Make It Worth My While

This afternoon I found myself doing something I thought I'd never do again: the Dry Top meta. Not that I have anything against Dry Top or its eternally recurring sequence of set-piece bar-fillers. It's the original model of the map meta format Guild Wars 2 has been using for about as long as I can remember and it's aged better than a lot of the iterations that followed it.

No, I just never thought I'd have any reason to go back and do the whole thing from start to finish. I guess, technically, I still don't. All I really needed to do was complete ten events and I might have done that in half a cycle or less if I'd been a bit smarter about moving around the map or if I'd happened to land in something a little more organized.

I'd still have stayed for the whole thing, most likely, anyway. As well as ten events I also need to pick fifty plants, mine fifty rocks and chop fifty logs. And I'd have had to be there for the sandstorm that exposes all the buried chests because I need to open ten in the east of the map and ten more in the west.

Why, you may well ask, do I suddenly want to do all of that? Haven't I managed perfectly well for many years without setting foot in Dry Top, far less going there with "needs"?

Yes, I have. And I could carry on that way, too. Only I saw the news squib on MassivelyOP about the repromotion of Living World Season Two and it struck me I could get a blog post out of how weird an idea I thought it was. 

I had it in mind to spin the news into a piece about how ArenaNet will never be able to follow Daybreak, Jagex, Blizzard and the rest down the retro-nostalgia-progression-classic path because of the way the game is structured. I'll add that one to the growing list of posts I'm thinking about doing. I'll have an actual draft post backlog at this rate.

 

As I was thinking about it, I realized it was Tuesday. (Yes, I had forgotten what day it was. I've been furloughed since New Year. That's my excuse). Tuesday is patch day in GW2 so I thought I'd see if the update notes had appeared on the forum, which they had. 

I had a read of those and noticed, to my considerable surprise, as well as the expected return of the old there was also some rather more interesting new: "Taimi and Gorrik are setting up a lab in the Eye of the North. If you've completed Episode 5 of The Icebrood Saga, check in with them for the latest information."

If it hadn't been in the patch notes I'd never have known about it, although if I hadn't known about it I wouldn't have missed much. When I logged in I was met by one of those big envelopes that fills the center of screen to let you know ANet have sent you mail they don't want you to miss. 

I opened both the letters I'd been sent. One told me what I already knew: Season Two was back in play. The other offered me free unlocks for the first couple of chapters in case I didn't already have them, which, of course, I did. 

There was nothing pointing me to the Eye of the North and no mention of Taimi or Gorrick. Neither was there any orange headline in the events listings that fills the top right of the HUD. Nor was there any change to my Journal, which told me I was, as always, nine years late for the presentation of my Krewe's submission for the Snaff Prize.

Nothing for it but to go and see for myself. I ported to the Eye, hoping I'd at least receive some kind of indication where to go when I arrived. No such luck. In the end I just ran around until I happened to spot a couple of conversation icons, little green-tinted speech bubbles, hanging over some tiny figures in a corner at the very back, next to the scrying pool.

Taimi explains this is where she and Gorrick (for it is they) have chosen to set up their new lab because it's next to the only available dragon, Aurene. They seem pleased. I was unconvinced. The pair of them reminded me of Harry Potter trying to pretend his cupboard under the stairs was a real bedroom. 

I ran through the desultory conversation options. I asked several questions about the aftermath of the recent deaths of the two elder dragons, Jormag and Primordus. From the brief replies I gather no-one knows anything. Some dragon minions died, some didn't. The missing magic is still missing. The people Jormag froze are thawing but no-one knows how long it will take or if the victims will survive it.

Finally, Taimi suggested it might be helpful if I relived my previous dragon-killing experiences, at which point I finally tumbled what was going on: it was all just a set-up to get me to go do the same, old  Living Story stuff I'd already been told about by letter. 

 

Just to be sure, I did as she suggested and went to look in the Scrying Pool. There was a new dialog option: Relive Your Adventures In Dry Top . I clicked on it and it ported me to Dry Top. Not a special, back-in-the-day instance of Dry Top. Just plain, old regular Dry Top. 

It was busy. I might have stayed for a few events just for the fun of it, since I was there anyway, but before I'd decided, someone in chat started talking about a Legendary Amulet, then someone else linked it, and finally a third person suggested typing "Seasons of the Dragons" into the Achievements search box. So I did.

Almost since the game began, the paucity of rewards for completing content has made GW2 something of a standing joke in the genre. The old meme about two blues and a green is very nearly as true today as it was in 2013. Someone at ANet wants people to do these new achievements, that's for sure.

For completing the meta-achievements for the all four promoted chapters of the revived Living Story you will receive:

An ascended weapon chest

Your choice of precursor for an End of Dragons legendary weapon.

A 32-slot bag

A legendary amulet.

As it so happens, none of that is so good I feel I have to do content I don't want to do just to get it. I have unopened Ascended weapons chests in the bank, I can make 32 slot bags (and what's more I can afford to) and as I've said on many occasions I have never understood the point of legendary items. 

Even so, I'm more than willing to agree those are good rewards. There are even some decent rewards for doing the individual chapter metas. The first one gets you, among other things, three Mystic Coins and your choice of a nice-looking weapon. There are some skins there I'd use.

Best of all, there's no rush. The new achievements are permanent. They don't go away when the promotion ends. You can take as long as you like, making this a decent option for something to work on when there's nothing much else happening. Which, let's face it, is quite often in GW2.

