You Got The Look: Villagers and Heroes

Villagers and Heroes is turning out to be one of those off-the-beaten-track MMOs that just clicks with me. In that respect it follows in a great tradition that goes all the way back to The Realm, which I used to play for some light relief between sessions back in Everquest's  Ruins of Kunark era.

Thinking back on other amuse-bouche MMOs that I ended up developing a taste for, there was Ferentus, one of the earlier Eastern imports, which never got out of beta, Endless Ages, Crowns of Power, NeoSteam, Argo and probably quite a few more I've forgotten. The king of them all was the very much-missed Rubies of Eventide, which closed down when one of the owners took umbrage with some of the players, powered down the server and locked the source code in a cupboard. Literally.

After they die many MMOs seem to slip into a ghostly half-life. Of the games listed above, Endless Ages had a couple of attempts at revival and still has people tinkering with the code trying to get something working, NeoSteam has now closed in all territories but appears to have an established "Private Server" scene and Argo was supposed to be returning under new management but now seems to have gone for good. Crowns of Power still has a website where you can download the game and even a "Server Status" page that suggests it's running but the forums tell another story.

I'm on a cart. I SAID I'M ON A CART!

The Realm, of course, just keeps on trucking. Next year will see the 20th anniversary of this venerable genre institution. That's twenty years as a subscription mmo, by the way; a 2D subscription MMO. Who said the sub model was dead?

Villagers and Heroes itself is, as I mentioned in the previous post, on its third iteration although it has continued to operate continuously through the various makeovers. This version really seems to have nailed it for me. It always seemed like a game I ought to enjoy more than I did and now I do.

Yesterday, while I was playing GW2 rather desultorily, as many people seem to be right now, what with the giant iceberg of Tuesday's update looming on the horizon, I found myself thinking, not about the new builds I'd have to be choosing, nor even about jumping ship to play my Necro on Ragefire or do my weeklies in EQ2. No, I was thinking about the plot in V&H and wondering what might happen next. And also about how nice it would be to do a bit of crafting and gathering in those bright, cartoon fields and orchards of that mystical land.

It's not always bright and colorful. Sometimes the world goes all watercolor pastel.

In the end I spent about five hours in V&H yesterday, following the plot, training up my Woodcrafting and my Bug Hunting, backtracking to complete and hand in some of the plethora of quests I seem to have acquired (and inevitably acquiring more in the process). It was a relaxing, involving and thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a Sunday.

I only stopped because I ran into an annoying bug where each NPC I approached would only reply to me with the dialog of the last person I spoke to. I'm hoping that will have fixed itself by  the next time I log in. If not I guess I'll find out how efficient the petition system is.

At low levels there seems to be an enormous amount to do and the pace of leveling is just about exactly as I like it. My new Wizard dinged level 8 last night. It took about eight hours to get there from character creation. Of course, she's also level 10 or more in almost all of the crafting and gathering disciplines, of which there are quite a few. I think she only has Cooking and Fishing left before she completes the introductory "get all these to ten and come back and see me quest" someone gave her right at the beginning.

I believethe level cap is 65 so there would seem to be a lot of mileage just in leveling up. What the end game is I have no idea and nor do I care very much. I'll think about that if I get there, which I don't imagine for a moment I will. A look at the map suggests a large and inviting world to explore, though, and if it's all as interesting and accessible as it has been so far, who knows?

Why do some MMOs feel inviting and fun to play while others can be such a struggle or feel so bland? There must be a whole raft of reasons but the look and feel is crucial. If that isn't right then whatever glories lie hidden beneath the surface are likely to stay there.

I knew an Eamon at university. He was studying architecture and talking to him taught me a lot about the relationship between form and function. If that's him he's really let himself go.

Appearances may be shallow but they have a big effect on whether I want to start playing something - if it looks delicious in screenshots it makes me want to dive in. Aesthetics aren't enough to hold the attention long-term though unless they come with  great sense of design to back them up.

Form follows function as the modernists used to say and the new UI is exemplary in that regard. Everything looks both crisp and modular and explains itself immediately by use. There's no fiddling about wondering what to press or where to click. It looks great and it works first time. Given that we spend so much of our "play" time operating the interface, to have doing so feel like a sensual pleasure in itself goes a long way towards encouraging a preference for one game over another.

Concretizing the sense of discovery.

Villagers and Heroes may not look spectacular but it's crisp and clear and charmingly stylized. When Mrs Bhagpuss peered over my shoulder and saw it for the first time she said "You're in a cartoon" and yes, it does have that look of a quality animation from the mid-late 80s about it. The typography reminds me of Wizard 101, another game whose style strongly enhanced and supported its gameplay. I really like that pseudo-brushstroke font.

The game also has solid sound direction and a really striking musical score. Unlike, say, Syp, I'm not a huge fan of video music in its own right. There are plenty of pieces and melodies that have a strong emotional effect on me but it's usually because of the memories they invoke rather than any intrinsic musicality of their own.

The music in fantasy MMOs tends to be of a type; sweeping synthesized orchestral pomp, blaring, brassy martial bombast, would-be wistful pastoral warbling and the like. Villagers and Heroes, at least in the few starting zones I've seen, is a little more sonically adventurous. It has, for example, some off-kilter, edgy, piano improvisations that nag uncomfortably in the background. Unsettling, particularly in a starting zone.

