is totally forgiving of anyone who doesn't want to follow the plot. But I do want to. Not because I'm looking forward to the fight. I'd sooner the boss fights didn't exist or, better, weren't tied to progression.

No, I want to kill Bonemass because I'm guessing it will open up the next craft tier. Whatever that is.

I'm assuming it won't be black iron, even though I already have a few scraps of that and they're flagged "No Teleport", just like all the other metallic ores. They drop from Fulings, the goblins who live on the plains. Fulings are a real handful. I can only handle them with any confidence one at a time but we've had a few run-ins and I've come off best, more times than not.

Picking up the black iron scraps they drop hasn't opened any new recipes and my forge doesn't show anything for black iron either. It won't even go in the smelter. It's hardly surprising. Plains isn't the next biome on the difficulty curve. That's mountain. Presumably there's a progressive step I'm missing.

If I want to carry on up the crafting ladder I'm going to have to take on the next boss in the hope it drops an item that unlocks the next stage of technological development, the way the last two did. Only first I have to find the damn creature. 

It shouldn't be too difficult. It's marked on my map, after all. Twice. The first marker appeared when I examined a Vegesir in a sunken crypt. 

The location it pointed to is way, way off to the North, far beyond anything I've explored so far. I was happy when, a little while later, I looked at a different Vegesir in another crypt and got a second marker much closer to areas I'd already visited down in the South-East.

That looked a better prospect even though it was clearly going to take a sea voyage to reach. The spot lay due East of the coast, just across the spur where I'd built my treehouse. Last night I ported down there and trotted through the black forest to take a look. 

I took with me all the materials I needed to build a longship. I figured I could try that out at the same time.

I found a nice flat rock jutting into the sea and started building a boathouse. Greydwarves kept streaming in to stop me but they're no more than annoying these days. I swatted them with the axe as they came and picked up the planks they all drop. Good of them to bring me a steady supply of wood.

Before I'd finished building my dock the ground started to shake. Troll attack! I was out of arrows so I let him vent his anger on my lean-to shack while I watched two more trolls a few hundred yards down the coast. They were fighting something I couldn't see. And they lost.

That was disturbing but I thought I could guess what was happening. As I explore my world I'm finding a lot of places where biomes intersect. So many, in fact, that I'm beginning to think it's the rule rather than the exception. 

Sometimes several come together at a kind of nexus of chaos. I was at a spot yesterday where meadows, black forest, plains and swamp all joined up. It was a very scary place to be. I didn't hang around.

The problem with biomes butting up against each other is the excellent AI afforded to their inhabitants. All the aggressive creatures like to hunt. They don't just kill things they happen to bump into, either. They really do go hunting, moving from one kill to the next with what looks disturbingly like intelligent thought or well-honed instinct.

Once deathsquitos or fuling hunting parties finds easy prey in black forest or meadows biomes they go on a killing spree. As they chase their prey it can lead them far inside the boundaries of the supposedly less-dangerous area. It makes for a very nasty surprise when you meet them as you're looking to spend a safe and comfortable night.

Fighting fulings and deathsquitos in deep swamp water with impeded movement and terrible visibility is no fun at all, I can tell you. There are good pickings to be had from going over the battelefield afterwards, though. I've picked up more deer skins that way than I've killed deer.

Seeing the two surviving fulings from the troll massacre heading up the shoreline towards me I decided to postpone building and get on the boat. It was raining hard and I'd wanted to wait for clear weather but better the open sea in a storm than two fulings in a tight corner.

The storm wasn't too bad and the wind was with me. It didn't take long to come in sight of land. The longship goes fast with a fair wind. Unfortunately the land in question was mostly plains and I was going fast. By the time I'd pulled the ship parallel to the coast a deathsquito had spotted me and made a beeline (ironically) straight for me. 

Fighting a deathsquito onboard a longship is an experience I wouldn't want to repeat. Which is a shame because no sooner had I killed that one than another turned up. I managed to catch him a good blow with my axe but my nerves were shot by then. Night was coming on and I realized, belatedly, that I'd come sailing into strange, dangerous waters wearing all my best gear.

If this is meadows, how come I can see bison?

I abandoned the mission, turned the boat around and headed back. I spent the rest of the night finishing the boathouse and digging out a deep moat all around it in the hope of discouraging any wandering goblins. Then I went to bed, in game and in real life.

This morning I jogged back to my treehouse, took the portal to my log cabin, changed into my bronze armor, stashed anything of value in chests and packed the mats to make a couple of portals. Then I headed back to the coast for another try. It didn't go much better than the first, although at least I neither died nor sank the ship, which was something.

The weather was fine but the wind stayed stubbornly against me for most of the hour I spent looking for a safe place to land. I thought I'd found one when I saw green grass and the map told me I'd reached meadows but when I jumped off the deck onto a rock I could see deathsquitos flitting through the trees and the huge, shaggy silhouettes of bison just beyond.