I said at the start of the post that I never imagined myself doing the Dry Top meta again. While it's certanly true I had no plans in that direction, it was always possible I might have done it on a whim. I enjoyed it when it was current content and it's still good, knock-about fun today. 

The chances of me ever feeling the urge to run through an old chapter of the Living Story, though? Infinitesemal. Most of it I didn't much enjoy the first time. I only did it for the story and I've seen how that turned out. Why would I put myself through it all again? 

For the loot, of course. That's why we do this stuff, at least half the time, isn't it? And even though I don't especially want the items I listed above (although who can turn down a free 32-slot bag?), the sheer novelty of a GW2 event with good loot might be enough to make me feel I really should take advantage of the developers' momentary lapse in judgment.

I can do the six achievements in Dry Top, at least. Those are very easy and not at all unpleasant. After that I guess I'll try the first of the LS2 missions just to see how it goes. I am slightly curious to see if the small amount of power creep the game's experienced with two expansions has made any of those attritional boss fights any more palatable.

The open-ended timescale makes it feasible. I could turn it into a long-term project, knock off a mission now and again, whenever the mood takes me; a rainy Sunday afternoon, a dull Wednesday evening when I have nothing better to do. I wouldn't say it sounds exciting but at least it doesn't make me come out in a cold sweat.

Maybe they could put that on the poster.

Alone Again Or

Naithin at Time To Loot has a post up, bouncing off a YouTube video by Josh Strife Hayes. The video, which I've embedded below for those who don't feel like clicking on a link, is called How the MMO became less social and it's three-quarters of one of the best analyses of the much-discussed phenomenon that I've seen.

I would recommend watching it all the way through... or listening to it in the background while you do something else, for example play an mmorpg. It's basically a lecture. It would make more sense as a podcast than a YouTube video although I did discover from watching the first few minutes that Runes of Magic is a better-looking game than I remembered.

The first three sections are lucidly argued. I found myself agreeing with most of the points made. It was the fourth segment that Naithin's post highlighted, though, the chapter entitled "The shifting of social interactions to 3rd party platforms", and that was the part I found the least convincing.

Josh draws threads from the previous three parts together to make the case that socialization in mmorpgs hasn't disappeared altogether, it's just gone somewhere else. As someone who's very much part of the problem he describes under the second and third headings ("The genre popularity boom and rise of the solo player" and "The catering of systems to the solo player"), a player for whose increasingly solipsistic tastes the entire genre has been redefined, I find myself in a precarious position, discussing how players might these days find themselves engaging in what passes for organized content.

I'll take Naithin's word for it that such players today often "organise dungeon content. Raids. Heck, any group content" on external platforms like Discord (It's always Discord, isn't it?). If that's the case, though, I would question just how much of a change it represents.

You call it bragging, I call it socializing.

Larger formal content like raids has always been organized externally but even in the early days, most quasi-formal appointments-to-play, from guild events to weddings, were generally handled outside of the games themselves. As far back as 2001-2 I was having to make accounts with various hosting platforms, register for services like Magelo, set passwords and sign in to forums, just so I could find out what guilds I'd joined were planning. And those were family guilds, not raiders.

I remember it now because I found it so irritating then, but I knew you couldn't get by as a supposed "social" player just on the in-game communication channels alone. The people for whom those were paramount were, ironically, those most resistant to the overt social aspects of the genre. People who were focused on ad hoc content, on character-based activities, on leveling up and playing alts.

Socialization in those days was gameplay, even if you weren't social about it. Even for a soloist, the experience was defined by relationships with others, in that case as much by a refusal to participate as a wish to be included. I do think one long-forgotten aspect of solo play in pre-World of Warcraft mmorpgs is just how proud solo players were of their skills. They soloed not because no-one would group with them but because they didn't need anyone to group with them.

There's a whole different post to be written about how the genre's drift towards soloability has contributed to the attritional decline of true solo play. Maybe I'll get to that another time. Sticking with the topic at hand, the slow but steady transition of the mmorpg genre from one in which gameplay is predicated on in-game socialization to one in which the overwhelming majority of content is available to all regardless of willingness to socialize represents a fundamental change that can't be hand-waved away by a misconcatenation of interactions that share only a few surface similarities.

In the beginning, mmorpgs were ultra-social. Everything Josh says about the early days rings true to me from my own experience. Being able to fight monsters side-by-side with people on the other side of the world and talk to them while doing it was mindboggling. The games operated as de facto social media platforms even before the term "social media" had currency. 

If you need a favor you still have to ask.

 

These are not new insights. They're concepts often discussed and widely accepted nowadays. But Josh does highlight something much less frequently noted: some of what we glibly term "socializing" was, in fact, core gameplay content. 

There's a kind of accepted wisdom about the old LFG days. How much time was wasted, standing around in a city or at the entrance to a dungeon, spamming /shout or /ooc with your virtual CV, hoping someone would at least acknowledge your existence before you had to give up and log out. It all makes things sound quite pathetic and painfully dull. 

And it could be. But what you hear far less of, something Josh alludes to but doesn't elaborate on, is how putting groups together could be fun. How coming up with effective ways to sell yourself as a useful, desirable group member was a skill as satisfying to improve as two-hand blunt or evocation. How people became as well-known for their group-building prowess as their tanking skills. Much is said about the value of reputation in those days: in my experience almost nothing gave higher social status than a rep as someone who could build and run really strong, effective groups.

