I Think I'm Gonna Let My Subscription Slide

After some thought this morning, I cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft, just a day before it fell due.  I filled out the "Why don't you love me anymore?" questionnaire including the "any other reasons" section, where I ran into the five-hundred word buffer long before I'd finished explaining why it wasn't them, it was me.

Even so, I was pretty cagey. There was something about my decision-making process I wasn't sure I wanted Blizzard to know. Among the reasons I feel I can't really justify paying ten pounds a month for WoW, the main one is that I can do most of the things I enjoy in the game without paying them a penny.

I strongly prefer the low-mid level game to what comes later. I like making new characters, trying different race and class combos and generally goofing around. All of that, I can do for free. With the level squish effectively adding another twenty old-school levels to the free option as well as opening up every expansion short of Shadowlands for anyone, there's more than enough free content to keep me amused for the foreseeable future. 

I'm not sure I want to bring that to Blizzard's attention. I mean, have they noticed? I'm guessing they're now so laser-focused on the bizarro version of WoW people have to pay for that they've completely forgotten they're giving away a bigger and arguably better mmorpg than anything we used to pay for back when subscriptions were the norm.

I was so certain I'd be carrying on without the sub I even did some prep for when it lapses. I made two new characters on the Horde side, where I had no-one under forty, then I had my level fifty goblin shaman buy half a dozen thirty-slot bags and post them to the newbies along with five hundred gold pocket money each. 

 

Then I ran a few old raids on my fifty hunter to make a couple of thousand gold and sent some of that to several of my low-level Alliance characters, along with all the hexweave bags he's been making in his garrison. And of course I'd already taken the trouble to start a new garrison with my level fifteen druid, who can take over as Alliance bagmaker if I need more, which I probably won't.

Apart from the simple truth that I just haven't been using most of the parts of the game I'm paying for since the new year, one of my main motives for cancelling is to find out just how much fun WoW is under the free to play rules. On paper, there's a lot more freedom of choice, with double the levels and a huge increase in explorable content, not to mention free players can now have a thousand gold to their names.

And there's the materials vault or whatever it's called. When did they add that? I only noticed it a couple of weeks ago and the mat-packed bags of every character I've logged in since suggests I hadn't just forgotten about it... but then I logged in my gnome hunter, who hasn't been anywhere near a bank for at least a year, went to buy it for her and she already had it. But it was empty... 

No clue how that happened.

Just the massive increase to inventory space alone is going to transform the experience of playing low-level characters. Running out of space has always been a defining feature of the game until I reached a point where I could just buy my way out of it, which was never going to happen on the old version of the free trial. Now that's changed, whether it's going to make for a more enjoyable experience... well, that's what I'd like to find out.

 

I'm also interested to know whether, having made a new vulpera (They start at level ten, annoyingly.) I'll be able to play her. I've tried to research it but the information I've found has been contradictory, never a surprise when it comes to WoW. I think the allied races are excluded from those you can create as a free player, even if you've unlocked them, but whether you can play one that's already on your account is something I'll find out tomorrow.

The penultimate reason for canceling the sub is that, as must be obvious, I've decided not to buy Shadowlands just yet. I did a bit of searching and it seems I could get a key for the expansion for less than £15, which would have been exactly what I'd be willing to pay, but only if I want to play on a U.S. server. For some reason that escapes me, the cheapest EU key in the secondary market runs around £25 whereas I 've seen U.S. keys as low as £13.

I do actually have a U.S. WoW account but for irritating historical reasons I have almost all my characters on an EU one instead. I always prefer to play on American servers when I can but I really don't want to repeat my EverQuest/EverQuest II/Guild Wars 2 history by spreading my efforts across multiple accounts, let alone regions. 

The other problem with buying Shadowlands is that all I'm really interested in is the levelling part. There's a near-zero chance of my carrying on with it once I've seen all the zones and storylines. It seems nuts to pay anything like full price just for that when I still have so much of the older content to play through for free. I'll wait until I can pick up Shadowlands at a price that more closely refelects the use I'm likely to make of it.

 

The final and most pressing reason for the cancellation has nothing at all to do with WoW itself. These last couple of weeks I've barely mentioned EQII and that's because I haven't been playing it much. I even went several days without logging in at all. I'd finished the signature adventure and tradeskill questlines on my Berserker/Weaponsmith and it felt as though I was done with Reign of Shadows other than going through the same content again with another character.

Yeah, that was stupid. I knew it wasn't true, it just felt as though it might be. Last night I finally logged in and while I was setting my Overseer missions I saw someone was setting up a raid for the Wolf PQ in Savage Weald 2. I asked for an invite, got one and ported there. 

When I arrived I noticed I was standing next to an NPC with a green feather over his head. He was a researcher with one of the repeatable research quests so I took it. An hour later I'd done three public quests and got a major upgrade from one of them (celestial quality, shoulder slot). I'd also finished two research quests, one of which gave me a key recipe book for adornments which, when I make them, will give me a bunch more upgrades.

