And So The Story Goes

Following on from yesterday's post, where I took a thousand words to explain how I wished I could keep to the point once in a while, today I thought I might try a five-finger excercise on that very theme. There's a topic going around, kicked off by Aywren but generally following in the slipstream of Final Fantasy XIV's growing success, concerning the necessity or even advisablity of hanging mmorpg gameplay on the hook of a strong, linear narrative.

Naithan sums up the situation perfectly in the title of his post on the problem (if problem is what it is): "FFXIV May as Well Not Be an MMO". Couldn't have put it better.

Of course, FFXIV isn't just an mmorpg, it's an instalment in a long-running series of JRPGs. It's a hybrid.

And it's not the first. A decade ago (what, has it been that long already?) all the attention was on an upcoming mmorpg set in the Star Wars universe, Star Wars: the Old Republic. Produced by BioWare, a developer famous for story-driven, single-player and co-op RPGs, what we were being promised was a collation of two forms: the massively-multiple theme park mmo experience of World of Warcraft underpinned by the nuanced storytelling associated with games like Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect.

Much was made of the "Fourth Pillar", the term BioWare liked to use for Story. Anyone remember what the other three pillars were? I didn't. I had to go look it up and it wasn't easy to find.

"Traditionally, massively multiplayer online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars - combat, exploration and character progression", said "BioWare boss Ray Muzyka" in an interview with Eurogamer back in 2008. (Yes, it really was that long ago). His contention seemed to be that until then mmorpgs hadn't bothered telling stories, but that was okay because now BioWare were around to make things right. 

I suspect that plenty of writers who'd been making a living putting words in the mouths of NPCs for the previous ten years might have looked at that interview a little askance. I'm pretty sure Blizzard and SOE thought they'd been telling stories set in their imagined worlds and I'm damn sure Turbine did in the one they'd leased from the Tolkein estate. That was kind of the point, wasn't it?

BioWare were widely seen to be riding in to battle against an enemy that didn't exist but time has proved them right about one thing: story has become that fourth pillar, at least in the minds of some players and developers. 

In the early years of the genre, narrative and story were gameplay elements but they weren't the focus of the experience. I played the EverQuest titles for years without ever having more than a vague idea what the overarching story was. But I always knew there was one.

Because those games attempted to replicate the experience of being in and of a world not as the "one, true hero", just someone who saw things happening around them and joined in as best they could, story was everywhere. Not just the personal stories of the players themselves, as touted by the advocates of the sandbox, but crafted stories, written by writers and given to NPC actors to tell.

The quests told stories, the incidental, ambient dialog told stories, the books and the statues and the ruins told stories. The worlds told stories and they were as real as stories ever are, which is as real as real gets. And you never heard them all.  

You heard fragments, sections, pieces. You heard rumors and legends and myths. You puzzled and figured and discussed and out of all of that came stories with frayed edges and loose ends, tales to tell over camps and at guild meets, stories to argue and maybe even duel over.

Then along came the serious writers, the adults in the room, ready to tidy up the toys and put them neatly back in their boxes. A story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It has to have a hero and a moral. It has to follow the rules.

Why did it happen? I have a theory. The games, the genre itself, began with explorers. Explorers are the ones who go out and make the maps. Explorers, though, don't stay behind to hammer in the signposts or manage the map concession in the town square.

There's always been a tension, a competition, between the four archetypes, the Explorer, the Socialiser, the Killer and the Achiever. The people who tell you where to go are the achievers and the importance of story in mmorpgs grows alongside their ascendency. Almost by definition, the one archetype that has to come out on top is the Achiever.

And so it was. Achievers gained their ascendency, in the games and in the studios, years ago. Almost all the mmorpgs we play now are box-tickers, first and last. Everything must be codified, accounted for and scored, including exploration, socialising and killing. All those boxes have to be ticked.

And that's just what the current incarnation of Story in mmorpgs does. It ticks boxes. The new, big, important stories are unified and linear. They may contain many digressions and sub-plots but like those in a novel they all serve the central narrative. You start at page one and you read to the end. Every page turned, evey cut scene watched, is a box ticked. 

Stories, of course, are infinitely more than box-ticking excercises. In a good story, the characters become friends, their actions, memories. Stories become us. We're made of stories.

There's nothing wrong with a good story, of course there's not. There's everything right with one. I love a good story. I'm not saying I want the stories in morpgs to be not good. That would be crazy. I'm not saying I don't want mmorpgs to have stories in them. That would be crazier still.

But there's a place for these particular kinds of finished, complete, linear stories. From everything I've seen so far I'm not convinced that mmorpgs can, let alone should, be that place. 

Mmorpgs are places where stories happen, of course they are. That's the whole point of an mmorpg: it's a place where anything can happen. It's a world, or it can be. Stories belong in mmorpgs as they belong everywhere. But stories can't be mmorpgs. Mmorpgs can't be stories.

To bind the mmorpg form to the yoke of narrative is to set hard restraints on its limitless capacity to change. A linear narrative is a corridor passing countless doors that will never be opened, a train on a track that arrows straight to the horizon. It's a wasted opportunity.

We already have so many ways to tell those kinds of stories. Mmorpgs offer a chance to tell the old stories in new ways, maybe even to tell new stories in ways that have never been seen before. For a while that seemed like it might happen but the signs and portents aren't good. Mmorpgs are being assimilated in the old narrative tradition, when they should be in the vanguard of something new, something non-linear, fragmented, chaotic, alive. 

It maybe already be too late. The damage may already have been done. Story sells, or so it seems. And, of course, it's the winners who get tell the stories.

Their stories, not ours.

Too Many Words

So that was a long gap between posts. I suspect things are going to get oddly sporadic, random even, now I'm back at work. Having dropped a day to go to three days a week and also requested, if possible, the three days don't come all at once, I now have a pattern that's sufficiently scattered I can't readily hold it in mind. 

I can't say being back at work is a joy but it does at least provide a little outside perspective after six months sat at home in front of a screen. And a keyboard.

One of the many recurring tasks the job involves is writing those little cards you see that sit on the shelves to draw attention to certain titles. The latest guidance suggests they should never be more than twenty-five words long. After I saw that I went around and did a word count of a few of mine (and other peoples'). Almost all of them were longer than that. The only reason they weren't a lot longer was you couldn't fit any more words on the cards.

