Throne And Liberty - A Waypoint-And-Click Adventure

Here's the thing about Throne and Liberty. One of the things. The graphics are gorgeous but the world itself really isn't. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Solisium was a beautiful place, once. Not any more. At least that's what the disembodied voice that sounds like a slightly bored student reading to the class from a set text strongly implies. 

The voice starts up each time you open a new waypoint. The camera spins up and around, a swooping spiral to give you an aerial view of the stretch of the map you just revealed. Meanwhile, the unnamed tour guide recites two sentences - it's always exactly two - telling you what you're gawping at and why it looks so bad.

Usually it's because there's been some kind of war. One group of wizards scrapping with another, most likely. Or an attempt at colonization that met heavy resistance from the indigenous occupants. Werewolves, orcs, goblins. Anyone dumb enough to get in the way of progress. Sometimes there's no proximate cause. The land just seems to have been exploited for its natural resources then abandoned.

Actually one of the more attractive views, believe it or not.

I find it hard to think of another MMORPG, survival game or open world RPG I've played that looks so unremittingly bleak. By the time I'd completed my project of opening every accessible waypoint (There was just one I couldn't get to and that only because it's on an island to which access is only given at a point in the storyline I haven't yet reached.) I'd seen nothing but deforestation and desertification on the imperial scale. 

It might have been depressing if I hadn't been feeling so pleased with myself for finding a way to the last waypoint I needed. it was situated high on a butte, right in the middle of a camp filled with very aggressive orcs, something I discovered the hard way. 

I tried the direct approach first. It did not go well. I gave it some thought and decided something more subtle was required. The camp was bordered on the seaward side by some high cliffs. There was a village at the foot of the mountain range. I'd already opened a waypoint there so I ported in and started to clamber up the rocks.

I know you can't see any orcs but I assure you - they are there!

Throne and Liberty lies at some point mid-way between games like Genshin Impact or Wuthering Waves, where you're encouraged to use your parkour skills to climb anything you can see and much more movement-restrictive games like Guild Wars or the first version of Final Fantasy XIV, where you couldn't reliably step over a low kerb. 

I wouldn't go so far as to say that in Solisium, if you can see it, you can get to it. There are a fair number of invisble barriers as well as the very obvious visible ones I mentioned in a previous post. By and large, though, I've found that if something looks like you should be able to climb it, you probably can. With some effort. And a lot of bunny-hopping.

It took me a while to work my way right to the top of the crag overlooking the orc encampment but I managed it eventually. And it was fun. Climbing in open world games generally is.

What was more surprising was how nice it all was up there. A liminal space, where nothing happened and no player was expected to be. In contrast to the bleak, blasted wasteland below it was all lush, green alpine valleys, flush with trees, grass as fresh and flat as a well-tended lawn. All it needed was a few birds singing, the sound of distant goat bells and and a log cabin or two to make it the perfect holiday destination.

In retrospect, I realize I should have taken some pictures but at the time I was laser-focused on not falling off or getting stuck. It's quite easy to get stuck in Throne and Liberty, which is presumably why there's a button in the UI to move you to a safe spot when it happens. I've had to use it already and I imagine I'll be using it again soon enough.

Glide down, grab the WP, port out. Easy Peasy.

Once I'd morphed into a hawk and glided down to the final waypoint I was a bit stuck on what to do next. That's the problem with goals. Once you achieve them you have to come up with more.

Since I didn't have any bright ideas, I did what anyone would do in a dull moment and went back to following the plot. Or what passes for one in this game.

Chris Neal at MassivelyOP described the storylines in T&L as "barely connected little adventures", which seems entirely fair, based on what I've seen so far. It's an unusual approach. I believe there is some kind of over-arching narrative concerning some devious organization called the Arkeum and its nefarious plans but as yet those plans, whatever they may be, have remained firmly in the background.

In the foreground of the chapter I completed last night was some kind of Goblin insurrection. I had a quest that asked me to kill a Goblin Shaman so I got started on that and it turned into a whole series of quite interesting escapades involving the little green nuisances. 

There was one part where the whole lot of them attacked a tower and I had to run ahead up the steps setting magic traps to blow the little buggers to bits. That was fun but not so much as when I met a bespectacled researcher who looked not unlike Velma Dinkley from Scooby Doo and who had some similarly cartoonish ideas on how to infiltrate the goblin councils.

Okay, she doesn't really look like Velma. It's just those glasses.

She morphed me into a goblin because that's a thing people can do and I scuttled over to listen to them whooping themselves up for a riot with a lot of speechmaking and dancing. I had to dance, too. I got four new buttons on my hot-bar and everything.

I never figured out how that worked. It was the usual match-the-moves deal but I couldn't figure out the tells. It didn't matter in the end because there was no fail state. I just kept pressing all the buttons and eventually I somehow convinced the gobbos I was one of them. Then they all ran off, leaving their secret plans on the floor for me to grab because now we really were in an episode of Mystery Incorporated.

So, I enjoyed that. I also liked the side-quest, where a blind girl asked me to look at her painting and tell her what I saw. She was concerned because it had been freaking everyone else out. I'm not surprised. It turned out to be a portal to some infernal realm so they were right to be concerned.

The realm was also an instance of some sort but I didn't investigate further. I don't think I'm up to anything much more than basic overland questing right now, for the simple reason that I've intentionally made no effort whatsoever to upgrade any of my skills or gear since I started. I've been running a little experiment to see how far I can go without engaging with any of the progression systems other than simple leveling but I'm afraid it's going to have to stop.

She's not spooky at all, is she?

Level 20 seems to be the cut-off point. Experience comes very quickly in Throne and Liberty. When I returned to questing last night I was Level 12 and when I logged out not much more than ninety minutes later I'd just dinged twenty. 

Allocation of xp seemed unpredictable. For the most part it dripped in steadily and predictably but there were two occesions when I gained a full level for not doing anything much at all, presumably when I completed some quest stage or other. 