Navigating along the coast confirmed what I suspected but didn't want to admit. The new landmass I'd found was mostly plains with a few small pockets of black forest or meadows close to the water. Nowhere was there a section large enough that fulings and deathsquitos wern't using it as a hunting ground.

I'd been planing on establishing a base, setting up a stockade and putting up a portal, then sailing back to install a link in the network at one of my houses. Only then was I going to come back, properly dressed and equipped to go searching for Bonemass's altar on foot.

Looks like swamp but the minimap knows better.

That never happened. Since I couldn't find anywhere remotely safe enough to settle I decided to see how close I could sail to the marker on the map. All the way, as it turned out. Which was not a good thing at all.

To be strictly accurate, I never got close enough to see the altar or summoning site or whatever it is. I kept sailing, the wind mostly against me. It was slow going. As I neared the marker on the map all I could see ahead were dead trees jutting out of the water. Technically it was swampland only there wasn't any land. It was swampwater.

The longship got nearer and nearer to the marker. The water got shallower and shallower. I could see draugs watching from among the trees. There had to be something solid for them to stand on but I couldn't see what it was. 

With the icon for my ship all but on top of the marker on my map I hit a sandbar. Ahead of me there was still nothing that looked like solid ground. Or was there? Looking closer I realized all the stark, black trees were rooted in golden sand. The swamp was growing out of the plain.

The ship wasn't going to go much farther. It didn't have the draft. I was fearful of getting it stuck for good. The sun was going down. I considered the prospect of fighting a boss in water with adds coming in from both plain and swamp at once.

Nope. I don't think so.

Turn, blast you!

 

With a great deal of effort I got the longship turned around and headed for open water. I tried several times to find somewhere to land but there was nowhere. The wind was dead against me most of the time. For a terrifying few minutes I found myself becalmed just a few feet offshore, plains stetching away into the darkness on both sides.

Luckily nothing spotted me. The wind finally shifted and blew me back out to sea, where I spent a cold, dark night, alert for sea serpents that thankfully never came.

As soon as the sun came up I tacked into the wind and zig-zagged my way back to where I'd started. I pulled the longship into a cove, leaped out and sprinted for the closest portal. 

Cross that off the list. Looks like I'm in for a long trip north.

On Ya Like Veronica

As well as driving down my engagement with every other game I was playing a month ago, Valheim has cut into the time I spend watching TV. shows. Watching television (whatever we mean by that, these days) is something that had been very much on an upward trend for me until then. From a low base of nothing at all just a few years ago, my hours spent staring passively at a screen have grown steadily, until this last pandemic year saw me goggle-eyed for as much as three hours a night, more often than not

Despite staying up later than normal these past few weeks so as to chop just one more tree or, more likely, recover just one more corpse, I've still been managing an hour or two most nights and what I've mostly been watching has been Riverdale. I was going to wait until I'd seen all five seasons to post about it but honestly, if I wait that long, I may well be too confused to say anything at all.

Last year, largely as a result of a passing comment by XzzySqrl, I think, although whether that comment was about the new show or the old I now have no idea, I started watching The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. That one started out a lot darker and, well, more genuinely chilling than I was expecting. After the first episode I put it away, maybe for later and maybe for not at all.

It wouldn't stop nagging at the back of my mind so I went back sooner than I imagined I would and ended up watching the entire run, all of which I loved, once the shock wore off. As the seasons progressed the initial darkness gave way to something closer to the hyperstylized camp I was expecting, although thematically the really-quite-disturbing overtones (can't call them undertones) never entirely went away. 

Maybe I just got used to the idea of ritual cannibalism as a normal part of small-town life. God knows after a while it seemed like the least of Greendale's problems. There is that about a long-running television show; the things that stand out at the start always recede into the background as the milieu deepens and settles. You acclimatize or, perhaps, are assimilated.

 

I was well aware that Greendale was connected to Riverdale. I am a comics fan, after all. Just not an Archie Comics fan. That probably goes without saying. As Sheldon derisively replies to Penny's ex-boyfriend Zack, when he asks where the Archie comics might be found, it's "In the bedrooms of ten year old girls, where they should be". 

Yes, I'm also watching the Big Bang Theory. I realize that's a controversial choice. I'm not planning on having a debate about it but I will if I have to. I can hardly pretend I don't care for it. I'm watching it on Netflix but I own the first seven seasons on DvD. 

Some of the seasons I own several times because I started buying it after the first. I was an early adopter at least in U.K. terms. It began to be packaged in seasonal bundles and some years it was cheaper to buy a bundle than to buy just the newest season alone so now I have several copies of some of them. Don't you hate marketing? 

I used to work in marketing, by the way. It was a long time ago. I didn't do anything bad. That I remember now. Or would admit to.

Even though I own seven seasons I stopped watching at the start of season six. The show went downhill around then. Or so I heard. Since I didn't watch it it's hard for me to say. I'll know soon, though, because a few weeks back I began again from the start. I'd just finished How I Met Your Mother and I needed another sitcom that would take a few months to get through. The choice is diminishing. I get though the things like candy. 