I stumble upon The Vinton Village Festival. Prancing Pony eat your heart out.

At one point I even stopped playing to listen, which is a very odd thing to find yourself doing. I'm not sure whether it's a good decision commercially but I certainly prefer it to the usual fantasy elevator music. I guess that jazz feel is all of a piece with the general maturity and sophistication of the aesthetic.

For a game that has a cartoonish look that would appear on the surface to be aimed at a younger audience Villagers and Heroes has an oddly adult feel. The main storyline is mostly the usual fantasy nonsense but there's a strong undertone of sexual jealousy and infidelity running through it. I seem to remember that the original launch of the game as A Mystical Land made reference to fairy tales and there's definitely some of that Germanic fairy tale darkness around the edges.

Let my light banish your darkness!

What with a very busy week at work and the fallout from tomorrow's giant patch bomb Villagers and Heroes probably won't get much play for a while now but it's done enough already to establish a firm position in the hierarchy of "MMOs I Might Play Quite Often", something the previous two versions never really achieved.

I was even looking at the cash shop, which looks very reasonably priced, especially to someone coming from ANet's outrageously expensive Gem Store, and there's a better than even chance I'll spend some money there if I carry on playing. I fancy a house and some sheep and the bags are really cheap. As Maldwiz pointed out to Tobold, we all have the same 24 hours in our days so what we do with them is our choice but the choice is far too hard.

Ill Communication

The recent furore over the Heart of Thorns pre-purchase and its incomplete features list, along with the exposure of my own inaccurate understanding of one of its features, highlights just how confusing the whole process has been from the start. Jeromai summed it up perfectly in a comment

"Their whole information distribution chain is more than out of whack, assuming that we know what the devs know, that we're going to comb through every last medium (social media, Twitch, Youtube, livestreams, blogs, beta sneak peeks, god knows what) in order to put together the whole picture of what the expansion contains."

This is becoming something of a common complaint among what might be called the traditionalist faction within the wider MMO audience, the kind of people who write long-form posts on blogs or take the time to read them, along with the small minority of players who visit a game's official forums. There's a tendency to feel disenfranchised rather than empowered by this new, democratized distribution of information.

When Daybreak Games recently decided to move discussion on the beta for the Rum Cellar DLC to reddit instead of the official forums there was consternation and anger among the very conservative EQ2 fanbase. It turned out to be a storm in a teacup, of course, since the beta itself was over in the blink of an owlbear's eye and, as this thread gleefully confirms, no-one used reddit as instructed anyway, least of all the Daybreak devs.

EQ2Wire supremo Feldon summed it up in the thread thus: "Community/Marketing announced something. The EQ2 devs fulfilled their obligations and posted on Reddit. In addition, they continued posting here, on a platform with which they are familiar and comfortable".

When the genre was younger there was supposedly less diffraction, with the options for communication being limited to the official forums, in-game communications and a handful of  game- and topic-specific websites. For quest information on Everquest back at the turn of the century, for example, you might have turned to Allakhazam, to EQAtlas for maps and to Caster's Realm for spells. If you played a monk or a rogue you would, perhaps, keep Monkly Business or The Safehouse bookmarked. Warriors would visit The Steel Warrior, Druids The Druids Grove and so on. I'm not sure that every class had its own dedicated website but most certainly did.

Many guilds also hosted their own websites, either independently or often via the guild and character database portal Magelo, use of which became almost de rigeur for a while as people would demand to see your Magelo profile before allowing you into a group. Even I had a profile there although I never really used it for anything.

Somewhat surprisingly, most of those decade-and-older portals listed in the previous couple of paragraphs are still up and running in one form or another, although Caster's Realm folded its tents in 2010 and The Steel Warrior finally went dark just this January. Allakhazam evolved into the Zam network, itself now under threat, while EQAtlas, which creator, Muse, stopped updating around the release of the Planes of Power expansion, can still be found at Allakabor.com.

All of these and many more became sources of not-always reliable general information. In the course of a heated in-game discussion over some arcane point of game mechanics or lore, evidence from one or other would often be cited as "proof". Often, though, it was nothing of the kind, just hearsay given spurious weight by the imprimatur of a well-known name.

When Mythic launched Dark Age of Camelot, along with the game came The Camelot Herald. It was an official companion website that tracked and recorded in-game activity at realm, guild and character level and it was brilliantly fronted by Sanya Weathers. Although, now, it looks like something carved on stone tablets, at the time it seemed revelatory - actual, direct, immediate communication with the people making the game! It was a huge difference from what we'd been accustomed to, trying to wring some kind of meaningful response out of Abashi on SOE's whineplay gameplay forum.

From then on the floodgates slowly began to creak open. The arrival of WoW brought an exponential growth of interest in the genre that co-incided with the beginning of the social media age but, just as the wider world took a while to get up to speed with always-on, instant mass communication, so did MMO gaming.

At the launch of Warhammer Online in September 2008 blogging was still in the ascendency and MySpace was about to peak. By the end of the year the best days of all three were already behind them. New media, new games, new ways of communicating, all were coming online faster than anyone expected and many could handle.

Not much more than half a decade on the world has changed almost out of recognition. Not only are there hundreds of MMOs and millions of MMO gamers but your granny skypes you from her tablet, your boss checks your Facebook page, Robert Smith follows you on Twitter and your cousin just tweeted he quit his job because he can make more money Twitch-streaming Hearthstone.