Generally, when older players harp on about what was lost, they make too much of how "we sat around between pulls and chatted". Yes, we did do that, a lot, but for my money real "socializing" never revolved around fireside conversation as we waited for the cleric to get her mana back. It wasn't swapping stories about what we were doing outside the game that made for strong bonds. It was discussing what we were going to do in it.

My strongest memories of social interactions from the golden age of the genre mainly involve planning sessions as we brainstormed tactics to achieve some immediate gameplay goal. That's what no longer happens in most of the mmorpgs I play, largely because, as Josh explains, the need for such tactical concerns has been designed out of the genre.

Once it was groups. Now it's maps.

 

It's why I'm looking forward to the return of the Marionette fight to Guild Wars 2. It's a rare example in modern times of content that regularly generated the kind of in the moment tactical discussions I relish. That's the kind of social gameplay I enjoy.

And that's why I don't see the burgeoning acceptance and use of third-party platforms for communication between people with a shared interest in mmorpgs as a replacement or even a corollary for the kind of gameplay-based social interactions upon which the genre made its name. And that's if we accept on face value the argument that the average mmorpg player is making widespread use of social media these days.

I wonder if they are? Discord, as has been discussed in this corner of the blogosphere a number of times of late, is far from being accepted as a universal good. Some people like it, some people put up with it, some people can't stand it. In the games I play it's not at all unusual to hear people being critical of out-of-game platforms, not because of any inherent flaws in the software but because they're deemed to be an inappropriate way to communicate.

A lot of that is most likely based on age and experience. Older players are less likely to want to move their conversations to new and unfamiliar platforms, partly out of an innate resistance to change but also from previous failures. How many different communication media will a ten-year veteran already have signed up for and then found themselves not using a few months later?

Some of the resistance, though, is structural. Communication that takes place outside of the game is by definition not part of the game. It's related to it but not of it. To some players that's not why they're playing. They want to be part of a self-contained imaginary world that has internal consistency. That's hard enough already without making further concessions to asynchronous social media or voice chat.

Some people never speak. Some people never shut up.

 

I'm not going to fight for the flag on this one. I have no way of knowing how widespread the use of 3rd party social media platforms within the wider mmorpg audience might be. In a way, though, the more widespread it is, the less it means. 

Josh refers to a whole range of providers - YouTube, Discord, Twitch, Facebook - as though a shared interest expressed across those for a commonly-held hobby makes for some kind of cohesive social bond. If that's true then it must also apply to all fans of, well, anything. It's just too general to have significance.

As he says, at the start mmorpgs were doing something new, something unique. Now they share those functions with much larger, more popular, more successful platforms, processes and providers. That mmorpg players also use those platforms says much about the pervasive influence and acceptance of social media but it doesn't necessarily indicate a straightforward change of venue.

Everyone uses social media. Of course that includes mmorpg players. Just because we socialize outside the games we play doesn't mean we've simply transferred our in-game social structures and practices to a new host. The games aren't social any more, not in the way they were. Talking about them on social media doesn't change that. Making plans with our friends about what we're going to do when we see them in game doesn't change that. 

Josh had it right in the set-up: for mmorpgs, socialization was gameplay. His conclusion, that "the social aspect has simply moved out of the game" won't stand up.

If the socialization isn't in the game, it's not part of the game. And that's not, in itself, a bad thing. Not everything has been lost. The genre hasn't become asocial, just differently socialized. I prefer things as they are now. I like the new forms of socialization that have replaced the old.

That's why my game of choice for much of the last decade has been Guild Wars 2. Of all the mmorpgs I play, it's the one that's most successfully managed to integrate the genre's older, socially-reliant gameplay with modern, solo-oriented expectations.

But, once again, that's a whole other post.

Get Good

 

It's not immediately obvious because, typically, it was night-time when I took the shot, but the picture at the head of this post was taken with my new Kamera. 

I say "new". New to me, that is. As far as the game's concerned, it's very much the old Kamera.

I wanted it for the usual reason. It takes a better picture. Or at least a clearer picture. The first Kamera I got, the one I've been using for most of the shots in recent posts, adds a dingy, orange-brown tint around the outside and also sometimes splatters a few faded spots around that may or may not be lens flare. 

To me, they look more like the kind of processing errors I used to get when I took holiday snaps on cheap film with the clunky russian camera my aunt gave me and sent them through the mail, in pre-paid envelopes, to an anonymous box number at some windowless warehouse on an out-of-town industrial estate somewhere in the midlands. We all used to do it. It's so nostalgic there's probably an Instagram filter for it now.

As I said in the post, I was just grateful to have a Kamera at all. It makes for a much more convenient and practical way to take screenshots in Genshin Impact than the regular method. A few brown splotches are a small price to pay. 

I was mildly frustrated that I wasn't able to get the vanilla version, though. Particularly since all the guides I read seemed to think I should. I went back to see Xu several times but he resolutely refused to pop a blue exclamation mark. I decided it was never going to happen and forgot about it.

It's not as though I haven't had plenty else to do in the game. Thanks to that teapot, the one with the "must be AR 35 to enter" sign slapped across the lid, I have a long list of things to be getting on with.

The first hurdle was getting to AR 25. That's as far as you can go before taking a test. I was AR22 when I came back and at first I found it slow going. As is generally the way of things in mmorpgs (Disclaimer: Genshin Impact is not an mmorpg.) progress began to speed up the moment I decided to stop pratting about and buckle down to playing the way the developers intended.

After I'd nailed AR25,  bumped some of the team up to 40 and knocked off Stormterror I did a little research on how to proceed. Luckily for me I'd never tried to level and gear up all of my characters, something that's strongly discouraged, so I hadn't wasted too many resources getting to where I was.

