Are We There Yet?

Not that I want to obsess about it but the news just  keeps  coming. I know these hype trains roll around with tedious regularity, only to end up shunted off into some cultural siding, rusting reminders of promises unfulfilled, but occasionally one just keeps picking up speed and momentum until it's hard to hear anything above the singing of the rails as it speeds by on its way to the future.

While many of the claims being made may be overstated, many of the reports exaggerated, there are already so many active applications of the process in play it would take a major effort of will to deny the reality that's already upon us. The future can look after itself; this is the present talking.

Of course, just as with most of the insanely over-optimistic claims made on behalf of the metaverse, much of what's being said and written about AI is pure nonsense. Whatever merits either may have are not helped by the crazed, evangelistic language and wildly hyperbolic assertions made by their most fervent supporters.

The evidence, however, speaks for itself. For the imaginary metaverse so heavily promoted by shills for crypto and blockchain, sad, deluded failures like Decentraland do service as the very opposite of proof of concept,offering up ruined monuments to greed, hubris and self-delusion, as Dan Olson's lengthy and entertaining takedown takes almost too much pleasure in describing. Meanwhile, anguished, aggrandized pleas for recognition of AI sentience come across more as cries for help from those that make them than any remotely objective assessment of current technological capability.

It's all too easy in the current, fevered climate to make assumptions that lurch too far to the extreme, to believe it's either all a crock or a scam or a farce or the singularity or the apocalypse. It's none of these things. Then again, I'm not going to be the one to assure you there aren't crooks, scammers and farceurs at work here too. They're always with us.

Backtracking just a little, where I would take issue with Dan Olson is in his rubbishing of the notion that to believe the metaverse is already here is in some way to give in to vaguery that renders the term meaningless. Nope. It's here alright. Like AI, the metaverse is observably present. It just doesn't look like the photos in its press pack.

The metaverse is clearly the worldwide web we all use every day. It already fulfills all of the necessary criteria - instant communication anywhere at any time with anyone; immediate access to services and products; communal virtual spaces; avatars, abstracts, anonymity. The pieces are in place. The only thing that's likely or that needs to change substantively is our mode of access which, as Dan rightly explains, will not magically arrive as a world filled with people happily strapping half-bricks to their foreheads.

Virtual reality of the kind imagined by its zealots will have to wait for technical solutions several orders of magnitude more strange and rare than anything we've seen so far. My own feeling is that we're far more likely to adopt something along the lines of the augmented reality seen in The Expanse, where schematics replace flat screens via a form of projection, than anything like Star Trek's holodeck, but there's no need for either. The flat screens we have now will do just fine.

As the metaverse turns out to be nothing more than a fanciful rebranding of the digital revolution that began thirty years ago, so AI may end up being nothing more exotic than a collection of software we employ to reduce the amount of tedious busywork we've been mislabeling "creativity" for far too long. Ever since the industrial revolution, engineers have been automating processes that used to require manual labor; now the software engineers are getting in on the act.

Much of the negativity I've seen concerning the advance of generative AI into areas previously handled by low-wage, low-status workers has revolved around the inherent uselessness of the product itself. The argument seems to be that AIs are only capable of churning out reams of twaddle, which might well be used to replace the twaddle previously produced by people at a much slower and costlier rate, and that this is somehow a bad thing because it will put the twaddlers out of a job.  

At best it seems like something of a circular argument. If we don't value the output, why do we value the means of its production? And if we consider producing it a worthwhile way for someone to earn a living, why do we not value the work they produce? Is it humanitarian to want to reserve an occupation for human use so those without better prospects can keep themselves alive by producing work no-one wants or values?

Don't look at me. I did English. I think you want a philosophy grad or a sociologist or maybe even an economist. I just find it a bit unconvincing as an argument, that's all, which may well be because I don't know what I'm talking about. Wouldn't be the first time.

I also don't find it all that interesting. I'm not that bothered about who writes copy I don't read for  websites I don't visit. AIs or interns, it's all a bit too abstract for me.

A fight in which I do have more of a dog, and one which ought to be of particular interest to residents of this part of the blogosphere, might be the potential incursion of AI into gaming. There's been some talk of that of late, not least in the abrupt redirection of resources intended for the "social mmorpg" Galaxies of Eden into a business dedicated instead to "the creation of cybernetic beings and eventually infinite virtual universes."

I first read about this at MassivelyOP, where the tone of the reporting was decidedly cool. I'm used to MOP being heavily down on anything AI or metaverse adjacent, so I went directly to the source to make up my own mind. In this case I think I'd have to acknowledge the sarcasm and disdain is probably justified. I refer you to the embedded video in the linked page if you require further convincing.

It's my feeling that generative AI will come to play a substantial role in the making of video games, especially rpgs. The two seem to be made for each other. Far from feeling apprehensive about how they might interact, I'm very keen to see them strike sparks off each other. I do not, however, believe that, as claimed by the developers of Galaxies of Eden, "We are now at the precipice of attaining true AI sentience and infinite content generation". In your dreams.

They also claim to have "managed to craft a crudely sentient cybernetic being", something I more than doubt, even with the most generous definitions of "sentient" and "being". Or "crudely", for that matter. As usual, there seems to be a self-destructive desire to run at breakneck speed into the future, not just before mastering walking but at the very moment when the first, tottering steps are being taken.

A much more reasoned and objective experiment with AI integration in an mmo - or in this case a text-based MUD - was reported by New World Notes, a blog that styles itself "The world's longest-running metaverse news and culture site." I won't attempt to precis the full article; it's worth reading in full, including the transcripts of some of the ChatGPT-generated NPC conversations that took place in game. They are impressive, at least if you're the kind of person who'd normally impressed by roleplayers larking around. 