It's a full-time job just keeping up to date. And everything's connected. You never know who's reading or watching. Just this week I noticed an unusual uptick in views from Facebook, which turned out to be coming from a link on the Villagers and Heroes FB page to my mini-review of the game's revamp. One of the devs even popped in here to comment, which is the kind of notice every blogger hopes to get, although only when they've been saying something nice about someone...

It's the modern world and its hardly surprising entertainment companies especially want to grab a share. Partly it's the thrill of the new and partly it's fear of being left behind. There's a lot of push and a lot of pull. You only had to watch Dave Georgeson doing his Livestreams to know he was in his element. I doubt anyone had to persuade him to pickup a mic and stride around a stage. More like hold him back. His former sidekick, now successor, Terry Michaels, on the other hand, looks like someone shoved him out there with a cattle-prod.

When it comes to efficiency, though, well, who knows? Are ArenaNet, to get back to where this ramble began, really making such a bad job of communicating with their audience? Worse than the rest? Probably not.

Like almost every media company these days they try the scattergun approach, firing seemingly random broadsides across every available social platform. It means fragments of detail sometimes burst and fade in some corner where no-one happened to be paying much attention at the time.

To counter such anarchic, if orchestrated, spontaneity, however, they post rigorous and meticulous pieces on the official website, all of which they hyperlink through the game's own launcher. It's hard to claim that they don't exercise due diligence to their non-paying customers.

And yet, for all that rigor, even immersed, committed players like Jeromai and myself end up feeling we're in a fog, that we must have missed something, that we don't really feel on top of our brief. If the people who are paying attention feel this way, what of the reported 90% of players who never follow out of game sources at all?

Well I can only offer anecdotal reportage but from the lively and frequent conversations I've participated in in map chat from Wayfarer Hills to Lion's Arch, my impression is that, while some people have a vague idea something is going on, most haven't even noticed. The in-game pop-up was quite possibly the first time some people had even heard of Heart of Thorns and some of them still don't know what it is, far less what it means for them.

In game this week I heard people arguing vehemently that the expansion will be free, that it won't cost more than $10, that you will be able to buy it for Gems, even that it's a new game entirely. I heard people say they'd already bought the $99 edition and others saying they would never buy it at any price. I heard quite a few people asking, nervously, if they had to buy it and what would happen if they didn't. Mostly what I heard, though, was confusion and misinformation.

I've played a fair few MMOs as they've passed through the expansion cycle and I don't think I've ever heard the public channels as uncertain and ill-informed as this over the simple release of a boxed expansion. That's only the background noise, though. The expansion and whatever it does or doesn't bring can at least be pushed out into the long grass of later in the year. By the time the release arrives we will know what we are getting so all decisions can be deferred until then.

On Tuesday, however, something happens that cannot be shrugged away until later. An elephantine pre-expansion patch drops, filled with changes that will rework the mechanics of the game and necessitate a complete re-appraisal of every character. Anet went to the unprecedented lengths of emailing the entire draft patch notes to every accountholder a week in advance, presumably on the grounds that the thing would take a week to read. The chances of more than a handful of players actually having read them are infinitesimal.

I like a bit of chaos so I'm quite looking forward to it but not everyone will be so sanguine. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Could ANet have done more to soften the impact? Well, you can always do more but in the end it probably isn't so much the channels that companies use that matter so much as the intent with which they use them and the willingness of their players to pay attention. Despite the proliferation of platforms I'm not sure that's much different to how it ever was or that it can ever change. They've done as much as they can and it won't help a lot.

None of which, of course, either explains or excuses the absence of a basic list of contents on the Pre-Purchase box. That's just daft.

Hitting A (Pay) Wall: GW2

There's been a bit of a bit of a hoo-hah this week. You may have heard about it. ArenaNet came out with the pre-release, pre-order, pre-purchase details for Heart of Thorns, their much-hyped first expansion to Guild Wars 2. Just in case anyone hasn't seen the skinny, there it is, down below.

I stole that image from Aywren who, like an awful lot of people, has already decided to sit this whole thing out at least until after launch, if not for ever. There's a reddit campaign up and running that aims to persuade people to boycott the expansion. It's currently 84% upvoted (whatever that means). The thread on the official ANet forums totals eighty-two pages as I write, with over 4000 posts, most of which, if a random sampling is anything like a guide, are vows not to buy HoT until Something Is Done About It.

Ravious makes a heartfelt plea for tolerance and compassion for the poor artists and designers. They just tried to make a nice game for everyone only to find themselves hounded off Twitter and reddit by the baying internet hordes, all for something that they didn't even have anything to do with. Tobold, who doesn't really do nuance and doesn't have a dog in the fight anyway, since he doesn't play the game in the first place, chips in to lay the whole thing at the door of "the usual entitlement kids".

I guess we should go round them up. Anyone know where they usually hang out? Oh yes, Twitter and reddit and the forums. Not on nice blogs like these, that's for sure. Oh, never mind that anyway. It's too late to close that door.

This is just a sample of the furor. The story hasn't made the BBC Technology News pages yet but I imagine it's only a matter of time.

