You Could, But Should You?

MMO Folklorist has an excellent post up right now, with the enticing title "10 tips for playing old MMOs". It's a good read, offering excellent advice, all of which I heartily endorse. I would, however, add an eleventh tip of my own:

#11 - Don't.

No, seriously, don't bother. It's too much like hard work. Who even has the time? 

And you'll regret it. It'll feel bad. You won't enjoy it. 

If it's an old game you never played, it'll be weird and discomfiting. If it's an old game you never played but always wished you had, it'll be weird, discomfiting and disappointing. If it's an old game you used to play but haven't for years it'll either be exactly the same, if it's been in maintenance mode, and you'll very quickly remember why you stopped playing in the first place, or it'll be completely different, if it's been in continual development since you left, and you'll feel disoriented and betrayed.

About the only way you're likely to have a constructive and satisfactory relationship with an old game is 

1. If you never stopped playing it
2. You approach it like a research project

Even then, it's a long shot. The former most likely means you're a bitter vet, for whom nothing the devs do is ever going to be good enough. The latter will leave you emotionally disconnected, experiencing the game purely in the abstract, missing out on all the reasons people played it in the first place. 

Is that too negative? Probably. But it's something I was thinking as I was I playing EverQuest II all week, in preference to any new hotness I could have been enjoying, like Honkai: Star Rail, for example, a game I've played precisely twice so far, despite really enjoying it each time.

The main reason I was thinking along those lines was because, yet again, I've found myself drawn, entirely unintentionally, into levelling up a new(ish) character on a new (to me) server, while still trying to progress my regular characters on my regular server. It's made for some unexpected comparisons and given me a few unforeseen insights.

For example, it's made me more aware than ever of just how fiendishly, ferociously, frankly insanely complicated levelling a character in an older mmorpg can be. 

No, that's unfair. Not "can be". Is. 

There's no way around it. The whole affair is ridiculously overwrought. No-one who doesn't pretty much devote their life to it can possibly understand it all. Even most people who play more than a reasonable person should will only have a clear grasp of a subset of the mechanics and systems involved. I'd be very surprised if even most of the devs could tell you how parts of the game they don't personally work on function from the perspective of the player.

Let me make it clear at this point that I have absolutely no intention of giving chapter and verse on any of these operations. I sat down today intending to write a post about my latest tussles with the Overseer system, a relatively new, relatively straightforward feature that, from the frustrated queries and wholly inadequate replies I see, still manages to defeat most most players. But even to do that would require a series of posts, A series I don't want to write and no-one wants to read.

I can tell you in a sentence how to get the most out of the Overseer system, though. Keep bloody using it. It's that simple. Don't try it, find it gives you nothing worth having and isn't any fun, then drop it, complaining it gives you nothing and isn't any fun. It's like any other muscle. You have to work it and it hurts. But when you've built it up you can do things with it you couldn't do before.

It's taken me a month of doing all my permitted ten missions every day to hit the point where, finally, I'm just beginning to see the rewards. For at least three weeks I got next to nothing worth having and watched my bags fill up with stuff I had no use for until I had to get one of my less-played characters to come and take several hundred unwanted items off my hands and store them in her bank. 

Finally, just last week, I got a couple of drops I wanted: better missions. That's all I'd been plugging away for because I know how Overseer works. The good stuff comes from the higher quality missions and access to the higher quality missions comes from the lower quality missions so you have to do a lot of lower quality missions you don't otherwise want to do before you can start doing the higher ones you do.

Also, you only start out each season with two of the lowest quality missions so at first you can't just log in, set your ten mission max and call it a day. The lower quality the mission, the shorter the time it takes to run and the faster the cooldown, so you have to keep checking back so you can recycle those damn two hopeless missions five times in a day if you can stomach it to get your ten.

Gradually more missions drop and better ones and they last longer and cooldown more slowly and finally you hit the point where you have more good missions available than you can do in a day and then you're sweet. I'm betting most players give up long before then.

I am, after a month, almost at the sweet spot now. I know, from experience, that from here I will pass through the very satisfying stage when lots of good stuff starts dropping, then to the point when I have almost all the good stuff I can possibly use, except for a smattering of goodies the rng fairy has seen fit to deny me. 

I will then keep plugging away in the hope of getting those, diligently setting my ten daily Overseer missions, cackling whenever I get something I want, until the cackling turns into curses and I can't be bothered any more. It takes a few months. 

That's one of the simpler progression systems. Easy to learn, easy to do. Does it sound like something you, who don't already play the game, want to be doing? No, of course it doesn't! And neither do most of the other necessary progression systems, of which there must be dozens by now. 

If you want, as people blithely announce in general chat that they do, to be competetive at endgame or even just to get invited into at-cap Heroic groups, you need to understand and pursue separate and complex progression systems involving not just your basic character level and your gear and your many, many AAs but your spells and abilities, your mercenaries, your familiars and your mounts, most of which have advancement trees of their own as well as their own gear to be managed and upgraded and even adorned. 

Oh yes, Adornments. There's a viciously complex mesh of dropped, quested and crafted gems to be slotted into your gear, some of which are absolutely essential, as well as a newish raft of temporary adornments that buttress the old ones. These days, there are also vast quantities of consumables that feed directly into the effectiveness of your character. The days of being able to ignore potions as some kind of luxury are long gone.

If you want to get involved with tradeskills, you can near-enough duplicate all of that because EQII genuinely has crafting as a full career option. You can be a crafter and only a crafter if you want and you'll have nigh-on as much to do as any adventurer. Well, at least until you hit that endgame grind. I imagine. Don't look at me. I'm a casual. I don't know what the real players do.