If nothing else, it demonstrates that ChatGPT can certainly improvise as well as most casual roleplayers, admittedly not the highest of bars. As Matt Mihaly of Iron Realms, the company behind Aetolia, the MUD in question, makes abundantly clear, however, any widespread integration between commercially available generative AI programs and mmos would be prohibitively expensive right now. 

What probably wouldn't be either impractical or costly, however, would be asking something like Chat GPT or Bard to write static quests. In fact, why speculate? In the immortal words of Luci from Disenchantment, as recorded on the T-shirt I'm wearing right now... Just Do It!

My prompt: 

 

"Here is an example of how quest dialog is formulated in EverQuest II:

(Which I've cut because it's far too long for the post - I used the first section of dialog here if you really want to know.)

Here is the structure of a short quest in the game:

" Speak to Gherrana Cobbleblork at the Highland Outposts to begin this quest. She asks you to "gather some feathers from the kragploom aviaks".

    Kill 10 of any type of Kragplooms.
        The closest ones are Kragploom chicks in The Highlands.
        More Kragplooms can be found on top of Kragploom Butte north-northeast of The Highlands. ( 91,223,197 )

Return to Gherrana for your reward. "

Please construct a short quest for the game in which a non-player character asks a player character to go somewhere and do something for them in similar style. Include names and some dialog to give the quest flavor.

 

And here's Bard's response:

"Sure, here is a short quest for EverQuest II:

Quest Name: The Lost Key

Quest Giver: Agnar the Smith

Location: The Commonlands

Quest Description:

Agnar the Smith has lost his key to his workshop. He asks you to find it for him.

Quest Steps:

1. Speak to Agnar the Smith in the Commonlands.
2. Go to the nearby cave and search for the key.
3. Return the key to Agnar the Smith.

Reward:

100 platinum pieces

Dialog:

• You say, "Hail, Agnar the Smith."

• Agnar the Smith says, "Greetings, traveler. What can I do for you today?"

• You say, "I've heard you lost your key."

• Agnar the Smith sighs. "Yes, I did. I was working on a new sword when I accidentally dropped it into the nearby cave. I've looked everywhere, but I can't seem to find it."

• You say, "I'll go look for it."

• Agnar the Smith smiles. "Thank you, traveler. I'll be forever in your debt."

• You go to the nearby cave and search for the key. After a few minutes, you find it on the ground near a pile of rocks.

• You return to Agnar the Smith.

• You say, "I found your key."

• Agnar the Smith is overjoyed. "Thank you so much! I don't know what I would have done without you."

• Agnar the Smith gives you 100 platinum pieces.

• Agnar the Smith says, "Please, take this as a token of my gratitude."

• You say, "You're welcome. I'm glad I could help."

That took Bard about five seconds and can anyone honestly say its substantively inferior to any run-of-the-mill mmorpg quest? If anything, it already assumes too much backstory compared to the average "Fetch" quest. 

 

I'm not suggesting the EQII team would be able to copy and paste the whole thing into the game verbatim - you probably wouldn't want to be handing out 100 platinum pieces for a Commonlands quest, for a start and I'm not sure where the cave might be - but I am saying it wouldn't require much more than a little tidying up before it could be slotted in alongside most of the existing low-level quests in that zone without anyone being any the wiser.

To my mind, it's not a matter of having AIs replace designers or writers so much as giving those people a powerful new tool that could make their work a lot easier - and quicker. If nothing else, it ought to make a big difference to those one-dev shops I keep reading about.

 

Maybe we will eventually be able to leave the AIs to it and all just sit back and consume what they produce but long before that paradisaical day arrives I suspect we'll be enjoying their human-moderated output without even realizing.

Much the way we spend much of our time in the metaverse every day of our lives right now.

Backing Backbone

Earlier this year I bought several games on Steam. It was winter. It was cold. It was wet. I was inside a lot. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Three of those games had very similar settings and themes. They were all variants of the anthropomorphic noir detective subgenre, in which animals talk and act like humans as they go around behaving as if they were starring in a 1940s B-movie alongside Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre. 

There are a lot of games like this. Why, I have no idea. I find it difficult to imagine how the subgenre even came to exist, let alone why it's become so enduringly popular. I mean, I'm a year or so off retirement and the movies that inspired these games had already fallen out of fashion before I was born. And yet here they are, all those cynical PIs with their irony and anomie, trudging through neon-lit streets in the rain, swapping gruff one-liners with hoodlums in leather jackets and swearing never to get involved with another dame, just as they get involved with another dame.

Except now they're all cats and dogs and raccoons and even goddam chickens. Explain it to me. Go on, I dare you.

So far this year I've played four of these games, three on Steam, one on Prime Gaming, and finished three. I guess I must like them. 

Not that they're all the same. Or even all that much alike. They vary from lighthearted spoofs to existential essays but they all have two things in common - talking animals and mystery. 

The game I just finished, Backbone, started out as a Kickstarter. Having played it, I was curious to see what the pitch had been. It was clear a lot of people weren't happy with some of the turns the game had taken in development and I wondered whether they'd been misled by the campaign or by their own expectations.

Having read the details, I do think the complainers might have a point. I should caveat that by saying I loved the game, finding many of the aspects others label as problematic to be among its many strengths. I wouldn't, however, disagree that it doesn't seem to be exactly the game the Kickstarter was selling.

Back in 2018, the campaign funded at $95k over a $63k ask. Canadian dollars. It hit 50%  of its stretch goals. The game was scheduled to release a year later. It actually arrived on Steam three years after the close of the campaign, in June 2021. By Kickstarter standards and given everything that was going on in the world at that time, it seems like a reasonable outcome. 