I spent some time considering my options. After a lot of thought and some research on the options I decided to carry on with three of my team and keep one slot open for now. My line-up was going to be:

Traveler - The one I consider to be "my" character. Also the one I feel most comfortable with in combat.

Diluc - Lucky five-star pull. By far my best DPS. Dies too much. Needs to stop doing that.

Kaeya - Very useful cryo skills. Otherwise not really sold on him.

Barbara - Team healer and very good at it. Also the only ranged character in the team.

 

I'd already leveled Traveler, Diluc and Barbara to 40. I took them to try the open-world version of one of the bosses they'd have to beat at the end of the instance that would grant me the right to carry on leveling my Adventure Rank to thirty five, just to get some kind of benchmark.

Things did not go well. I had a think about it and decided I needed to do two things:

1. Ascend my three main characters so they could carry on leveling to fifty. 
2.  Learn how to play.

There was a certain synergy involved. After a good deal of research I found I either already had or was able to obtain all the materials required for Ascension except for Everflame Seeds (for Diluc) and Cleansing Hearts (for Barbara). 

I had everything for Traveler, who for some reason is able to Ascend from 40 to 50 without having to kill any bosses at all. Once I'd figured out how to use the Souvenir Shop and the Alchemy table I was able to bump her up to 43 before I ran out of leveling mats.

For the other two, though, there was nothing for it but to take on some very challenging (to me, anyway) overland bosses. I did some more research, found out where the Pyro Regisvine that drops the seeds hangs out, read the strats for beating it and went to give it a try.

It wasn't a total disaster. The vine was under half health when the last of my four characters died. It definitely felt doable. Most importantly, I could see what I was doing wrong. I was playing like an idiot.

She's obviously seen me fight.

 

Here's the thing. Genshin Impact feels like an mmorpg but it isn't one. It also looks like a button-masher and it's not one of those either. If it reminds me of anything it might be Wizard 101 and for a couple of reasons:

1. It looks like a kids game but it doesn't play like one.
2. Boss fights in Genshin Impact feel like W101 card play on fast-forward.

Once I'd started to think of my characters as cards in a pack it got... no easier to play them at all. That's going to take practice. What did get easier was understanding how they interact. Characters have to set up for each other, using their powers like the cards in W101. All that talk about Elemental Combos was what confused me. Thinking of them as different cards made it much clearer.

Then there's the old consumables issue. I rarely take anything like the necessary advantage of consumables in any game. I'm doing pretty well if I remember to keep a few basic, long-duration buffs up from things like food and drink. 

It was only when I was working out how to use the Alchemy table that I noticed I could make potions. Since my team were singed around the edges from the fight with the vine some fire resist pots seemed like they'd come in useful.

They probably will, too, some time. Not for that fight, though. I went back to give it another try now I'd figured out I needed to do more than just try to weed-whack it death. I forgot to drink the potions but it  went much better anyway. Really very much better. I won. And no-one even died!

 Fine! I'll go back to Mondstadt, then, where I'm appreciated!

Using Barbara much more often, only making her run away instead of just letting her stand there yelping when the vine set her on fire, helped a lot. Ignoring all the guide advice about using Hydro and Cryo on the beatdown phases helped even more. 

This is a lesson I really should have remembered from countless other games. Sometimes you really do have to use specific abilities or classes or characters because some mobs have complete immunity to certain things. Outside of that, though, if it's just that some things do more damage than others, then it's much more nuanced calculation. Kaeya may have the right kind of elemental attack and the vine may take less damage from fire, but Diluc hits so much harder than Kaeya it's still much more effective to let him do the hard burns.

Naturally the blasted vine only dropped one seed. Since I needed two we had to kill it again. Second time, of course, it dropped two so now I have a spare. I also have a level 43 Diluc, which is as far as I got before once again I ran out of mats.

That just leaves Barbara. I took her over to kill the boss that drops the Cleansing Hearts but it didn't go too well. It went about the same as the first fight with the vine, in fact. The boss was on about half health by the time my whole team was dead. Having only one ranged character, against whose attacks the mobs are completely immune, is kind of a problem when they choose to float in the water out of melee range.

I could have carried on but I was distracted by some map marker that I spotted when we revived. It looked as if I had a hand-in in Liyue. I thought I'd do that first so I ported over and as I was running through the streets (the authorities seem to have forgotten all about the Traveler being wanted for suspected deicide, luckily for her and me), who did I happen to spot but my old friend Xu wearing a smart, new blue exclamation point for a hat.

You have got to be kidding me...

 

Long story not as short as it could have been, it turned out he wanted me to help him deliver some snapshots he'd taken on commission and when I'd done that he gave me one of his old Kameras. Why he'd suddenly decided to do that when he didn't even appear to know what a Kamera was every other time I spoke to him I have no idea.

Well, I guess I do have a few ideas. I'm not sure if I already passed him after I dinged AR25. I think I did but I can't be absolutely certain. I might have been on the run from the law at the time, anyway. It's possible the quest is level-gated. It's also possible there's some kind of pre-requisite. I've done quite a lot of stuff since I last spoke to him, including a whole tranche of the main story quest and a bunch of things around Liyue and its environs. Maybe I set some kind of flag.

Whatever, it's done. It happened. I got my Kamera. No more grubby-looking prints. Just nice, clean shots from here on in.