I'm going to try to stick to the advised word-count on any new ones I write in the hope I might develop some transferrable skills. If I could train myself to be concise I might be able to knock out a blog post in under an hour, which would mean I could reasonably expect to get something up whether I'd worked that day or not.

Shorter, snappier posting has been a goal of mine for years. It's not like I don't know how. It's more like I've forgotten. Looking back at the early days, pretty much every post comes in under five hundred words, some at half that. Re-reading them now, they don't seem to lose much for being so very, very much shorter. 

The posts get progressively longer and longer over the years until these days I don't consider I've scratched the surface of anything in much under two and a half thousand words. I discard entire ideas for posts nowadays (and not infrequently either) because as I frame them in my mind I can feel them running to five thousand words or more. 

I wanted to do one in reply to Aywren's post on the importance of story in mmorpgs but just the thought of doing justice to the subject made me feel tired. I couldn't see how I could get it done in less than a couple of days of solid work. 

The reason I did a music post on Friday, due to an unfortunate piece of scheduling the one day in five I wasn't working, was that music posts are relaxing and fun to do. They take even longer to put together than regular posts but well over half of it is watching videos and listening to songs so it hardly counts. 

And the way I write music posts feels different. They're almost always just a lot of opinions, emotions and supposedly smart remarks, all wrapped up in a frame where I try to sound more hip and happening than I am, a persona I've cultivated for the best part of fifty years now and with which I'm very comfortable. It comes easily.

 

Writing long meditations on the warp and weft of mmorpgs, by comparison, feels uncannily similar to being back at college. There's a lot of reading and research, the structure has to be considered and there's a deadline to get everything done and handed in which always seems to be bearing down on me. Eventually I get it finished. Then I sit back and wait for comments. The only thing missing is a grade.

The only comment I got on the first essay I ever handed at college was succinct and to the point: "Too long". That was it, the only thing my supervisor had to say. He certainly took his own advice. 

We had some words about it. Things got quite heated. I changed supervisors for one who seemed not to mind. My essays, if anything, got longer. I wonder, now, if the first guy might not have had a point.

This, as I'm sure everyone still reading will have noticed, is yet another post about posting. There's something of a convention in the blogosphere, or this part of it, anyway, to apologize for blogging about blogging as though it's self-indulgent or tedious. It might be either or both but not necessarily. As a blogger, I lap this stuff up. It's shop talk and shop talk is only boring to people who don't work in the shop. We all work in the blog shop.

It's July now and if anyone's mentioned Blaugust 2021 I haven't seen it. Belghast is very evidently not in any position to take on the extra work and responsibilty and if he even thinks about doing it someone had better call an intervention pretty darn quick. If anyone else was planning on stepping in I guess we'd have heard about it by now. I am, for for sure, not voulunteering!

These past few years Blaugust has offered the best chance to chat about how blogging works. We usually have that week at the start where everyone comes out with their tips and hints and the week at the end where we all recap how it went and in the middle there's a lot of topic-work that frequently includes showing your workings. It's like a convention, where everyone gets to sit around and tell each other things they all already know, and yet somehow hearing other people say them helps make sense of it all.

If we're not doing that this year then I guess there are just going to be more posts like this, where we mither on about how we're doing, what's working and what isn't. Or I will, anyway. I mean, you can't just write about games all the time, right? Sometimes you just have to write about how you write about games.

That's about nine hundred words. It's not the five hundred I'm hoping to get down to but it's a start. I'm going to stop now because I can already feel a bunch more words trying to push their way to the front and I'm damned if I'm going to let them get the better of me. Again.

Now I just have to think of what to call this thing and which pictures I could use to break it up a little. That's the hard part.

Sweetest Of The Janes

Almost any time the name Miley Cyrus is mentioned in our house, something that happens more often than you might imagine, Mrs. Bhagpuss can usually be relied upon to say "We like Miley. She's a good girl!". 

Whether Miley would take that as the compliment it's meant if she heard it is difficult to say. If she happens to follow this blog (Hi, Miley, if you're reading!), I guess we might find out. There is a comment section, after all. I guess stranger things have probably happened, although not too many I can think of right now. 

I imagine she'd take it well, anyway. She seems to do just about everything well. She certainly sings well, something an increasing number of erstwhile skeptics seem to have noticed at last. She's been making something of a practice of covering other people's songs lately and doing it better than just about anyone. The comment threads that follow them on YouTube are full of backhanded compliments from aging rock fans who never thought she could do it but who at least have the grace to admit they were wrong.

It's a wide and surprising selection ranging from Pink Floyd to Hole to Dolly Parton. (That Doll Parts cover is stupendous, by the way). I really wanted to pull up the video but that will have to wait for another time because this isn't a post about Miley Cyrus and how amazing she is. 

Oh, sorry, is that what you thought was happening here? 

Nope. This is a post about the Velvet Underground song Sweet Jane. I saw Miley had covered it, brilliantly, and it made me remember a project I was planning, a long time ago.

Somewhere in the house where I live there's an audio cassette that must be around a quarter of a century old by now. On it are a bunch of covers of Sweet Jane. I started collecting them after I heard the Cowboy Junkies version, probably the most famous Sweet Jane cover of them all, and there are a lot, trust me.

It goes without saying it wasn't the first cover of Sweet Jane I'd heard. That would have been Mott the Hoople, who covered it magnificently on their 1972 album "All the Young Dudes". It's entirely possible that was the first version of the song I ever heard, period. I was listening to the Velvets before that but I took quite a while to get around to buying Loaded, the album on which the song first appeared.

I did buy Max's Kansas City early on, where Sweet Jane comes in at Side 1 Track 2, but that came out the same year as the Mott album and I'm fairly sure I already knew the song by then. And anyway, the version I really loved in those days didn't become widely available until two years later with the release of the sublime 1969.

Sweet Jane is a story song. Lou wrote a lot of those. I've seen it explained as everything from "a surreal look at the life of a rock star" to "correcting the misplaced notion among the "protest kids" that prior generations were trapped in society's shackles and that only the current generation knows how to live free of them." Yeah, right, that'll be it. I think this precis from Billboard probably gets it about right.

It has one of the best and most widely borrowed riffs in all rock. It comes from the very tail end of the period when the Velvets' operated with a languid, cowboy strut rather than the frenetic amphetamine yowl they're still somewhat famous for and it lopes along with a loose, louche grace. You can hear the perfect economy of the rhythm guitar part in this ten-minute take from Take No Prisoners, where the band vamps while Lou does his stand-up routine. I could listen to it on an infinite loop.