The question comes not so much with the timeframe as with what was eventually delivered. The pitch promised "a pixel art cinematic adventure with stealth and action elements" in which players would be able to "solve detective cases, interrogate witnesses, explore the intriguing and dangerous world... and sneak your way to safety using smell-based stealth mechanics". 

Further gameplay detail included "No hand-holding - move forward through the game by your own rules. Every case has numerous trails, and it’s up to you to decide which one to follow." There would be "Stealth & Action. In the animal world, smell is the most powerful sense. Hide in multi-level environments, mask your scent in garbage bins, follow suspects and escape the chase. "

Unsurprisingly, given all of that, some people thought they were getting a detective game. That's not really what happened.

Backbone currently has a "Mixed" rating from nearly 1600 reviews. It's Recent Review status is better at "Mostly Positive." I imagine the improvement comes from newer purchasers having already heard the complaints and factored them in before committing. Almost all those complaints revolve around two things: lack of agency and the ending.

Of the former, there can be no doubt. There may be "numerous trails" as promised but all of them lead to the same destination. Different choices result in varying conversations but no matter what you choose, the plot moves inexorably forwards to its one and only conlcusion. There's no option to save. The game does that for you as it sees fit, keeping just one updated copy. You have but one choice at all times: continue from where the game last saved or start over from the beginning.

As for "Stealth & Action", it wouldn't be fair to say they don't feature in gameplay at all but they do seem at best tacked on and even that limited degree of interaction dwindles away as the game progresses. The vaunted "smell-based stealth mechanics", if they even exist, passed me by completely. I don't remember a single instance when smell came into play.

I did read a complaint or two about a lack of puzzles, which seems less fair. There are a couple, near the start, but the Kickstarter pitch never claimed there would be any. Backbone is very much not a Point & Click adventure game. It's much more a visual novel.  

A more reasonable complaint involves the absence of the promised "detective work". While it may be nominally correct to say there's some investigating involved, every clue and every discovery is pre-ordained. Every interactable object is highlighted, mostly only as and when required. "Detection" largely consists of walking through the scrolling landscape, clicking on each prompt as it appears.

Complaints about the ending and particularly the major change of direction taken by the plot in the latter part of the game seem to me to be far less justifiable. The Kickstarter page clearly describes a world that "combines the visual and social contrasts of film noir with anthropomorphic animals, retrofuturistic technologies, and dystopian fiction". No-one should really be surprised by the strong science fiction elements when they appear.

The storyline lives up to its billing as "challenging" and "thought-provoking". Unsettling and disturbing would be two other adjectives I might use. It's easy to see why backers, already irritated by the absence of the kind of gameplay they expected, might bridle at the discomfitting nature of the narrative as it reveals itself.

And so to that ending. Without spoiling anything more than the illusion that this might be a cosy, comfortable game full of cuddly animals who talk, I'll say it's bleak, uncompromising and depressing. I loved it.

It's also - and I think this might be the real reason it's proved so unpopular - wholly incomplete. It leaves the player with that unpleasantly familiar sensation of coming to the end of the final season of a series that's failed to renew. There are more plot threads left dangling than were there when it began.

Unlike a cancelled TV show, however, I have the strong impression this is entirely intentional. It's certainly consistent with the stated desire to tell "a tale about how our environment shapes us, and how we influence it in return." Given that Eggnut, the developer, went on to release not a sequel but a prequel, "Tails: The Backbone Preludes", it seems the original game ends in just the way they intended. 

Within those constraints, the game they made is excellent. It is, indeed, as they also said it would be, "a pixel art cinematic adventure". The art lives up its billing as "a modern take on the classical retro adventure look", filled with "contrasting silhouettes against the setting sun, dust particles, neon signs and steaming sewer hatches". It's one of the most visually appealing games I've played for a good while, with enormous depth of detail that richly repays long moments spent studying the background of every scene.

The writing, which gets plenty of praise even from some of those who dislike the game as a whole, is, for once, almost as good as people say. True, noir tropes do provide a safe scaffold, but here language expresses itself with an unconstrained fluency, not limited by the expectations of the form. As the visuals are cinematic, so the writing feels novelistic.

While the plot maintains a steady throughline, numerous diversions add considerable tonal variety. As anticipated, world-building is to the fore, matching the claim that there's "A rich, living and breathing world waiting to be explored". It's a world whose depth and detail we'll most probably never get to see but isn't that always the way of these things?

As for the music, described as "combining jazz and electronic music to create a viscous soundtrack that feels like a dark, enveloping veil of bebop and cinematic soundscapes"... well, judge for yourself. Suffice it to say, every time a song started up in game I stopped whatever I was doing and listened to the end and I'm writing this post to a backdrop of the soundtrack right now.

All in all I can heartily recommend Backbone to anyone who doesn't develop a twitch when they aren't in control. It may not be that much of a game but its a hell of an experience. In tone and range it reminds me most of Disco Elysium, a comparison Steam itself seems keen to promote, although it's flatter and less nuanced. Still, it would be a high bar to reach. Even to challenge it is praiseworthy.

I've wishlisted "Tails" to pick up when it goes on sale. It's currently rated "Very Positive", strongly suggesting the original game found its audience. I would be among them.

Here We Go Again

Well, that was annoying. I was halfway through a post and feeling pretty pleased with it and then Blogger decided to delete the entire thing. It's a known issue with no fix because Google doesn't give a rat's arse about Blogger but it's only the second or third time it's ever happened to me in more than a decade so I suppose I should feel grateful for that. Give me a moment.

There are a couple of ways to insure against it. One is to have the Preview open as you write, something I often do, only not this time, of course. I've got it  open now, though, you can bet on that. Or you can write the whole thing in another editor and copy it over, which kind of defeats the point of Blogger having its own editor in the first place.