At one point I finished a long sequence to find myself a few percent shy of a level and I was delighted to find it was acceptable to go kill a couple of random goblins to make up the difference. How deliciously traditional - and satisfying - that felt. More games should allow players who enjoy it to grind xp grind from killing mobs instead of questing.

I did a bit of both and once again, I found myself having fun. There's nothing very original or special about Throne and Liberty but it does seem to have that old-fashioned MMORPG feel to it, the sense that you can just go out there and do stuff that doesn't particularly matter and it will keep you entertained for a while. 

You can quest, sure, but you don't have to if you're not really feeling it. There are other options. That's a wheel that maybe needed some re-inventing.

One original feature of the game is the perpetual NPC commentary. I kinda like it.

It also helps that no-one's claiming the fate of the world rests on your shoulders or telling you you're the Chosen One. At most you might be one of a whole load of chosen ones but not a particularly special example of the breed. A lot of people have star stuff in them. You're just one of many. You should probably do something with your talent but it doesn't have to be right now, just when you get around to it. That feels liberating, appropriately.

In the end I only stopped because the main questline had just taken me into a solo instance and I was getting my backside handed to me repeatedly by the mobs in the first room. It was apparent that starting gear and skills weren't going to cut it thee so I called it a night.

I still don't think I'll be staying with Throne and Liberty for long. I imagine that soon enough, or more likely all too soon, it'll turn into the regular upgrade grind they all do. That's mostly what I was hoping to avoid by not upgrading anything at all.

Still, the upgrade process in most of these games starts out as enjoyable and achievable. It's only later, when the improvements cease to be significant and the mechanics become both time consuming and costly, that the whole enterprise turns into a chore. I'm hoping it'll be a good while before that happens and until it does I'm quite looking forward to the ride.

Scrub grass, weeds, bare rock, dead trees... this place has it all!

I can definitely say that, when I sit down at my desk and contemplate what game I'd like to play, Throne and Liberty is the one that comes first to mind just now. It's not the best. It's not even my favorite. It's just new and it has that indefinable whatever that calls to me when I see the Play button there on Steam.

I am going to have to do something about gearing up but I find, somewhat to my own surprise, that I'm actually looking forward to it. It'll mean reading a lot of tool-tips but I can do that. And then I'm going back in that cave to teach those wizards a lesson. 

Plus, hopefully, make some money. Waypoints stop being free to use at Level 30 and the rate xp comes in in this game, I could easily knock off another ten levels by the end of the day.

After that, who can say. I don't even know what the level cap is. Maybe I'll get there, maybe I won't. I would like to get far enough into the storyline to gain access to that forbidden island, at least. 

It'd be a shame not to open that last waypoint, now I've gotten this far.

#13 - Morden - Born 8 October 2001 - 3 days 19 hours

Well, that didn't go how I thought it would. 

I should get that printed on a T-shirt, right below the EverQuest logo.

So, what I thought I was going to do this morning was log in Morden, my Level 14 Cleric on the Roleplaying server, Firiona Vie. take a couple of screenshots and then write something about the history of the server, or at least the opening day or two, which is pretty much all I remember. 

This being EverQuest, things turned out rather differently.

After a very minor delay, when I guessed wrongly which account he was on, I logged Morden in to the where he logged out whenever he was last played. That, as it is for almost all my characters, turned out to be Plane of Knowledge. 

It's usually there because from PoK you can get to just about anywhere you need to go by way of the many portals posted all around the place. It's also one hundred per cent safe for any class and race, which isn't something you can say about everywhere in Norrath, as we're about to find out.

If I don't find someone in PoK, odds are they'll be in the Guild Lobby, an adjacent instance with the added advantage of being the place where altruistic players unload their best buffs before logging out, meaning you can get yourself raid buffed if you hang about long enough. Since time stands still in both the Lobby and Plane of Knowledge, you get to keep those buffs, which can last for several hours, until you go somewhere else, so there's no incentive to leave unless you're going to go kill something.

It was night when I logged in. It's always night when I log in to any game to take screenshots. I realize this is perception bias but that doesn't mean it's not true. And night-time in Norrath is dark, or it is in Plane of Knowledge, anyway. Much too dark for a good picture.

It was while I was considering the light that I noticed Morden was holding a fishing rod. Don't ask me why. I guess he was fishing last time I played him but that was probably more than twenty years ago. Whatever the reason, it gave me an idea. 

I thought I'd get a shot of him "fishing" in the ornamental pool where the fishing vendor stands. There aren't any fish in the water there but who's to know? I got there and it was nice and bright with the street lights and the pale, blue tiles so I had him hop up on the low wall surrounding the pond and he fluffed it and fell in.

No problem. The water's only a couple of feet deep. Even a dwarf can't drown in two feet of water. He just can't get out.

Here's a thing that happens in EverQuest: if you fall into some water, especially water contained inside a walled structure like a pond or a fountain, sometimes you can't get out again. I've seen it happen lots of times. Someone jumps into a water feature, either by mistake or for fun or to practice swimming and then it comes time to get out and they find they're stuck. You can't jump in water and there's no climbing out without steps or a ladder like they have in the Cabilis canals.

What's supposed to happen, I think, is that whoever made the pond or the pool or the fountain is meant to include a spot where the physics changes and you just shoot out of the water onto land when you push against it. Only sometimes they forget.

They forgot when they made this one. Morden swam all around the pool, pressing against the wall, several times. He got about twenty skill-ups for his swimming skill but he couldn't find a way out of the water.

Fortunately, Morden is a Cleric and Clerics get the Gate spell. I figured he'd be bound in Plane of Knowledge - most of my characters are, for obvious reasons of convenience and practicality - so he'd just port out of the pool and appear on dry land somewhere nearby. 

Except that's not what happened. If I'd been given fifty guesses where he would have appeared I wouldn't even have come close.

For some reason long lost to the mists of time, when Morden last cast Bind Affinity to set his respawn point, he must have picked a spot right in the middle of Firiona Vie. That's the city, not the server or the Princess. Obviously.