It's also an FM radio classic, or it became one after the fact, when the Velvet Underground name finally meant something. I'd wonder if that was the heritage all the many covers were drawing from if it wasn't that most these days include the glorious bridge that was left off the radio-friendly Loaded edit. Okay, that's not exactly how it happened but it might as well be.

What I'd been planning back then was a mixtape featuring nothing but versions of Sweet Jane. Those were the days of the cassette mixtape, as so fondly recalled in Belghast's excellent Mixtape Mondays series. I figured doing a whole tape with just one song on it would both amuse and annoy certain friends of mine. 

I never finished it. It was much, much harder to pan for gold in those pre-internet days. I just about managed enough versions for an actual album but C90s are two albums long, at least.

If I was doing it now I could fill one of those C90 five-packs I used to buy with nothing but Sweet Jane covers. There are so many! And some of them are even good! In fact, a lot of them are good. Sweet Jane is one of those magical songs that almost anyone can handle, unlike that other much-covered Velvets' classic, "Waiting for the Man", whose deceptively difficult pacing makes a fool of almost everyone rash enough to take it on.

Lou had his preferences. He later denied the Hunter-Wagner hard rock re-invention from the Rock 'n' Roll Animal album, so popular with seventies metalheads, even though it had been his idea in the first place and he was the one singing on it. I saw him with the Hunter-Wagner line-up, touring behind that album. He certainly seemed invested in it then. He worked with Mott on theirs, too, along with his pal David Bowie. They were both reportedly pleased with how those sessions worked out. 

Supposedly, he also liked the Brownsville Station version, something I find difficult to credit, having listened to it. It was one of the earlier covers by a major band (What, you don't remember Brownsville Station and "Smokin' in the Boys Room"? Yeah, well, you didn't miss much...) coming just a year after Mott, so maybe he just liked the attention. And the royalties. His favorite, according a number of interviews, was that Cowboy Junkies' slowdown and why wouldn't it be? 

In the end it's all a matter of re-interpretation and reinvention, isn't it? Who wants to hear someone do a song just like the record? If it's the original artist, well, you might as well just listen to the record, hadn't you? And if it's someone else and they manage to get it dead-on, well, it's one of those dogs walking on their hind legs deals. Tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be... Lou Reed.

To cover a song is to live inside it. To turn it outside-in and wear it like a skin. Anything less is karaoke. Not that there's anything wrong with karaoke but it's not meant to outlast the moment. If you're going to put together a mixtape from nothing but versions of the same song, you're going to need a little more than that.

In the end, that's why I shelved the project. I listened back to what I had and it felt a little much even to me. The interpretations didn't differ sufficiently to keep the whole thing fresh. Of course, I didn't have the internet back then.

Even with the inexhaustible resources of the worldwide web I'm still not sure it would be a wise choice. It's one thing to put a bunch of links in a blog post and pick out some highlights for people to watch and enjoy at leisure, another to set up an actual playlist with thirty Sweet Janes in a row. Who'd listen to that? Plus, someone already did it, so it's not like it would even be original. 

I'll just stick to a handful, then. Some of my favorites and some of the stranger variations. Enough for a short album or a very long EP.

 

Wreckless Eric. I can scarcely believe I never heard this until yesterday, when I started doing the research for this post. I've been a fan since I first heard John Peel play Semaphore Signals in 1977 and I somehow managed to miss this until now. It's perfection.

Cowboy Junkies. The whole "slow it to a crawl" thing has become such a covers cliche now it's hard to remember how revolutionary this felt when I first heard it. I was mesmerized. I still am.

The Jim Carroll Band. If anyone was born to cover this it would have to be Jim Carroll. Like Jonathan Richman, he was there when it all went down the first time around. That's Jim's annoying voice you can hear on Max's Kansas City, asking if anyone's got any Tuinol. I imagine someone did.

Two Nice Girls. As I've mentioned, there was a time when I was taking flak for sporting a Joan Armatrading pin on my green safari jacket. The jacket itself was never a problem. There was no punk dress code in '76-77, that was yet to come and I was already gone when it came in, but apparently there were still lines you couldn't cross. Even at my height of admiration for Joan, though, it would never have occurred to me to cross Love and Affection with the Velvet Underground, but then I never was a nice girl.

Kate Nash. There was certainly a time when expressing anything other than contempt for Kate Nash would have gotten me much the same reaction but I've enjoyed everything I've heard by her, not that it's been all that much. She has a voice that comes ready heartbroken. This is a magical reinterpretation. I'd love to hear what Kate was thinking when she made it. I hear a lot of Laurie Anderson in there, which, if intentional, is genius and, if not, is even smarter than that.

 

Brother Ali and Chuck Prophet. If you ever thought what Sweet Jane really needed was a bald guy with a beard rapping through the middle of it then here's the cover you've been waiting for. The frame is the laid-back take you'd expect from Chuck Prophet, leader of one of my favorite underrated eighties bands, Green on Red. He says himself in the introduction he's operating somewhat out of his comfort zone and I think he's referring to having been bundled up with Brother Ali, probably at neither of their insistence. It kind of doesn't work - at all - but it's a curiosity for sure.

Annabel Lamb. I'm a sucker for dropouts. If Annabel had left much more out of this one there wouldn't have been anything left to leave in. The arrangements are so eighties but the vocals drip Berlin in the '30s. Disorienting.

 

Willie Nile. I'd like to say I'd saved the best for last but I really haven't. I have saved the most swaggering, blustering, overblown epic for the end of the show, though. It seemed appropriate. I get the feeling I'm supposed to know who Willie Nile is but I really don't. This has almost half a million views on YouTube, where there are clips of him performing with Springsteen, too. He seems to be one of those New York guys who just knows everyone but I'd never heard of him until today. Pretty sure I won't be hearing of him again, either.

And that's about enough Sweet Janes for one day, I think. If you only listen to one, make it Miley. If you want more, there must be another hundred or so on YouTube. I didn't watch them all. If you find a good one I missed, be sure and let me know. 

Counting Crows

 

I'd forgotten Crowfall was due to launch today. MassivelyOP's announcement this morning came as something of a surprise. Bree, author of the post, and a few readers who dropped comments on the brief thread that followed, seemed more impressed a Kickstarter mmorpg had managed to launch at all than by any possibility it could be any good.

"Yes, a crowdfunded MMO with a real launch!" 