My own first reaction was mostly along the lines of "what's all the fuss about?" Yes, $50 (£35) is on the pricey side for a bog-standard, basic version of an MMO expansion but it's hardly out of the ballpark. The perks and extras in the deluxe versions do look a bit weary and shop-worn but then, to me, they almost always do, which is why I have never in fifteen years bought one.

Wait, I think I can make something out through the fog...is it a release date? Nah...

Dig a bit deeper, though, and reasons to be scornful begin to make themselves clear. There's the highly contentious issue of ANet overtly promoting the base game over the past few weeks with the strong message that it's needed to play the expansion, only to reveal, after (presumably) many thousands of people had taken them at their word and bought the game, that it in fact comes bundled with the expansion anyway.

That is, at best, clumsy marketing. Some people, quite a lot of people, think it's more sinister than that. I'd probably be one of them if I hadn't experienced enough marketing cock-ups from the inside over the years at various places I've worked to realize that it's entirely possible the people who wrote the sales blurbs had no idea what the guys setting the parameters for the pre-purchase had in mind.

Ah, there's that word again: pre-purchase. It's an unusual one for MMOs. We're used to all kinds of Early Access deals that are, effectively, pre-purchases but when it comes to expansions for existing games we're more accustomed to pre-orders. The difference is whose bank the money is in between now and launch and when you can change your mind: pre-release means "yours" and "any time until release"; pre-purchase means "now" and "never".

Got to cure this acrophobia somehow before all that verticality arrives.

Still, if you're sure you'll want it when it comes and you can afford it then why not pay now? Well, perhaps because as yet no-one has any idea when "when it comes" is going to be. We're no nearer knowing a release date now than we were in February. It might be August, it might be November, it might be 2025.

Of course, if you do make that pre-purchase you get immediate access to all the beta events, of which there are currently none scheduled. There might be some. There probably will be some. A few of them might even last longer than the two-hour sessions we've seen so far, or take place in more than a corner of one unfinished zone, or not be open to everyone anyway.

Oh yes, zones. About time they got a mention. It's traditional to at least list how many of those a given MMORPG expansion is going to add to the game it expands. Here's what Zam said about EQ2's last expansion, Altar of Malice:

"In total, the expansion will include:

• Level cap raised to 100 for tradeskill, adventuring and guilds
• 2 new overlands zones
• 14 new heroic zones
• 6 new raid zones
• 6 new advanced solo zones
• HQs, L&Ls
• 4 new avatars
• New tradeskill quests
• Tradeskill apprentice with "best in slot recipes"

That's quite specific. I quite like to see a feature list like that before I get my credit card out. I'd quite to like to know just how many zones there are in HoT and, even though I almost never set foot in GW2 dungeons, how many new dungeons we're getting (have any HoT dungeons even been mentioned yet?).

Guild Halls are going to be wasted on some people...

The thing is, even without the rather expensive box price, the very lackluster selection of "goodies" and the absence of a free character slot to for the new Revenant profession (just plain mean and a terrible PR own-goal), HoT looks, well, pretty ropy.

So far it looks like a claustrophobic jungle where we expand only upwards, like a 1960s urban redevelopment project.  "Verticality" stands in for horizontality or what we traditionally call zones, maps or explorable areas.

That does not appeal to me and nor do the recently-revealed Guild Halls which, ironically, look as though they would serve perfectly well as explorable maps themselves. I get the feeling our three-person guild would be as lost in one of those as three mice in St Paul's Cathedral and have about as much impact on the space.

In fact, hardly anything about HoT appeals to me. Some of it is meh, the rest is yikes! Nothing I've seen so far is wow! Or WoW for that matter, which at this point I am thinking is a negative, not the positive it would have been four years ago. I could go through the whole "feature list", such as it is, and detail why I'm not excited but, well, I'm not interested enough.

Zubon suggests that I should already know by my emotional reaction that I'm done with GW2 and don't need to buy HoT. "Do big changes inspire interest or dread?" he asks. "You have already made your decision, you just need to recognize it".

We may be at Jormag but our minds are on Our Glorious Leader

Well, yes, that's all very well except for one thing. I do, very definitely, want to go on playing WvW. I am very excited about that. As I type this there is a fantastic, nail-biting match going on in which Yaks Bend may just sneak a win over the combined efforts of a cheating Fort Aspenwood and their lick-spittle sometime-lackeys Sea of Sorrows.

Mrs Bhagpuss is in there right now and I want to get this written so I can join her and the rest of our brave, beleaguered forces. As things stand only blogging is getting in the way of me doing just that but come the release of HoT it won't really be an option at all unless I have bought and installed the expansion, which replaces three out of the four WvW maps with new ones.

Or so I believed until half an hour ago until Ettesiun and Jondare started me wondering with their comments. Actually it turns out this is completely untrue! I went and did some fact-checking and, as you can hear Colin Johanson say at around 11.55 in this interview with Angry Joe, all players will have access to the new WvW maps whether they buy the expansion or not. I do think he sounds a bit as though he wishes it were otherwise but still, there it is. There goes my Ringo joke. I was rather fond of it too! 

So it now appears I don't have to buy the Heart of Thorns expansion in order to go on playing WvW in a full and meaningful fashion. I'm going to have to come up with some other reason to buy it I guess. Damned if I can think of one off the top of my head though.

And all these facts have made a right old mess out a perfectly good argument, too!