Firiona Vie, as has been mentioned in previous posts, is a coastal port city on the continent of Kunark. It's where the boat comes in if you travel there by sea. It is also currently under the control of the Teir`Dal, Norrath's Dark Elven race. Dark Elves do not like Dwarves. Boy, do they not!

There was a big event some time around 2002-3, when the Teir'Dal wrested control of the city from the Feir'Dal, aka the Wood Elves. EverQuest used to go in for huge, game-changing events back then. People were much more tolerant of having the furniture re-arranged. Several cities changed hands and whole races turned refugee. It was a different time.

I can only imagine that when Morden bound himself in Firiona Vie, the Wood Elves (Good Elves.) were firmly in control. It still doesn't explain what he was doing there at Level 14, a good ten levels at least below where he'd need to be to do anythig in the zone, let alone why he'd have thought it was a good idea to bind there. Still, it would at least have been safe for him to do it.

It bloody well isn't now! Before I'd had time to take in my surroundings and figure out where the hell we were, some hyperactive Dark Elf Dragoon charged up and killed Morden in a couple of hits. He was dead on the boardwalk before I'd worked out what was happening.

This posed something of a dilemma but I can't say I haven't been there before. Quite a few times, actually. Getting suddenly and unexpectedly killed and having to figure out what to do about it is something of an occupational hazard in EQ.

I had a couple of ideas. The easiest solution would be to log out to character select and use the Return Home button that was added a few years into the life of the game to make things easier for customer service players by allowing people to log in to their starting towns instead of whatever dumb location they'd left their character in when they had to go answer the door or let the dog out.

By a bizarre co-incidence, however, when I'd logged in this morning, the first thing I'd seen was a message telling me it was Morden's birthday (It's tomorrow by my count but close enough.) and the second was a note telling me he was entitled to reset his home city to either Crescent's Reach, the newbie starting zone for The Serpent's Spine expansion or North Kaladim, the racial home of the Dwarves

To Return Home you have to have one, obviously, as I assume Morden must have, once but I was starting to doubt whether he had one any more. Not being interested in moving in with the Dragon-kin in Crescent's Reach, I tried to use the command to reset to Kaladim but apparently you can't do that when you're dead.

I couldn't bring him back to life to do it because his respawn spot was literally where his corpse was lying. He was in a classic death-bind loop, or he would be if I let him stand up. 

Never mind. There are ways. 

I tried to close EQ from the task bar and got the message "You can't camp while you're dead". So many things you can't do when you're no longer breathing. I tried Alt-F4 and Ctrl-F4 to no effect so I hit Alt-Ctrl-Del and closed the application from there. That worked.

I relogged and checked Return Home on Character Select. Greyed out. Looked like he didn't have a home after all. My next plan was to log him in and see if I could use the command to set one before he got killed again. 

Fortunately, this time, no-one attacked him right away. It seemed the guards were patrolling and didn't happen to be close enough to spot him immediately. I took the chance to scuttle down to the water's edge, well way from any patrol routes to re-assess the situation. Even at Level 14, I thought I had a fair chance of following the zone wall to the long tunnel through to Lake of Ill Omen. There's a Plane of Knowledge portal in a cave at the end of those tunnels or I seem to remember one there. 

It was a risky plan but it might have worked. Unfortunately, it failed before it really got started. 

First I had to swim across the river to what looked like some steps on the far side. Except they weren't steps, jut a line on the wall. Once again, I couldn't get out of the water, or not on the side I needed to be. And by then night had fallen because yes, that again, too.

I could barely see anything but I could see guards patrolling the walls. I seemed to recall there weren't any on the bridge, though. Even if there were, I could always jump off before I got to the end. As a plan it had even less to say in its favor than the last one but it might also have worked - if I could have seen where I was going. 

Sadly, it was far too dark. Before he even got to the bridge, Morden was smacked into oblivion by a twenty-foot tall Golem. Couldn't even see something that size - that's how dark it was.

At least I'd had the foresight to use that reset command to set his starting city to Kaladim before he went running off into the night. All I needed to do was hit Return Home... and it was still greyed out. 

A quick google told me there's a known bug with Return Home that frequently leaves it unusable for no particular reason. It's been like it at least all this year and no-one's done anything to fix it. Old game is old.

My back-up back-up plan of using a Level Boost at Character Select to bang Morden up to Level 85 or 100 failed when it turned out he didn't have any available. I know I have some on the account but they're probably still in Claim, waiting for me to collect them. Anyway, I didn't really want to waste one on him.

I logged back in yet again, once again avoiding the attentions of the local constabulary, and as I was thinking about my next move, the ship from Antonica (Or is it Feydwer?) sailed into view. After a moment's hesitation I had Morden leg it over to the dock to see if he could jump on board.

It was a very risky move in the darkened streets of a hostile city and I'd love to say my courage (Or recklessness.) paid off... but it neither did nor didn't. I got to the dock without mishap but not before the ship had sailed. I did at least manage to find what seems to be a safe spot to hunker down and wait and that's where Morden is now.

He may be there some time. There's no real urgency to move him, after all. It's not as though I'm going to play him. Do I really need to spend another hour trying to get him to safety just to park him for another twenty years? 

Even if I can get him on the boat, I'm not sure where it goes. If it's coming to an Evil port it most likely came from one, didn't it? I'm not sure ending up in the Evil Outpost in The Overthere would be much of an improvement.

What I'm probably going to do is leave Morden where he is for a bit and hope the Return Home button starts working. Supposedly the bug is intermittent. If that doesn't happen then he can just bide his time until I'm in the mood to do something about it. He's got his fishing rod and he's right next to the ocean. He's not going to starve.

All of which leaves me not much time to talk about the Firiona Vie server itself and how Morden came to be created there. It's an interesting and complicated tale but I'll keep it to the bare bones.

Firiona Vie was created about a year and a half after the launch of the game to provide something that had been a constant demand from day one, a server dedicated to roleplaying. There'd always been at least one unofficial RP server - it was Brell Serilis when I started Tarquinn there - but "the community" wanted more.