My rough plan going forward is to hold off on Barbara's ascension while I work on easier stuff to accrue plenty of mats so that I can 

1. Level Traveler and Diluc to 50, thereby making the fight with Barbara's boss-mob significantly easier
2. Practice fighting until I am not completely terrible at it
3. Work on improving everyone's gear, some of which could certainly use it.

Also, have some fun. Genshin Impact is a very entertaining game in all kinds of ways of which the fighting is probably the least. It would be a shame to miss the actual good parts just because I need to "git gud". 

And let's face it, I am never going to get good. I'll settle for just good enough.

The Rain, The Park And Other Things

It rained all day today. It's still raining now. I spent hours in World vs World, mostly defending our one and only T3 Keep or retaking the rest of our stuff after we lost it, which was about every five minutes. 

This week's event must have been wildly successful if the marker of success is how much time I've spent playing, when I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I killed close to a thousand players, ranked up more times than I can remember and made it into the final set of skirmish rewards, Diamond, for the first time in years.

Activity was about as manic as I've seen it. For most of the day no side in our match owned more than one upgraded keep. Almost everything was paper. There were players running around all over the place. Crystal Desert were on a mission to overtake us and go up to Tier Three at the weekly reset later tonight. They had close to a full squad runing all day, even at the times when there are normally none of them to be seen.

Just keep telling yourself that.

Despite all that action and chaos and effort, I didn't see a queue on any map, not even once. I've barely seen one all week and even the couple of times I did it was only one or two people. Measured by that metric, things were actually busier a few weeks ago, when there was no event of any kind.

This is Tier Four we're talking about, of course. Maybe the matches above us had deeper queues and more of them. Then again, much of the time when I check, Yaks Bend is listed as "Full" and you can't get any more populated than that. You'd think, right?

It doesn't work that way. No-one knows how it does work, exactly, but we do know it's not a head-count. It's an algorithm or I imagine it is. Everything's an algorithm nowadays. All ArenaNet will admit to is that they calculate how busy Worlds are by reference to a number of factors including but not limited to how many people log in to WvW, how long they stay and what kind of things they do while they're there.

By that measure, earlier this week about two-thirds of the servers were flagged "Full". Today it was just over half. It changes all the time but if there's a pattern to it I don't know what it is. 

I do know that when people wanted to move to a server that was always "Full" they would sometimes stay up until three or four in the morning in the hope they could catch it in one of the brief windows when it dropped to "Very High". Back in the days when people used the forums for more than just arguing and badmouthing developers, you'd sometimes get public-service posts letting everyone know some server or other had opened for transfers, which, naturally, meant that server would be "Full" again at the next update.

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I had a brief discussion abut it in guild chat as we were running to defend something or other this morning. I was venting my irritation at people who don't care about the match result and Mrs. Bhagpuss was explaining to me why I could go boil my head. She takes the very widely held view that server pride died when ANet changed the rules on transfers and moving to the winning team every six to eight weeks became the meta. 

I can't really argue with that. Server pride doesn't make much sense when there's a whole playstyle devoted specifically to switching servers. Even harder to take it seriously when you factor in the link system, where you don't even know which server it is you're on half the time. 

Just keep telling yourself that.

Even so, a competition is a competition and a match is a match. You don't get a prize or a title for after a pick-up game in the park but I would contend that you do still care who wins. Yes, when you all come back the next day and pick teams again you're probably going to end up playing alongside the kid you were trying to kick in the shins the day before but each pick-up match is a discrete event and each one matters or else none of them do.

That is the problem in a nutshell for a lot of people. None of them do. So why do they bother? Same million reasons anyone does anything in mmorpgs. Loot, gear, achievements, bragging rights, social pressure, fun, boredom... When GW2 began, ArenaNet wanted WvW to be the endgame. They included the maps in world completion and tied a bunch of stuff in the Mists to other features of the game. 

You can guess how that went down with PvE players. Once the dedicated WvW crowd that arrived expecting DAOC 2.0 had left in a huff, ANet moved quickly to pacify the people they had left. The problem was, they had a set of maps, rules and mechanics designed neither for pure PvP players nor monster-bashers. We've been living with a series of passive-aggressive compromises ever since.

Just keep telling yourself that.

All the many, many redesigns have failed. The last one, the supposed mega-revamp that would do away with Worlds entirely and heave everyone into some kind of ludicrously over-complicated parody of high-school, with everything built on popularity and cliques, thankfully appears to have died of lack of interest. What might replace it remains unspoken. 

My guess would be nothing. There's a conspiracy theory, so widely accepted now it might as well be confirmed fact, that ANet make major bank on transfer fees. Another of their dirty little secrets is how the links are decided every other month. Some of the decisions seem so nihilistic that monetary gain appears the only rational explanation.

Whether it's true or not that they couldn't do without the income generated by thousands of people paying to change the name of their team every few weeks, I suspect another well-founded theory will be proven to be correct. There's no-one left at ANet who cares enough about WvW to try to make it less disfunctional. 

Okay, maybe don't keep telling yourself that. And definitely don't tell anyone else.

There was a moment of moderate shock recently when one of the former WvW devs returned to work on it again. That was seen by some as a sign that life might be about to be breathed back into the corpse. It seems a bit of a stretch. It's not like much changed the last time he was in charge. Or, rather, things did change. Just, well, nothing that mattered...

The moment of truth will be when we get to hear the full feature list for End of Dragons. Back when Heart of Thorns was in development it included the biggest shake-up WvW has ever had. That was an unmitigated disaster. Path of Fire didn't even mention WvW let alone change anything there. PoF is generally reckoned to have been a popular, successful expansion. A lot of people still detest HoT. Draw your own conclusions.