Come on the Yaks!

Rebuilding The Spires : EQ2

The guidelines are up for the forthcoming EQ2 Timelocked Expansion Servers. Yes, already. These Daybreak guys don't hang about, do they?

Wilhelm has a great, detailed post up about it, which more than covers all the bases. I was typing up a reply to that but it ran on a little so I moved it here instead.

Geez. Where to start...

• I do not believe there is anything like the public interest in EQ2 nostalgia that there is for EQ. I'm going to be pretty surprised if we see anything remotely like the feeding frenzy that accompanied the launch of Ragefire.

• Oddly, though I agree with Wilhelm broadly that EQ/EQ2 and PvP have never been happy bedfellows, I think the PvP version here could be the more successful of the two. Almost all of the changes seem to be the ones PvP players have been yelling about for years and it's not like they really have a "home" they feel happy in right now, so it should at least sop up just about all of whatever interest still exists for that format.

• Those unlock times are insane. An expansion every month or every other month for the slacker option. I can only think they've looked at the speed people actually level on retro servers, worked out that it really does only take a few weeks, at most, for the bleeding edge guilds to clear the entirety of the available content in an expansion and decided to benchmark on that. Sod everyone who can't keep up. It seems a very odd way to try and monetize this thing though - you'd think they'd want to keep people hanging around, although maybe they're bargaining on wringing as much money out of people as fast as possible before the marks realize they've been had.

• As for that "feature set", they really should start running business seminars. Apparently there's a way to make money by selling a cut-down version of something people already have to those same people, even though they already get the full-fat version for free! It's like they've found a magic money mine!

• Like Wilhelm, I also prefer Freeport/Qeynos followed by Antonica and Commonlands for my 1-20 play but for the record I'd like to say that I prefer Darklight Woods to Frostfang Sea by a considerable margin, if only because FFS is so utterly depressing to look at.  I'd much prefer to start on The Isle of Refuge but...

• They do seem to have a hang-up about that, don't they? Bringing it back would be such an easy PR win and it surely can't be hard to do, yet they just will not countenance it. I'd love to know what's going on there...

I just can't summon up any enthusiasm at all for this project. For my money, the current version of EQ2 is a hundred times better than even the first, good iteration, the one after Scott Hartsman came on board and saved the ship from crashing into the rocks back in 2005. The original iteration was horrible but at least re-creating that would be of some pseudo-historic value - maybe. This isn't even close - it's just the current version with bits switched off. Some of the best bits, I'd say.

There are good arguments to made for the original Everquest experience, arguments that can be remade convincingly for each evolution of that game through Kunark, Velious, Luclin, Planes of Power and Lost Dungeons of Norrath at least. There are probably people who'd even make a case for Gates of Discord and Omens of War although I'd like to think they aren't allowed anything sharp to write with where they are.

Over in EQ2 however, while there may be things to be said for the way the State of the Game developed circa Echoes of Faydwer and Rise of Kunark, having played through most of the expansions at time of launch I never felt anything like the huge step changes that each EQ expansion brought. There was a gear reset and that tended to be about it. I'm not at all sure what nostalgia this is even supposed to kindle.

All the same, I'll be logging in and voting and I suppose I'll end up making a character on whatever the server is called (it'll be some dragon's name, no doubt) and I'll be there whenever it launches (a lot sooner than anyone expects, probably). Be there or be square or something.

I'm starting to think all this nostalgia is getting out of hand though.

Scratch "starting".

Seasons Come, Seasons Go

As the days drift into summer and I prepare to go back to work after a longish break it occurs to me to take stock of what I'm currently doing and what I might do in the months to come, at least when it comes to playing MMORPGs. For an uncomfortably long time it felt as though just about all I played was GW2 and, while I still play far more of that than anything else, at least it seems now that other games and projects are beginning to push their way in, at last.

GW2

GW2 is still dominant. I have a fanciful idea that if Mrs Bhagpuss wasn't so keen on it I might play less but the fact is I still play a lot of it when I'm home alone and she's out at work. It remains one of the best pick-up-and-play MMOs I've ever enjoyed. There's always something to do or somewhere to go and very little ever gets in the way of going there and doing it.

I think very much of the game's success rests on that incredible ease of access. I've never known any MMO with such an ever-open, revolving door, through which old faces re-appear without fanfare day after week after month after year. I wonder whether the upcoming major revamp of the trait and skill system will affect that negatively? I know that having to redo all my choices after a similar event has all but killed my interest in other games.

As we all twiddle our thumbs as we wait for Heart of Thorns the focus in our house is very much on the War in the Mists. Since Yaks Bend won the third WvW tournament last autumn and rose to the ranks of Tier Two we've been locked in a never-ending grudge match with Fort Aspenwood.

It's important to treat your enemy with respect.

Apparently there were some kind of shenanigans last week while we were away on holiday and this week there is a war of retaliation going on. We woke up on Saturday morning to find that YB had taken control of the whole of FA's borderland and waypointed all their keeps, which is the WvW equivalent of slapping someone in the face with a leather gauntlet. Our crazed and glorious leader, who almost literally never sleeps, then proceeded to stay awake for more than 48 hours making sure we held the lot.

Since then it's been a series of huge battles that never seems to end. All weekend I kept meaning to log out and do something else but there was always an emergency somewhere. As I write this we are still just short of 7k ahead, down from a high of 22k and I'm itching to log in and see what the maps look like.