As a solo or casual adventurer, you can't really ignore tradeskills, anyway. Not unless you're planning on putting a lot of time and effort into making money instead. If you have to buy all the things you need that crafters make you'll be spending a lot. Much more economical, at the very least, to level up the craft that makes your skill and spell upgrades. 

Only, once you do that you'll find your crafter needs other stuff that crafters use so you'll either have to buy that too or make it yourself, except the tradeskill you chose probably doesn't make the thing you want, so you might as well make another character and have them level up that craft... And then there's Adorning and Transmuting and Tinkering that anyone can do, which don't count as core tradeskills but which actually make things no-one can do without, like those pesky Adornments and the materials used to make them and the storage bins to put the materials in...

Oh, and did I mention that as well as having their own 125 levels of questlines, crafters also have a completely separate, full set of gear, into which you can fit a completely different set of Adornments? And so on and so on and so on. Doesn't it sound a lot more sensible never to get started on all of this in the first place?

If you're determined, at least you'd want to be where everyone else is. A busy server means more competition over prices on the Broker, more people to answer polite questions in chat, more offers of help and encouragement. You're a lot more likely to find a guild willing to show you ropes and hold your hand. If you're determined to try one of these old games, don't do what I just did and start on a dead server.

In my defence, I didn't know it was going to be dead when I went there. I didn't even think about it. As I posted at the time, I was focused on the ruleset, not the population. 

I did have at the back of my mind the Firiona Vie server in EverQuest, which uses a very similar ruleset and which, specifically because of that, has long been one of the busiest. It is something of a truism, though, that what works for EQ doesn't always carry over to EQII. Apparently free trade is one of those things.

On an average day on Isle of Refuge, where I moved Mitsu when she got kicked off of Kaladim, a /who all search returns fewer than 50 names. The one and only time I've seen the search hit the 100 character cut-off was late on a Saturday night on a holiday weekend. By contrast, Skyfire, my main server, usually considered to be, at best, Medium population, never shows fewer than a hundred players, even in the depths of the night for the USA.

I see people all over the place on Skyfire. There's never no-one at the East Freeport bank, for example, and often there are other people running around whichever zone I happen to be in, even if it's not one in the current expansion. The place feels lived-in. 

On Isle of Refuge I see no-one. I can and do go days without running into another player. General chat, always buzzing on Skyfire, is largely silent. With horrible irony, the Broker on the server where you're allowed to trade almost anything is both far more expensive and far less stocked than on the one with the usual restrictions. Even the basics, like large-capacity bags, are hard to come by - and teeth-grindingly overpriced if you can find them.

 

All of which is fine by me. If I get the time I'll do another post about how much fun it is to level a character on a server where I pretty much have to rely on my own resources. It's more like the old days than most things, if only because it reminds me of my time on Test, where double figures of players online at once was an event and finding anything you wanted on the broker a miracle.

It isn't, however, an experience I'd recommend to someone seeking the supposed lost pleasures of an older mmorpg. To get anything out of an experience like that, you're probably going to want all the help you can get and it still won't be nearly enough.

Which is why, much as I love the older games, I can't in good conscience recommend playing them any more. Not, that is, unless you're doing it already. Or, of course, if you think you're up to it. If that's what you think, knock yourself out. Just come in with your eyes open.

And after all, you might as well give it a try. What have you got to lose? Only your time. And your patience. And quite possibly your sanity.

Some, But By No Means All, Of What I've Been Listening To Lately

It's well past time for another "What I've Been Listening To Lately" post. I know it is because I have more than thirty tracks bookmarked for possible inclusion and that's about three times as many as I need. 

It would be more if I wasn't in the habit of using Dark Firefox or whatever it's called when I'm web-browsing on my Kindle Fire late at night. I started using it because it has all kinds of ad-blocking built in and I was fed up of adverts interrupting everything I watched on YouTube when I used Chrome but also too lazy to install the relevant add-ons to stop them.

Dark Firefox (If that's not what it's called it obviously should be...) is perfect for clean, clear viewing but it's also obsessed with leaving no trace behind, so when I wake up next day and try to remember what I watched and find I can't, there's no way to check. I did try sending myself emails with the links but none of them ever arrived. If it was in the daytime I'm sure I'd figure it out but the whole point of the thing is I'm using it right before I fall asleep so...

Anyway, it's not like I need any more suggestions. I mean, I have three or four times as many as I can use already. It's just that something I saw last night might have been even better. You'd think that would mean I'd remember it but oh no, that's not how this works.

We're four paragraphs in and we haven't had a tune yet. Let's see what's in the pot. 

Okay, some of these I can put to one side for a couple of other music posts I've been planning. (Hah! "Planning"! It is to laugh!). Could even make that three posts - I have nearly enough new covers.... 

Don't mind me. Just thinking aloud here...

Okay. Off we go. Shall we begin with something safe and familiar? 

She Smoked In The House - Brandy Clark

Ways it's familiar:

1. Syp already shared. I said in his comments I was going to use it too and now I have.
2. That opening pizzicatto riff. Isn't it "Every Breath You Take", speeded up?
3. All those downhome refs. (Am I using "Downhome" right?).
4. Smoking. Remember that?

A little story: Over the winter, before the evenings got lighter, Mrs Bhagpuss and I got into the habit of walking Beryl around some streets on a housing estate nearby. We'd stop at a discontinued bus shelter to sit and feed her from a plastic purse (It's an insight into our lives you weren't expecting, I'm sure. See? All of you who skip these music posts are really missing out... Oh, wait...) 