It didn't work, of course. Not even in the days when there were people employed to make sure the rules were kept. I forget now what the full ruleset was (There's a little more detail here.) but I remember there were plenty of clauses. All but two of them were withdrawn in a matter of months.

The two that stuck were Free Trade and no Common language. The first made sure the server prospered by attracting large numbers of players with no interest in roleplaying. The second proved how skin-deep any real interest in playing a role was even for the rest.

"Free Trade" meant almost no No Drop and Heirloom flags. If you had it you could sell it. That brought in a particular demographic, players mostly interested in becoming rich and powerful, arguably the antithesis of roleplaying unless you happened to be playing an oligarch or a railway baron. 

The language rule was more curious. There's a common tongue everyone speaks - called Common, naturally - but every race in EverQuest has its own language that any other race can learn. Prior to the arrival of a dedicated server catering to their needs, roleplayers traditionally spoke in the language proper to their chosen race, at least some of the time, so it seemed logical to remove the Common option and have them all learn each other's languages or not be able to communicate at all.

You can imagine how that went down in a group-oriented game with a culture of partying up with strangers. It didn't last the first day. In a matter of hours after the server came up someone decided there was going to be a common language after all and it was going be Elven. Thereafter, Elven was what everyone spoke but first they had to learn it. Which turned out to be no problem at all.

In Norrath you quickly pick up languages just by hearing them spoken. I remember sitting in a circle with a bunch of other people as one person gibbered away in Elven and the rest of us watched our skill tick up. Sometimes other races would chip in in their languages and those would go up too. I imagine now, after more than twenty years, Firiona Vie must be a server filled with polyglots, everyone fluent in every language. 

Or more likely they all speak Elven and no-one even thinks about it any more. So much for the great experiment.

Mrs Bhagpuss and made characters on Firiona Vie the day the server came up. The next day, we were gone. I don't at all remember it as being our grand farewell to the game  but from the timing I guess it must have been. I also have no clue how I came to play Morden for nearly four days, which amounts to over ninety hours in game. I suppose I must have but when it happened or what we did is lost to me now.

Firiona Vie launched on 8 October 2001. Dark Age of Camelot launched the following day. 

It would be over a year before I made my next character in EQ.

***Addendum***

After I posted this I went and made a cup of tea then came back and logged into EQ again, whereupon I found the Return Home button was working normally. I used it, ran Morden from North Kaladim to Plane of Knowledge and bound him there.

On the way through Kaladim I somehow once again managed to fall into some water, this time an underground stream, and once again I couldn't get out... until I thought to swap from third-person perspective to first, at which point getting out of the water became trivial. 

I now recall that that's how it always worked. EQ was designed as a first-person game with third being a buggy, awkward also-ran. I never even used third-person until I'd been playing for a couple of years and it didn't work reliably for a couple of years after that. Even when it did, I never used third in water. Always swap to first when you go swimming, that's the rule. Can't believe I forgot!

Seeing Solisium - One DC At A Time

I've been playing Throne and Liberty more than I expected and less than I'd like. 

After Helpie went home (That's them departing in a burst of light up above.) I gave up on following the quests and started racing around the map in wolf form, trying to open all the waypoints. It turned out to be much more fun than questing. Unfortunately, the whole thing is horribly unstable still in spite of all the patches and hot fixes so I keep getting disconnected and dumped to desktop. I won't really know how much fun the game can be until that stops.

Another annoying factor are the barriers. I've run into several. They show up as shimmering walls of force that block the way. 

I'm not sure whether they mark areas that aren't in the game yet or whether you have to be a certain level or have reached a specific stage in the storyline. There's no useful information in game to tell you, although when I arrived at the bridge in the screenshot above, I overheard a conversation between a guard and a merchant trying to cross that suggested political unrest or possibly military action had led to the gates being closed.

Travel in general is pleasing. There's no stamina or other drain to stop you running at wolf speed all the time. Better yet, as an otter you can swim forever, a very welcome change from all those games where you run out of breath and start to drown before you've swum the length of a kiddie's paddling pool.

Flying is the exception. It takes stamina to rise, making flight mostly a long, downhill glide. At least you don't fall out of the air when you run out of puff. I've seen worse.

Once you get away from the places you're supposed to be, where everything's happening and everyone is milling about getting under each others' feet, the world feels surprisingly empty. Not empty of interest - there's a lot to see just about everwhere- just empty of life.

I spent maybe an hour between disconnects, exploring the extensive shoreline and the deep ravines and river valleys. I saw shipwrecks and towers along the sand, platforms and rope bridges between the high rock stacks. I saw doors in the cliffs and statues among the scrub. What I didn't see were animals or monsters or people.

And then suddeny I didn't see anything at all because the fog rolled in. I vaguely knew there were weather effects in the game - winds that could blow you off your feet - but I'd heard nothing about the thick fog that makes it all but impossible to see where you're going.

I remain to be convinced of the gameplay value of weather effects that impede vision or movement. Leaving aside the obvious inconvenience to the player, it seems unlikely a culture whose least members are able to change shape at will would put up with not being able to see clearly in fog or darkness. Maybe there's a bat-form waiting to be discovered.

There's no sign of it in the wilds but in the more populated regions, Solisium has a serious litter problem. Everywhere you go there are pieces of paper lying about. I've played plenty of games that use this kind of incidental, incremental storytelling but I struggle to think of one with the sheer number of collectable texts Throne and Liberty employs.

I've been trying to read them all but the quality is variable. Some are quite interesting. Some are clearly designed only to be stored, not studied. Whenever I come across systems like this in a game I find myself wondering about the designer or developer who had to sit in an office coming up with all this stuff. Sometimes you can feel the glee as the unknown writer relishes the chance to let their imagination rip; sometimes you feel the dead weight of another endless afternoon spent on a thankless, meaningless chore.

My current plan consists of trying pick up as many pieces of paper as possible while unlocking every waypoint in all the areas I can reach. It's something I often used to do in games just for the fun of it. It's been too long since I ignored the demands of nagging NPCs in favor of just getting out there and seeing the world.