Enter the Mesmer. Take 2.

I did find time to make my second mesmer, something I've been meaning to do for a while. As we approach HoT I'm trying to consolidate onto a single account for expansion purposes and my only mesmer is on the wrong one. The gold-to-gems exchange rate was as good as I've seen it for a while at the weekend so I dug into my warchest and bought another character slot.

The natural inclination was to go for yet another Asura although my first Mesmer is a human for some reason I forget. Mrs Bhagpuss has a Charr mesmer that she says is very funny to play. In the end though I decided to go for a Sylvari, just because there's an outside chance that race might have some special role in the expansion content and I currently don't have one on the right account.

The next question is whether to level the mesmer normally or boost her with xp and leveling scrolls. Since I like leveling so much chances are it will be the former although I did use one of the Advance Directly To Level 20 scrolls just to get a bit of a running start.

GW2 probably takes up two-thirds to three-quarters of my playtime each day. The rest is split between Everquest, EQ2, Dragon Nest and now Villagers and Heroes.

No Officer, I wasn't begging. My feet were just tired. Yes, I'll move along now.

 

Everquest

EQ at the moment seems to mean Ragefire. My necro dinged nine at the weekend. He's still trudging to Blackburrow and back every session, combining leveling with faction-raising. It sure takes a lot of gnoll teeth to convince that Captain Tillin a gnome's not up to no good.

I'm acutely aware I ought to get some grouping in just for the fun of it but I can't see it happening this side of Kunark. I'd love to do the Sarnak Fort in Lake of Ill Omen again. Maybe I should start a druid in preparation. Still, I've already played more than I expected and I think there are a few more sessions left in me before I wander off.

When Ragefire peters out I'd like to get back to my Magician who's currently a smidge away from dinging 90. It would be lovely to have a max level character in EQ again but the level cap is now 105 and those 15 levels, solo, even for a mage, the most capable of all solo classes in modern Norrath, would take me a year of Lessons at least.

Remember me? No, apparently not.

 

EQ2

The channeler I started in EQ2 seems to have gone dormant. When I do log in it's mainly to do the Phantom and Tranquil Sea weeklies for the tokens and armor. My Berserker is slowly kitting himself out to a very good standard for a solo character. I skipped the recent Rum Cellar DLC, which seemed mainly suitable for groups, but I will certainly be buying the autumn "Campansion", assuming it has the regulation amount of solo content.

The recently-announced server merges are unlikely to affect my regular characters, all of whom are on Freeport, the second most populated server behind Antonia Bayle. Server merges can spell bad things for an MMO but in this case its something people have been asking for for a long time so its probably good news on balance.

I seem to have gone all pastel crayonny.

 

Wind-Down Games

Dragon Nest has gone unplayed since I got back from Spain last week but only because of lack of time, not interest. There is a risk it might conflict directly with the new shiny, Villagers and Heroes, for the same end-of-day wind-down slot, though.

They aren't really anything at all alike, DN being fast, action-oriented and badly translated while V&H is stately, steady and beautifully written, but somehow they have a similar, light-hearted, ironic humor and a bright, cheerful surface that makes them both ideal to play just before bed. I hope I'll find time to keep playing both, unlike previous candidates like Eldevin or Istaria which seem to have slipped off the table entirely.

 

TSW

The changes to overland solo content difficulty in TSW didn't do much to hold me after I popped in to check it out. They're good changes but, honestly, I never really had much trouble with that part of the game. I soloed all the way to the end of Carpathian Teeth on my original run. It's the instances that I always had trouble with.

I would love to finish the main sequence quest from the original TSW sometime but I am stuck on a fight about three chapters or so from the end (I think) and I can't face doing it again. I'd need to do whatever it takes to overgear myself because it seems to be a DPS issue (as well as an incompetence one, but my experience in MMOs is that you can almost always upgrade your character to compensate for your inability as a player if only you wait long enough). Even the addition of mounts hasn't been enough to lure me to log back in.

He said wait right here, I'll be back soon. But that was months ago!

 

ESO and ArcheAge

ESO and ArcheAge both ended extremely abruptly for me. I was enjoying both of them, playing and blogging, and then I just seemed to hit a complete full stop.

In ArcheAge it was the moment I filled up my work point bar or whatever it's called. It felt like that was what I'd been aiming to do and now I'd done it and I literally never logged in again. Crazy.

In ESO it was the change to F2P. My free 30 days finished, there was a short gap before it went free and that small hiatus was enough to derail me. Again, haven't logged in since.

WildStar

I'd like to get back to both of those sometime but then there are other MMORPGs to consider. Not least WildStar. I looked at the box on Amazon yesterday. I was about to put it in my basket when I noticed the game is Region Locked, something I'd completely forgotten. I really dislike playing on European servers so now I have to think about whether to buy a box from Amazon.com (they will ship them, I checked) so as to get a US server code.

Or maybe when the game goes F2P it won't be region-locked any more. If so, I should maybe just wait. A region-locked F2P would seem very weird unless it was franchised to different companies across the world, which I don't believe WildStar is.

 

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Then there's SW:ToR. It's not a game I ever had any interest in playing but the current change in development direction makes me wonder if the original MMO-proper part of the game will be around for much longer. The upcoming Knights of the Fallen Empire that everyone's making such a big hoo-hah about doesn't sound so much like an expansion to me as a completely different game.