While we were there, pretty much every time, someone would come out of one of the houses, close the front door and start smoking a cigarette, in the dark, sometimes in the rain, right outside their own house. I had no idea smoking inside the house was no longer allowed. Especially when it's your own house.

Fuckboys - NENAS

I think this is what they call "Counterprogramming". John Peel made an entire career out of it. No-one would like both these tracks, would they? Actually, this is surprisingly soft and soothing. It doesn't really match the threat of the title. I'm guessing "Fuckboys" has a different nuance in Spanish. Not that I'm claiming I'm 100% sure what it means in English...

Ruby Off The Rails - Sarah And The Safe Word

I bet you were expecting something a lot more like that, right? The lyrics are in the description on YouTube and if you can't make them out when you listen, I highly recommend reading them. The song's not about what you'd think. Unless you're H.P. Lovecraft, in which case it probably is.

Since I managed to keep my commentary in check on the last two, I think we might just have time for a little interlude. As I'm sure everyone whose still reading will know, I've been having a little trouble coming up with a name for this series and I definitely need one, now it's clearly become a regular feature. So I asked a couple of AIs for some ideas. 

That's Bard on the left and ChatGPT on the right. Bard's suggestions are bad but conceivably could be tweaked to be useable. I could probably make something out of "The Best New Music You've Never Heard Of". I'm not going to but I could. 

ChatGPT's ideas are just bad. Really, very bad. Horrible, awful, terrible bad. I hope it just completely ignored my stipulation for something "amusing, wry or witty" and those aren't its attempts to be any of those things. If so, god help us all.

The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to stick with "What I've Been Listening To Lately" for the feature title. It's crisp, clean and has a rhythm to it. Also, for once, it's declarative. We could probably do with a bit more of that around here.

Veronica Lake - Sparks

I was underwhelmed by the eponymous first single off the new Sparks album, The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte when I first heard it, although now I watch the Cate-Blanchett-fronted video again, I have no idea why. Like the second single, Veronica Lake, it's excellent. 

It'd be very hard indeed to come up with another rock act that's still manages to be as innovative and unusual with every release as the Mael brothers. They're older than I am ffs and I'm old! I feel pretty pleased with myself for still listening to and enjoying new sounds; those guys are still coming up with them. 

Albeit, in this case, with lyrics about someone even older than they are. Do people still know Veronica Lake? She was out of fashion before I was born! Maybe she's back again. It wouldn't be the first time.

Nurse - Bar Italia

Second to people throwing food at each other, my most-hated music video trope has to be people doing things backwards while the tape rolls forwards. Which must say something about how much I like this track, to have stuck with it anyway. 

It helped that it was the second video for a Bar Italia song I watched, the first being Punkt. And I'm not sure even now which of the two I prefer. Good thing about music, isn't it? That it's not exclusive. You don't have to choose. Except sometimes you do. Particularly when you're putting a blog post together.

Go Outside - Eliza Elliott

There's a new single from Alex Lahey's album that just came out. We could have had it but we're having this instead. I think that was where I found it, in a sidebar link. Not sure. If not there, then I have no idea. I really should keep notes.

They do sound a little alike but Eliza sounds more like Traceyanne Campbell to me. But then, doesn't everyone? Or is it just everyone good? Boy, she's an influence, that one.

Très Jolie - Pony

Anyone feeling nostalgic for 1986? 1994? 2002? Last summer? Pony have you covered. 

And it's another one for the Pony Files. 

For anyone that just came in, I have a long-standing theory that any band or song with the word "pony" in it is going to be worth hearing. I've tested it rigorously and, while there are exceptions, it's stood up pretty well. You can't get more pony than calling your band Pony, I guess. Unless you called it Ponypony. No-one seems to have done that, although Pony Pony Run Run came close. I'll take dibs on Ponypony, then.

Renaissance Affair - Shallowhalo

That last tune had a French title but didn't sound French. This one has an English name but the strongest French vibe. Can a song sound French? This one can. Is it something about the synthdrums? A certain, indefinable, gallic breathiness to the vocals? A generalised, continental swirl? Hard to say but it's unmistakeable.

I wasn't even going to slot Shallowhalo in just there but the track I was going to use had such a horrific copyright warning next to it I balked, even though, thanks to that Tom Scott video Shintar linked me, I'm 99.9% sure that linking directly to YouTube via Blogger's innate command covers all the legalities. Luckily, since I have so many tunes to share, I can skip the ones that feel in any way problematic.

The Gaping Mouth - Lowertown

Speaking of problematic, that's a disturbing video. Especially towards the end. At least you're getting a warning. I didn't. I've just been to the optician for the first time in a long time, too. I'm glad I went before I watched this. 

I think Lowertown are probably the most interesting new-to-me band in this batch. By rights. they probably oughtn't to be in this post. I should have held them back for one of those other posts I have in mind. Both, in fact. Doesn't matter. I have three more tracks by them bookmarked for that.

Fairlies - Grian Chatten

Let's end with someone famous. Well, more famous than the last few, at least. Grian Chatten is the lead singer of Fontaines D.C., a band whose star has been rising for a while. Thus far, I've found myself relatively immune to their charms. Not to say I don't like them. I do like them. I just don't hear a lot I don't hear elsewhere.

This, though, is the business. The loping rhythm that calls up the ghost of the Violent Femmes, the strident chorus that could be any number of midfield Britpop runners, the smooth crooning of the verses... it's a melange that settles into sense right away. I can even hear Morrissey in there, somewhere, god help us all, once more.