As far as I see it, WvW is in maintenance mode now. It's there. It works. If you want to play it you can. People do. Still, even now, quite a lot of them. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it for five or six hours today. It was fun.

Maybe that could be the WvW slogan: "Raining out? Bored? Can't think of anything better to do? Come play WvW"!

There are worse ways to spend a wet friday in May.

I Believe In Progress

When I logged into EverQuest today I noticed there'd been an update. Nothing unusual in that. I think we get one every month or so. Maybe more.

I tend not to pay too much attention. It's fairly unlikely that most of the changes are going to affect me even when I'm actively traveling around Norrath and environs, leveling up or otherwise engaging in something that might loosely be called gameplay. Generally it's tweaks and fixes to content I'm not going to engage with or new quests and activities I'm never going to do. EverQuest is a huge, huge game now and even when I play semi-regularly, as I did for a good part of 2019 and 2020, the vast majority of it remains opaque to me.

There's got to be a trick to it...

These days, when almost the entirety of my EQ gameplay consists of setting and completing Overseer quests and once a week, usually on a Friday, swapping the rewards from my magician to my trader so he can take advantage of the weekend sales rush, it seems even less urgent that I pay close attention to things that are changing. I probably didn't know what they were like before, so if I happen to run into them after, it'll be just as though that's how they always were.

Even so, I do tend to read the patch notes. It's a habit of very longstanding, going back to the early days, when the game was much smaller and everything was much more likely to matter. In those days the first you'd know about most changes would be when you ran into them in game and since bumping into something unfamiliar in Norrath can frequently lead to sudden death, reading the notes was a matter of simple self-preservation.

Today's notes contained some interesting information. There was a lot of detail about something called "Hunter Achievements", about which I kind of thought I remembered hearing before although I couldn't remember what they were. A long section of the patch notes gave details of the rewards you could get for completing these achievements, all of which seemed to be bags of various sizes, all of them substantial already and all of them now bigger still. 

Those bags sounded yummy. I thought I ought to go look up just exactly what you needed to do to get them. I had a momentary fantasy that maybe it was like Lord of the Rings Online or Final Fantasy XIV, where you just go around killing certain kinds of creatures until you've killed some arbitrary number and magically become an expert in hunting whatever it happens to be. I like those.

I didn't really think it would be that simple. Not for those bags.  And I was right. Naturally, it turned out to be both more complicated and tougher than I expected. It pretty much means killing every named in each zone in each tier in each expansion. Kind of a bigger project than I was imagining. Something to think about for the future, maybe.

Arguably more urgent, although only for a very lax definition of "urgency", would be the Fabled creatures currently running around Norrath. I've done my share of Fabled hunting but not for quite a few years. It was compelling content when the ones I could kill also dropped things I could use but those lines diverged long ago. 

I didn't even know it was Fabled season again. I just happened to notice this entry in the update:

Infinite, one-hundred per cent regen. That's some "issue". Nice use of the conditional, too. Someone's written patch notes before.

Those two items made me think about taking the Mage out for a spin. She's max level, well-geared for solo content, raid-buffed to the eyeballs and she even has that new pet-summoning focus she hasn't had the chance to try out yet. It would not be a tragedy if her current, also raid-buffed, pet got himself killed, trying to take down some Fabled mob out of his weight class.

Do I really want to get sucked into playing EQ again just now, though? The list of mmorpgs I'm mentally juggling is begining to get out of hand. If it gets any longer there's going to be a waitlist just to get on the bench.

Off with the hot pants, on with the cool pants.

Let's shelve that one for now. The main item in the patch notes, the one that got me writing about them for today's post, was something I could test without leaving the Bazaar. In many ways, the EverQuest of 2021 somehow manages to remain true to the original spirit, even the Vision, of the game but for many years now the developers have been performing miracles to keep it as up-to-date and user-friendly as something so archaic could ever hope to be.

We've seen countless quality of life changes over the years, from in-game maps and quest journals through achievements and collections to massive increases in inventory space. Long gone are the days when EQ players only had to think about eight spells at a time. My magician has a dozen spells now but she also has four dozen active hot keys, most of which trigger other spells or spell-like abilities. 

The looting system in EQ is now, in my opinion, the best in the genre. It was past time EQ matched that convenience in picking stuff up with a quick way to decide what might be worth putting on. Just about every modern mmorpg comes with some form of auto-comparison for gear and now EverQuest does too.

What? This old thing? Oh, it's only fit for the trash, now!

I read the notes on how it works. It seemed simple enough and it was, once I'd remembered how to inspect things (it's alt-lmb). As far as I could tell from my brief experiments you have to be wearing one of the items for the comparison option to appear, so no comparing two items in your bags.

That makes it great for making comparisons on the fly when something good drops but more importantly for me, the function works through the Bazaar window, too. There have been times when I've spent whole afternoons meticulously and laboriously comparing stats between items by opening a bunch of inspect windows and staring at them until my vision blurs. Sometimes I've even taken screenshots and compared those.

This will save me a ton of time when the new expansion arrives at the end of the year, bringing with it a level cap increase and a slew of potential wardrobe improvements. Always assuming we're getting a new expansion, that is, and always assuming it's going to come with a level increase.

I wonder what other features and mechanics EverQuest can look forward to receiving, years after all the cool, new games got them. I'm sure there must be a few left to add although nothing comes immediately to mind.