Nothing for it but to redo the whole thing. Except you know it's never going to be as good the second time around. Then again, maybe it'll be better. The trick is not to try to replicate everything exactly. Just go at it as if it was the first time.

So, what was I posting about, anyway? Music, luckily. I say luckily because even though I'd been at it for a couple of hours, most of that was watching and listening to stuff, not typing. 

I started out by complaining about this year's Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Competition. I wrote about it last year and had a good time doing it. The long list is nearly a hundred acts and I planned on picking the highlights out of that before going on to discuss the finalists. I've mentioned a couple of times in previous posts that I was working on it but I'm sorry to say it just hasn't come together as I imagined it would.

I skimmed through the full long list a week or so ago, picking out everything that caught me eye, then I went back over it more dilligently. I don't say I listened to every single track all the way through but I caught at least a flavor of most of them. 

And virtually nothing stood out. A lot just wasn't to my taste and what was I didn't find particularly exciting. I made my own shortlist of almost a dozen acts but of the lot of them, there was only one that I'd have included in one of my regular "What I've Been Listening to Lately" posts. And they weren't even new to me or the blog! 

Back Row - Prima Queen

I may still get around to doing a GFECT post, maybe when the winner is announced, but right now I'm just not feeling it, especially when I have a bunch of great tracks saved up to play instead. Stuff I genuinely have been listening to and will be listening to again.

I'll say up front, though, if you're one of the few who enjoys these posts, don't expect to hear anything much you haven't seen here before. These posts split into two types: utterly unfamiliar names I've trawled up on a deep dive down some YouTube rabbit hole or "Friends of the Blog". This is definitely the latter.

Let's start with this one because I need cheering up after Blogger screwed me over.

Wouldn't Let Me In - Alex Lahey

You wouldn't think she was singing about discrimination and prejudice, would you? I think this is what the kids call "a bop". What kind of idiot wouldn't let Alex in to anything, anyway? Do these people just hate fun?

Church Outfit - Poppy 

I can't keep up with Poppy's new directions. There are so many. I prefer this one by a cyberspace mile to Death Metal Poppy. We nearly fell out over that one.

This is, apparently, a return to a previous period of Poppyism, anyway, not a wholly new departure. It's going back to the industrial synth grind of the Choke EP, or so I'm told. I don't actually remember that one. Let's see if it was any good... Oh, wow! It really was! I'd forgotten...

My favorite era of Poppydom is still the stuff she did with Titanic Sinclair. Sorry, Poppy. I was hard enough into the whole thing at one point that I almost signed up for Poppy.Church. I had the forms up and everything. I only didn't because signing up for things online is such a faff. 

I wonder if Poppy.Church is still a thing? Nope. It's not. I'd still wear the lapel pin but I'm not paying twenty quid for one.

Winter is Blue - Clairo

Wow. That was a bit of a bootlegger turn. Sorry if anyone got whiplash. 

I saw this first on Instagram. Not that I have an Insta account. I saw it linked somewhere. Stereogum or Pitchfork, probably. Now it's on YouTube, where everything comes in the end.

I got Clairo's sophomore album, Sling, for my birthday last year and I love it but I wasn't prepared for how sophisticated it would be. There's some of the expected bedroom pop but there's a whole lot of Laurel Canyon and plenty of jazz, too. I can't think of a time when Joni Mitchell's guiding hand has been laid more firmly on the shoulders of contemporary female singer-songwriters. Her influence is everywhere. Good thing, too. 

<Edit> And I completely forgot to mention that this is a cover of a song originally written and recorded by cult psych-folk legend Vashti Bunyan. I had a whole paragraph about that in the original but somehow fogot to include it in the reconstruction.

We The Female - Chai

Let me just quote you a few choice lines from the lyric:

"Full of mistakes but lovable"

"Shut up, follow us!"

"Don't try to be somebody"

"We are mighty, yet feminine"

"We are pretty but masculine"

"Just trust us and listen!"

Reminds me in the best way of early Gerling. 

John Ashbery Takes A Walk (ft. Charlotte Gainsbourg) - SQÜRL

SQÜRL is Jim Jarmusch's band. The first time I heard them I immediately began trawling YouTube for more bands featuring movie directors so I could put a post together. That post never got written because I didn't find any. Not any good ones, anyway. Only SQÜRL.

This latest of theirs is magnificent but you may need to adjust your aesthetics before listening . The ever-wonderful Charlotte Gainsbourg perfectly enunciates not one but two poems by John Ashbery, "one of the greatest 20th-century American poets", over a stately, clangorous drone. As a seasoned poseur, I can handle this sort of thing, but exposure to levels of pretension this high could prove a danger to the less experienced pseud.

--- Time Out ---

And that's me all caught up! Only took me forty-five minutes to redo two hour's work. Not sure if it's an improvement but I certainly typed it a lot faster. Everything from here on in is original, for what that's worth.

--- Time In Again ---

 Spalarkle (Alys) ft. Caroline Polachek - felicita

I followed the link to this because of Caroline Polachek. felicita was new to me. The two have worked together before, albeit with very different results. felicita is part the PC Music collective, an organisation known for "its surreal or exaggerated take on pop music tropes from the 1990s and 2000s". My kind of thing. I'm sure they'll turn up here again.

steamroller - feeble little horse

I haven't entirely bought into Feeble Little Horse as yet, much-hyped though they've been in certain quarters. This is killer, though. A glorious, disciplined, melodic churn that reminds me of Cranes. I've pulled up this excellent live version so we'll all have something to look at while we listen. It's beautifully recorded for a club gig but you can hear the dynamics much more clearly in the studio recording, which even has a visualiser, although I suspect it could induce motion sickness so maybe don't stare at it too long.