How I Met Your Mother: now that's a polarizing show. Or it should be. I can see why Big Bang Theory raises hackles but How I Met Your Mother frequently made me consider buying tar and feathers. Metaphorically. I probably didn't need to clarify that.

But I didn't come here to rant about HIMYM (Fed up of typing the whole long-ass name). I considered coming here and ranting about it many times while I was watching it but I didn't and it's a bit late now. Suffice it to say I did get to the end, somehow, and I thought the final episode was exactly what the show needed, which was something I wouldn't have said about some of the more heinous episodes. 

I only mentioned it because there's not a great deal that happens in HIMYM that rings true to life but Sheldon's comment on Archie Comics is so impeccably accurate it could very easily have been something I heard a friend say at a comic convention in 1985. I nearly got into a fist fight with someone once just because I said I didn't hate Disney and admitting to not seeing the point of Corto Maltese was tantamount to committing social suicide in my circle. Comics fans are tribal.

The irony is that Sheldon's comment, which was made maybe a decade ago, now has to stand in the shadow of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's re-invention of the Archieverse. And it's a dark, dark shadow.

I sorta-kinda knew about it before I started watching TCAOS (yes, I'm going to abbreviate all these multi-word titles). I'd picked up something about Riverdale being retooled as Twin Peaks for Teens a few years back. I'd even added the DVD of Season One to my Amazon wishlist (this was in my pre-Prime, pre-Netflix life).  

Mrs Bhagpuss bought it for me one Christmas and we watched the first episode together. It was pretty much what I was expecting. I liked it but not so much I wanted to watch the rest right away. It went on the shelf with all the other scores of unseen discs.

When I ran out of Sabrinas (they really should have kept making them - it was just hitting its stride) the obvious next step was backwards. I rewatched the first episode of Riverdale (nice short name, no need to accronymize that one) and it was as I remembered. The whole first season was what I thought I was getting: Teen Peaks

I'd seen Sabrina. I should have known where things would go. Off the rails, that's where.

The second season was almost in sync with the cartwheeling trajectory Twin Peaks itself carved out back in the super-early nineties, when David Lynch took his hands off the wheel and the show veered crazily from one side of the lost highway to the other until he came out of his daydream and took back control. I loved that ride. I know a lot of people didn't but I went with it all the way.

I went with Riverdale's sophomore season, too. It's basically one, long serial-killer arc. That apple's not falling far from the tree. 

It also starts to speed up, something I've noticed happening to most 21st century American drama series. The pace can feel almost glacial to begin with but once inertia's been overcome things get moving, fast. You have to hang on tight and hope.

Honestly, I feel sometimes like there are single episodes where enough happens to pad out a whole regular series of British TV. Our runs always used to be much shorter, so that would only be six or eight episodes, but even so... 

If it was just hyperactive pacing, that would be one thing, but it's the plots, the writing and, especially, the characterization. Characterization? What characterization? Superheroes, conceptualized and dialoged by a dozen different writers over a couple of decades, have more consistency than Archie, Veronica, Cheryl, Jughead and the rest. 

I kind of want to exempt Betty, who does actually stay moderately close to someone you could recognize as the same person episode to episode... always assuming you can parse the pony-tailed girl-next-door as Louise Brooks wannabe dominatrix and serial-killer's ammanuensis dichotomy in the first place. But any slack you might want to cut the show in terms of believabilty goes straight out the window in Season Three.

Season Three is batshit crazy. I'm sorry but there's no gentler way to put it. The Twin Peaks/serial killer motifs don't go away, they're just crushed by the avalanche of insanity that pours out of every script like flying monkeys in an acid flashback. It isn't even the extremity of the irreality that fractures the illusion; it's the conflicting conceits.

For one thing, someone decided back at the beginning it would be a good idea to have Jughead frame every episode as a kind of story he's writing. Someone calles him Riverdale's own J.D. Salinger at one point but Jug himself clearly takes Truman Capote circa Cold Blood as his model. He's documenting his own reality but how much he's heightening it, who can say?

That does add some kind of filter. It might even go some way to explaining the frequent lurches into pastiche, parody and homage. Of course we have the musical episodes that have been obligatory in all teen shows since Buffy pulled it off so utterly brilliantly back in the nineties but we also have point for point remakes of Chinatown or The Breakfast Club to contend with along with parts of Riverdale apparently existing in entirely different time periods for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Pop's Chock'lit Shop, where the gang all hang out, reflects the Archie Comics traditional obsession with the 1950s, a sock-hop and milkshake take that jars grindingly with an alternate 1950s also present, one that puts a Philip K Dick style fallout shelter in the woods for the gang to take turns hiding out from the authorities after the many and various murders they may or may not have committed, or just to enjoy increasingly exploitative, if always determinedly soft-core, sex. 