Just like that I had a whole new reason to knuckle down and get on with the expansion. I remembered how important research quests had been in Blood of Luclin a year ago and also how much I'd enjoyed doing them. And I had a ton of fun doing the PQs, which are currently a hot ticket in EQII, at least until a critical mass of people get the drops they want.

I took a moment to consider whether I'd rather be spending my time in WoW or EQII. The answer was obvious. I've been looking for an mmorpg to sink my teeth into and there it was, right in front of me all the time. Back to Norrath it is.

For a while, anyway.

Learn From Experience

Here's a little story. Some of you may have heard it before. If you've played EverQuest it may even have happened to you, long ago, back in the day when things like this used to happen. Of course, they don't happen any more, even in EverQuest. Those days are long gone. Of course they are.

So, a couple of days ago Daybreak were doing some major platform maintenance. Might have been something to do with the recent sale, might just be start of year housekeeping, who knows? Doesn't matter. The point is, all the servers in every game were down for a while. 

In EQ that meant every character trading in the Bazaar, online or offline, got kicked back to character select. Normally I cash out my trader towards the end of the week then I restock for the weekend, when the servers are busiest and trade is brisk, but since he was available I thought I might as well do it early.

As you can see from the screenshot to the left, at character select there are a bunch of buttons just below the list of characters. I've always thought it was an odd design choice to have the Delete Character button there. It's just asking for trouble.

Don't worry! I didn't press that one by mistake. And even if I had, SOE long ago added a confirmation step to take the pressure off customer service. No, there's another button below "delete" that reads "Enter Tutorial". Can't say I've really paid much attention to it in the past.

Well, I will from now on.

You'll notice in the shot to the left that button is greyed out. That's because you can't go back to the tutorial once you reach level ten. On the main account I use these days when I play EverQuest I don't have anyone low enough to use it.

Also, as you can see if you look closely, you can see I'm already over the limit for character slots allowed under Daybreak's current free to play ruleset. In fact, I have seven playable characters out of a maximum of six thanks to some grandfathering rights, which is also probably why my account is flagged "Silver Player", a category I'm not sure exists any more for new players.

All this nit-picking detail is going to mean something in a bit. Patience!

If I was to take a screenshot of the other account I use for EQ, the one on which I have my Bazaar trader set up, you'd be able to see that there I have some characters who can revisit the Mines of Gloomingdeep, should they so desire.  Not that they would. I never liked that tutorial although I'm aware it's quite well thought of by some.

One of those characters is my Bazaar trader himself. He's a level two dwarf paladin and the only reason I can think of that he's not level one is that he must have dinged on discovery xp getting there from Kaladim. If EQ has discovery xp, which I'm not sure it does. 

However he managed it, he's never done anything else since. He lives in the Bazaar. The farthest he ever goes is down the ramp from his trading platform to the bank on the floor below and back. He's wearing the minimal gear he started with and all ten of his inventory slots are filled with trading bags, which in turn are filled with everything he has to sell.

One of the unusual features about the Bazaar when it was introduced with the Shadows of Luclin expansion nineteen years ago was that weight didn't exist there. At the time I think even coin still had weight but even if it didn't everything else certainly did. Weight-reducing bags were an essential accoutrement for all serious adventurers and it was common to see encumbered characters crawling towards vendors to try and sell their heaviest loot so they could move normally again.

In those stricter times it was even possible to find yourself so overweight you could literally no longer move at all, something which led to quite a few comedy moments when incautious players unthinkingly zoned their traders out of the weightless Bazaar to grab something from Plane of Knowledge, only to find the full burden of their bulging packs had nailed them to the ground. Not least because the tradeoff for Bazaar ten-slot bags being extremely cheap was they weigh a ton so you can't easily use them anywhere else.

It happened to me once. I had to get Mrs Bhagpuss to bring her druid over to buff me so I could get back through the door. 

Once bitten, though, eh? Not going to make that mistake again. And anyway, didn't they change Plane of Knowledge to have the same weight restrictions, or lack of them, as the Bazaar?

Spoiler! No, they didn't! And how do I know that? Did I assume otherwise and find out the hard way when I took my trader for a stroll across PoK? I wish! No, it was nothing that simple.

Remember that Enter Tutorial button I mentioned earlier? Think of it as Chekhov's gun. Yes, dear reader, I pressed the damned thing. And shot myself in the foot.

By mistake, of course. And I noticed even as I did it. Just not fast enough to do anything about it.

So there I was in Gloomingdeep. Even before I tried to move I guessed  what would happen when I did : nothing. I wasn't sure, though. I had hope. Maybe there is no encumbrance so bad it can't be shuffled off, these days. 

I play the game. You'd think I'd know but I didn't. I can explain. 

Modern gear in EverQuest has lots of stats. Even at low levels. If you play through the tutorial you'll emerge with enough strength to lift a carthorse let alone a few bags. The character I play most often has a strength of 1203 and she's a magician. She doesn't even need strength.

It's been a long time since any character I play in EverQuest hit their encumbrance level. Well, until yesterday. My paladin-trader was something like 360/60. He could not move. Okay, he could turn around on the spot, three hundred and sixty degrees, because physics works like that in Norrath. Take a step in any direction though? Not happening.