Much though I enjoy the occasional romp around Steamfont or Qeynos Hills when a new progression server spins up, I have to say I much prefer my EQ to come with all mod cons. What's more, I'm pretty sure few would have been complaining back in 1999 if these kinds of features had been listed as highlights in patches back then.

Or maybe they would. Who cares? Too late now! I get to rank my pants and no-one can stop me. And it only took a couple of decades. You can keep your progression servers. I'll take my progress as it comes and be grateful for it.

That's Entertainment

I finally finished Broken Sword 5 this evening. According to Steam it took me 16.4 hours. As with so many of Steam's timings that feels way off, even though I'm sure it's accurate to the second. After all, if there's one thing computers can do it's read a clock.

Subjective perception of time is curious. I've seen my share of movies at the cinema, where I've checked the time after a couple of hours to see how much longer there is to go, only to find it's not even been an hour since the film started. That means the movie hasn't worked for me. I don't think I can come up with a single example where feeling a movie has gone on longer than it actually has suggests anything positive about about the experience.

For games it can work both ways. Sometimes, for example in a tedious instance or an attritional boss fight, fifteen minutes that passes like half an hour means exactly the same as it does in the cinema. When I say it feels as though I've been playing BS5 for at least twice as long as Steam says I have, though, that means exactly the opposite. I've been having a fine old time.

 

I think what happens is that for all those puzzles, when I'm doing nothing but problem-solving, staring at the screen, cogitating like crazy, mind whirring, lost to all other thought, subjective time stretches like a lazy cat. A few public minutes expand into personal hours. I can generally tell it's happened when I notice my backside has gone to sleep.

You can take that as an endorsement. Once again, I became thoroughly engrossed in George and Nico's adventures. I believe the accepted oppinion is that BS5 is far, far better than BS3 and 4, neither of which follows the traditional point-and-click format, but not quite up to the standard of BS1 and 2.

I can remember the first Broken Sword pretty well but I can't remember very much about the second (which probably means I should play it again). Based on my no doubt inaccurate memories, I'd say the fifth and so far final episode is on a par with the first two.

 

A lot of the strength lies with the two central characters, both of whom are likeable, amusing and good company. The voice acting is also extremely strong, particularly from Rolf Saxon, who plays George Stobbart in all five games. Nico has apparently changed actor more than once although the voice I've been listening to these last couple of weeks sounded exactly as I remembered it.

Most of the supporting cast are both well-written and well-played and the plot is good, solid pulp/noir adventure but for me the real stars of the fifth game have to be the artists. There aren't all that many locations in the game but almost all the ones we get to see are superbly detailed, intricate without ever being fussy, characterful without being quirky. I spent a lot of those sixteen hours peering into every corner of the screen.

It didn't hurt that several of the locations are places I've visited. Not just the cities or the countries but the specific places in the shots. The scenes in Paris and London are emblematic rather than representational but all the elements look entirely familiar. 

 

Well, perhaps not the junkyard right behind what appears to be the old Battersea Power Station. I'm pretty sure that never existed. The flying pig is a nice visual joke though.

The long section set in Catalonia brought back some memories. I've traveled a good deal in that part of Spain and while I'm not quite sure I've seen a valley exactly like the one where Senor Marques has his Castel (it looks more like the South of France to me), I have been to almost every one of the numerous towns and cities shown on the map that forms part of one of the puzzles.

 

The location that really surprised me was Montserat, the mountainside monastery. As a major tourist destination and somewhere I've visited a couple of times and passed by several more, the buildings and settings were instantly familiar. I've ridden on that cable car - albeit on the inside. Things like that do add something extra the experience. 

As for the gameplay, it was just about perfect for me. I found the pacing better than I expected (I remember getting very stuck at times on the first two games) and the puzzles seemed to be very well judged in the way the complexity ramps gently throughout. The in-game hints were very well-judged. I only had to use them a few times and in all cases it was because I knew what to do but couldn't quite figure out the mechanics of getting the game to let me do it.

Most of the solutions were at least feasible, if not always plausible and there were fewer times when I cocked my head at the screen and asked "Really?" than in most adventure games. I could have done without George adopting a cockroach as a pet and carrying it about in a matchbox for the entire game but maybe that's just me being picky.

The climax, including the unexpected, brief animated cut scene, was suitably spectacular. The best part was the coda. About bloody time is all I can say.

 

All in all, excellent entertainment. I suspect we have now seen the end of George and Nico's adventures but if not, count me in for whatever they get up to next.

(Another) Another World

Tobold has a post up which touches on something that doesn't get mentioned often enough in most discussions of mmorpgs that I've read over the years. He's writing about the founding of Lightforge Games, a new games development studio started by a bunch of people you may or may not have heard of from a bunch of studios you very definitely will - Epic, BioWare, Zenimax, Blizzard. 

As expressed in the PCGamer interview Tobold links to, the pitch is vague in the extreme: "a new cross-platform, social videogame where players have the power to create worlds and tell stories in unprecedented freedom" combining "elements from Minecraft or Roblox with tabletop RPGs to form a new way to play roleplaying games". 

They go on to talk about how they intend to "revolutionize RPGs", which is pretty much the standard new company boilerplate these days. PCGamer sounds unconvinced: ""Revolutionize RPGs" is bold and vague... Roblox is more of a platform for making and playing games than a game in itself. So, are we looking at a creation tool and client for digital tabletop adventures? Or will it be more like a player-driven MMO with custom building? Something in between?"

