Our Never-Ending Summer Of Fun

There's a lot going on in the MMORPG and MMORPG-Adjacent Genre right now, isn't there? I feel like I could knock out a post a day just retailing snippets about upcoming releases, betas, expansions and Early Access. It makes for a very easy blogging experience, although I'm not sure I want to turn Inventory Full into a half-assed, sloppily-researched repository for day-late, second-hand news.

Oh, wait...

On that note, here are a couple more stories that strike me as being at least worth a mention. The first is the game I said yesterday I was contractually obliged not to discuss: Wayfinder.

According to MassivelyOP, Wayfinder is going into Early Access next month. On the fifteenth to be specific. If you want to be there from the beginning, it's going to cost you a minimum of £13.99 for the Base Pack, which is at the cheaper end as these things go. That'll get you through the door and into the first Season, which they for some reason have decided to call a "Reward Tower" because language doesn't need to mean anything and it's boring when it does.

Your £13.99 doesn't get you a whole lot other than in. For that you'll need to dig deeper into your wallet. There are three more tiers, all with exotic and enticing names, designed to make you feel settling for the the lowly Base Pack would be an act of self-hatred. 

There's the Initiate Pack (£32.99) the Awakened Pack (£59.99) and the Exalted Pack (£98.99). If you want to know what's in each of them, there's a handy comparison table here. There's even a video. Go look at those. I'm sure as hell not typing it all out. 

Those are some big numbers but it's probably going to come as no surprise to anyone to hear that the finished game when it eventually launches, should that day ever come, will operate thenceforth on a Free To Play model. In this respect, Wayfinder is a shining example of the consensus reality in which we all now seem to live.

It's one where you can charge large sums of money for games that are acknowledged by all to be incomplete. It seems to me to be something that could almost only happen in the digital world. About the only physical analog I can think of would be living in the shell of a house while it's being built around you - or more likely renovated. It's a thing people do but it's considered somewhat outré. 

In the world of MMORPGs, of course, living in a virtual world while the developers build it around you has always been considered completely normal. No MMORPG is ever finished, as the truism has it. The difference is that in the beforetimes any developer wishing to expand the scope and scale of their creation was at least obligated to finish the foundations first. These days you can just stick a sign up on the empty lot and charge people to camp there while they hope something gets built one day.

I wish I could give my opinions on Wayfinder's prospects but thanks to the NDA I can't. I'm not absolutely sure I'm even alowed to say I was in the betas although, when I made that comment in response to a post by Heartless Gamer, he pointed out quite reasonably that anyone could tell who was in the beta just by checking their Steam profile, so I guess it must be ok.

What I can say is that not only will I not be rushing to hand over even £13.99 for the lowly Base Pack, I won't be bothering to download the game when it flips to Free To Play at the official launch, either. Not unless I hear there have been some truly radical changes made during Early Access, anyway. That may say more about my personal tastes than the merits of the game, of course.

Another MMORPG I most likely won't be bothering to download is Ethyrial: Days Of Yore. It's not just because of that bloody colon, either, although it certainly doesn't help. (Belated respect to the Wayfinder team for at least not appending an awkward and unecessary suffix to their already evocative single-word title.)

I played Ethyrial (See? Perfectly fine name on its own. Why mess it up with a colon?) during February's Next Fest and didn't hate it. It's one of those self-proclaimed "old school" games, inspired by the supposed Golden Age of the late '90s, something I guess that annoying post-colonic coda is intended to convey. It's travelled a very rocky road over the couple of years since it first appeared on the radar back in 2021 but it's post-launch trajectory has been more of a swerve over a cliff. 

Other than the demo, I have never once felt the desire to play it or indeed mention it, not least because until now I'd have had to pay $10 a month just to get a look at the thing. Given it's been sitting uncomfortably on a Steam rating of Mostly Negative, the only incentive to pay for access would seem to be to find out if it really is as bad as people think. 

It didn't seem anything like that terrible when I tried it but I only saw the starting area. It was certainly odd but that's not always a bad thing. I don't dispute that there was a time when I'd have considered "taking a look" to be a valid reason for spending ten dollars but not any longer. I've seen my share of weird, wobbly MMORPGs. I don't need to pay to see any more.

Except now I don't have to; not for Ethyrial, anyway. As MMOBomb reported this morning, as of today you can play the game for free. There are some behind the scenes difficulties that are likely to hold up development for the foreseeable future so the small-and-getting-smaller team behind the game have decided to leave it on Steam as-is for now only without the sub, so anyone who feels like trying it out can have a go for nothing.

So I'm downloading it as I type, right? Nah. I wasn't that interested before and I'm even less interested now. At the end of that First Impressions piece I summed my feelings up like this: "I played for a couple of hours but I could have gone all night. Or at least I could if it wasn't for the nagging feeling I'd done it all before." In other words, this might have been exhillarating in 1999 but right now it's just exhausting.

I'm beginning to feel my days of trying out would-be "old school MMORPGs" are coming to an end. I stopped getting excited about them a while ago but I retained an annoying sense of duty to the form that meant I felt obliged at least to take a quick look at any I didn't have to pay for. I don't quite feel that way any more. I count a couple of reasons for the change of heart. 

Firstly and most importantly there's been an absolute glut of the things. Someone (Not me!) ought to make a list but it feels like I've read dozens of press releases over the last few years in which everyone from single developers working from home in their spare time to substantial teams, sitting in offices filled with Big Name Devs, enjoying funding in the millions, have claimed to be working on the spiritual successor to Ultima Online or EverQuest or Asheron's Call or some other ancient game that no-one under forty knows or cares about.