At this point I paused to take stock of my options. Walking out, even at a slow crawl? Off the table. Gating? Nope - melee classes don't get the Gate spell. 

How about "Return Home", the option SOE put in as a mercy to melees so they could at least log in somewhere safe? It's right there at character select. You can see it in the picture above. I logged him out and... just as in that picture, it was greyed out. Apparently it has a cooldown. The timer resets when you log in. How long for I'm not sure but longer than I wanted to wait.

Okay then. I have several accounts. How about I log another one in and send someone to the Gloomingdeep Mines to rescue the pally? Maybe a Druid who can open a portal to Plane of Knowledge. 

Yeah, that didn't work. Got to be under level ten to go to the tutorial, remember? I considered making a new character who would be able to go there, only I was over the character cap for the account. And anyway, what would they do? Carry him?

I had another think and as I was thinking a couple of players ran past me. In the Tutorial. What are the odds? Maybe I could ask one of them for help. I conned them. One was level two, the other was level six. Can't see them helping much. Why humiliate myself?

Maybe I had something in my bags that would help. There are plenty of "clickies" in EQ, items you can click to make something happen, like a port to somewhere. I checked. Guess what? I'd long since stripped the paladin of everything that might take up a valuable trading space. Nothing useful there.

I thought of trying /stuck. Every mmorpg has a command like that to save customer service from being bothered with players hung up on bits of scenery. I tried it. Command not recognized. No, I remember now, EQ never did have anything like that. It's a social game. You're supposed to call a friend to get you out of trouble. I've been that friend a few times. Only it's a long time since I spoke to anyone in EQ.

Next idea - Ranger Gate! That always works. Ranger gate is when a melee class needs to get back to bind in a hurry so they go up to the nearest NPC or mob that cons red and poke it with their sword. So-called because... well, rangers. Under level five you just wake up at your bind spot with all your stuff. A druid could come get him from there. 

I tried to attack the nearest NPC. Couldn't reach him. Tried taunting him. Out of range. Looked for a ranged weapon. Didn't have one.

Bugger. 

At this point I was out of ideas. Time to check google. I found a thread on the forums about getting unstuck. Someone had linked to a list of items that might help. Top of that list was Book of Knowledge, a five-charge clickie that ports you to Plane of Knowledge (where else?). 

And where do you get a Book of Knowledge? From the Gift of Legacies Lost. And where do you get one of those? /Claim. 

Aha! That magical trove of freebies dear to the heart of every longtime EQ and EverQuest II player. The place where all the promos and special event items and bribes and anniversary gifts and expansion pre-order bonuses languish, forgotten and unclaimed. 

Best of all, you can grab them from anywhere, even in the tutorial. I checked and I had a mere 990 or so Gifts of Legacies Lost still pending. So I claimed one. Only one problem. It comes as a gift-wrapped present that goes inside a bag but to use the contents you have to open the gift, which then turns into a bag filled with stuff. And you can't put a full bag inside another bag. You need an open inventory slot. Which the pally didn't have, what with him being a trader and all.

Fortunately he'd had a pretty good few days on the trading floor. Quite a few of his bags were only partly full. It took some swapping about but eventually I managed to empty one of his bags into another and then put the empty bag in as well. Presto! Empty inventory slot. 

I got the Book of Knowledge, clicked it, and presto again! Gate to PoK. Geez! Nightmare over.

Oh yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you? Remember when I said I was pretty sure they'd given Plane of knowledge the same weightlessness as the Bazaar? Yeah, that never happened. Still couldn't move.

At least now the paladin was somewhere my other account could reach him. I got the magician out. She was going to take his money and give him more mats to sell anyway so why not save some time. She could levitate him and he could float his way home. 

Apparently being levitated has no effect on encumbrance. Didn't know that. 

In the end I logged in my druid, brought her over, gave the pally a blast of the old reliable, Spirit of Wolf, plus the highest strength buff he could take and that was just enough to let him waddle off across the grass, back to the Bazaar. The whole escapade took about forty minutes or a quarter of the time it's taken me to write it all down.

The moral of this story is Never Press the Wrong Button. Accidents will happen, though, so the real takeaway has to be Pick the Right Person for the Job. Next time I need a Bazaar trader I'll quickly level a Druid into the teens and then something like this can never happen again.

No, next time it'll be something else.

Who Has The Choice?

For me, 2021 is shaping up to be the year of the well-written video game. The Blackwell Chronicles came through with some quality, pulpish noir. Disco Elysium made a play for the difficult experimental fiction stakes and didn't fall too far short. Along the Edge went for french film blurred and made it home safely.

Standards were set. The bar looked high. Lucky me, I'd left the best for last.

As regular readers may recall, I played Neo Cab's free demo back in October 2019 and reviewed it at some length. I just re-read that post and it covers a good deal of what I thought I was going to say in this one, so if you're interested in trying the game for yourself, something I'd highly recommend, I'd suggest going there first. I'm going to try not to cover the same ground again.

I don't really need to. Now that I've played through the whole game to an ending, there's little in the initial review I'd disagree with. It hits most of the main features I'd want to cover, other than the excellent synthwave score, which definitely deserves a mention. 