A game that I wouldn't call an MMO at all. With the months of 12X xp leading up to launch and the xpack coming with a free level 60 anyway it looks very much as though BioWare is going out of the MMO business and retrenching back to the single-player/co-op story model on which they built their latter-day reputation.

If that's the plan then SW:ToR would become an instanced lobby game not a real MMORPG. Maybe between now and the coming of KotFE will be the last chance to play the game as a proper MMO. If so I would want at least to give it a look before it goes away because for sure there will be no Original SW:tOR Emulator Project coming along later to satisfy anyone's historical curiosity.

So there's all that, plus a gazillion other possibles like Project: Gorgon and the Pathfinder free trial and Trove and who knows what else. I haven't even finished the main storyline in City of Steam, something I thought I'd have been done with a couple of years ago.

Ah well. To every thing there is a season as they say. Or, in the case of MMOs, a session, at least.

Here We Go Again : Villagers and Heroes

What I really need is a new MMORPG. That's what I'm always telling myself as I look at the twenty-plus already waiting on my desktop.

There's that Age of Conan box still sitting, sealed, on the bookshelf to my left, for example. That's a game that always looks great in screenshots. I ought at least to give it a try before Funcom go out of business. Or what about SW:ToR? It's clearly going somewhere these days although I'm not sure anyone knows where. Wouldn't it be terrible to ignore it for five years and then find out it had been great all along? That's a mistake I don't want to make again.

Anyway, I blame MassivelyOP. They will keep putting out these little teasers for things that sound interesting, MMOs I've never heard of, or ones I'd forgotten were still around, like Villagers and Heroes.

V&H is not a new game. Far from it. It's not even new to me. It started off several years back as a cheerful little browser-based romp going by the ultra-generic name of "A Mystical Land". I played it briefly back then and found it mildly amusing, especially in the way some of the NPCs were so blatantly rude to the player characters, but it never really stuck.

At some point there was a name-change to the scarcely less-generic "Villagers and Heroes" Some gameplay tweaks followed but although I popped back once or twice it still didn't grab me. Now here it comes again, this time trading under the title Villagers and Heroes: Reborn. The screenshots from the latest revamp looked promising, it was already installed, the icon was even right there on my desktop, so...

I tried my old login details and they worked. The new version of the game updated in a few minutes. I read the extensive patch notes while I waited. AVG threw a fit but I overrode that, gave it the relevant permissions and off I went for another round.

Apparently I'd made it as far as level nine last time. There was my old character. The graphical revamp appeared to have turned him nut brown. He looked like a seventy-year old farmer. I ran him around for a while until it occurred to me that since the entire start of the game had been given a makeover I'd be better off starting from scratch.

The game, which is F2P, allows you three character slots. Since there are four classes, the extremely traditional Warrior, Wizard, Hunter and Priest, I'm guessing you can buy at least a fourth slot to make up the full set. I already had a Hunter so this time round I went for Wizard.

Character creation is excellent. Really, really good. The whole look and feel is solid, professional, warm and inviting. There aren't a whole lot of subtle variations to be made to how your character looks but the choice is reasonable.

All the time you're on the character creation screen some plummy-voiced old thesp chats away in the background. He seems to have an agenda of some kind, or possibly a grudge. Maybe against you. It gave the whole thing a vaguely sinister, off-color air that I liked a lot. I wouldn't trust him to get me a donut from the commissary, I know that much.

As you go through the selection of starting skills and abilities, choose which part of the realm you hail from and flip through the pages of your biography, each choice you make adds a detailed paragraph to your character description. It's a very effective way to give every character an automated version of the kind of detailed background dedicated roleplayers would make up for themselves but no-one else ever bothers with. I thought it gave at least as good a result as GW2's similar system.

V&H also has by far the best random name generator I have ever seen. I spent about fifteen minutes just playing with it. It brings up a huge variety of names in a range of formats - ordinary one-word names like Norman or Rose, forename and surname pairs, portentous titles, typical fantasy gibberish, surreal combinations and straightforward names you might imagine working alongside in an insurance office...

I almost went with Katie Buck Mutton. I could feel her character coming through so strongly just from that name. Too strongly. I thought she might just take me over. I plumped for something plain and simple and in I went.

There's one of those fly-past introductions to the world, voiced by the same unreliable narrator. It judders and jerks, which is a known bug, and if it had lasted more than the minute or so it did I think it would have made me motion sick. Then you touch down in the new starting zone, Ethos Island.

Even back when it was called A Mystical Land this was always a game with strong, clear art direction and visual flair. The revised visuals keep the cartoonish look but bring it very much  up-to-date. The colors zing, everything looks solid, rounded, firm. It's one of those games that looks better when you're inside it than it does in screenshots (some games are the opposite) so, given that it looks good in screenshots...

When it comes to gameplay, V&H isn't breaking any new ground. It has been described as a "PvE Sandbox" and maybe it is but it sure has a lot of quests too. I like MMORPG questing. I like to read all the text, listen to all the dialog, follow all the plots. Anyone who doesn't like doing these things is not going to have a epiphany while playing Villagers and Heroes but for people who enjoy a well-written MMO quest with a sense of irony, a fluid prose style and a light touch, there's plenty here to enjoy.