For that alone, Throne and Liberty has been worth it so far. If Amazon or NCSoft or whoever's responsible can fix the damn servers so I can stay online for more than half an hour at a time, I'll be happy to play a little longer. I still don't think it's going to be a lot longer but who knows? 

I guess we'll just have to wait and see. 

I seem to be saying that a lot these days.

Friday's (Fail To) Grab Bag

  No nonsense. Just get on with it. Mostly games this time. A little music at the end.

Hope You Like Our New Lack Of Direction

I'm about ready to call the Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt revamp a bust. I have more than a hundred and sixty hours in the game since it went into Early Access, thirty-five hours since the new version arrived, benched my old character and mandated a re-start. 

It's the same game.

I suspected as much almost from the start but last night I beat the fourth boss to win access to the fifth "storied" realm and found myself back on the exact same path I was traveling months ago. There's Nellie Bly, standing on top of a spur of rock next to a decommissioned portal, explaining you'll never get to Nightingale so you might as well help her fix the machine so you can go to somewhere else, a place she's found called The Watch.

I was honestly hoping never to see The Watch again. It's where the old game ran into the buffers of a half-assed, unfinished "end game", in which a solo rpg morphed clumsily into a lobby MMO with no point or purpose. I was dearly hoping that would be the part of the game they'd fixed because it really, really needed it, whereas most of the parts they have changed didn't need it anything like as much but it looks like all the effort has gone into the crafting tidy-up. That and those so-called "stories", absolutely none of which I noticed as I followed a series of repetitive tasks and battled a series of tedious bosses.

All of which makes it sound like I don't like the game, which isn't the case. My feeling is quite the opposite. I like Nightingale a lot, which is why I've played it for all those hours. I liked the original and I like the new version well enough, too. 

It was nice to come back for a second run and enjoy a slight variation over the first few sessions but much though I enjoyed the hunt for parts to fix Nellie's portal and all the side-quests that spring up along the way when I did them earlier this year, I don't particularly want to do them all again just now. I think I may have to give Nightingale a rest for a while. 

I'd still recommend the game to anyone who likes base-building rpgs with light survival trappings and who hasn't already tried it. It looks good, plays quite smoothly and the crafting and building are more than decent. It's very much an Early Access title in the sense that it isn't finished yet but what's there is sound and solid. 

If you're waiting until it is finished before jumping in, though, I wouldn't advise it. It's far from clear the whether the developers have any clear vision of what they want the finished game to look like and it seems less likely all the time that they'd have the resources to get there even if they did. Might as well play it now if you're going to play it at all. It might not be there later.

 

You've Lost Me Now

Off the back of that, I'd like to talk about something I've mentioned before: Steam Achievements. They can be quite instructive on the health of a game, especially taken in combination with Steam charts. 

Before Realms Rebuilt, Nightingale had just a few hundred players by Steam's count. That jumped to six thousand on the update but after a couple of weeks peak concurrency is down by a third and slowly falling. Still, it's a clear and definite improvement. 

The achievements tell a different tale. I have four post-revamp achievements. Each of them is for beating a boss and gaining access to the next Realm. The percentage of players who've managed any of them is tiny but that's because it's calculated against all the players who have the game in their Steam Library, not against those playing right now. 

Most people who ever played Nightingale no longer play, so the low numbers are to be expected. What's telling is the relative numbers that have completed each of those four Achievements. Since they were only added with the update and since they each represent completion of a mandatory step to progress through the storyline, the achievements record the degree to which that much-hyped new narrative approach has persuaded people.

The result is not encouraging. At time of writing, just over 9% of players completed all the tutorial
quests in the Abeyance realm but only half of those managed to get to the end of the Realm that followed, Sylvan's Cradle. By the end of the third realm, Welkin's Reach, the numbers had almost halved again and less than two percent have made it past the fourth realm, Magwytch Marshes. 

That is a serious problem for the new direction. If the story was compelling, it wouldn't be shedding almost half of its audience at the end of every chapter. Perhaps if there actually was a story, that would help. Maybe they should think about adding one. 

 

Meet New People. Then Kill Them.

For all its narrative shortcomings, Nightingale is doing a very much better job of holding my attention than Throne and Liberty. When I was posting about the new game yesterday, I was quite keen to get back to it and play some more. When I did, though, I found myself losing interest much sooner than I expected.

I did some more quests. They were okay, no more than that. Still, I was having a reasonably amusing time, running about doing things for people I didn't know or care about, which they could have been doing for themselves. 

The place was very busy and the server was struggling a little. I remember thinking a couple of times that I'd probably be having more fun if I waited until the crowds had moved on. Then I got disconnected and dumped to desktop, which I have to admit did break the flow and temper my enthusiasm a little.

Still, I came back to try again. A quest took me to the edge of the area I'd opened and on a whim I carried on to see what might be over the next hill. A lot fewer people, as it turned out, which felt better, so I kept going. 

I did some enjoyable exploring. The game sure is pretty to look at. I started searching for teleport stones to add to my map, it always being handy to have them opened before you need them for questing. That took me through a number of dangerous areas but nothing seemed to run as fast as my wolf travel form and aggro drops fast so I just kept running and everything was fine.

Until I ran past a player and they killed me, that is.

They were doing one of the many open-world events designed for guilds. These are everywhere and they seem to be highly competitive. A guild ranking of some sort gets broadcast when they end. 

The events also turn the area where they take place into a non-consensual PvP zone. I was well aware of that - it's clearly flagged - but I figured anyone doing the events would be too busy with their own stuff to bother with someone just passing through. 

Yeah, nope.

Being ganked as I ran past a guy looting a wagon marked my first and so far only death in Throne and Liberty. I stopped being bothered by being ganked sometime around 2002, so I just respawned and got on with it but once again it put a dent in my momentum. I decided to avoid the conflict zones and go around the coast but there wasn't to much to see down on the beach and when Beryl came bounding in looking for attention I was very happy to stop and give her some.