Neo Cab is intense. It does play out like an animated movie. The writing is sharp, pulpy, clever. All of that is true but there's so much more.

So much more, in fact, that it's plainly impossible to see the whole of the game on a single playthrough. Even in the demo, which is just the first section of the game excised, there's a clear indication that each choice made occludes another. 

By intent, most likely. When you meet Oona, the quantum statistician, the metatextuality of the game design becomes impossible to miss. I have to wonder. Can you even complete a playthrough where you don't meet Oona? 

Can you blame them?

 

The mechanics suggest you have free choice in who gets to ride your cab but it's hard to imagine how the narrative could function without certain characters and Oona seems like the keystone. Everything she says, does and is seems crucial, not just to the narrative, the plot and the structure but to the game's very reason for being.

I guess the only way to find out is to play the game again. Like she does.

Oona's job is sifting through the timelines to tell the future. Mostly she uses her talent to recover lost passphrases. Quantum computing allows her to observe quadrillions of potential outcomes in seconds. She emblematizes infinite variety. This is overt. Discussed. Context will not be lost.

Here's a problem with narrative-driven games that codify choice: without re-plays it's impossible to tell how real those choices are. In Neo Cab you can literally watch your timelines close down around you when others open up. Every pick-up you take means two or three you didn't and as the game unfurls around you it becomes more and more apparent that it matters.

Or it looks as if it would. Until I play again, though, who knows? I can say with certainty there have to be many more conversations to discover. Every pick-up tells a story and I left plenty waiting by the side of the road for the next driver to enjoy. Whether any of them materially affect the outcome, though? That I can't say without playing again.

I took a second run at Disco Elysium the other night. I wanted to see how things went if instead of going straight edge and career-focused I played things batshit crazy. It seemed like it would be almost a different game that way. It was not. 

Plot in a nutshell.

 

After about two hours I gave up. It didn't seem to matter what I did. The only differences I noticed were the dialogs and even going full Dr. Demento barely seemed to phase anyone. They all found some way to accomodate my insanity into their worldview and carry on dealing with me just the same as when I was straight. Every nodal decision point folded the same way no matter what I did.

I was left with a vague impression that in Disco Elysium a handful of decisions could possibly have long-term implications but the damn game takes over thirty hours to finish. I don't have the time or energy to spare to test whether that impression holds true. Not if almost everything else along the way stays the same.

Testing the timelines in Neo Cab is a much more practical proposition. By comparison the game zips along. Steam tells me my total played time, including the demo (which, after all, is just the first chapter of the full game) checks in at just under five hours. As always seems to be the case, I would have said it felt far longer. In a good way. I'm certain now, subjective time slows down the more intense the experience. And Neo Cab is, that word again, intense.

Once you arrive in Los Ojos, structurally, the way the game works is this: you begin each day with a minimum number of pick-ups to make, a monetary target to hit and a rating to sustain. In theory, if you miss any of these there are penalties. 

What those penalties are I can't say because I never missed any of my marks. I made my pickups, earned my money and never let my rating slip more than half a point below max. And it felt exhausting. Really, it did. Neo Cab has elements of survival game mechanics but they're tied into a commentary on the gamification of the real lives of an increasingly marginalized and disempowered demographic. And it's uncomfortable. 

Keep telling yourself that. You'll sleep better.

 

As well as earning a living you have to keep your cab fuelled and find somewhere to sleep each night. There are costs involved and they vary. The places you stay also speak to your mood and your mood is another game factor, measured as it is by your Feelgrid, which in turn has some impact on which dialog options you get to choose.

There's more game to Neo Cab than you might imagine from its reviews, most of which focus on its success as a visual novel. It's really a hybrid, a visual novel with survival-lite mechanics. I never felt I was under undue pressure to perform as a cab driver but equally I was never able to forget I had a job to do, an employer to placate and personal needs to sustain. 

It felt stressful and that's entirely intentional, I think. Your character is under pressure to perform and that bleeds through but there's also direct stress on you the gamer because you want to see all of the game and you know you can't. On multiple occasions I sat back and dithered over a decision, unwilling to make a choice because I could imagine the consequences both for Lina and for me. Not that I always imagined correctly. Neo Cab isn't that obvious. Or predictable. 

In the end you have to make a choice, of course. There's no time pressure. The game's happy to sit still while you angst over who to upset, who to ignore, where to go next, what to do. But sometime you have to step off the kerb. 

I'm focusing on the mechanics a little but the moving parts only move for a reason and that reason is to carry the story. I read a few reviews of Neo Cab after I finished last night and most of them used the word dystopia. That's not what I'd call it. And I wouldn't call it cyberpunk, either.

Motel blues.

  

Neo Cab is a near-future social satire in the direct and quite unmistakeable tradition of Philip K. Dick. The most ironic thing is the way the cab doesn't talk. You'd need to be a passenger, riding a Capra cab, for that. 

Dick was famous for multiple perspective narratives and the way Neo Cab distributes story across character after character is straight out of his playbook. In games we talk about world-building, by which we tend to mean lore and visuals. In literature this is how you do it.