And that's ten, which is enough for anyone to assimilate in a feeding. In the background as I was putting this all together I was also helpfully able to dispose of several more I won't be bothering with after all, so the decks are somewhat cleared. Maybe just two or three to go forward, all the rest being accounted for by the aforesaid posts-in-planning, should they ever materialize.

Hold your breaths on that. Or maybe best don't.

Same Time Next Year?

In a comment on a recent post, Shintar asked whether I was still interested in Guild Wars 2 and what I thought of ArenaNet's new update cadence. The question made me think. What I mostly thought was "Oh yeah! GW2! I used to play that!"

I can fairly honestly say that was the first thought I'd had about the game for weeks. I'm not even sure how long it's been since I last logged in - must be a couple of months - and even then it would only have been to claim some freebie I got through Amazon Prime. I'm not sure I've played the game in any meaningful way since last year.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Actually, more than a couple. I could probably do bullet points.

• A decade is a long time to play any game without a break.
• I probably would have stopped well before this if Mrs Bhagpuss didn't still play.
• Mrs Bhagpuss doesn't still play.
• We got a dog. That's why she stopped. Dogs eat time (And anything else they can grab.)
  
• GW2 can be pretty boring. It's very, very grindy. You really have to have Stockholm Syndrome not to see that.
• Other mmorpgs give much more back, much more quickly and much more easily.
• GW2 got a bit more popular than it used to be and my latent Hipster gene kicked in.

Beyond all of those, though, I think the fundemental issue I have with GW2 is the same one I've had since about October or November 2012, which is that it's not the game I was told it was going to be, which was also, coincidentally, near enough the game it was at launch. I loved the free-form, do what you like, go where you want, nothing matters any more than anything else feel of the original maps, something I felt was well iterated upon in Heart of Thorns, but by and large that has proved neither a popular nor a commercially successful path for the game and has been progressively bred out of the game in favor of zonewide metas that suck the very life out of everyone who experiences them more than a handful of times. 

I accept that may be the minority view. It seems most players like a lot of direction and relish very long-term goals that require a huge amount of time, effort and repetition to achieve, whereas these days I like to be able to complete an entire project in no more than one gaming session and preferably in about ten minutes. Consequently, GW2 and I haven't really been a good fit for a long time.

Other than it being Mrs Bhagpuss's game of choice, what really kept me on board for the last few years was the jump in and have fun chaos of World vs World and the excellent worldbuilding provided mostly by the art team, supported by the writers, when they were on form which, sadly, they weren't, or not as often as they could and indeed should have been. 

I should probably log in and feed my dog...

 

As an explorer archetype, I usually found something to keep me engaged every time new content dropped but as I commented many, many times, it didn't drop often enough and when it did, there was never enough of it.

GW2 also famously has appallingly bad rewards, quite possibly the most disappointing in the genre. I nearly said the worst "risk vs reward" there but of course GW2 offers no risk whatsoever and never has, which is presumably why the rewards for doing anything have always been so abysmally poor. For most of the run of the game, ANet's solution to this has been to emphasize quantity over quality which, for me, has just meant an unconscionable amount of time spent organizing my bags. If I can blame any one game for finally making me agree with the common consensus that inventory management is a chore not a pleasure, it's this one.

None of this in itself would make me walk away from the game and truthfully I didn't and I haven't. It's been more of a drift. For the reasons listed and probably some others I've forgotten, I gradually found myself playing less. And I didn't miss it. I fact, the less I played, the less I thought about playing, until I reached the point I'm at now, where it takes someone prompting me to remember the game exists at all.

Obviously, I will go back and play again at some point. I go back to most mmorpgs multiple times after breaks. Sometimes the return takes, as has happened this year with EverQuest II and sometimes it doesn't, as with Lord of the Rings a few months back. 

One thing that always gives a game a fighting chance of regaining my attention is the release of a new expansion. I love expansions. They're like new games only bite-sized. When I say "expansions", though, I mean the real thing, not just some glorified update. Something that literally expands the game by a measurable percentage, somewhere in the order of 25-50% of the original base release, either by adding land mass, systems or mechanics, but preferably a combination of all three.

Thanks, but I'll pass.

 

Since the runaway success of World of Warcraft, I think there's been a widely accepted idea that mmorpg expansions arrive about once every two years or so. For me that's always been way too slow. My expectations were formed by EverQuest, which for several years put out two full-sized expansions every year, then after that proved to be too much of a good thing, switched to a minimum of an expansion every twelve months and always just in time for Christmas. 

EQII followed suit and I've come to believe that once a year, supported by a couple of major updates inbetween, is the ideal cadence to keep players busy and engaged. It allows sufficient time to assimilate and appreciate each expansion before anticipation builds for the next, which arrives just as people are beginning to tire of the last one.

I ought, therefore, to be very happy to hear that ArenaNet have belatedly decided to go with exactly this cadence from now on. The studio released a couple of "Updates" on the official website this year, one in February, which I confess I hadn't even seen until today, and another this week. Both talk at some length about how the game's content release model is set to change:

"Rather than launching an expansion every two to four years with a season of Living World in between, we’ll be releasing smaller expansions more frequently at a slightly reduced price and adding additional content for those expansions through quarterly updates, meaning that the next big release is only ever a few months away."

The Spring Update gives chapter and verse on what constitutes "an expansion" under the new regime. Or at least, I think it does...

 "In this new model, the first release in an expansion cycle will introduce a new story arc and setting, two new open-world maps, two Strike Missions, new gameplay and combat features, new Masteries, and new rewards."

Typically with an ArenaNet press release, it's a bit wooly. Is "the first release in an expansion cycle" what I would call "the expansion"? The thing you pay for? Unclear.