At the moment I don't feel especially motivated to log back in. It all seems a bit pointless when there are so many other games I'd rather play. Still, it is the new hotness, until the next new hotness comes along, so I imagine I'll give it another go. I don't think it'll be staying in the rotation for long, though. 

 

Alien Invasions 

What might take its place is X-Com. Or X-Com 2. I've been moaning on about wanting a good, turn-based, tactical RPG with a focus on team combat since I finished Solasta and decided I was too mean to stump up for Baldur's Gate 3. 

I've read so much about how good the X-Com series is that when I saw these two were on offer on Steam for 90% and 95% off it seemed silly not to buy them, so I did. I had a momentary feeling of dread that I might already have them in my Amazon Prime collection but no, I don't. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they turned up there in a month or two but that's a risk you have to take when you buy anything.

My question now is whether I should play them chronologically or whether the second is a significant improvement on the first, in which case maybe I should start there. I think there's some narrative continuity but I have no idea if the story is actually important. I mostly just want to do the fights. 

And now for the audio-visual section of our presentation... 

In A Dream, All In A Dream

That's Dreamworld. I read about it on MMOBomb and was surprised I hadn't heard about it before. It describes itself as "a groundbreaking Sandbox MMO, where all players create together in a single infinite world " but the part that interests me is the AI integration, which "allows players to generate their own 3D models in-game using a text prompt".

The game is running a "public test" next week and all you need to do is ask for access through Steam, which I have done. I'm very curious to see how those AI tools work. I did try another game in development that purported to use something similar and it did not impress but this one looks a lot more sophisticated. It'll be interesting to see how it works - or doesn't. 

Cue Outro

Can't have a grab bag with no music. And what sort of music do we like around here? Well, let's see. Among other things, we like smart, intelligent indie bands, we like cover versions, we like Lana del Rey. Put them all together and what have you got?

Say Yes To Heaven - Fontaines D.C.
(Original Lana del Rey)

Not the most obvious choice, is it? I see they're not dressing like EMF any more, either. Maybe Liam got to them. He does that. It's his gift.

Past, Present and Future

Thinking of Lana, which I pretty much always am, I watched a couple of old interviews recently, from back when she was Lizzie Grant. They're like music all in themselves. I thought I'd share just one really short clip...

"I just wanna do something I can be the best at."

Mission accomplished, then.

Throne And Liberty - First Impressions - Of A Kind...

Before we begin, just in case you came here from Google Search looking for some kind of useful information about the game, I do apologize. That's not really what we do here...

After an extremely lengthy and repetitive installation process that seemed to go on forever, I finally got in and played some Throne and Liberty last night. Just over three hours of it, according to Steam, although it didn't feel that long, which might mean I enjoyed myself.

On the other hand it, it might just be that I was zipping through the parts I'd already done back in open beta at such a pace it felt like a lot less time had passed than the clock would have showed. Shown... Shewn...?

Hang on... what's the past participle of "To show"? Let me ask Gemini...

Well, there you go. I get these moments of existential doubt sometimes. Doesn't everyone? How fortunate we are that our AI overlords allies are here to help. 

Although I'm not quite sure I like the way it's corrected my capitalization. That seems a bit cocky. Reminds me of Dirk Bogarde in "The Servant". Not a good sign.

Popular game is popular.

Well, this isn't going the way I thought it would. Shall we see if we can get it back on track? Or shall we just sit here talking to ourselves in the second person plural like some kind of experimental novel?

Does anyone really enjoy experimental novels? The kind that come in a box with all the pages loose so you can read them in any order? Or ones where the author has managed a hundred thousand words without once using the letter "e"?  

I know a couple of people who claim to read that sort of thing for pleasure but I can't stick them, myself. The novels, that is, not the people who like them. Although...

I'm all for being pretentious but there are limits. I was reading Stuart Lee in the bathroom a few minutes ago and he described Tarka the Otter as an experimental novel for adults that Puffin repackaged as a children's book in the 1970s, which goes a long way to explaining why I gave up on the damn thing when I tried to read it in my teens.

Speaking of otters, I think you can be one in Throne and Liberty. There are "travel forms" you can morph into, "morph" being the verb employed in the game for the process which, in keeping with all such events in every game, is never explained. It's just magic, I suppose.

I have three travel forms so far: wolf for running, hawk for flying and otter. (Or at least something that looks like an otter although, for reasons that also go unexplained, it appears to be wearing a hat.) I'm guessing the otter is for swimming but since I haven't been in the water yet I can't say for sure.

If you'd just switch the lights on, we could appreciate the stitching.

I like travel forms as a rule. I think my first experience with them must have been in EverQuest, where druids get a spell that lets them change into wolves. Being a wolf in Norrath confers a number of advantages besides letting you run faster. 

I mean, that's a given, given the name of the iconic spell: Spirit of Wolf aka SoW or more often "Can I get a SoW?", the cry so frequently heard in any public space where crowds gather in preparation for adventure, but being a wolf in EQ also makes some people like you more. And others less but swings/roundabouts.

When I get back to Throne and Liberty (I'd have used the name of the world where it takes place there, if I'd known what it was. I wonder if Gemini knows?

Okay, come on! You have to admit it. That's useful. I know I could have googled it to get the same result but isn't it neater to ask a straight question and get a straight answer? Of course it would be better if the answer was right...¹)

I left a sentence hanging up there, didn't I? I haven't forgotten. I'll start that part over. 

When I get back to Arcion (See? That's better, isn't it?) I'll have to see if I can't find some water to jump in so I can try the otter-form out. I wonder how many travel forms there are in the game? Not nearly as many as there are in AdventureQuest 3D, I bet. There are dozens of them there.

I think I look pretty badass. But then, I would...

So, anyway, other than running around as a wolf, which is always fun, what else did I find to do in Arcion? (Now I know what the place is called you can bet I'm going to make the most of it.)

Mostly questing so far, as you'd expect. I haven't really bothered to read up much about T&L but I have a general idea from things I've heard that it's a very group-oriented game. Unsurprisingly, that restriction has yet to get in my way. It's early days. I'm still getting tutorial tips.