"Big grats to the team for getting the game fully released"

"Congrats on them for crossing that finish line"

The MOP piece linked to a reddit thread called "Estimated Population?" in which the OP expressed some concern over how many people would be playing. So far the thread has drawn comments from around thirty people, the majority of whom don't appear to hold very high hopes for the future of the game. 

On a more positive note, there were reports of ten or fifteen thousand viewers on Twitch and a couple of people who'd bought the Buy to Play title took a moment out from their first day frenzy to pop into the thread and offer anecdotal evidence:

"There are at least 100+ players in the starting area on US West"

 "Game was freaking popping at launch..."

I took a look at the official forums. They were very quiet but as we all know forums aren't the hot ticket they once were. There was some mention of Discord being the place where Crows might be found but I wasn't quite interested enough to join yet another Discord channel just to find out if that was true.

After a while it occured to me to check just how many people had backed the game during its Kickstarter campaign way back in 2015. It was 16,936. Someone on the reddit thread claims that in the five years since then the number "who own the game from backing the game" has ballooned to 300,000 but they don't show their workings so I have no idea whether that's true or not.

 

MassivelyOP also published a much longer and more detailed "Launch Impressions" post, authored by Andrew Ross. I was hoping for some hard data but although it's an interesting read it's more of a review of the game itself than any kind of account of how the launch is going.

Early in the piece, Andrew goes off on quite a digression about Istaria, the player-owned mmorpg that started out as Horizons a very, very long time ago. It's an unexpected comparison for Crowfall but I can see what he's getting at. 

I played Horizons in beta and for a short while after launch and I've played Istaria a few times since and written about it here on occasion. Both games have a supposedly deep crafting system with considerable inter-reliance in common. They also both feature several unusual non-human player races. 

It had completely slipped my mind, if indeed I ever knew, that Horizons was originally planned as a PvP title. It was pure PvE by the time I got into beta and as far as I know it's been PvE evers since. The comparison does raise the question, re-iterated by a number of commenters in various threads I've seen, of whether deep crafting systems and a PvP focus really go together or not.

The relative success of games like EVE and Albion Online prove the wolves and the sheep can co-exist but two titles in twenty years isn't all that much of an evidence base. Maybe there are more but those are the two people always seem to quote.

From the thirty levels of tutorial I saw in beta I find it difficult to imagine Crowfall attracting a similar audience. There are a lot of PvE mmorpgs that offer a great deal more to players who aren't interested in PvP and the crafting, while it might be quite involved compared to the genre standard, still didn't seem all that original or exciting to me.  

The options for PvP players are a lot more limited but whether there's enough interest to feed the non-stop conflict the game promises very much remains to be seen. There certainly haven't yet been any of the traditional news stories about launch day queues or servers crashing under load that mmo launches often spit up, although I guess we haven't hit North American prime time yet as I write this so it could still happen.

 

One thing that struck me as I read through the various threads were the number of references to the upcoming open beta for Amazon's New World. Even though I played in both the first closed beta and last year's short open test phase and have the game on pre-order, I'd forgotten it was quite this close to launch.

Most of the people who mention New World suggest that Crowfall has, at most, until that open beta begins to attract and lock down an audience. The sentiment appears to be much stronger in favor of Amazon's game, which feels like it's turned a corner in PR terms over the last year or so. 

Where much of what was being said about the game up until last summer's open testing was cynical and dismissive, what people saw there seems to have changed a lot of minds. The directional shift from open PvP to PvE with optional PvP may have angered a section of the original audience but it seems to have had much the effect Amazon presumably hoped for on the wider marketplace. Amazon have also run a strong publicty campaign in the lead-up to launch, which is something no-one could claim on behalf of Crowfall.

The closely-spaced launch of the two mmorpgs reminds me a little of the summer of 2012, when Funcom opened the doors to The Secret World just weeks before the arrival of Guild Wars 2. I remember a lot of people back then saying they were giving TSW that window to prove itself before they made the switch. The winner of that contest was plain before the year was out.

There are also, of course, several other mmorpgs due to launch in the same summer window this year. Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis is already here, Swords of Legend Online is due later this month and Bless Unleashed follows in August. None of those is likely to trouble either Crowfall or New World and I suspect Crowfall itself will have no more of an impact on New World than the rest, either.

Unless we hear something entirely unexpected, it looks like this summer's Battle of the Mmorpgs is Amazon's to lose.

Coming Up Slowly

Oh look! Another max level in EverQuest II. Whoop, and if you will pardon the expression, di-doo!

How many does that make? I forget. Give me a moment and I'll check... It's seven. Plus four max level tradeskillers. 

In theory it gets easier each time because you get a 20% xp bonus for each max level character on the account, up to a maximum 200%. Leveling a new character to the cap has to be completely trivial for an established player, right? I mean, let's look at all the boosts and benefits I had going for me when I started this latest journey. 

For a start, I skipped the first hundred levels. I had an old Level 100 token sitting around so I used that. I could have skipped to 110 or even straight to 120, I had tokens for all of them, but I was trying out a class I wasn't very familiar with, so I thought I'd use the twenty levels to practice. After all, how long could it take?

We'll get to that but I'll tell you now, it's longer than you think. And I don't just mean how many weeks and months it's taken me to get around to logging the character in and doing something about it, either. I'm talking about played time. 

My Vah Shir Swashbuckler has a played time of eighteen and a quarter hours. That's a tad short of an hour a level. 

There might be a little afk time in there but not very much. Mostly when I logged her in it was to level. There's definitely a lot of "looking stuff up" time but that definitely counts. If I hadn't looked things up as I went along I'd still be levelling now.

 

Eighteen hours! How could it possibly have taken that long? It's a fair question. There was 120% veteran XP and 100% experience potion running at all times. She had 100% vitality for at least half the time, maybe more. From about level 105 or 106 the server was giving another 100% for the Scorched Sky holiday. 

All of those are cumulative bonuses so I was levelling with a following wind that varied from 220% to 420%. And it still took me eighteen hours to do twenty levels. 

There's more. When the Blood of Luclin expansion raised the level cap from 110 to 120, Daybreak made a major change to the way levelling worked. Basic quests from that expansion give so much xp you frequently ding several times on a single hand-in. 

Yesterday, when I finally got to begin the BoL Signature questline, my Swashie went from 110 to 113 to 115 to 117 to 119 to cap without troubling any of the levels inbetween. It took maybe ninety minutes, much of which was me checking the map and trotting from spot to spot because you don't get to fly in Luclin until a lot later.