I found myself caught up in the main storyline rather easily. Just what did failed Mayoral candidate Rhoda drop into the spooky old well after dark? What made Clementine deClancy vanish? What do the blood symbols on the note Chauncey's brother found mean?

The main-line quests are presented in great detail, first in the initial quest dialog and later in a diary-style write-up in your journal. Someone who actually knows how to write spent a long time over this stuff and it shows.The side-quests, of which there are many, get the same attention on the dialog but only a brief note in the diary. Every aspect of the UI, from the Quest Journal to the Inventory to the Crafting Window, is crisp, clean and very user-friendly.

It was nice to see that the residents of the realm haven't received any kind of politeness makeover. The unbearably snobbish Clementine dismissed me as a "filthy little ant" and Viggo thinks I have "a hooligan mouth" and sent me on a quest to get some soap to wash it out!

As I wandered about trying to find some I bumped into various crafting and gathering  trainers, which derailed my good questing intentions. Although I took Tailoring and Plant Lore at character creation, after a couple of hours play I somehow ended up as a Smith and a Miner. Doesn't matter - in V&H you can do all the things and on the evidence so far you'd want to because all the things are fun.

So, here I am in Lower Ethos Island down by the docks, looking for parchments stolen by the disturbingly intelligent local rats. I know how to Gnogment my weapons and I already killed a Daily Bounty Boss. If I was in the market for a new MMORPG this one would be in with a fair chance. Better than fair.

Good thing I don't have time for another MMO then, isn't it?

I Can See For Miles : GW2

One little wrinkle in the whole Pay-To-Win debate that never gets much of a mention is the huge disparity in hardware we all take for granted. It's something that sits in back of every aspect of the hobby from competitive PvP to solo questing.

Some developers make a huge effort to equalize the playing field within the game itself. All kinds of mechanics get a run-out. PvP matches impose a standard gear set, instances cap or snap to level, smart systems run buff checks and remove the ones they don't approve... It's a long list with a clear intent : get as close as possible to player parity.

Only no-one and nothing pays much attention to what's going on outside the game.

There's an event in GW2 called The Frozen Maw. It runs once every two hours in Wayfarer's Foothills. Like many of GW2's regularly-scheduled open raid events it's developed a culture and traditions all its own. As the pre-events conclude and the evil, dragon-worshipping shaman makes his awkward, egotistical claim that he can handle us all with a little effort, people begin quoting their frame-rates in chat.

Small turn-out today.

All big events have a tendency to drop frames but for some reason this one is the worst. As the shaman struggles to complete his ritual to summon the giant ice elemental that will never appear (I've seen the shaman win - nothing happens) the screen fills with flurrying snow. This is what usually gets the blame for the slowdown. As the snow thickens and more snow dervishes spawn frame-rates drop to single figures. Well, mine does.

My PC is getting on for five years old. It was low-mid range for a gaming rig when I got it. I've upgraded it somewhat over the years but I am guessing it would now class as straight entry-level as far as gaming goes. I was going to replace it this Spring but it still runs everything I want to play smartly and efficiently so I've put the decision off for a while.

As I'm strafing around, dodging and rolling with my 9FPS, frankly I can't tell much, if any, difference. Everything looks the same as it did when I had 40FPS, which is about the best I ever get. I read once that the human eye can't distinguish frame rates faster than 30 per second although I've since read that that's not true. Either way, any difference escapes my notice.

Meanwhile, however, there will always be some bright spark claiming 80FPS and listing all the components of his rig so we can admire his good fortune and good sense. Or, really, just his disposable income.

For PvE events taking place under the auspice of ArenaNet's All Must Win Prizes ethos this really doesn't matter. In WvW yesterday, though, a discussion occurred that pointed up how sometimes spending more money really can give you a direct competitive advantage, even in as forgiving a game as GW2.

Yaks Bend had a defensive trebuchet placed in what was supposed to be an unassailable spot inside a keep. Fort Aspenwood attacked and somehow took it down. This lead to the usual, inevitable accusations of hacking.

There used to be a widely-used software hack that allowed you to see further than you should have been able to and thereby to place the targeting circle over things that ought to have been out of reach. This practice, known as "zoom-hacking", largely disappeared when ANet added a first person view. They changed the whole way the camera works, expanded the field of vision and it became possible to do just about anything zoom-hacking used to do by using the legitimate in-game controls.

Extreme close-up!

The treb that got downed by an arrow cart, however, seemed to be beyond even the new, wider FoV. Except someone on our side knew better. He explained that it could be done by playing the game in Windowed mode and stretching the image across multiple monitors, thereby extending the maximum possible field of view.

I don't know if that is an accurate description but if we take him at his word it would, surely, make what happened a legal and legitimate tactic. No third party software or other is being used to alter GW2. There was a video demo of the practice on YouTube way back when the game was in beta in 2012.

So there you have it. Pay to Win. Spend more money out of game to get a clear in-game advantage. Buy a better graphics card, a faster CPU, a topline gaming mouse. Set up multiple monitors. Hire a masseur to stand behind your swivel chair and massage your shoulders as you play. The only limit to your potential advantage over other players is your wallet.

By comparison, a mere selection of codified official advantages, available for nominal sums through the official in-game cash shop, seems hardly worth complaining about.