Rachel Veut Danser - Le Pain

And finally, something entirely new. The only track in the post not to feature anyone whose been in one of these things before. As far as I know, anyway.

It's gorgeously French, isn't it? Her voice reminds me of Valerie Leulliot from longtime favorites, Autour de Lucie. See? I still found a way to make this all about something familiar. Maybe I just hate new things.

Yeah, I don't think so. Next time I'll do my best to prove it. Even if it means actually putting some work in for once.

If It Looks Too Good To Be True...

I need to correct a fundemental error in yesterday's post on the changes to EverQuest II's Kael Drakkel server so, rather than bury it as an edit no-one would ever read, I thought I might as well give it a very brief post of its own. Also, since I logged in and played there for a while this morning and have a couple of observations to make, I might as well throw those in, too. Still going to keep it very short, though. No-one's that interested; me included.

Firstly, the correction: Kael Drakkel is not going to be a free-to-play server after all. 

Well... it is, kind of, but only for three weeks. 

This goes back to the confusion over dates I alluded to when I said "The changes are somewhat mysteriously scheduled to occur "Between April 6 and April 25", although it's stressed that they are permanent once implemented". I was taking my information from the Producer's Letter, which says

 "Between April 6 and April 25, we will be kicking off these permanent changes above by making the Kael Drakkel server available to all players—even those without membership"

I thought that was a clear statement that the server would be permanently available to everyone, members and free players alike, but no, that's not how it works at all. As today's announcement clearly explains,

"Anyone can play on Kael Drakkel. No subscription required until April 26!" 

I can see now how the statement in the Producer's Letter can be parsed to read as "Between April 6 and April 25 we will be making the Kael Drakkel server available to all players - even those without membership - as a time-limited opportunity to try out the changes, which will be permanent for members" but to my mind the phrase "kicking off" doesn't really express the meaning "temporarily introducing" at all clearly, although I do admit - and indeed did observe - that the sentence as a whole doesn't make much sense without such an interpretation. 

I just took it to be a badly-written sentence. Which it is, although not for the reason I thought.

The upshot is that everyone has three weeks to give the new ruleset on Kael Drakkel a try for free but after that, and if they want to stay longer, they'll need an All Access membership. So, is it worth getting one?

Only you can decide, although I'd obviously not suggest it was ever going to be worth subscribing just to play one of the four available titles on a special rules server. All Access is a great deal anyway, though.

I'm in the happy position of being a Member already, so I don't have to choose. Based on my brief experiences this morning, I don't think I'll be making Kael Drakkel my new Norrathian home but I imagine I'll be dropping in from time to time, which is exactly what Darkpaw want to hear.

The announcement I linked above goes a long way towards clarifying what Darkpaw are expecting from the rule changes. They want it to be a server anyone (I guess I should say "any All Access Member".) can hop onto at whim, mess around for a while, then leave. It's the sort of place you can imagine someone killing half an hour before the raid starts or spending a couple of hours while their home server is down for maintenance.

As Darkpaw describe it 

"We want Kael Drakkel to be your home away from home, especially when you just want to enjoy the game without all the pressure and extra time required. Think of Kael Drakkel as “plug and play”—get in and have immediate fun. Whether you make the server your home or a place to go when you just want some quick entertainment, all are welcome!"

It reminds me slightly of when ArenaNet added Edge of the Mists to Guild Wars 2 so players in the overflow for World vs World would have something to do while they waited. That worked for a while but eventually EotM turned into a ghost zone, when ANet switched off the xp faucet.

The big inducement to play on Kael Drakkel are the things you can get there for your "real" character. I don't think even Darkpaw are imagining many players setting up to play full-time on the Legend and Lore server. The secondary attraction is the ability to solo a lot of stuff you couldn't handle on a Live server.

I took a brief look at both of those this morning. I came away quite impressed with the goodies on offer, less so with the whole soloing a raid thing.

Nimgimli commented on yesterday's post that the idea of Kael Drakkel sounded attractive enough but the plethora of skills and abilities you'd need to learn at Level 90 was offputting. I replied, somewhat glibly asserting that solo content in EQII is already so easy that knowing what your skills do is a luxury more than a requirement.

Having died four times in a row to the first raid boss I tried this morning, I'm now willing to say that may not be strictly true on the new Kael Drakkel. It wasn't even a recent raid boss, either. It was one from way back near the start of the game. By the fourth try I could see victory was definitely within my reach but it would have taken more concentration and better playing skill than I was willing to muster just for the experiment.

On the other hand, outside the raid zone there was a yellow-con, Heroic named mob that I was able to one-shot, which seemed a tad extreme in the opposite direction. I came across a couple of bugs, too, so it's not impossible things aren't working as planned just yet. I'll keep an eye on the forums to see how many complaints there are.

As for the rewards, I spent some time looking at what Lore and Legend Merchant Ronald Gleneed had to offer and came away quite impressed. Some of it is unique to the revamped server and some comes from time-expired events, presumably making it otherwise unavailable. 

There's a ton of housing stuff, a lot of which I'd like to own. There are several mounts, at least one of which I'd use for looks. Even the new appearance armor, which didn't look all that impressive in the screenshots, is pretty spiffy when you see it in game. There was a constant stream of players coming to check it out, too, which is encouraging, especially seeing it was the middle of the night in the U.S.

The currency used to buy all of it comes from doing Achievements, that being the way Kael Drakkel operates. As far as I can tell, they're just the same, regular Achievements you can do on any server, only on Kael Drakkel you get paid for them. I somehow have over three hundred Lore and Legend Tokens already, enough to buy quite a lot of the stuff that interests me, although if I buy the Arcanists Hover Platform, it'll about clean me out.