And I would call Neo Cab literature. It has all the hallmarks: structure, intent, style. The more of these kind of narrative-driven games I play, the more convinced I'm becoming by the form. It is something different to other media. The experience is materially different to reading a graphic novel or watching an animated movie, the two most obvious analogs. 

Just how different ultimately rests, I believe, not just on the significance of the choices themselves but in the way the writers and designers are able to integrate the taking of those choices with a coherent vision and purpose. It's one thing to create a slickly-programmed version of a Choose Your Own Adventure paperback, entirely another to articulate and animate the full panoply of unwritten stories that lie between the lines of every good novel.

Whether a game even needs to do that is another question. Perhaps the potentiality is the point. Replaying Disco Elysium looks to have been a mistake. I pulled back the curtain and there was the technician, crouched on the floor with his hands on the levers. The power of a book or a play or a film rests as much on what's not told, not shown, after all. We're left wondering what might have happened. Like life.

Truer words, Savy...

 

I played Neo Cab to an ending. It was a good ending. Satisfying, convincing, meaningful. As Yeebo observed in yesterday's comments, reviewers have commented on the abrupt way Neo Cab ends and I can't argue. It did feel sudden but it also felt right. It was a little like a play where the big battle happens off-stage and all the audience gets to know about it is what the characters tell them after it's over, but, hey, if it was good enough for Shakespeare...

I would have added one extra scene, a final cab ride, one more conversation. I think that would have given some closure. There's a coda, though, that overwrites all of that, makes it feel unecessary. I got exactly the ending I wanted. The ending I would have written. And I felt, with the choices I made, that I had written it.

That's the difference, isn't it? However great you feel at the end of a novel or a film your experience is that of a reader, a viewer, an observer. Immersion and empathy put you inside the text, make the emotional experience resonant and real but without agency you can't feel ownership the way you can in a video game. 

In an odd way narrative-driven gaming is collaborative. No, you didn't write any of the lines. You didn't come up with the plot or create any of the characters. Still, in some scarcely defined fashion, you had a hand in how things turned out. You were active not passive. At least a little.

... truer words.

 

Neo Cab integrates active and passive engagement better than anything I've played probably since Doki Doki Literature Club. There's none of DDLC's confident deformation of form but as I've said already Neo Cab has its own metatextuality; effective, subtle, satisfying.

I'm conflicted over whether to lean into that vortex or pull away. I'm increasingly beginning to feel that peeling back the layers to reveal the musculature beneath these narratives is damaging to the whole. The ending you get is the ending you got and there's an end to it, or should be.

But Neo Cab sidesteps such concerns by making the narrative all about possibilities. Oona rides the timelines and once I knew there was a chance it could happen, my whole focus shifted to seeing Lina through to an apprenticeship in witch science. If Lina gets to see her other selves take the turnings she missed, why shouldn't I?

I've given myself permission to try again but maybe I'll take a few days off before I get back behind the wheel. I could do with some downtime. This game is intense. 

Did I mention that?

Cab It Up

 

If I was on Twitter this would be a tweet but I'm not so it's a really short blog post instead. 

Neo Cab is the best game I've played in a long time. And I want this picture on a T-shirt.

Full review tomorrow. Maybe. 

Depends which timeline we're in.

I Run Missions

The latest instalment in Guild Wars 2's Icebrood Saga, which I previewed somewhat sarcastically just one week ago, dropped last night. It seems to be called either "Champions" or "Power" or "Primordus Rising" or very possibly "Icebrood Saga: Champions: Power: Primordus Rising". I admit I've lost track of the current naming convention.

Whatever it's called, it's alright. I'm not sure I'd go much further than that but I've played through the new story content and I didn't not enjoy it. It took the traditional two and a half hours, on the nose, only with more fighting and less standing around chatting than usual. 

The format is different to what we've been used to but I suspect not to what we're going to have to get used to in the future. After years and years of muddling around with various combinations of open world and instanced content, none of which ever seemed to suit enough people for ArenaNet to stick with any of them, we've arrived at something called "Dragon Response Missions". 

Theese are repeatable, instanced sequences of events that can be done either solo or in groups of up to five players, either premades or put together by the game, as you prefer. They seem to tick more boxes than most of the previous content delivery systems while avoiding some of the most egregious pitfalls. They also bundle up into a relatively saleable package for the Gem Store so they would seem to have a better chance of sticking around than most of the gimmicks ANet have tried over the last eight and a half years.

 

And I have to say, somewhat grudgingly, that they do work. I'd vastly prefer to have this content presented as it was in Season One, as time-limited events in open world maps, hanging around only as long as it takes for the next chapter to arrive but I accept that ship sailed long ago. A vociferous faction within the playerbase hates anything that's not forever and one-time content is uncommercial since it costs the same to produce as repeatable material but can't be repackaged and resold.

I was surprised at just how many DRMs (Dragon Response Missions. You'd already forgotten, hadn't you?) I had to do this time. Six of them. At least, I think it was six. Wait, no, I mean I know it was six as in that's how many I did. I'm just a little vague on whether maybe the first couple were ones I hadn't done from last chapter. I am finding it hard to keep all this stuff straight in my head these days.