What that means is that it must have taken me about sixteen of those eighteen hours to get from one hundred to a hundred and ten. Which it did. Kinda.

Here's the problem. There's currently no viable route from 100 to 110 for a solo player other than to follow the Signature questline from 2017's Planes of Prophecy. Well, there may be but if there is I don't know what it is. If anyone knows of one please don't keep it to yourself.

There are other places you can go where the mobs and the quests will give you experience, quite a few of them, all the way back to 2013's Chains of Eternity, at least. The problem is, in order to discourage players from doing exactly that and to keep everyone in the same current, endgame content, Daybreak took to raising the experience required per level by orders of magnitude in each successive expansion. 

You can by all means go and do all of the storyline content and sidequests for every expansion you fancy. I'd encourage anyone who enjoys the game to do just that  because most of it is pretty fair entertainment. Just don't expect to see your xp bar move by so much as a pixel while you're doing it.

If you're leveling a character the old-fashioned way, starting from level one, none of this matters much for a good, long while. You can merrily move around within the vast reaches of past content at will, limited only by the same factors that always existed, namely whether you can kill stuff before it kills you. 

When you hit 100, though, you'll find yourself going to Plane of Magic same as I did, no matter what other plans you had. Or you will if you want to see the number next to your name change, ever again.

 

Plane of Magic is a really nice zone. In fact, the longer I play and the more characters I level, the more I begin to appreciate just how very good all of EQII's open world expansion zones are. There's scarcely a duffer among them. Perhaps the closest to a pass would be the underground cavern of 2015's Terrors of Thalumbra but really even that's not bad, just a little claustrophobic.

The problem with Plane of Magic, if there is one, is the tripartite faction. I liked it well enough at the time but I found it an odd choice: "I like a faction grind as much as the next twenty-year veteran but I wouldn't choose to start an expansion with one." Four years and three more expansions later it stands as an odd roadblock for anyone taking the scenic route to current content.

Still, it zips along speedily enough with the aforementioned buffs. I'm not so sure how it would be if you were a genuine newbie leveling a character for the first time but then again, if you were that and you'd made it to 100, you'd probably be having a great time smelling the daisies and not be in any mood to hurry.

If you're just trying to grab another max level to add to the squad, Plane of Magic could feel like something of a trial. I picked away at it through a number of shortish sessions, knocking out a level here, a level there, mostly late in the evening when I didn't have the energy for anything ambitious. 

It was just as well I wasn't in a rush because even with flying mounts, intra-zone teleports, EQII Maps and a walkthrough for every quest, there's still a lot of downtime. It's a big zone and the questgivers take an almost palpable delight in making you criss-cross every inch of it. 

The worst parts are those longeurs when you can't get any more storyline quests because of hard caps on faction. You have no choice other than to run some repeatables for faction and that wasn't much fun four years ago. Every time I ended up taking a break from the levelling ladder for a week or two it was because I'd hit one of those plateaus.

I got there eventually. When someone in game mentioned there was a 100% server bonus for a few days, something that had managed to pass me by until then, I figured it was now or... well, next time there was a server bonus. I knuckled down and knocked off the rest of the levels to 110, at which point I figured I'd be able to move on to Blood of Luclin and finish the next ten in an hour or two.

Honestly, you'd think I'd know better by now. For once, I had no problem getting to the expansion itself. Sometimes there are pre-requisites to get in but I just fired up the Fast Travel map and clicked my way straight to the Blinding. Trouble was, no-one there would talk to me.

I spent some time kitting myself out in the free gear from the box on the floor, then I went to look up what I needed to do. There was a lead-in quest I'd forgotten because of course there was. There almost always is.

 

When I'd dinged 110 I'd gotten a key in the mail that I knew would port me to the Duality, one of Norrath's movers and shakers who's taken on the role of showrunner for expansions nowadays. I went to see him and he gave me the quest. It involved clearing out an instance and getting an item from the final boss. I figured what with my new gear and all I wouldn't have too many problems.

After I died on the third boss I decided I probably ought to have a mercenary along, if only for the healing. I'd managed up 'til then without one but time was obviously starting to catch up on me. I spent a while looking at the options and decided I'd take Evania Val`Sera, the Elite Merc you unlock when you do the Yun`Zi (aka Panda) quests. I've worked with her several times and she's very reliable. 

I also knew where she was. She stands about next to the banker in the floating city of Nye`Caelona in Obulos Frontier. There's a Fast Travel option for the zone but apparently my Swashbuckler didn't meet the requirements. I still don't know why. I figured it would take longer to find out the reason than it would to go there the slow way.

It took me two tries before I remembered the overland route but I got there eventually. I was aware of another little problem ahead, in that the city guards have a nasty habit of banishing anyone they don't recognize. If they spot you, first they stun you then they port you into the next zone. I wasn't overly concerned about that. I felt confident I could avoid them for long enough to talk to Val`Sera and I was right. 

What I hadn't counted on was Val`Sera refusing to speak in any language but her native Cae`Dal, which my Swashbuckler didn't know. We stood there failing to communicate for a while before I gave up and flew off. 

Language learning in EQII has gone through several iterations. There have always been some books you could buy but mostly you'd need to kill creatures who spoke the language until you'd acquired sufficient notes or runes or whatever to pick up the basics. Later, most of those languages were also added to NPCs in the form of more books you could buy, which sped the whole thing up immeasurably.

That's not how you learn Cae`Dal. To learn Cae`Dal you have to complete a collection. I spent two sessions going up and down Giant's Walk and in and out of Warslik's Woods, picking up every shiny "?" I could find. To make it even tougher, all of the required items are flagged No Drop. Every blasted one! 

 

I got the final one but of course that didn't mean I could speak the language yet. First I had to find a Collector and swap my finds for the reward, in this case a flag against the character noting they could speak Cae`Dal. 

I should make it quite clear at this point that I'm not complaining about most of these arcane, abstruse and downright pernicketty systems and mechanics. It's this degree of quirky granularity that makes EQII feel real to me. There's a close correlation between awkwardness and immersion in my brain and EQII generally walks that line with aplomb.

What I am saying is that all of this takes a long-ass time. Geez, does it ever! I got my flag, I went back to Cae`Dal, I swooped down next to Val`Sera and before I could speak to her some bloody guard saw me, grabbed me by the scruff and threw me all the way to Kylong Plains! That'll teach me to rush things.