Meanwhile good-bad girl Veronica (no, wait, Cheryl's the good-bad girl. Or is it Betty?) runs a 1920s speakeasy, Jughead struggles to control a 1960s biker gang, the Manson family are moving in from The Farm and Cheryl's mother has a whole floor of the hotel set aside as a brothel. Why no-one even raises an eyebrow at a character called Alice Cooper defeats me. It suggests a level of self-restraint entirely absent from literally any other aspect of the show. I'm working on the theory that never mentioning it is in itself an act of supremely confident metafiction.

At times it's hard to remember with so much happening but there is some kind of season arc involving a roleplaying game called Griffons and Gargoyles that may or may not have actual supernatural effects. It may or may not (Again. Actually, always) be the instrument of a malevolent entity known as the Gargoyle King.  

You might be tempted to assume this would all have a Scooby Doo ending where the hood gets pulled off to reveal it was the janitor all along only by halfway through the season the hood's already been pulled off twice, revealing two different janitorial impersonators (oh, wait, that was the Black Hood in  Season Two. No, as you were, it's both of them!) and yet the Gargoyle King's still out there. And anyway, don't forget Riverdale is just one town over from Greendale, where the actual devil hangs out, along with more witches than you can shake a broomstick at.

Greendale, by the way, is the place Jughead drives Penny (not the one from the Big Bang Theory, although that's a crossover I'd pay good money to see) so he can take out a bowie knife and carve the biker gang tattoo out of her arm. Torture, mutilation and, particularly, branding with hot irons are recurring leitmotifs of this happy-go-lucky, teen-friendly show. 

We've come a long way from the kind of Archie comics Sheldon was deriding in the comic shop back in 2010. And I'm only halfway through Season Three. Where will it all end? I have no frickin' clue but I want to be there when it happens.

I can only manage one episode of Riverdale a night. Mostly because that's all Valheim allows time for. To decompress from the crazy I sometimes take in an episode of Kid Cosmic, an absolutely gorgeous work of line art set in motion, with a rockin' soundtrack and a blessedly U-certificate rating. 

The mesmerizing backgrounds remind me of any number of ligne claire classics but the true inspiration appears to be American also-ran comic-book imprints from the fifties and sixties like Harvey and Charlton. Contemporaries and competitors of Archie Comics, in fact.

Sheldon Cooper wouldn't have had any truck with those, either.

Your loss, Shelly.

Nothing Lost And Nothing Gained

One of the more surprising things about Valheim is the absence of bugs, glitches and things not working as they should. For a game in Early Access, let alone one with just five developers, it's astonishingly stable, solid and bug-free.

According to Steam I've now put a hundred and fifty hours into the game, a figure that would suggest obsession verging on madness were it not that it includes a considerable amount of time when the game was merely idling at login as I wrote blog posts and even played other games. In however long it may be that I've actually been logged in and playing, though, it wasn't until yesterday I encountered the first thing I'd tentatively describe as a bug.

And it was a killer. 

If there's one thing you really don't want to run into in a game based on vertical gear progression it's a bug that results in an unrecoverable corpse. When you've spent the best part of three days of your real life finding, mining and refining ore, turning it into armor and weapons and upgrading those as far as you're capable, you very much expect that the game will play fair and not wipe out all your hard work in a moment.

Here's what happened. I was in a sunken crypt. My bags were full of scrap iron and I needed to ferry it back to the nearest holding camp so I could come back for more. I came out through the gate and there was an oozer right in doorway. 

It was night. Visibility was near-zero. I went to skip around the ooze and leg it but somehow I got spun around. I was disoriented. I carried on running but I wasn't going anywhere. I couldn't figure out where I was or where the oozer was but it wasn't having any such problems. 

I'd been low health when I exited the crypt and I didn't have a poison resist running. By the time I'd hit the key to glug one down it was already too late. I was dead.

I was mildly miffed. It was a careless death and my own fault. Never mind. My bed was close by. It was a simple recovery.

Only it wasn't. When I got back I couldn't see my gravemarker. I could see it on the map but not in the world. Since I wasn't sure where I'd been when I died my only recourse was to roam around in the dark hoping to stumble over my grave by chance. I died again doing that. Only to be expected. 

Coming back again, it occurred to me that maybe I'd died inside the entrance to the crypt. I'd been stuck on something. It could have been the stonework.

It was. In a way. When I got to the entrance and looked through the gate, there was my grave, glowing bright red. Not in front of the gate. Beyond it. Well beyond.

"She's only shining bright 'Cause she's so out of reach".

Somehow I'd contrived to die outside the crypt itself but inside the invisible barrier that separates the open world from the instanced dungeon. My stuff was neither here nor there. It was somewhere else.

I tried edging close enough to click on the corpse but the game was having none of it. Before I could get in range I zoned into the crypt. 

I tried from the roof. No dice. All around the walls. No response. Inside the crypt. Nothing.

At this point I was sure it was unrecoverable. It existed in an ethereal state, neither lost nor found. I could see it but I couldn't touch it.