It's probably wise to be suspicious if not outright cynical about claims of this nature. We've heard them so many times. Everyone plans on getting right all the things they see being done wrong. You'd hope so, too. No-one intends to repeat the maistakes of the past.

The "About" page on the official website is positively angelic in its positivism. I'm not knocking it. Far better to articulate aspirations and risk being called to book when you fail to justify them than not to have them in the first place. 

No, I'm not going to criticize or even critique Lightforge's intentions, nor speculate on their prospects. At this stage my only interest in the new company is as a catalyst, spurring Tobold into saying out loud something I've been thinking for a while: "The fundamental reason why virtual worlds in MMORPGs never really felt like living, breathing worlds is that most of the inhabitants aren't there most of the time. We live in the real world 24 hours a day, 365 days per year, for up to a hundred years or so. We live in virtual worlds for the few hours per day that we have the time for them, maybe not every day, and a lot of players inhabit a virtual world just for a few months before moving on to the next game."

It ties in with a reply I made to Everwake's comment on my Bless Unleashed first impressions post. I said, quite brutally, "I think we tend to expect far too much of games... Why we think every new mmorpg has to be worth dropping everything else to play for years beats me. It's more than enough for a game to be serviceable and entertaining". 

So often we allocate all the blame to execution when expectation is the real problem. It's not just that everything can't be perfect. Everything can't even be great. Some things have to be mediocre and some things have to be bad or how will we even be able to tell the difference?

It reminds me of that joke Garrison Keillor was so proud of he used it at the start of every episode of The Prairie Home Companion: "Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." And that's what we do all the time. Expect every new game to be above average.

It's bad enough when we're talking about single-player, standalone games with a beginning, a middle and an end but when it comes to mmorpgs the whole thing gets so much worse. Now every new game doesn't just have to be better than all the games that came before it, revolutionary, mould-breaking, innovative and original. 

No, because it's an mmorpg, or even a virtual world, it has to be capable of fulfilling all our gaming needs indefinitely. It has to be that One Game we'll play forever, a world so fascinating, so compelling, so satisfying, we'll have no choice, no desire to be anywhere else, ever again.

The "virtual world" concept, which seems to be coming back into vogue after a long time out of fashion, incorporates in its very name the idea that these are places where we can live. Not visit, not play, not goof around when we're bored until something better turns up: live.

Really? Even if that was possible, is that what we want? Is that what we ought to want?

When these discussions happen someone always brings up Star Trek. The Holodeck, that simulator where they go so the production team or the writers or the stars can get a break from space opera for a week or two, wear normal clothes, or at least different clothes. If mmorpgs were like that, someone always says, then I'd be happy. I'd never want to leave.

Star Trek is an outlier. In almost all the science fiction stories I've read, where there's a device that allows people to send their mind into a virtual, fantasy environment and "live" there indefinitely, that's the pivot of a plot about the dangers it entails. It's never fluffy bunny funtime in there. Or, if it is, it sure as hell isn't outside and that's going to be the moral.

Where is it we get these ideas, that a single mmoprg should be able to fulfill all our entertainment needs for years and years? From experience, some of us. From folk memory, the rest.

We all, or most of us, remember that feeling when we first discovered online fantasy gaming. Or mmorpgs. Or virtual worlds. When it was so overwhelmingly new, different, intense and strange we couldn't think of anything we'd rather be doing. 

Many of us timed it so that we didn't actually have an awful lot else we did have to be doing. School and college allow for an awful lot of free time. We were able to spend long enough in our virtual worlds that they started to feel more real than the mundane lives we returned to for those unhappy moments when the servers briefly went offline.

Do we go on playing those same games, our first mmorpg loves, year in, year out, thirty, forty, fifty hours a week? Thankfully, no. Most of us, anyway. We wind down, we cut back, we move on. 

Not all of us turn our backs on our old homes, delete all our characters, give away our stuff. Many of us keep popping in to see how the old place is getting on. Sometimes we stay for a while. Some of us never entirely leave. But we don't spend all our time there. We don't live there forever. 

And I don't see the people at Lightforge expecting that we should. We're the ones doing that. It's something many of us expect of ourselves and of the developers who design our games. We assess the success of each new mmorpg by how able it is to hold players indefinitely, while at the same time we complain about the methods they employ to make it happen.

What else are they supposed to do, though? Mmorpgs take five years or more to make. They cost millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. If one doesn't catch the attention of the critical, demanding audience, that's it. Game over. Can't just knock out another.

Or can you? Isn't that what we see with the inexhaustible flow of identical games from the East? Bless being replaced by Bless Unleashed just the latest example. The annual announcements of the slates of new mmos. Games that don't intend to be anyone's forever game. Just some fun for now, enjoy it then move on. There'll be another along shortly.

If the games are filled with tricks to make us keep playing, why is that? Because we want to stay and they don't want us to leave. Is it mutual self-interest or co-dependency? 

For a couple of months this year all I wanted to do almost every day was play Valheim. It worried me at the time. I mentioned it once or twice. I knew, though, that Valheim had an endpoint. I got there and my interest dimmed and I stopped. I'm glad about that. 

I also said at the time that playing Valheim was very close to the feeling I remembered of playing EverQuest twenty years ago. It's a great feeling. Of course I want it back. I also want to know it won't last forever.

I wish Lightforge well in their quest to revolutionize the way we play rpgs online. Raph Koster, too, and all the other teams working on projects they hope will literally make our dreams come true. I wish them well but I hope they're not quite as successful as they tell us they're going to be.

I'm not sure we're ready for a true virtual world quite yet.