Now I check the press release it does indeed look as though the first two missions I did, one down some cave and the other... no, it's no good, I already forgot where the other was and I only did it last night... aren't part of Power at all. The official four this time around seem to be the ones in Fields of Ruin, Thunderhead Peaks, Lake Doric, and Snowden Drifts.

That might explain why I noticed a significant jump in quality when I got to Ebonhawke. (That's the Fields of Ruin one for those who've never played GW2 and indeed for those that have but don't care to waste brain cells on Tyrian trivia like what city is in which map). The dialog and plot didn't change all that much but the mechanics of the fights became considerably more interesting, suggesting a different team might have had a hand in designing them.

 

This is the really surprising thing about the new chapter. The fights are genuinely enjoyable. It's been a while since I last thought that about a story instance. Sure, they have been getting much better but that's "better" on a scale that begins at "tedious" somewhere back in Season Two and floors out at "unbearable" in the middle of Season Four before slowly climbing back up to the dizzy heights of "tolerable" and even "okay"during the Icebrood Saga. 

Or something like that. Honestly, I've blanked a lot of it. Or tried to. Anyway, the instanced fights used to be something I dreaded and now they're not. In fact, on this latest evidence, they might even be something I could find myself looking forward to. I never thought I'd say that.

I'm not saying I'm going to do what I'm supposed to do and start repeating these missions over and over until the next set drops. Life is neither long enough nor dull enough for that to sound like a good option. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that I might do them again on another character, though. Maybe even more than one.  

It sounds like damning with the faintest of praise but it really isn't. These instances truck along. They don't waste a whole lot of time. Something's always happening but none of it takes too long. Well, okay, the bit with the dragon spears did drag on a little but I thik that had more to do with most of my pickup group spending more time lying down than standing up.

There was a quite a bit of that in the final instance in Snowden Drifts, too, although that group was a lot more capable. Just had too many glass cannons. I was very glad I was doing the missions on my heal-specced druid, the one I always use for story content. He's hard to down let alone kill, which came in handy for getting everyone else who can actually do more damage than a kitten on valium back up off the floor. It's not always all about the dps, even in GW2. Okay, admittedly it usually is...

I'm a little in two minds about how the new direction approaches narrative. Traditionally, the story part of the Living Story has been delivered in lengthy scenes where the player and any number of important NPCs stand around and tell each other the plot. At inordinate length. Sometimes the PC will be given something to do, like in that party we had back in Beetle Manor. Often they'll get to chip in now and again. Basically, though, it's sit back, relax, watch and listen.

With the missions it's more like trying to hold a conversation with three people while jogging through heavy traffic. Everyone's shouting over everyone else, there's a lot of background noise and you only have one ear on the conversation because you have to watch out for things that might kill you.

It's fortunate the entire dialog gets printed in the chat box because I would have missed whole chunks of plot without it. As it was, appreciating the subtle nuances of the voice actors (whom we're all very glad to see (or hear) back at work, I'm sure) took up most of my attention. Having everyone talking during the action sequences certainly works dramatically. I'm just not sure it works practically. Maybe I need to adjust my audio settings to prefer speech over the sounds of stuff being set on fire.

 

And there's a lot of stuff being set on fire. Either that or frozen solid. That's the theme - fire and ice. Believe it or not, I'd kind of missed the memo about Primordus being Tyria's official Elder FIRE Dragon. I'd always had him pegged as "Earth" or "Stone" for some reason. Possibly because he comes with attached dwarves and dwarves always suggest solidity and earthiness, not fiery armageddon.

I did know Jormag was the Ice dragon, of course. Can't really miss that. So it makes sense in a mythological way that they're twins. Twins who hate each other and want to kill each other. Or at least Jormag wants to kill Primordus. If Primordus has expressed an opinion I must have missed it. I don't think he's spoken yet.

As you can probably tell, this recent episode has re-onboarded me a little with the storyline. I do find the whole elder dragon thing quite intriguing. There were some pointed conversations on the nature of dragons between Ryland, Caithe, Braham and the Commander. Kas might have chipped in, too.

Oh yes, the gang's all here. Rytlock grunted a couple of times but he took a back seat for once since he was on Logan's home turf. Marjory and Taimi had cameos and even Gorrik showed his face although he didn't get any lines. Still, he's doing a lot better than Zoja. Seriously, recast her role already, don't just keep ghosting her. She's the greatest living Asuran! How would she not be there, telling everyone they were doing things all wrong?

Marjory's not much better off. Clearly no-one in the writers' room has clue one what to do with her, which is ironic seeing she's supposed to be a detective. Whatever happened to that, anyway? Taimi, once so over-exposed half the playerbase would cheerfully have drop-kicked her off Rata Sum, had one short scene, which she managed to steal by coming over as excitable as a dog in a sausage factory. For someone with just a few months to live (Remember that plotline? No, neither do the writers, apparently) she seemed remarkably chipper. 

Everyone seems remarkably chipper given the situation but then I guess we all know something about that these days. There's always some bleedover, isn't there?