In an mmorpg at this point you might put in a petition or contact customer service. I didn't think that was likely to be something Iron Gate would offer. And anyway, it's Early Access. Play at your own risk.

My feelings on the situation were surprisingly muted. I had, after all, made all the things I'd lost. I could easily make them all again. It would be annoying, having to repeat a couple of days gameplay, note for note, but I've endured far worse in other games.

I'd rather avoid it, all the same. And Valheim has five million players now. Maybe one of them had run into something similar and found a way out. 

Turns out they had indeed. A search brought up this thread on Valheim's Public Bug Tracker. It demonstrates just how many ways there are to lose your corpse for good. A lot of them arise from situations like mine, from deaths in liminal hinterlands the game can't seem to parse.

The bad news is, if it happens to you there doesn't seem to be any way to get your stuff back. The good news is you can get new stuff just as good. All you have to do is cheat.

In retrospect I probably could have worked this out for myself. I'd read Potshot's post on how to set Valheim up in pseudo-creative mode. I'd read a couple of posts by Tobold that alluded to various cheats that should have given me a clue. I'd even pressed F5 by mistake many times (I keep my hammer in slot 5) so I knew just what the console looked like.

But I never cheat in video games. Well, unless you call using walkthroughs cheating. It's not that I have any moral issues with cheating in single player games. I just don't like to do it myself. 

As one of the people explaining the method used to replace items from an unrecoverable coprse pointed out, though, this wouldn't be cheating. It's effectively no different from having your items restored by a GM. The game bugged out and stole your stuff. You're entitled to get it back.

So I did. It was easy. All you need to do is find a safe spot, hit F5 to open the console, then type imacheater. Dev humor. Dontcha just love it?

That sets cheat mode to True. It'll stay that way until you type the same thing again. It's a toggle.

With cheat mode on you can do as many impossible things before breakfast as you want. If you type "Help" the game will even tell you what they are.

All I wanted was my stuff back. Or stuff that looked like my stuff. The originals were gone forever but what's a digital original? Just some numbers in a database. 

For each item you want, all you have to do is type "spawn". Then the name of the item. Then how many you need. Like this:

The syntax has to be exact, of course, and it's case-sensitive. Once you get it right the items just fall out of the sky and land at your feet.

My only problem was remembering what I'd lost. I was determined to get back only what I'd had. Valheim has very well-paced progression. The last thing I wanted to do was bug my own fun.

Luckily, I'd been concentrating all afternoon on making and upgrading iron armor, tools and weapons. I knew just what I'd lost there. For some reason you can't spawn items at anything but the base level so I summoned those, along with a pile of iron for upgrades.

It took me five or ten minutes to get back everything I could remember. The final thing I recalled was the key I'd gotten from The Elder. Thank Odin I don't have to go back and do that fight again!

I knew there were some mats I'd forgotten but nothing worth bothering about. I put the extra iron and the few duplicates I'd created while I was learning the commands into a chest. My Cheater's Chest. Nothing comes out of there unless it's to address a situation like this one.

And that was that. Potential disaster averted. I'm very happy the option exists although I strongly suspect it may have to be tweaked somewhat as the game evolves, particularly in the light of multi-player worlds.

I did also have a slight concern at the back of my mind that I might have opened Pandora's Box. Would anything feel as real, now I'd peeked behind the curtain? 

Short answer? Yes. I played on for another hour or so and within a few minutes I was mining and gathering with the same enthusiasm as ever. If it's a choice between bending reality a little or losing two days work to a glitch, I'll bend it with the best of them.

And then I'll bend it straight again.

Relocation Due

Time for a quick progress report on Valheim. So many things happen so fast, it's easy to lose track if you don't keep notes. 

And since I don't keep notes, this is of necessity an impressionistic account. Everything in it definitely happened but I wouldn't swear this was the order it happened in. 

A lot of other things happened, too. I either deliberately left them out or I only remembered about them after I'd passed the point where mentioning them would make any sense. Lastly, I don't doubt plenty happened that I'm not remembering at all.

With that caveat, here's what I got up to yesterday. 

It was a day of mixed fortunes. I'd begun by taking the portal to the small hut on the edge of the swamp, where I'd set up my mining camp the day before. There was a sunken crypt just at the bottom of the escarpment. I'd ventured down to investigate and found it occupied by nothing more than a couple of blobs, no threat at all now I have my newly-fermented poison resistance potions.

When I struggled back up to the camp, bags filled with scrap iron, there was an unpleasant surprise waiting for me. The portal lay in ruins. The stockade I'd built around it was completely untouched. There'd been a huge thunderstorm. Could it have been struck by lightning? 

Who knows? I shrugged, rebuilt the portal from the debris and went to bed. 

When I awoke I decided to go straight back to the crypt to finish mining the rest of the iron there. That took a long time. It was only when I emerged, laden down with iron, that I spotted the green lights of another crypt not far away. I wanted to go straight there to see what I could find but it was late. I marked it on my map for future reference and headed back to camp.