Let's assume it is. That means that, on the new yearly expansion cycle, we get two new overland maps, which is there or thereabouts half of what we were getting in the 2-4 year cycle xpacks. That makes sense. We also get a storyline and new Masteries, as you'd expect, plus a bunch of unspecified "features" and "rewards". And some bloody strike missions, god forbid, but we won't mention those.

The "What have you done for me lately?" emote. Well, that's what I'd call it.

 

That sounds quite a lot like what we were getting under the last Living World cadence to me, possibly minus the Masteries, although maybe not. I haven't really been paying that much attention to the details for a couple of years. 

Still, it sounds like a decent chunk of content. Not as much as Darkpaw manage to produce for two mmorpgs every year with a combined team team that's probably about a tenth the size of ANet's, but I'll be generous and allow it as "An expansion". I'll likely come back and play through the story and see the maps, provided the release doesn't clash with something more interesting.

There is, as there needs to be, a scaffold to support the game between these new, yearly expansions:

"In the following quarterly updates, we’ll add story chapters, an additional open-world map, challenge modes for the Strike Missions, a new fractal dungeon and challenge mode, new rewards, additions to the new systems introduced in that expansion, and—depending on the release plan for that expansion—new gameplay and combat features."

If I'm reading that correctly, they're committing to a specific number of new maps each year: three. I'm not about to go back and count up what we were getting under the last set-up but I'm fairly sure it was more than that, so this is an effective reduction in the speed at which the world-map expands. That may not be a bad thing. 

There was a sense that some previous Living World maaps were getting a bit samey and as other long-running mmorpgs can attest, the bigger you make your world, either the wider you spread your playerbase or the emptier most of it feels. Three good maps a year is better than four mediocre ones.

Other than that, I have to say it sounds remarkably similar to what came before. While I can't argue that the change to a fixed, yearly, paid-for expansion cadence doesn't appeal directly to my own preferences, a decade of experience with ArenaNet's propositions and plans tells me not to take any of this at face value. The company has a consistent history of devising and floating plans like this, trying to stick to them for a while, failing and then dropping them for something new.

Still "in development" after, what, five years?

 

If they can stick to this cadence and if players accept it, I think it could be a good change for the game. Annual expansions with new settings and storylines could keep the game feeling fresher and more lively than it has for much of its run. There should be fewer longeuers, fewer content droughts, less overt timewasting.   

All of this, though, we've heard before. Every new release cadence was supposed to provide stable throughput of content to keep everyone entertained but none of them was judged to have succeeded well enough not to be retired and replaced within a year or two. Other mmorpgs truck on steadily, year by year, with much the same release schedules and don't seem to do too badly by it but Guild Wars 2 has never been able to settle down to a comfortable routine.

Not playing the game regularly any more and having no real plans to return any time soon, I have never had less invested in the outcome of one of these lurches in direction, which makes it somewhat ironic that, on paper at least, it looks like one more suited to my preferences than most. All the same, I do hope it's a success. I very much approve of the concept of annual expansions. I just don't entirely trust ANet to keep pumping them out the way Darkpaw does.

I'm sure they'll at least manage one this year. It would be excruciatingly embarassing to miss that target. If nothing else, it'll provide an excellent opportunity for me to return to GW2 for another run. I'm pretty sure I won't be able to resist. Whether there'll be another such opportunity the year after that, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Or maybe there'll be a new cadence model by then. If there is, I certainly won't be surprised.

I Went To The Seaside And All I Got You Was This Dumb Post

I wasn't going to post at all today because Mrs Bhagpuss and I went to the seaside with Beryl so time was short when we got back. Well, I say seaside... for strict journalistic accuracy, I guess I should make that estuary. The real sea is just a tad too far from where we live for a comfortable day trip with a small dog. 

Still, the Victorians apparently didn't care much for the difference, since they built a very nice little town where the river widens out and goes tidal. There's a lovely walk along the headland, a promenade, a pier, some nice pebble beaches and plenty of rock pools for Beryl to paddle in, so who's counting?

As I said, I didn't think I'd have time for a post but it occurred to me I had a couple or three odds and ends I'd wanted to fit in somewhere and this seemed like as good an opportunity as I was going to get, so here we are. It might be Wednesday but it's Friday in my mind... or something like that. 

AI Predicts The Future!

First up, that Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Competition. A few weeks back I posted about it in somewhat desultory fashion at the end of a piece about Google's AI chatbot, Bard. I wasn't very excited by any of the shortlist so I asked Bard "Who do you think will win and why?". 

Somewhat to my surprise, Bard had a very definite opinion, predicting, with some confidence, "I think that N’famady Kouyaté has a strong chance of winning." The result of the Battle of the Bands final, as reported by NME, although apparently not on the Glasto official site itself, as far as I can see, was announced yesterday. Guess who won?

Yep. Got it in one: N’famady Kouyaté.

Now, to be fair, I also had the balofonist down as the likely winner before I even asked Bard but even so... I wonder if Bard picks lottery numbers? 

We Mean It In A Loving Way!

In another callback to an earlier post, here's a video I meant to share a while ago but never found a suitable slot for. Oh, alright then, I forgot all about it. Happy now?

I thought it was funny but I guess you'd have to know the show. I wonder how much crossover there actually was, at the time it was originally broadcast, between the short-lived, cult TV series and people who actually play tabletop roleplaying games? I mean, it's not like D&D plays the same central of role in Freaks and Geeks that it does in Stranger Things. It's more of a bolt-on towards the end.