Before I could begin, of course, I had to make a character. That was fun. I do like character creation. It's a game in itself these days, isn't it?

Hold that thought. I have to stop now and drive to another city to drop off Mrs. Bhagpuss's annual accounts at the accountants, which makes it sound way more grand than it really is. Then we're going to give Beryl a walk and maybe have lunch - it's a beautiful day - so I'm going to have to pick this up when I get back. 

Maybe I'll be in a less self-indulgent mood then. I'll probably read this back and delete most of it so you'll only be reading this if you're in a different timeline, one where that didn't happen.

And I'm back. Had a lovely walk, saw some impressive goats, ate a very large ice-cream. Good times.

We're all still here so I guess I didn't split the timeline. Always a consideration. Also I read the above back and it seemed pretty spry so I'm gonna carry on. Where was I? Oh yes...

So I made a character and almost fell into the same trap as last time. Nearly ended up with someone who looks like the first cousin of the first NPC you meet, which would be a bit like wearing the same frock to a party. Embarrassing!

I'd love to say I remembered and caught myself in time but in fact it was only when I got into the game and the person in question came running up that it all came back to me. Fortunately, I'd already gone for a goth-gamine-tomboy look just very slightly askew from my norm so it all worked out fine.

After that I sped through the tutorials as fast as possible. It's amazing how it comes back to you. If you'd asked me ahead of time to recap my adventures in open beta I would have stared at you blankly but every step and most of the dialog drifted up from somewhere, just a beat ahead, as I clicked through for the second time.

It took me more than an hour and a half to get back to where I left off last time, which was the bit where you have to make bait to lure wolves for the annual wolf-killing competition and then get the wolf-bits to make the trophy you get for killing the most wolves (Except, as it turns out, you don't, because they stopped giving them out years ago.).

I felt a bit odd, running through packs of wolves as a wolf, killing them and stealing their teeth, but that's the way of things in magic-land.

Last time I did it, I stopped after I'd made the bait and gotten a drunken dwarf with a really unconvincing accent (Although not, for once, a Scottish one - or at least I hope that's not what it's meant to be.) to make me a couple of fake trophies. It seemed fair enough for the trophies to be fakes since I hadn't even entered the competition, let alone won it.

A dwarf with Imposter Syndrome. That's new.

It was around there, somewhere, that I felt things were getting a little meta but I hadn't seen anything yet. At the risk of spoilers, although it's one of the first quests in the game so it's probably exempt in under the ten-minute rule (Which I just made up so don't bother googling it. Or asking an AI.) the quest carries on for a fair old while, bringing in hallucinations, visions, time-travel and who knows what-all else until it turns out you're the mysterious hero who saved all those children a decade ago. 

Or something. Don't look at me. I didn't write it. I could barely follow it.

It's all quite confusing and honestly not really as bad as I'm making it sound. It was fine. By the standards of MMORPG questing, that is. Which, let's not kid ourselves, are not all that high.

I'm extremely wary of raising expectations that are bound to be disappointed but the quality of both writing and voice acting in Wuthering Waves have spoiled me for these kinds of quests. I think I would have been moderately impressed with this one a couple of years ago and I still think it's more than decent for the genre but standards have risen.

Or my tastes have changed. Or both. 

I don't think there's much doubt about the voice acting, though. It is not great. At least, not in these early stages. Maybe it improves later. That happens, sometimes.

It's not actually bad. Just not very engaging. If I had to guess I'd say it was a lack of direction more than any fault of the actors themselves.

Down in one! Down in one!

There are exceptions. I liked Chris, Dave's pal. He was good. The voice actor seemed to be having some fun and putting the effort in, which is more than I could say for some of them. 

I was predisposed towards him just because he was called Chris, though, to be fair. I liked there being two nobles called Dave and Chris. (Dave wasn't as convincing.) It made a nice change from all the Lord Evertrues, Ragnar Bloodswords and Lentensip Fentonworps we usually run into in these things. 

That quest chain itself was quite long. I think it probably took me the best part of an hour. By the time I
finished it (Plus all the other tutorial tasks.) I was Level 12. 

It mostly involved a lot of running around, plenty of chatter and a good deal of fighting. All the fighting was easy even though I had no idea what any of my abilities did. I could have stopped and read the tool tips but I wanted to get on. Anyway, button-mashing seemed to be more than up to the task.

Apart from the two tutorials showing me how to craft and upgrade weapons and armor, I made absolutely no effort to improve myself from the moment I stepped into the world. I kept getting messages telling me I had new abilities or I could upgrade the old ones but I didn't bother. 

I made a nice hat and a sword and then annoyingly I got another hat as a quest reward. Other than that, when I dinged 12 I was still wearing the same clothes I started with.

I'm guessing at some point I'll have to buckle down and make sense of what looks like a very fussy and over-complicated gear-and-skill system but so long as I can get away with not bothering, that's what I plan to do. I find it unlikely that I'll stick with Throne and Liberty for long, especially if those rumors about needing to guild and group up are true, but I'm not done yet. I had fun last night, though, and I'm quite keen to carry on and have some more today.

If nothing else, the world is extremely pretty to look at and I quite like the character I'm playing, which is always key. Whether that will be enough to hold my attention for more than a few sessions I somewhat doubt. As I keep complaining, if complaining is the right word, which it's not, there's a lot going on in gaming just now. T&L is going to have to dig some pretty sharp claws in to hang on to my custom and the no money at all it's worth. 

I doubt it can but I'm going to expose myself a little longer to give it the chance. It seems like the polite thing to do. They are giving the game away for free, after all. It would be rude not to play it for a while.

^{1. [The actual name of the world in Throne and Liberty is Solisium.]↩}1.

Comes With Free Fox

My plan for today was to post about my first session in Throne & Liberty, which went live-for-free yesterday. Unfortunately, even though I took advantage of the pre-download option and downloaded the entire game on Sunday, so far it has refused to start due to what feel like endless repatches and updates. 