Next morning I cleared out the rest of the first crypt and brought the ore back to camp. Then I went down to see about clearing out the second. There was an oozer hanging about but I sprinted past and ducked inside. The crypt seemed empty but I could hear the tell-tale buzzing of flies. Somewhere deeper inside,  a pile of rotting bodies festered in the dank, green water.

Exploring the first couple of rooms passed without incident. I took as much ore as I could carry and made the short run back to camp. I was getting low on food by now but the nearest supplies were back on the main island and I didn't want to take the time to portal there. 

 

The outer entrance to a sunken crypt: some wooden walls and a workbench and it makes a great temporary base camp.

The second crypt seemed even quiter than the first. I thought I'd chance it with the supplies I had on me. Back I went again.

This time all did not go well. The crypt was proving to be quite extensive. I broke through into a new room and the buzzing got louder. I could see the body pile but I guessed I could edge around it. My working theory was that draugr only woke if you trod on their decaying corpses. It's a theory still unproven.

There was a chest on a podium. I wanted to see what it held. I was hoping for iron and my hope was rewarded. Iron indeed and lots of it. I was loading it up when grunting behind me alerted me to the presence of something large. A draugr elite. I didn't see it spawn so I couldn't say if it came up out the pile of bodies or wandered in from another room. 

Its origins didn't make much difference. It was huge and powerful and my health was already low from not having gone back to get more food when I had the chance. Even so, I would have dodged the creature and escaped had I not found myself caught up on the jagged spikes of scrap I'd left blocking the doorway, when I'd rushed into the room in greed and haste.

Loot in haste, repent at leisure, as they say. I died at the draugr's feet. That was going to be a fun corpse run. I'd tried to follow the first rule of imminent death in Valheim - die in an open space as far from where the thing that killed you lives as possible - but by running I'd been hoist on my own petard, almost literally.

When I woke up in my bed my first thought was to rush straight back while I had the blessing of the gods. So I  did and at first it looked good. The run back was quick and easy. It even turned out the elite had wandered away from corpse. That would have been good news if where he'd wandered hadn't been right to the entrance. He killed me the moment I came through the door.

I tried once more but this time the oozer I spotted earlier had come back. It was squatting like a toad on the roof of the crypt. If oozes had eyes I'd have said it was staring right at me.

"It's always a troll" - Potshot.

At this point I had to stop for lunch. Me, the player, that is. Me, the character should have stopped for lunch long ago. Then all this might never have happened. 

A break to think things through in these situations is good. Get some perspective. I decided my best option was to portal back, eat, get dressed in my spare armor, bring a bow and some more poison resistance mead to deal with the oozer first. Then I'd go in and either kill the draugr or, better, if it had wandered into another room, grab my first corpse and run.

I logged back in and a troll was smashing down my portal. I don't know if that's how the first one got destroyed but this time the troll didn't leave the walls up. He knocked down the entire compound, flattened the portal and stomped off. Nothing I could do to stop him.

At this point I could have rebuilt the portal and carried on with my original plan but it was less immediately appealing than it had been. I didn't even have a hammer. I still had the immunity buff, though, so I thought I'd give it one more try.

And this time the gods smiled on me. The oozer had wandered off and when I entered the crypt so had the elite. I could hear him groaning somewhere but he wasn't at the front and when I got to my corpse he wasn't there either. I looted and ran.

Outside I put my armor back on, ate some sausages and a yellow mushroom, all I had, then stepped back inside. The draugr elite was standing at the far end of the entrance hall. I quickly swung my bow up and put a couple of ironhead arrows into him. It took half his life and sent him staggering back. 

As he righted himself I ducked back outside and waited a few seconds. Then I stepped back into the crypt and gave him a couple more. That took most of the fight out of him. He closed in and a blow from my axe finished him off. 

One death for a whole crypt filled with iron seemed a fair bargain. It would have been, too, if the same damn thing hadn't happened again. I'd made the assumption the crypt was clear by then but there was another bone pile. Also one of the heaps of scrap metal had a draugr entombed inside it and another led to a room with a couple more. There was at least one more death (mine, I mean) maybe two. It's all a bit of a blur, now.

Before. Suspiciously elf-like.

In the end it was very much worthwhile all the same. It was a big crypt. A lot of rooms. I spent an hour or more exploring it and digging it out. I came away with nearly two hundred pieces of scrap iron from altogether.

Now I had to decide what to do with it all. Another hour or so passed as I moved between shelters, picking up the ore I'd stashed in various chests to carry it back to the compound on the hill so I could consolidate my gains in one place. I'd made three short-term shelters during the operation, one the fortified front of one of the crypts itself, another under a fallen tree. I had chests filled with ore and gems in all of them.

I was pondering the complex logistics of getting the ore back to my foundry on the other island when the ground began to shake. The troll was back. This time I was fit to deal with him. He was battering the outer perimiter fence when I put the first arrow in him. By the time the atack was over the fence was still standing and the troll was down to the last sliver of health... and then he ran.