I was a lot more careful the third time. Val and I had our introductory interview, I paid the fee and she signed on for the duration. With her heals we made short work of the third boss and the fourth. Then the final boss turned out to have one of those infuriating power drain abilities. I didn't manage to call Val off in time, so she got drained too and we both ran flat out of power and died. 

Quite slowly. It was painful to watch. I'd have run but for the longest time it looked like we might win. Even after I died I thought Val might finish it on her own. She didn't.

I bought some Clarity potions from the Broker to help with that but not after I'd gone all the way to the bank. I had plenty there but it turned out all the ones I'd stashed had a minimum level of 120 so I couldn't use any of them. This is where the time goes...

With the power regen from the potions we had no more problems. We killed the final boss, got the item, took it to the Duality, followed him to Teren's Grasp. watched him configurate the Combine Spires to communicate with Luclin once more, then off we went to the Blinding - again!

This time all the questgivers could see me and soon I had plenty to do. I knocked off a few simple kill tens and travelled around learning something about the Recuso and their history and DING! Level 120.

 

As an experienced player who went through all of this content as it came into the game and who's done all of it at least one more time since then, some of it several times, I found this a highly instructive experience. 

We all know how difficult returning to an mmorpg you haven't played for a while can be, for any number of reasons. What's perhaps less well-recorded is how confusing it can be even for a current, active player, any time they step even a little way off the beaten path. 

Just about every mmorpg I have ever played suffers from this astonishing accretion of former systems and looping mechanics. Guild Wars 2 is absolutely rife with them. I hear people asking for advice on these kinds of legacy issues there almost every day. In World of Warcraft I found no end of similar problems as I tried to make my way to the top, both in and out of Chromie Time.

EQII is no worse than any of them but as one of the smaller of the supposedly AAA titles and especially as one that now has a new owner, with a new platform that might stand some measurable chance of attracting fresh blood, it could just be worth someone's time to take a look at whether some of the worst of the jagged edges could be sanded down some. I'd at least think about reducing the faction requirements in Plane of Magic and making the BoL quests available automatically on reaching 110.

Then again, anyone who doesn't like it can just use the max level boost that comes with every expansion as standard these days. I suppose I did bring it on myself by using that old 100 boost, anyway.

Hoarders never prosper. Is that a saying? Probably not but maybe it should be.

Foundations And Identity

Following yesterday's unscheduled rant I return you today to our scheduled programming, a meditation on the purpose and function of mmorpg gameplay. Or, then again, not. 

I was going to make some observations on how I look for different experiences from the games I play depending on what's going on in my non-gaming life. After a couple of years when, for various reasons, I've spent considerably more time at home than at work, when the time spent playing games has varied from much-needed downtime to something approaching house arrest, I thought I might have some perspective from which observations might be made and conclusions might be drawn.

And then Shintar asked a very purposeful question in the comments to yesterday's post. Actually a series of questions:

"It seems strange that you feel so compelled to play GW2 even though you find it stale. Is it just because of Mrs B? It seems like an odd juxtaposition that there are apparently a hundred games you'd like to play and for which you don't have enough time, but you play GW2 every day even though it annoys you now? Or is it still genuinely much more fun to you than any of those other games despite the annoyances expressed in this post?"

And Kaylriene gave a long explanation of his decision to leave his guild and how that might lead to his not playing World of Warcraft any more, in which he invoked the "sunk cost fallacy". And Wilhelm posted a digression on the definition of immersion , how we fall under a game's spell and how certain changes might or might not be enough to break the magic. And Redbeard concluded a lengthy analysis of Burning Crusade's Karazhan raid by invoking buyer's remorse with a terse "I busted my ass for this?"

All of which led me to conclude I probably ought to have a bit of a rethink. Why people play play the games they do, why they go on playing them and why they stop is a complicated process. Why I thought I might have a handle on it beats me, now. I wasn't thinking, obviously.

So, I'm not going to trot out a neat little piece about how sometimes you want thrills and sometimes you want to be sedated. Life isn't a Ramones lyric (probably just as well). I'm just going to dig into my own motivations a bit and see what I can find. No universal principles, just some self-analysis. Everyone else is going to have to work on their own stuff. 

Shintar asks some very good questions. Why do I play Guild Wars 2 just about every day, then complain about what an unambitious, repetitive, stale game it can be? How does that fit in with my regular complaints about not having enough time to play the ever-growing number of mmorpgs I wish I was playing? And how is playing a game and calling it "stale" in a blog post any different from being one of those people I've called out in the past for logging into a game just to tell everyone how bad it is and how bored they are?

I thought about all of this when I was replying to Shintar. I came up with a number of true and accurate reasons why I've played GW2 almost every day for ten years. It's easy, it's familiar, it's comfortable. It does feel great to play, physically. Plus, something I didn't mention, it's gorgeous to look at.

Perhaps most importantly of all, it's right there, all the time. It's a staple, like a loaf of bread. And just like bread you can still eat it and enjoy it when it's gone a little stale. You just need to toast it a little.

And that's pretty much what ArenaNet do. It's what most mmorpg developers do. They bake their loaf and when it starts to get stale they toast it a little to bring back the flavor. That's what all these endless holiday events and minor updates are: a little heat applied to bring the flavor out.

Okay, I think that's as far as I want to stretch that analogy. Trust me, I had a couple more paragraphs along the same lines but they weren't making things any clearer. Very much the opposite, in fact.

 

My point is, just because something isn't at absolute peak freshness doesn't mean you throw it away. Stale is very much not the same as spoiled. If the air in your room starts to feel a little stale you open a window. You don't move to a new house.

Ah, yes. Moving home. Here comes another analogy, although come to think of it it's barely an analogy at all. Swapping allegiance from one mmorpg to another is moving home, in a virtual sense. Or perhaps it's more like starting a new job. Let's not get bogged down in analogical analytics.

In twenty years, how many times would I say I've fully "moved home" in mmorpgs? It's a much more complex question than it seems on the surface. For the first decade I played there were homes within homes. It wasn't only which game I played, it was which server I played the game on. 

Moving server in EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot or EverQuest II was very nearly as big a wrench as changing games. It meant starting from scratch, leveling new characters, making new friends. It meant leaving behind any and all resources other than your knowledge of the game itself and sometimes even most of that. Adapting to the original Firiona Vie ruleset in EQ, for example, or changing from Albion to Midgard in DAOC meant a learning curve comparable to starting a new game.