While I'm on the subject, I don't believe I've seen a single review of Honor Among Thieves anywhere in this part of the blogosphere. Did I miss someone's take on it or has no-one really had anything to say? Surely people must have seen it by now. I'd have thought a big-budget, critically-acclaimed, commercially successful movie based on a core component of our collective hobby might have triggered at least some kind of response. Then again, I haven't seen it and I think this is probably the first time I've mentioned it, so I can hardly talk, can I? 

And That's A Wrap!

Since TV's come up, here's another news story I spotted that I thought might be worth a note. It finally occurred to me that the third season of Stargirl hadn't turned up on Prime, so I did some googling and found it isn't going to happen. The Prime thing, that is. The third season of Stargirl, that's done. It's been and gone.

Why Prime isn't showing Season 3, when they showed 1 & 2 is anyone's guess. Well, money, I suppose. I'll have to watch it on DVD, which is fine. I'd like a hard copy to keep. I'd get the box of all three seasons, if they did one, which they don't. Whoever they are.

At least I know there isn't going to be a fourth season. The show's been cancelled. In an unusual move, though, two separate endings to Season 3 were shot; one for if they got renewed and one for if they didn't. It means the final season has a proper ending, for once.

I believe we were talking about that a while back. It seems like something showrunners and writers maybe ought to be considering as default option these days, although I guess it would be weird for the cast to shoot alternate endings for every season. Kind of like a recurring premonition of their own doom. 

It wouldn't be that hard to do, though. Most shows I can think of would be pretty easy to wrap up at the end of most seasons because what tends to happen is they tie a neat bow around the season arc anyway, then stick a foreboding cliffhanger on the end of that. Just crop it a bit and don't screen the lead-in to the series you didn't get. 

It Didn't Look Like This In The Shop!

And finally, I made BFF status with the latest on my Phantom hit-list, Urian. It happened a bit faster than I was expecting because I had a bit of luck with the latest event, the generically-named Fireworks Celebration, which is giving away handfuls of Ornate Gift Boxes, each worth a thousand points of Affection.

My glee was short-lived when I made the damn dress and put it on. I was - not unreasonably, I think - expecting it to look identical to the outfit Urian herself wears. The ones I got from Jenny, Johanne and Ave do. 

Unfortunately, whereas Urian's original is made of silk, the reproduction seems to be more like taffeta. It looks stiff and uncomfortable instead of free-flowing and instead of billowing, the long train sticks out to one side like a wonky bustle. It's not awful but it's not what I was expecting. 

I haven't decided whose look to appropriate next. I'll have to think a little more carefully about what the outfit's going to look like on my character, this time. Probably should have been doing that all along...

In other Noah's Heart news, there was another server merge recently. I didn't check who merged with whom but I'm guessing my server was the recipient because it seemed fairly busy before. Now it's busier still. 

How many more merges there'll be before the game goes dark I wouldn't like to say. Noah's Heart has such a minimal web presence I have to assume it's not going to be around for long. I hope it at least makes it to the first anniversary. I'd love to be able to say I played every day for a year straight.

And that's all I have for today. Let's be honest - it's a lot more than I thought I had!

Copy That!

Until yesterday, I was unaware of the existence of a Wes Anderson parody subculture on YouTube. I mean, I shouldn't have been. It's more than predictable. Wes Anderson has to be about the easiest director to parody since, oh, I don't know... Tim Burton?

I was alerted to the phenomenon by this news squib at NME. I'm no more than a casual admirer of Wes Anderson and I could happily go the rest of my life without hearing another word about Star Wars so I only clicked through to read it because of the mention of AI. I'm glad I did, though. The trailer is enjoyable on its own merits, either as a parody or a wish-fueled fever dream. Take a look.

There's no direct explanation of where the AI comes in although the static shots with barely-nodding heads make their provenance reasonably plain. The voice-over also sounds generated but as for the script it's hard to say. It's bland enough to be artificial but humans can be pretty beige, too. 

The three-paragraph description makes no mention of the methodology used and the channel's home page doesn't add anything, either. I was curious so I looked a little deeper. Don't get excited. I didn't find much.

At first, I assumed the folks who run the channel, Curious Refuge, had just linked it from someone else who'd made it but no, as their Twitter feed, where it first appears, has it: "We made a #StarWars trailer in the style of #wesanderson..." They just don't say how they made it.

In the lengthy thread that follows (Three-hundred-plus replies.) plenty of people ask which AI software was used but I couldn't see any direct response from the creators. Someone going by "Redacted" baldly states "The entire thing was hand drawn. Even the script." but I have no clue what connection that account has with the creators of the video or on what authority that definitive statement rests. It's most likely sarcasm.

A bit of a mystery, then. And just to complicate things a little more, the trailer is called "The Galactic Menagerie", which turns out to be the exact same name as another YouTube video, also very recent, but this time very definitely created by AI, specifically Midjourney and ChatGPT.

No clarity, then, but the upshot was my introduction to the sheer number of Wes Anderson parodies on YouTube, many of which are indeed facilitated, if not wholly created, by AI. The general principle seems to be just to have MidJourney whip up a batch of static images, then string them all together in a slideshow. Like this:

There are dozens, scores, possibly hundreds of these and very impressive showcases for Midjourney and other AI image generators they make, too. Unfortunately, very few bother with any kind of script, even an AI generated one, which makes them curios rather than compelling visions of an alternate reality.

At least this creator gave it a go, even if, by their own admission, the result was "a really bad video".

Actually, it's not that bad. It just doesn't really go anywhere, for which I blame the script, which was written by ChatGPT, which can do better. Maybe don't accept the first draft?