I followed him through the woods but I couldn't get a clear shot to bring him down and by the time I caught up to where I'd last seen him he'd vanished. It was odds on he'd be back so I set about making the camp troll-proof. 

It took me a couple of hours. I didn't just expand and strengthen the perimiter, I dug out a cave in the side of the hill and roofed it over, then I put the portal back up inside, underground. Let's see the bastard knock that down!

By the time I'd finished my little camp had turned into a secure base. I thought about the long and arduous trip I'd have to take to get the ore back to my log cabin deep in the south of the first island. It wasn't as though I could even bring the boat close and the terrain was utterly impossible for a cart. It would mean five or six overland journeys just to get the metal onto the ship, then a long sea journey, then several more overland runs. Hours and hours of work.

After. I might be part orc, y'know.

 

Or I could just build a new foundry where the ore was. It would only need a small amount of copper and tin and the mining camp was literally built on top of a large copper deposit with all the tin I could want in sight along the river at the base of the cliff.

So that's what I did.

With all the ore safely tucked away in chests I was free to use the portal network. I zipped about, grabbing everything I needed from my other houses. I dismantled a couple of non-ferrous upgrades at the original foundry and re-installed them in the new one. Everything else I made from scratch. It probably saved me more than eighty per cent of the time I would have spent shipping the ore home.

I decided I'd make the log cabin into my food warehouse and kitchen. The fermenter, the cauldron, the five beehives, the three cooking spits, they can all stay where they are. Having portals makes splitting bases by function no stranger or less convenient than having a bedroom, a kitchen, a workshop in different rooms of the same house.

Then I spent the rest of the day smelting iron. I deforested the entire clifftop for wood. The place looks like a logging camp now. It's not anywhere I'd want to live but it's finally dawned on me that in Valheim, where you live and where you work don't need to be the same. 

When I've finally made everything I can make out of iron and upgraded it all as far as it can go I'll close the doors on my cliffside foundry and re-locate to somewhere with a better view. And better neighbors.

For now, though, it's all hands to the bellows.

In Another League

Three weeks ago, when I read this interview with the BBC's Steffan Powell over at Gamesindustry.biz, I thought sure, that's fine, but you're "Radio 1 Newsbeat's gaming reporter". Your target audience is fifteen to twenty-nine year olds. Of course you're going to take gaming seriously. 

Just hearing the argument voiced by a representative of the media giant's most teen/young adult-oriented station risks undermining the argument that "The oil tanker is turning in terms of the mainstream media's approach to games”, doesn't it? 

Powell makes the point, repeatedly, that he can be 'parachuted in' to offer his insights to other parts of the network, but when he says things like "If a story is appropriate for other bits of the Beeb, we share it. She's a big beast, the BBC, and it can be quite confusing..." it doesn't entirely give off a vibe of everyone in the corporate monolith being on the same level, to use a gaming metaphor. Or even the same page.

I'm not for one moment denying there has been a change in attitude towards gaming in the media. I'd say that, as a general topic, it's treated not too differently now from the way popular music was treated in the '80s and '90s. Enough people in enough senior positions have grown up with it to understand at least a little about it and to realize that even if it's not something they personally enjoy, other people of their age and educational background find it engaging.

Gaming is still some way from where pop music sits in the media cycle today. These days even relatively minor musicians, people who had, at best, cult followings when they were alive or who enjoyed two or three hit records anyone's likely to temember, are deemed worthy of sizeable obituaries in the quality press. Anyone who ever had a session on the John Peel show is pretty much guaranteed a documentary.

You don't quite need to be the gaming equivalent of David Bowie or Elvis to get that kind of treatment in the mainstream but you probably have to at least be Leonard Cohen. Gaming to the media still means violence, gambling and addiction. Actually maybe that's not such a stretch from the way they cover popular music after all...

I read that article three weeks ago and promptly forgot about it. I certainly wouldn't be writing about it now, if it wasn't for one thing.

This morning I clicked on my bookmark for the cricket coverage at BBC Sport. I wasn't sure if the fourth Test with India started tomorow or Friday. It didn't say on the main page so I clicked the link that said "Live cricket coverage on the BBC". 

That took me to a page that very helpfully told me "There are no scheduled Cricket live coverages." Next to it was yet another link: "Select All to view our full range of selected coverages". So I clicked on that and this is what I saw:

The BBC not only covering the League of Legends UK Championships but selecting the final as recommended viewing? Placing it between Premier League and European football? Giving it that degree of equivalency and legitimacy?

I guess things are changing faster than I thought.

It Makes You Think

As I play Valheim, which seems to be about all I do at the moment, ideas for posts keep popping into my head. It's a game that doesn't just generate stories but one that makes me think. At the risk of repeating myself, a risk I'm always willing to take, while playing Valheim reminds me of quite a lot of things, it reminds me of nothing so much as playing early EverQuest.