I changed servers a lot in the first ten years I played mmorpgs. I mean really a lot. I started new characters on almost every fresh server in EverQuest throughout the period when demand meant new servers were coming up all the time. I changed realms in DAOC twice in six months. I swapped servers four times in EQII in six years and that's not counting server merges.

All of that churn served to keep the games very fresh indeed. There wasn't much time to worry about things getting stale when the focus was always on managing change. The coming of server clusters and megaservers all but put an end to that. When GW2 began, servers were very much a thing but for what seems like the longest time, GW2 has just been GW2. It's a loss and it adds to the sense of staleness but we wear it.

Such a degree of internal churn makes a nonsense of the linear sequence of "main mmorpgs" my timeline would list but I'll take a shot at one anyway. I'm limiting it to games I played continuously for six months and I'm not looping around to the ones I came back to and played for another six months or longer, which would only be EverQuest and EQII anyway, I think. Also I very much doubt these are in exact chronological order. 

For what it's worth, then, my main sequence mmorpgs have been:

EverQuest

Dark Age of Camelot

EverQuest II

Vanguard

Rift

World of Warcraft

Guild Wars 2

Of those seven, GW2 has the longest unbroken run as main game. I've played a lot more EQ and EQII in total, not least because I'm still playing them both now, but there have been plenty of gaps along the way. GW2 I have played very close to every day since it launched back in 2012.

Why? Such a good question. Is "because it's there" a good enough answer? Clearly not. All of those other games, plus many others that were my main game for a few weeks to a few months (Guild Wars, Wizard 101, Lord of the Rings Online, Allods, FFXIV, WoW Classic, Star Wars the Old Republic, Rubies of Eventide...) are also still "there". I could be playing any of them every day but I'm not. I'm playing GW2. Why is that?

I think it's because I have some deep-seated, almost unconscious need for a base. A foundation. A solid platform from which to explore other things. In the very few, very brief periods during my twenty years in this hobby, times when I've not had such a foundation, when there's been no single game I was able to think of as "the game I'm playing", I've felt rootless, adrift. 

It's an uncomfortable sensation, significantly more uncomfortable than playing a game that feels a little bit stale. Guild Wars 2 may not be the most exciting, innovative, amazing game out there but it's my game, the game I'm playing. It's part of my identity. I am a GW2 player.

For now. That's the thing. All of the games on the list above were "my" games at one time. I would have identified then as "a DAOC player" or "a Rift player". 

Some of them make comeback bids now and then. There's an argument to be made that my main game right this minute is actually EQII, not GW2 at all. I'm probably putting in more hours there at the moment, doing my Overseer tasks every day and leveling my Vah Shir to 120. Maybe I should install that app people run that tallies up your exact playtime in every game. That might tell another story altogether.

As I said in yesterday's post, GW2's current status as Main Game benefits hugely from lack of competition. I don't much want to go backwards and replace it with a game I used to play and none of the newer games I've tried have been able to supersede it. It remains at the top of the heap through inertia and by default.

What's likely is that one day a new game will replace Guild Wars 2 and GW2 will take its place on my "other games I'm playing" list. I would bet serious money I won't stop playing it altogether, no matter how wonderful the new game might be. I might, if I'm really lucky and the new game is something special, take a hiatus from GW2 for a few months but you can bet I'll be back.

Again, why? I think it's all down to that identity thing. After twenty years I'm still an EQ player. I'm still an EQII player. I'm still a Vanguard player. But I'm not a WoW player or a Rift player. I'm someone who sometimes plays WoW. I'm someone who used to play Rift.

I'm about as sure as I can be that I am and will always be a GW2 player. I may not always enjoy being one, I may not always choose to be one, but I will always be one. Whether I'm currently playing or not.

Which, right now, since there's nothing better on offer, I am.

That's When My Patience Went Away : GW2

Following my return to work I had the shell of a plan prepared for what I wanted to write about today. I was thinking along the lines of a meditation on the different entertainment needs brought on by enforced leisure and enforced labor, how one requires stimulation and the other just the opposite.

It was all percolating quite nicely. And then I saw this. 

The headline Massively:OP went with was

"Guild Wars 2 delays End of Dragons to 2022, brings Colin Johanson and Josh Davis back."

That's enough to put the fear into anyone. Reading through the official press release, it gets worse. Much worse:

"Alliances When?

This year."

That about puts the cap on it for me. Along with the rest of the handful of people still playing World vs World, I'd allowed myself to get comfortable. I thought this insane idea had died of neglect long ago and we could all just carry on as if the whole ludicrous farrago had never been suggested. Sadly, it seems I was mistaken.

If that wasn't sufficiently disheartening, there's this:

"In the past, development priorities shifted away from WvW, and unfortunately both World Restructuring and our players suffered as a result. Our new leadership team views WvW as a cornerstone mode of Guild Wars 2, and it will be a focus of ours going forward."

It's that sickening moment, when the door opens to your nice, quiet office on the ninth floor, where no-one ever goes and most people don't even know anyone works, and in come three suits from corporate with a checklist and an appraising look. Sometimes benign neglect is the best you can hope for.

In this case, it's not just simple fear of the unknown. There's the plain fact that every single iteration on WvW since 2012 that pretended towards anything more than a basic bug fix has been at best a downgrade and frequently a disaster. Every. Single. One.

Desert borderlands even killed EBG.

 

Naturally, the plan comes with promises and safeguards. Most of the section in the press release relating to Alliances is made up of apologies for previous errors and promises not to repeat them. All of which we heard last time and the time before that and the time before that again.

There's a touching naivete in the promise of a collaborative process based around a beta:

"World Restructuring features will be released in a multiphase beta. What this means is that we’ll release a part of the World Restructuring system, test it with you in the live game, gather your feedback, and then iterate on it for a future release. ... Once we’ve worked with you to lock down the design and implementation, we’ll polish it up and take it out of beta."

It sounds reassuring until you realize the despised revision that removed all of the alpine battlegrounds and replaced them with their desert counterparts was the result of a similar collaborative beta, albeit a closed one.  That was the update that drove maybe half of all WvW players to stop playing, most of them for good. Several badly-received revamps led to open rebellion that was only quelled by a public poll on what should be done, a poll that resulted in a humiliating defeat for ANet and the removal of all of the new content to which they'd tied their banner. So that went well.