That just leaves the scaling adornments, about which I can tell you... nothing. Didn't see 'em. Looked for 'em, couldn't find 'em. If I find out where you get them, I'll add a note to the end of this post.

And here it is. 

(The end of the post, that is. Not the note. I'm still looking.)

EQII - The Solo RPG

I had other plans for today's post but late last night (My time.) Jenn Chann, Head of Studio for Darkpaw Games, dropped yet another Producer's Letter for EverQuest II and it pretty much demands attention. I don't know what I was expecting (Yes I do - I wasn't expecting anything - I wasn't even thinking about it.) but it wasn't this:

"Playing on Kael Drakkel is about to become even more friendly! Characters on Lore and Legend servers will receive a powerful enhancement that will allow them to take on heroic and many raid encounters solo!"

Excuse me? Where did that come from?

But wait... there's more!

"...we will be ... making the Kael Drakkel server available to all players—even those without membership"

Now hold on a darn minute! A Daybreak special ruleset server you don't have to be an All Access member to play on? Has such a thing ever happened before?

Yeah, I don't know either and I really don't have time to go through fifteen years of patch notes to find out. It is, at the very least, extremely unusual. I think I'm on safe ground there.

In cutting to the core for once, I've left out some of the detail. Let's curl back.

"...accounts will be able to earn a new green adornment that scales between character level 50 and 125, and unlock the Kael Drakkel appearance armor sold by Ronald Gleneed, the Lore Token Merchant."

Okay, there's something weird about that. Let me think... Oh, yes! Kael Drakkel is the server where everyone starts at Level 90 and stays there. Why would Kael Drakkel players need or want scaling adornments?

Answer? They wouldn't. But their characters on other servers might.

"The appearance armor and new adornment are unlocked account-wide and may be bought from Ronald Gleneed in both Freeport and Qeynos Province District on all servers. While on the Kael Drakkel server, you will find a whole slew of new housing items to spend Lore and Legend Tokens."

So, let's unpack this a little. As of tomorrow (The changes are somewhat mysteriously scheduled to occur "Between April 6 and April 25", although it's stressed that they are permanent once implemented.) anyone can make a character on Kael Drakkel, which will effectively become a levelless, solo playground. 

There, along with fulfilling all their power fantasies of soloing at-level raid mobs, they'll be "able to earn", through means as yet unspecified but presumably via a progression mechanic of some kind, an item of value for any and all their characters on other servers. They'll also be able to earn or unlock, again in some manner as yet undisclosed, appearance armor and housing items, also to be available to any and all characters on any server. There's even a free mount just for logging in.

Depending, naturally, on just how desirable these various rewards are deemed to be and how reasonable the effort to get them is adjudged, this looks something like a masterstroke, always assuming the intent is to turn Kael Drakkel into a high-population server for a while. It potentially ticks boxes for just about every playstyle except PvP - solo, competetive progression, decorators, fashionistas...

What's more, by effectively creating a solo version of EverQuest II and making it free-to-play for everyone, it could - with effective marketing or word-of-mouth - potentially open up the world of Norrath to a much wider audience than has previously found it of interest. I mean - it's EQII that you can play on your own - and not just the old parts but right up to the current endgame.

I made a character on Kael Drakkel when it launched just over a year ago. I posted about the experience, calling it "an interesting ruleset and a solid implementation" but not one I found sufficiently appealing to pursue. I don't believe I've logged in to Kael Drakkel since.

Well, I'll be logging in now and not just out of curiosity. It does, of course, depend on just how useful/essential/appealing the various new incentives to playing there turn out to be, but as I've been reminded most strongly of late, it's almost always worth making the effort to add account-level benefits that any and all characters, including those you make in the future, might want to use. That's how I come to be flying around Norrath at level 39 right now.

Both Kael Drakkel in its original form and the about-to-be changed version are examples of Darkpaw's willingness to experiment with the format, something that few other developers seem as willing to do. Syp was wondering only yesterday why Standing Stone Games don't seem to be as ready to take similar risks with Lord of the Rings Online, given they're ostensibly owned by the same company, but I think in this particular instance we do have to make a clear distinction between Darkpaw and Daybreak. It's only the EverQuest titles that run these kinds of experiments as standard. I don't see it happening in Planetside II or DCUO.

There's actually quite a lot more in Jenn's letter, including information about the upcoming PvP-TLE server, the fixing of a long-standing bug in character transfers, news about the forthcoming Class Balance Forums and the system they'll use to decide on future class changes. There's some teaser art for the imminent Game Update 122 "Empire of Antiquity", currently in beta and an annotated version of the roadmap issued earlier this year. There's also something about the Swag Store but that's really outside my remit.

It's a lot, frankly. Especially for a game that - and I say this with love - surely saw its best days, at least commercially, many years ago. The amount of work and effort that goes into keeping EQII not just going but growing and changing is astonishing. Plenty of much higher profile, more populated mmorpgs get nothing like this degree of attention.

The changes to Kael Drakkel could, potentially, bring a lot more players to the game. If done well, they could virtually relaunch EQII as a solo rpg, one with an absolutely mind-boggling amount of content. Honestly, that's how I already play the game these days and have done for years but doing so requires a very great deal of research and application. This could legitimize that playstyle, make it hugely more accessible to the casual player and bind it into the rest of the franchise in a way that I don't think we've seen before.

Whether you think that's a good thing or not depends on how you see the genre, I guess. I'm sure there'll be plenty of pushback from the usual suspects but that crowd would complain about literally any change to the game. The real question isn't who this might annoy - it's who it might excite.