There were plenty of reasons I found myself sucked into the vortex by EQ. There was the astounding sensation of playing a game in real time with people on the other side of the planet ; there was the unearthly beauty of the three-dimensional images; there was the astonishingly convincing replication of the imagined experience of living in an alien world.

Above all, though, the hook that EverQuest sank deepest was the way it made me think. Nothing was explained but everything made sense. Or it would make sense if I could just figure it out. I rarely had the feeling I was playing a game, more like I was living a life. The rules I struggled to discover and understand had the heft of laws of physics, not regulations in a rulebook.

Over the years, as I pressed deeper into the undergrowth of online gaming, pushing through the increasingly cluttered thickets of mmorpgs, my sense of wonder diminished and receded. The more I games I played, the more they seemed like games I'd played before. 

That, of course, was what I wanted. When I nervously tried out Guild Wars 2 on the first open beta weekend almost exactly nine years ago I was cock-a-hoop that all the overblown promises (threats!) of broken moulds and new paradigms turned out to be so much overblown hype:

"Is it a paradigm shift? Is it a game changer? A step change? A new generation? No it flippin' well is not. ...what I've seen is an excellent implementation of traditional, standard and familiar MMO tropes. Guild Wars 2 looks to be a really first-class AAA theme-park MMO. If that's what you want then you're going to be very happy".

 And I was. I'm still playing it, after all. 

Looking back, I do think the blogger protests too much. (Me. I protest too much. I'm the blogger). GW2 was the big hope back then and I wanted very much to like it but ArenaNet and some of the game's more vocal supporters were making such iconoclastic claims for its supposedly innovative and original mechanics I was genuinely apprehensive I might not be able to play it at all.

That's about how I felt about EverQuest before I tried it back in 1999. I spent a lot of hours prepping before I even bought the thing. I browsed a lot of websites and read a load of online articles about mmorpgs in general (all three or four of them) and EQ in particular.

In the end I had to jump one way or the other. I jumped into Norrath and boy was that the deep end. It was weeks before I had even a vague idea what I was doing, months before I could say I was comfortable, years before I'd admit to being competent. It was a prolonged, intense, frequently uncomfortable initiation.

But it made me think. All the time. It still does, actually, when I go back and play. EverQuest engages the mind in multiple channels simultaneously. If the logic of some of the systems seemed abstruse then, after two decades of iteration they approach the ineffability of the arcane lore they attempt to emulate. 

To decipher the game's systemic tropes and canons you need to engage in analytical thought but out in the field you don't have time for that. You have to think in very different ways. Your senses need to be engaged at all times in case something wicked comes your way. Movement, sound, any subtle changes in the environment demand immediate attention, appropriate action if you want to survive, let alone prosper.

To play EverQuest is to be always slightly on edge. Never to be certain of your ground. Overconfidence can be fatal. Even confidence might be too much.

It's a while since I've played an mmorpg that demands that much or gives as much back in return. When I think about the ones I've played since... well, let's say since GW2, getting on for a decade ago... they've all been jolly romps to one degree or another. 

Alright, "jolly romp" scarcely applies to The Secret World, although technically I did play that before Guild Wars 2, but that's more to do with the subject matter than the gameplay. FFXIV, Blade and Soul, Bless, Revelation Online, Twin Saga, Dragomon Hunter, AdventureQuest 3D, ArcheAge, Black Desert, Landmark, Star Wars: the Old Republic... all of them engaged the intellect to some degree and most engaged the emotions but none really achieved the elusive, holistic mental gestalt of the genre at it's best.

And I'm not saying Valheim does, either. For one thing, it's not even an mmo, let alone an mmorpg. For another, in early access its scope is necessarily limited. No, I'm not making any great claims for what is without doubt more of an effective amalgam of game designs, drawn from elsewhere, than a purely original creation. Valheim is the sketch of what a great game could be rather than a great game in itself.

But it does make me think. 

So much planning. The journeys and the trips with their fiendish logistics. The preparation and the maintenance. The construction and the exploration and the goal-setting. 

There's the observation, the analysis, the wonder. How does the world look so hand-made when we know it's generated? Why do surtlings live in a swamp if water makes them explode? What are skeletons doing hunting deer when they neither eat meat nor wear hides?

And there's the in-the-moment, ad hoc, seat of your pants, skin of your teeth, getting through the next thirty seconds, somehow. The painful, arduous, frustrating recovery. The loss and the sliding down and the climbing back. The thoughts of regret, bitterness, resignation. The post-match analysis and the lessons to be learned.

I'm fairly sure it's what people who've played Minecraft have been experiencing for years. It's most likely nothing much at all compared to what people who've played Ark or Rust have endured or enjoyed. I keep seeing those comparisons but I'll have to take them on trust from people who've played those games because I never have.

But I have played EverQuest. And it was like this.The way it made me think was like this. 

That's what I've been missing. That's what mmorpgs have been missing.

I wonder if they'll ever find it?