I'm less disturbed about this than I might be. Two or three years ago Alliances seemed like a terrifyingly bad idea but that was when the game mode still retained a vestige of the camaraderie it once had. There's none of that any more. All that remains is some knockabout fun, something very similar to an oversized, hot-join, never-ending game of capture the flag in which no-one really cares where the flag is or who's got it. It's hard to see how Alliances can make it actively worse but I have faith that if there's a way, ArenaNet will find it.

We had fun, once.

 

Going back to MassivelyOP's headline, there are more bad things. First and worst is the postponement of the third expansion, End of Dragons. This is embarrassing. Guild Wars 2 has had two expansions to date, Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire. The first took three years to arrive, the second pegged that back to two. So far, so good. Not great, really very not great, but at least heading in the right direction.

When (I guess I should say "if") it launches, EoD will have been four and a half years in the making. The original game only took six months longer than that to build from scratch. At this point I'm certain the better plan would have been to start on GW3 right after the second expansion. If you're going to take the time you might as well make the damn game.

The given reason is, of course, quality. It's always quality. 

"...we need a little more time to deliver our creative vision for Cantha...We appreciate your patience as we take the time to give the expansion the attention it deserves"

Seriously, screw your "creative vision". And screw the self-congratulatory tone. Just get a damn expansion out in something close to the timescale every other major manages. 

The problem doesn't just lie with the development team, unfortunately. There's a glib, knowing wink in that "we appreciate your patience".  You can start a conversation about expansions in game any time you like and half the people talking will be saying they don't want one at all or they don't want one yet. It's not patience, it's apathy and antagonism. A lot of GW2 players will be cheering today because they won't have to suffer another expansion until next year.

I am not one of those players. The game is stale. It's been stale for much of its ten year run. The only time it freshens up is when we get a new expansion and so far that's been twice. And I only liked one of those.

Straight up, if there was a good alternative to GW2 I would be done with it now. I was done with it after Path of Fire. I keep logging in because it's there and it's familiar and it's easy and because it's the game Mrs Bhagpuss plays but mostly I'm still playing GW2 because not one of the alternatives I'm waiting on has made it to market yet. 

Mrs Bhagpuss, who only plays GW2 and, unlike me, rarely goes back to older mmorpgs she once enjoyed after she moves on to new ones, has been asking more and more often when the next good game is likely to appear. I can only hope it's soon but sadly I know it won't be before the delayed End of Dragons expansion so I guess we will indeed end up being "patient". But only because we have literally no choice.

So much for the expansion. How about those two guys coming back, eh? 

Heart of Thorns introduces a hitherto unknown problem to the game: too much loot.

 

This one's a bit more nuanced. From a company's point of view, can it ever be a good thing to have to announce you re-hired people you said goodbye to years ago? I guess it depends on why they left in the first place but at best it is, by definition, a backward-looking move. 

Colin Johanson was a very controversial figure in much of his time at GW2. He was the figurehead of a direction of which a vocal majority of players strongly disapproved. Whether it was true or not, he was labelled as the guy who wanted to make GW2 harder for casuals. 

He was the showrunner for Heart of Thorns, the expansion many players found daunting and difficult. The sales of the expansion were reportedly underwhelming and the aftermath confused and chaotic. Johansen posted an emotional and upbeat farewell when he left but my summary of his tenure, written at the time, was less than complimentary:

"Under his direction the game has felt increasingly rudderless, surging from each new idea to the next with barely any time to reflect on the failures or consolidate the successes.

He failed to hold the line on free, bi-weekly content updates or on not producing paid expansions. Worse, when forced to change direction on these and other key, structural positions, he failed to make a success of the imposed alternatives. It seems the relative failure of Heart of Thorns was the final straw."

Given the history, it's hard to see why his return should be greeted like the prodigal son. Or indeed, like Scott Hartsman riding in on his white charger to save EverQuest II, a comparison I am absolutely certain Colin wouldn't want anyone to make.(I imagine he'd prefer us to cast him as Yoshi P riding to the rescue of his own personal FFXIV, but then what dev wouldn't?).

I never had carried much affection for Colin Johanson's style or approach. Nevertheless, I do have to admit that the direction the game took under his tenure, up to and including the release of the first expansion, made it by some margin my favorite era. 

I liked Heart of Thorns. I liked it a lot. It would quite possibly make the list of my top ten favorite expansions for any game. I've played through it start to finish twice and partially several more. I still go there most weeks and goof around just because I enjoy being there.

The adventure begins!

Conversely I dislike, maybe even detest, the second expansion, Path of Fire, which attempted to be all the things HoT was not: accessible, steeped in Guild Wars lore, commercial. I found PoF smug, irritating and, by far the worst of all video game crimes, stultifyingly dull. I forced myself to complete the main storyline on one character. Never, never again.

That does give me some hope for Colin Johanson's return. He did once do stuff I really liked and, let's be brutally honest, he can hardly make things worse. Except, of course, he can. It's amazing how often that happens. Still, we can hope. 

That just leaves the return of Josh Davis, about whom I have to say "Who?". I vaguely remember his name. I have no idea who he is or what he did. The only GW2 writer I remember is that one who got canned for fighting with players on social media and I don't even remember what their name was.

The writing in GW2 has been all over the place for years. It has some standout moments and a vast amount of ho-hum filler. Storylines blow up then blow away like dust on the wind. Who was Mr E.? Anyone know? Anyone care? How's Zojja doing? Is she dead or alive? Is Taimi still ill or did her incurable condition cure itself? Marjorie and Kasmeer, are they still a thing? 

Gliding. 100% more fun than mounts. Official!

 

It's soap opera and melodrama. Most people probably just click through it to get to the fights anyway. I'm sure Josh Davis coming back means something to someone but not to me.

And there we must leave them, Colin and Josh, setting out their desks, going down the hall to have their photographs taken for their security passes. We'll have to judge them by their works, I guess, although precedent suggests we'll be lucky if we have the least clue who's actually responsible for what.

I'll spend my summer dreading the onset of the Alliance beta although at least it's going to give me something to rant write about . I'd far rather have had an unpolished expansion in August than a supposedly tarted up version of the same six months later but no-one's asking my opinion because the people who actually matter have already decided what my reaction's going to be: I'm going to be patient. I've been thanked for it so it must have happened.

Ashes of Creation and Pantheon need to get a bloody shift on. There's an open door here waiting to be pushed. At this stage I'd even take Camelot Unchained as a stepping-stone to something I actually want. I know Mrs. Bhagpuss will try it. I wonder if she'd give New World a look... she does have that new mouse now...