At least there are credits for all the tools used: ChatGPT, Midjourney, ElevenLabs, D-ID, and CapCut, for the record. Of those, ElevenLabs was new to me and looks very interesting. CapCut, too, although it's nothing specifically to do with AI.

At the moment it seems that, should you want to create something that stands out, you still need actual human intelligence, either in the writing, the editing or preferably both. This re-envisioning of Tarantino's oeuvre through the lens of Anderson's signature style is old tech - clips from the original movies spliced together - but it makes a powerful case. Who knew they had so much in common?

Could AI do that yet? You'd think pattern matching would be one of its strengths, so maybe, but could it make the leap from recognition and enumeration to conclusion, let alone deliver a visual lecture with this kind of ironic detachment? Probably not. Or, more likely, probably not yet...

One thing occurred to me as I was watching these videos (And loads more.) There's presumably a reason why YouTube has such a strongly-developed culture of video parody, whether artificial or human. It'll be because parody enjoys an unusual level of protection from the predation of copyright lawyers. If you don't want your work taken down, let alone to be on the end of a lawsuit about it, you'd best make sure you're taking the piss. [Edit: Thanks to Shintar linking this Tom Scott video in the comments, I'm now aware that YouTube's licenses do much to shield uploaders of all kinds of otherwise copyright-infinging content from the attention of corporate legal divisions. Parody and review do still offer protection above and beyond that baseline, though.]

On the subject of copyright, here's a sentence I never thought I'd need to type:

I agree with Grimes.  

Copyright does indeed suck. It was invented to aid monarchs and governments in  enforcing their will and codified to protect the vested interests of non-creative monopolies. It was for good reason that Frances Hardinge put the Stationers among the villains of her very excellent first two novels, Fly By Night and Twilight Robbery.

Giving the keynote speech at the annual International Music Summit, Grimes said, "Art is a conversation with everyone that’s come before us. Intertwining it with the ego is a modern concept."  She was directing her comments at the music industry, which "has been defined by lawyers" in a way that "strangles creativity", something that could equally be applied to most, if not all, other activities restrained by the dead hand of copyright law.

As reported in NME, her speech included more lucid and reasonable observations on the miserable status quo. She's in a fine position to throw stones because she, unlike many, hasn't just accepted the potential paradigm-shattering impact of AI but embraced it. If you want to make your own Grimes song, knock yourself out. Or indeed your own Grimes video.

How many will willingly follow her lead remains to be seen. It could be a trickle rather than a flood, I fear. Until the inevitable pressure of the future breaks down the stubborn resistance of the past, then, I guess we'll all just have to stick our tongues in our cheeks and keep poking sticks through those copyright bars. It's all we can do. 

For now.

Set Adrift On Memory Bliss: The Monsters&Memories Stress Test Is Well-Received By All

Over the weekend, Niche Worlds Cult, the developer of retro-classic mmorpg Monsters &Memories, ran a couple of stress tests to see how their servers, login processes and various mechanicals might stand up under pressure. The plan was to open the game to anyone who cared to download the client so they could wander around and try out such content as the project's pre-pre-alpha build had to offer. 

There were hefty advisories on the extremely undercooked nature of what was there to see and warnings not to expect too much but in the event it seemed like no-one who turned up had bothered to read them. 

Not that there were complaints - far from it. I heard very few in the ninety minutes or so I was there. No, it was more that everyone appeared to have decided to behave as if it was the launch of a new game - one they were really enjoying.

It was surreal, honestly. For a start it was really, really busy on the Saturday night, when I was able to play. I couldn't make the Friday time-slot due to being fast asleep but NWC had very sensibly and thoughtfully staggered the two events so as to make them available to a wider range of interested parties. On Saturday, the servers opened at 6PM my time and I was there, ready, with the client downloaded and patched.

It's like EQ and Vanguard had a (very inbred) baby...

There was only one server in the list so I hopped on that one and made a character. First signs were that the team might have been a tad... shall we say... ambitious? Character creation offered a choice of  a full dozen races - and eighteen classes. Of the races, only Gnome, Human and Ogre were available but all the classes were ready to play.

I thought I'd made a Gnome Elementalist but when I logged into the world it transpired I'd made a human instead. Whether that was a bug or my own ineptitude I can't say but either way it was a felicitous outcome. Gnomes, when I saw a few scuttling around, looked pretty weird and very small, a bit like hyperactive toddlers. I was happy to find myself playing a much better-looking human.

If you look really closely, you can see that Human is highlighted in green, something I did not notice at the time.

At this point you might be expecting an account of what I did during my hour and a half. It's coming - sort of. The thing is, I could easily sum up everything I did in a sentence: I ran around and took a lot of screenshots. That's it.

Okay, it's not absolutely all I did. I fiddled around with the settings and the UI a little because I just can't help myself. I also did the first quest hand in, of which more later. And I tried to fight one mob. Which killed me. Instantly. Oh, and I did a corpse recovery. Not sure why. I think I must have been swept up in the general enthusiasm. It was hard to avoid it.

Not everyone's as diligent about picking up their corpses as I am.

Since we're seven paragraphs in already I'll try belatedly not to bury the lede for once: Monsters&Memories isn't just an homage to mmorpgs of the EverQuest era - it's freakin' EverQuest Redux. Seriously, it's all but identical. Not just the ethos but the specific milieu. It's like an alternate-dimensional Norrath. And where it's not EQ Resurrected it's clearly Vanguard, which is very much the same thing.