All in all it was a creditable effort, I thought. I had fun.

I think there may have been a bunch of other non-story stuff in the update too but you'll have to wait for someone else to tell you all about that. Oh, wait, no-one else writes about this game any more, do they?

I guess that'll change when the expansion lands. For a couple of weeks, at least. And it'll take a full expansion to redirect attention this way because for sure the Living Story doesn't have much impact outside the installed base any more. 

Tough business.

Cruel Garrison

Time for a very quick update on what I've been up to in World of Warcraft. Dithering, mostly. My monthly subscription falls due in five days and I haven't yet decided whether to cancel. 

I re-subbed back in October with the intention of checking out the Shadowlands pre-patch, the level squish, Chromie Time and the new tutorial zone, Exile's Reach. I did all of those, wrote a bunch of posts about it and generally had a pretty good time. 

The plan had also been to open up access to the Vulpera allied race, make a fox and level that character to the cap but what with one thing and another I ended up levelling a goblin shaman first, all the way from character creation to the pre-Shadowlands level cap of fifty, something I definitely hadn't expected to find myself doing. After that I didn't quite have the determination to push the fox to fifty, mostly because the EverQuest II expansion arrived when she was about ten levels shy.

When Reign of Shadows appeared in early December I didn't stop playing WoW altogether but my hours dropped to a bare minimum. I was still logging in but almost entirely to keep my ricketty garrison working on hexweave bags. 

 

Even so, that took more time than I expected. I'd imagined it would be like EverQuest's Overseer, just a few clicks on the UI each day, but it seems Blizzard intended something a lot more hands-on. Making bags required me to keep my tailor supplied with sumptuous furs, while upgrading just the few buildings I needed to get the operation up and running cost gold I didn't have. 

I found myself out hunting wolves and cat-people for their fur for an hour or so almost every other day and making repeated forays into old raid instances to make money. For the last two months I've played WoW every day and while I've been there, that's all I've done. 

At first it was fun. Then it became a habit. Now it's starting to feel like a chore. I guess it's the WoD experience in microcosm. And I'm beginning to realize it's also all been a bit... pointless.

First I noticed that hexweave bags can reliably be bought for between 250g and 300g on my server. Using my garrison I can make a bag every other day or so for free but I can make enough gold to buy three or four bags in just the time it would take me to gather the fur. 

It's more satisfying to make them, in theory, but that satisfaction wears off after the first half-dozen or so. I'm at the point now where I feel I might as well just do a bunch of old raids once a week and buy my bags.

 

More significantly, I realized eventually that having an Alliance character with a garrison isn't going to help my Horde characters with their inventory issues. Blizzard take their faction split a lot more seriously than most other developers. Since one of the main reasons I was doing this in the first place was to put thirty slot bags on my Vulpera hunter I clearly didn't think it through.

Of course, I have Horde characters who could build garrisons of their own. And that sounded like a fairly attractive option until I realized something else. Garrisons are unique to the character that quests for them, not the account or even the faction on that account. 

Since my end-game here is to be capable of supplying big bags on demand to any new characters I make and play under the free-to-play rules after I cancel my subscription, what I should have done was send one Alliance and one Horde character, under level twenty, to start a garrison and then be very careful not to let them level too far to be able to keep using it. 

I'd already confirmed on my other free account that you don't need to subscribe to have a garrison and that under the new levelling rules you can get the quest at level ten. Today I spent half an hour getting my level fifteen druid from Stormwind to Shadowmoon Valley just to make absolutely sure she couldn't use the garrison I already had. I've found that no matter what online guides tell you about WoW you never really know for sure until you test it in game.

 

This time I could have saved myself the swim. She couldn't even see the damn thing. It exists in some other plane of reality, apparently. I spent the next half hour porting back to talk to Chromie then heading back to Shadowmoon to get the necessary quests.

That was just for proof of concept. I'd have to do the same again with a horde character and then I'd have to level up the garrisons and the necessary buildings and keep farming the furs and I'd have to fund all of that with characters in their teens. It makes absolutely no sense and I'm not going to do it.

A better plan might be to use the remaining five days of my sub to make enough gold with my Horde and Alliance level fifty characters to buy enough hexweave bags for everyone. That would be far, far easier and an ideal project for keeping my hands busy while I listen to the second England-Sri Lanka Test Match.

That's sorted then. Grind some gold, buy some bags, cancel the sub, go back to playing for free. Only...

I've been wondering whether I ought to buy Shadowlands. I've read a lot about it and it sounds pretty good for someone who enjoys levelling. I'd probably get a month or two's solid entertainment out of it and it's looking likely I'll be at home for about that long before I get the call to go back to work.

So, I'm dithering, as I said. Shadowlands is tempting but I haven't really finished with Reign of Shadows yet. It would make more sense to concentrate on finishing one expansion before I start on another. 

Or I could just let the sub roll on for another month and decide later. That's how they get you, isn't it? 

Well, it's how they get me, anyway.