As I type, it's about thirty per cent of the way through a 60GB+ download, which by my count is at least the third time it's tried to update the entire game. If it doesn't start after this one I may have to uninstall and start over, if I can be bothered. Am I even that interested?

My back-up plan was to say something about the huge, new update for Wuthering Waves. I'm certainly interested in that and I'm pleased to say it patched, installed and verified perfectly, although once again it took several tries as it dealt with various hot-fixes. 

Unfortunately... you knew there was another of those coming, right? - I was quite correct earlier, when I speculated that I'd probably need to catch up to the new content by completing the main story quest before I'd be able to travel to the Black Shores, where the story continues and the new content begins. 

As it so happens, the stage of the MSQ where I dropped off the back of the bus a few weeks back is the part where you meet an emissary from the mysterious Black Shores faction so I'm dead-on for context but it looks like there are a couple more chapters to go before I get to see the Black Shores themselves.

That's not going to be much of a problem because the story is really good. Excellent, even, by the standards of both anime-inspired RPGs and MMOs, which Wuthering Waves feels like, even if it's not. 

It's just as well the writing and voice acting are thoroughly engaging because the story is l...o...n...g. The chapter I did on Monday took me nearly four hours, much of which was talking to people or listening to them talk to each other. There was some traveling and a few fights but really it was like watching anime. Good anime.

With those two plans shelved for the time being, I needed something else to post about today and I was just starting to think about what that might be when I saw this post over at The EverQuest Show. 

It's pretty thorough. I could have just linked to it and left it at that but I thought I could get a post out of going to the official site and working something of my own up out of that. Except, when I tried, all I got was a black screen with white writing. And some pale yellow, for all the difference that made.

I thought that might be my VPN playing up. It seems to mess with images sometimes. It wasn't, though. I switched it off and it made no difference. 

Then I thought it might be Firefox, which is increasingly being treated like some weird, niche, hipster choice as far as most websites are concerned. But no, it wasn't that. I swapped to Chrome and it was just the same.

That left me in the peculiar position of only being able to see the images in the promo, of which there are many, by looking at a fan website. I could at least watch the "sneak peak" video from the official site though. Right? I mean, the big button was right there...

 

Nope. 

And Firefox wouldn't even let me find out why without jumping through another hoop.

 

So I learned more...

Which makes it seem like Darkpaw must have screwed something up although I bet it's really something I've done. Or haven't done. Unless it's just this general degradation of the internet that I keep hearing about, where eventually (Some say as soon as next year.) nothing will work at all.

I opened the video in a new tab just like Firefox wanted and it went to YouTube and here it is, embedded for your viewing pleasure because unlike the EQII website, it seems I have all my ducks lined up nicely when it comes to security configurations. Or, rather, Blogger has them all lined up for me. I mean, why keep a duck and quack yourself?

It's short. I'll say that for it. 

I also think it makes the game look older than most recent promos. Velious is not a pretty setting. It does no-one's artistic skills any favors. 

The original in EverQuest was bleak but the EQII version is worse. The only post-Shattering Velious zones I actually like, visually, are Withered Lands and Cobalt Scar and that's because they actually have something other than ice to look at.

Then there's Odus. That's not a lot better. The expansion looks to be split between the remnants of the two least attractive continents in Norrath. Where Velious is all ice and snow, faded blue and dirty white, Odus has always been red sandstone, yellow earth and brown rock.

Judging by the few seconds of footage there is to go by, Scars of Destruction is mostly made up from those two depressing palettes. Can't say I'm hyped for that.

About the only other details of note that I spotted, apart from the rose-pink lion statue at the start, which is quite pretty, were ants and ulthorks. I was expecting the latter but I can't say I had ants on my expansion bingo card. Or wanted them.

Reading through the descriptive text on the website I see we're also getting a couple of new NPC races - kappa and Mandoko. At least, I'm guessing that's what they are and also that they're new. I can't remember hearing the names before, anyway. 

Also, why do the Mandoko get a capital letter but the kappa don't? I hope that's a cultural thing not a typo.

As for the "bone-chewing vermin", since they're in Dragon Necropolis, I'm guessing they'll be the Chetari. I hope so. We can always use a new subspecies of ratmen. I'll be disappointed if it turns to be the Roekillik but they are already an established presence on Odus so it might well be them again.

Referring back to the EverQuest Show post, since I can't get much from the source, I see there are four new zones (Obviously there will be a shedload of instanced ones, too.). Two of them are old, two new. 

The old ones are Western Wastes and Dragon Necropolis, both once so terrifiying in the original EverQuest they made me come out in a sweat just thinking about them. Power creep meant I eventually had them both on solo farm status but I can' say I remember a lot about either. 

The two new ones are Sodden Archipelago and Blackhook Spiral, both of which look more interesting. I'm assuming they're on Odus since they have trees and jungles.

The features list weirdly includes "Boost your character's level to 130", which made me go check the current cap. It's 130. I guess they just mean you get a Boost consumable as part of the package, something that's been standard for a while. I'll actually use mine this time, seeing as how I haven't managed to get there on my own.

It also includes a couple of things that sound trivial but which I find weirdly exciting. We'll be able to store Petamorph Wands on a "key ring", which is something I've wanted for years. I have a ton of them, they take up loads of space and having to fiddle around in my packs looking for them severely limits my enthusiasm for what is otherwise a very enjoyable cosmetic.

We'll also be able to add auras to weapons to make them sparkle which honestly thrills my inner six-year old girl, a persona that's taking more and more control over my aesthetic choices the older I get.

Apart from that it's business as usual. I'll leave it to the EverQuest Show to go through the rest of the card except to say that the pre-order bonus is an Ice Tundra Fox pet.

If I wasn't going to pre-order before I read that, I sure am now! In fact, I'm off to do it as soon as I finish this, after which I'm going to make my character in Throne and Liberty, which just finished installing - for real this time, I hope - about five minutes ago. Only took about five hours. I hope it's worth it.