I suspect the answer will be almost no-one who doesn't already play the game, for the simple reason that almost no-one who doesn't already play the game will ever hear about it. Getting attention for a twenty-year old mmorpg outside its own niche is all but impossible. Still, you have to try, don't you?

And Darkpaw never stop trying.

Just Google It!

About this time of the month, I'd usually put up a post covering the free games coming to Prime Gaming over the next few weeks. It used to be a fairly simple post to write. I'd wait until the games appeared on the Prime Gaming app, read the descriptions, check out the developers' websites and the games' Steam pages, then write a few capsule previews, sprinkle in a few snarky comments and give some kind of judgment on whether each game interested me or not.

It was fun but always a bit more complicated than I felt it needed to be. The games listed on the app were never exactly the same as those listed on the Prime Gaming website. The new games didn't get added on the same day each month. Some games arrived as codes for other services, like GOG, to which your Amazon account needed to be linked before you could claim them.

On the whole, though, it was manageble enough. I enjoyed putting the posts together. I quite looked forward to it. Best of all, there was the odd comment or two suggesting the posts were helpful in some way, just in reminding people the games were out there, waiting to be claimed.

Earlier this year, though, Amazon changed the way the service operates. Instead of releasing all the games at the start of the month, now Prime subscribers receive one or more new free games every Thursday. That left me with a choice: I could either write a short post every week on the new game or games or I could do some research at the start of the month to find out what was coming, then write about it all at once.

I opted for the latter. A Google search brought up plenty of gaming and entertainment sites that had apparently received press releases ahead of time and turned them into news articles or reviews. It was easy enough for me to use those to create an annotated list of games of my own but even as I was doing it, I started to question both the process and the purpose.

When I was drawing the source material directly from Amazon Prime Gaming, it felt like legitimate research. Taking it from other secondary sources, who'd already parsed and reformatted the raw data seemed a lot more like... well, not plagiarism but definitely lazy journalism. Why not just link to those sites and have done with it?

Still, I didn't not enjoy writing that post and I felt I could put my own spin on things sufficiently to legitimize the effort. A lot of what many of us do as bloggers is reframe information and opinion we've sourced elsewhere. This wasn't materially different.

So, yesterday, it having occurred to me that we were a few days into April already, I thought I'd google "Free games with Amazon Prime Gaming in April 2023" to see what came up. As you can see from the link, plenty of sources have already had their say, including big players like GameSpot and there's even a promo video from Prime on YouTube.

The video surprised me a little, although I suppose it shouldn't have. It's obvious, when you think about it, that Amazon would run video promotions for Prime Gaming. Perhaps what is surprising, something I'm only realizing as I write this, is that I'm clearly in the habit of mentally screening out the thumbnail video links Google embeds close to the top of all searches these days.

I don't even remember when those started appearing. Was it recently? Have they always been there? I see them but I ignore them becuase they don't fit my decades-in-training image of what a page of google search results looks like. I'm expecting a list of text links so anything that isn't that gets screened out.

Checking the YouTube channel, I see the video archive goes back a couple of years. It looks like it started when Amazon rebranded Twitch Gaming, which they already owned, to Prime Gaming. I was already a Twitch Gaming player and I carried on using the Twitch app for a while before moving over to Prime. There was a period when both ran concurrently. I imagine that's why I missed the inception of the channel and later on I just never had cause to look for it.

I've added it my YouTube subscriptions now, along with the Prime Video channel, which I also didn't realize existed. That's going to help a lot with compiling these monthly posts in future as well as possibly giving me ideas for others.

As I said, I didn't find it so surprising that I'd missed the YouTube channels. What I found completely astonishing was that I'd also somehow managed to miss the fact that Prime Gaming has a blog! If you scan down that first page of results from the google search I linked, three places up from the bottom you'll find a link to something called, quite simply, Prime Gaming Blog.

I was a little suspicious at first. I clicked through, naturally, and what I found looked mostly official but I wasn't entirely sure whether it was a genuine Amazon production or a high-quality fan site. The blog runs on the Medium.com platform, which Wikipedia describes as "an American online publishing platform developed by Evan Williams and launched in August 2012."

Williams is apparently a co-founder of both Blogger and Twitter and Medium.com incorporates elements of both, supposedly providing "a means to publish writings and documents longer than Twitter's 140-character (now 280-character) maximum" in a more news-cycle-friendly format than Blogger's full, long-form footprint encourages.

The Prime Gaming Blog employs a newszine format not unlike that favored by several hobby bloggers with advanced HTML skills that already feature in my blog roll. You know who you are😉 The archive, again, goes back to the moment when Amazon canned Twitch Gaming and handed the division over to Prime. 

The thing that puzzles me here isn't that I missed it when it happened. We've already covered that with the video channel. No, what gets me is why the Prime Gaming Blog has never made itself known to me in the many google searches I've done on the subject before. Or, for that matter, why no-one has ever mentioned it in any comment, post or conversation I've read over the last couple of years.

I guess the answer lies partly in that lowly position, down at the foot of the search results. I mean, congrats for getting on the first page, guys, but shouldn't the official blog of the company be at the top? Especially when the company in question is a global behemoth like Amazon? 

For all I know, the unimaginitively, if pragmatically, named Prime Gaming Blog may only just have made it onto the first page. Maybe when I scanned the list last month it didn't even feature. Or, more likely, I found everything I needed on the first screen of results and didn't scroll down. It's really that first screen you want to hit, not somewhere down the page.

Anyway, I've found it now so I've added it both to my Feedly and also the blog roll. That should make compiling these monthly posts more timely and also remove that faint whiff of inauthenticity that was drifting in.  

That's always assuming I decide to carry on with them. With the official press release right there, in blog format, on the sidebar, maybe I don't need to get in my own way. I know the blog roll is the main reason half my readers come here in the first place. I probably should leave the damn thing to do the job it was put there to do.