Let's take a very specific example. One of the most universal experiences in original EQ was the note you handed in to your guildmaster. It just sits there in your inventory when you first log in, waiting for you to find it for yourself. When you do - and once you've figured out how to click on it to read - it it tells you go to go find a named NPC, the head of the guild for the class you've picked, so you can hand the note over to them. 

Nights are very, very dark. Humans do not have infravision. Or ultravision. Or a torch in my case.

For your effort, which usually takes a while because there's no map and no directional markers or even a punctuation point over anyone's head, you either get killed (If you accidentally auto-attack the person you're supposed to be giving the note to.) or you get a smudge of xp and a dirty vest. M&M follows this precedent precisely, apart from the vest. I got a belt instead.

But that wasn't all. I don't know what other classes get but as an Elementalist I also got a pinwheel and a box. I was supposed to wander around the city with the pinwheel until it started to spin, letting me know I was in the presence of a hungry Djinn. At this point I would light some incense and the Djinn would give me a pearl. 

It does look like the kind of place you might find a Djinn.

I had to do that three times to get pearls of water, wind and fire, which I would then put into the box, along with my pinwheel and my belt. Then I'd come back to the guildmaster and hand the whole lot over. To what end, I know not because I didn't do any of it.

Seriously - it's a stress test for a game that's not even in alpha yet! Why would I be doing quests? And yet everywhere people were doing just that. General chat was perpetually filled with the typical questions and demands of any busy starter area in a brand-new game. People were questing and levelling like it was going to matter!

And also like somewhere you wouldn't want to wear a padded jumpsuit.

You know what? Forget questing. They were forming groups! At Level 1. And doing dungeons. At Level 3! People were even flaunting their qualifications - "Elementalist Lvl 4 lfg. Have pet". Level frickin' four!? HOW??

In the ninety minutes I was able to play, which comprised a half hour when the server came up and an hour later in the evening, after I'd stopped to phone my mother and walk the dog (By which time the one available server had grown to three.) I made precisely no xp at all. Unless I got some for handing in that note. I might have. I didn't notice.

That water's looking pretty tempting around now.

For the longest time I couldn't even find anything to fight. Monsters&Memories has one the largest cities I have ever seen in an mmorpg. It's unfeasably gigantic. The main gates and the newbie grounds reminded me of Freeport but the rest is extraordinarily redolent both of Khal and Ahgram, the two middle-Eastern cities in Vanguard. It's hardly surprising. Vanguard always was the true sequel to EverQuest. Until now, apparently.

The city, whose name hasn't stuck in my mind, although I'm fairly sure it was mentioned, is extraordinarily well-realized for a game at this very early stage of development. It has all the necessary functions like banks and class guild halls but also statuary, boulevards and ambience. It also has guards you can ask for directions because of course it does. EQ had them...

I'd make a deposit - if I had even one copper piece.

Once again, I have to repeat that, for a game that's supposedly not even in a pre-alpha state yet, there's a surprising amount to do. I think the reason people were playing it like a game they'd just bought was mostly just because they could. There were quests and they worked. There was gear. There was progression. So what if none of it was going to stick around the moment the stress test ended? There was fun to be had so they were having it.

And those who'd knuckled down and got on with levelling were rewarded. On the Saturday when I played, the four-hour test was extended for a further four hours, for no other reason, I believe, than because people were having such a good time and saying so, enthusiastically and often. You can't buy a reaction like that but you sure can encouraage it when you get one.

The harbor's not nearly so inviting when you have to swim it in the dark - in your underwear.

There were devs in the channel chatting with players and they must have been ecstatic about how well it was all going. Not just the technical side, which seemed rock solid while I was playing - no lag, no disconnects - but the reception the game was getting from the crowd. They bloody loved it.

I loved it too but with an element of distance. It was wonderful to see such a faithful recreation of a thing I once worshipped, carried off with such success. I could feel the commitment to getting it right coming off the screen in waves. 

Speaking of harbors, this horseshoe-shape with a statue at each end is so Khal!

The thing is, though, I'm not sure it's what I want for myself any more. I'm not saying it's not. It might be. Certainly the mechanics and systems are exactly right for me - as far as they go. I love levelling every bit as much as I ever did, as evidenced by Mitsu, the EverQuest II character I've been turning into one of my most rounded tradeskillers in years these last few weeks. 

What I really don't think I want any more is the kind of exceptionally slow, ponderous and painful levelling that would be a necessary part of any faithful recreation of old EQ. My feeling is that those processes were accelerated for good reason. I know a lot of EQ vets think it's been all down hill since Kunark but I'm not one of them.

As they say in Qalia "Always pray for rain".

None of which will stop me for a moment from jumping into any open testing NWC offers for Monsters&Memories in future. What they've put in place already is a hugely impressive achievement and I'm fascinated to see where they take things from here. I'll be very happy to give them whatever help and support I can by playtesting or stress-testing and by recounting my experiences to whatever audience I may have.

If I'm ever going to put in the very significant number of hours necessary to do a new mmorpg justice, though, I fear it's going to have to be one with a lot more modern features than any genuine repro ought to offer. Like a decent map, for a start. And quest markers. And no corpse runs. 

"And on the surface of Norrath did Tunare create the Elves, creatures of limitless grace and beauty"

Yeah, I'm soft. But then, I'm also old. Life's too short to go get your corpse, especially when you respawn on the opposite side of the furshlugginer city. I had to run all the way round the outside walls and swim through the harbor to get back! And yes, I know it's very impressive that swimming is in and works already but it wasn't much of a comfort at the time.

And that's about all I have to say on the subject just now. For another view, Stingite at The Friendly Necromancer managed to get some time on days one and two. He got a lot farther than I did. 

But I bet he didn't take as many screenshots.