Next Cab On The Rank

One thing about playing mmorpgs that hadn't really occurred to me until recently was just how incredibly self-sustaining a hobby it is. I mean, I knew... I just hadn't been confronted by the evidence in such a personal fashion until now. Of late it's become something I can't easily ignore as I find myself spending more time and money on single-player titles.. 

There's been slippage, for sure. I didn't plan it but there's a lot of it going around. As Syl put it in her comeback post today, "the star of MMO gaming has also waned for me these past years as it has for many". 

Okay, maybe "waned" is a stretch. I'm not convinced I'm even spending less time playing mmorpgs than I was five years ago. I just have more time to play them. I've been at home an awful lot these past two years. Even I can only log so many hours in the same old, familiar games, week in, week out, year after year.

Circumstances certainly don't help. I have been feeling more than the occasional craving for novelty. Not so surprising, given I can't have travelled more than a couple of miles from my front door for the best part of eighteen months. If there was a constant stream of fresh mmorpgs to try I'd most likely have been happy to stick with those but as we know only too well by now, mmos take a hellishly long time to bring to market. Even early access can't get them to us fast enough. 

In common with just about everyone with a blog that used to focus on mmorpgs, of late I've been playing and posting about games in other genres. The newfound desire of gaming platforms to act like pushers in some 1950s exploitation flick, with their "just try a taste - the first one's on me" has had the hoped-for effect. 

Hoped-for by them, that is. What they don't tell you is just how fast you'll burn through these things. After two decades of mmo gaming it's a shock to the system. 

We're not three weeks into the year yet and already I've started and finished five single-player titles (Disco Elysium, three of the five chapters of the Blackwell Chronicles and Along the Edge which I never even got around to posting about) plus a couple of one-act demos. I've also tried several other freebies from Amazon and Epic, including two I'm still playing, Anna's Quest and Darkside Detective.

That's a hell of a lot of games to get through in eighteen days, especially when you consider there have been times when a lot fewer than half that many mmorpgs would have kept me fully occupied for eighteen months.

I'm beginning to see now why I've read so many people complaining about backlogs. Once you realize just how fast you get through this stuff it must be tempting to panic buy. I mean, what if the supply dried up? You need a massive stash just to feel safe.

With mmorpgs you don't have that problem. When you're deep inside one there's always more. The big fear is keeping up, not running out. 

And there are a lot of mmorpgs. In the past I've handled any moments of ennui by just downloading another. I'm still doing it. This morning, after yesterday's post and comments, I re-installed Allods Online. (Geez, that My.Games portal is annoying. I remember now why I uninstalled it last time.)

The thing is, after two decades I feel I've all but exhausted the supply of mmorpgs that interest me. Everything now's about taking a second look. Or a third. Or a tenth.

And doing that doesn't scratch the novelty itch. Not the most appealing metaphor but let's press on. 

The worrying thing is how moreish I'm finding the single-player titles. Finish one, you want to start another. It's chain-gaming and I'm not sure it's healthy.

Last night I began playing Neo Cab. I'm not going to give it the full first impression treatment because I kind of already did that back when I played the demo just over a year ago. I already have a lot to say about it, though. 

I'll get around to posting about it in detail when I'm further in but for now I'll just say it's excellent. Also it plays suprisingly differently than I was expecting. You get out of the car more than I thought you would. I find it quite stressful, but that's something I was expecting. The demo made me sweat.

The question is, how sustainable is single-player gaming as a pastime? For me, that is. For a start, there's the potential cost. One of the best things about playing mostly mmorpgs for twenty years is the money it's saved me. Even allowing for subscriptions, expansions and new games it's been incredibly economical and that's mostly because mmorpgs go on forever.

Single player games don't - at least the ones I enjoy - and that's the real problem here. The kind of single-player games I like don't just end, they end before I'm done with them. A long time before. All of them, pretty much. It's annoying. 

I could replay them but mostly I don't. The plain fact that there's an ending and I've seen it tends to put a cap on the experience. Maybe I could revisit it in a few years but first I have to build up that buffer.

Mmorpgs, as Kaylriene was saying, though, those you can keep on playing even when you're not sure why you're doing it. I can whittle away the afternoon or the evening just doing dailies, sorting inventory, dyeing my armor. It's not exciting but it passes the time. Literally. 

Best of all, there's almost never a point where it feels like you've reached an ending. And that's relaxing. It takes the pressure off. Mmorpgs, the way I play them at least, are relaxing. Sometimes I get so relaxed I fall asleep. Single-player games, they keep me awake. Make me think. Concentrate. Even, in the case of Neo Cab, make me a little scared to log in.

Hmm. That's the question. (Good! I was wondering what it was!). Do I want to feel relaxed and have it cost me next to nothing or would I rather pay money to be stressed? Put that way, it sounds obvious but it's not as easy as a choice as you might think. 

I'm pretty sure if I was working, not sitting around at home under lockdown, I wouldn't even be having this conversation (with myself). When I get home from work or I'm on a day off it's relaxation I'm looking for but after weeks of sitting about at home I find I'm in need of stimulation. Also new things to write about. And I don't mind paying to get them.

I'll probably keep on doing both, then. For now, anyway. 

Later in the year? 

We'll see.