I'm certainly not going to run through the full slate of free games for this month in this post. There are too many, for a start, allegedly fifteen of them, although some of those seem to be the SNK titles that have been included every time for months. I never even bother mentioning those.

The highlight for readers of this blog, I'm guessing, will be the inclusion of Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, which drops on April 13. Unlike last month's Baldur's Gate, which I finished twice, I never got very far with Icewind Dale. I'll be glad to add that to the roster.

I'll take a raincheck on posting my thoughts on the rest of the April offer. It depends how short of ideas I get. Meanwhile, if you want to check out the games for yourself, you can either follow the links above or go directly to the official post here, which also includes lots of detail on the in-game offers, as well as information on the new Luna titles.

I'm going to be claiming two Prime games for certain this month, with an option on two more. A shiny No Prize for anyone who can guess which they are.

Spring Fashion Supplement

It's been about a month since I last posted news of what I'm wearing in Noah's Heart. I realise it's a topic likely to be of interest to no-one but myself but I have to consider my legacy. This is just the sort of thing that's going to help convince me my life hasn't been a waste, when I look back on it on my deathbed. Also it's my blog and, to paraphrase Lesley Gore, I'll post what I want to.

It took me a litle longer than usual to max Affection with the next Phantom on my list so I could get her to hand over the pattern I needed to craft my own version of her signature look. That was because, for the first time, I chose one of the SSR-rated phantoms, all of whom require an extra level of persuasion to part with their patterns.

As XyzzySqrl explained in the comments to a post back in September last year, there's a very straightforward hierarchy in the game that goes from R (Rare) to SR (Super Rare) to SSR (Super Super Rare). Rare phantoms max affection at Level 11, Super Rare at Level 12 and Super Super Rare at Level 13. The number of points required for each level increases markedly as you make your way from vague acquaintances to BFFs. It takes 18k to go from 11 to 12, which is where I'd always stopped before but this time I needed but another 24k to go from 12 to 13.

For this reason only, I was loathe to pick an SSR phantom for my next charm offensive but in every other way it was the obvious choice. Visually, there's a very significant change in quality between the three grades. Rare phantoms wear relatively plain outfits in very muted colors, which often include a lot of dull, battleship grey. Super Rares are much more detailed and colorful, with plenty of attractive options to choose from, but Super Super Rares are incontestably the winners in any fashion parade, their costumes more subtle and intricate than their sometimes brash inferiors.

There are plenty of SSR looks I'd love to adopt but ironically the one I've picked isn't one of them. For once, I made my choice for pragmatic, gameplay reasons rather than whimsical amusement or pure aesthetics. I needed to improve some stats and this was a way of doing it.

Other than the extra tier, raising affection with SSR phantoms is no harder than with the lesser rarities, something that very definitely does not apply to raising their all-important star ratings. I currently have all my Rare phantoms at the highest star rating and fifteen out of nineteen Super Rares maxed as well. 

Of my twenty Super Super Rares, however, only one is even close. The rest have either no stars at all or just one or two. Since the SSRs are meant to be the superior choices for combat and since combat is unavoidable if you want to follow the storyline or progress through either the narrative seasons or the seasonal arenas, you'd obviously want to do all you can to stack your team with SSR phantoms at the highest star rating possible.

Which is, of course, how the developers hope to make their money. There are plenty of ways to speed that process up by spending cash, although none that completely avoid the usual reliance on the goodwill of the RNG gods. 

Since I have no intention of spending a single cent on the game, I have to make do as best I can, which means focusing on one SSR phantom at a time, and since the first such phantom I acquired was the one everyone gets at the start, Ave, that's where I've been directing my attention. 

Ave is a fun companion but she doesn't dress remotely the way I'd ever choose to dress a character of my own. I much prefer the looks of.... well, honestly, pretty much any of the other SSRs. Unfortunately, none of them was remotely ready for action so I was stuck with Ave and her frou-frou blue and white party dress.

That said, it looks better on than I expected. I'm going to wear it for a while, just for a change, but once the novelty wears off I imagine it will go back into the wardrobe, never to be seen again. 

On the plus side, all of the outfits come as separates - top, legs and shoes - and some also have hats. It is possible to mix and match the pieces to come up with a look of your own. There's also a dye system, which I haven't yet attempted to figure out. It is conceivable I might yet find a use for something Ave's wearing. I kind of doubt it but could happen...

I now have wearable versions of the outfits of three of the four phantoms that make up my regular team. You can store several different teams and you can swap individual team members at any time, out of combat, but once again, the more phantoms you try to maintain at full combat readiness, the more its going to cost you, either in cash, time or most probably both. I prefer to stick with the same crew most of the time.

The only regular team member I haven't maxed affection with is Hughes. He has an outfit I like but he's male and although Noah's Heart is very modern in its willingness to allow you to express both the male and female (Although not the non-binary.) aspects of your personality, it's not a game that allows cross-dressing. To dress like Hughes, I'd have to bring out my "Inner Personality" and cosplay as a boy.

Hughes is a Super Rare and I have a good number of other options in that category, some of whom have very attractive outfits. It might be easier to gear one of them up and swap Hughes out, at least for a while. Or I could just gear someone up outside the team and not bother so much about the "wasted" effort and expense.

I'm thinking on it. Noah's Heart remains a very interesting, involving, thought-provoking game, especially if you don't plan on buying your way to success. It's going to be a good while before I'm done with it, I'm happy to say. Although, of course, it might be done with me first. The game does seem to have slipped into a holding pattern of late, with very little in the way of genuine new content and a lot of re-use of existing resources.

I hope it lasts a while longer. I haven't nearly finished playing dress-up yet.