Some of those games look like they might be pretty good, if they ever come to anything at all. I have a handful on my Will Play If It Ever Comes Out list. Most of them, though, will either languish in underfunded development hell until the last of the money runs out or limp out of the gate in whatever condition someone can claim is "playable", most likely with a sticker marked "Early Access - Give Us Your Money!" attached, all in the hope of keeping the tawdry dream alive for just a little while longer.

It was quite exciting when it started but now it's just a familiar and somewhat depressing trope. Which isn't to say I don't enjoy kicking the tires of the donkey-cart once in a while. There's always the chance one of these things will turn out to be halfway decent. A few already have. 

The thing is, there are so many now, even I'm feeling the need to apply a little quality control in the selection process and I have a history of being notoriously indescriminating about this sort of thing. Ethyrial doesn't make the cut for me and I very much doubt it will for many others, either.

Secondly (Remember "Firstly"? It was four paragraphs back.) I'm starting to realise that a great deal of the kind of experience I used to enjoy back in the days games like Ethyrial are hoping to bring back are better replicated not by MMORPGs but by the newish hybrids, the survival-MMOs. That ill-defined sub-genre, with its focus on resource gathering and exploration, captures more of the old virtual world feeling than slavish attemps to turn back the clock.

It's also been my experience so far that the core elements of the survival genre tend to be better implemented than the comparable structural pillars of traditional MMORPGs. It seems that developers find it easier to create and implement systems for gathering, crafting and even building than they do for combat. It's usually the fighting that fails to convince, along with the supporting mechanics for vertical progression, whereas the running around chopping down trees parts seem relatively robust.

As an Explorer Archetype, the combat always seemed like a means to an end anyway. You had to fight mobs because they wouldn't let you get to the next hill to see what was over it. Trees and rocks tend not to hit back so that's one less roadblock in your path as you set out to see the world.

And that's probably about all I have to say on either Wayfinder or Ethyrial. I have no plans to investigate either of them further. Then again, plans are made to be changed, so I'm making no promises.

If anyone else feels like giving either a try and reporting back, I'll be very interested to hear how it goes. It'll give us something new to talk about during Blaugust, if nothing else. 

If that happens, I'm willing to bet that it'll be Wayfinder that gets whatever attention there is to be had. Even if, as I suspect, it does end up being the new Crowfall. As for Ethyrial, I doubt we'll hear much mention of it ever again.

Good Things Come

Today's post is a bit of a follow-up to one I wrote back in May, which was itself the forerunner to this one from a couple of days ago. It was going to be a "First Impressions" too, only now it's not, for reasons that will become apparent.

That post back in May talked up two new MMORPGs coming to Steam. One was Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore. The other was Sky: Children of the Light.  Apparently no-one can make a damn game these days without a colon. 

At the time, I said I'd wait until Coreborn went into Early Access to give it a try "if it's cheap enough". The date set for EA was 18 July and I'm pleased to say that date was met. The game is now available to play on Steam, where it will cost you £15.95 (Do your own conversion to Dollars, Euros, Groats or whatever it is they use around your place.)

That's the introductory sale price. There's a 24% discount until 25 July, when it goes back to the full £20.99. Presumably it's 24% off rather than the far more comfortable 25% so as to get a discounted price that ends in a five. Numerology is real.

I had the opportunity to play the game during the last Next Fest. I was pretty hot on it but even so I wasn't planning on jumping onboard the first passing build. I said I was going to "keep it in mind for a later, more fully-functional release, particularly one where progress won't be wiped." 

The Early Access FAQ, which is gratifyingly open and straightforward, makes it more than clear most of the content isn't just unfinished - it's unstarted. There's a long road yet to travel before we reach anything you'd call completion: "We anticipate the game being in early access for one to two years", they say, which, if previous experience is anything to go by, might easily stretch to four or five. 

Add to that the proposed payment model: "Once we leave Early Access, we intend for the game to be free to play" and I don't feel much like throwing money in Coreborn's general direction. It is an odd place we've reached, isn't it? We pay to play unfinished content that we could have for nothing if we'd only wait until it's done. It's lucky for the developers that most gamers seem to have the attention span of a kitten on ritalin and the patience of a toddler having a meltdown.

Coreborn reminds me a little of Project: Gorgon in that it's starting out with a very playable base game but also with big intentions to add many more features. As several bloggers of note have found out, that kind of slow, incremental development, even when sustained with admirable determination and consistency, can lead to a feeling of disconnection. 

There never seems to be a good time to commit to the game in the way it requires because everything is constantly in flux. The game is always going to be better if you hold off for a while. No-one with any self-control can ever get going.

I own a copy of Project:Gorgon thanks to backing the final Kickstarter but I've barely played it since it went into official Early Access, more than five years ago. If that seems like a long time, the P:G EA FAQ is even more unflinching in its honesty than Coreborn's: "Based on our experience with the game's development to date, and accounting for the quantity and quality of content and polish we aim to hit, we expect that Project: Gorgon will be in Early Access until it's ready."

For my money (That I paid more than half a decade ago.) Project:Gorgon has been fit to be declared "ready" for years, now. MMORPGs are famously never feature-complete and you only have to read Stingite's many posts on the game over at The Friendly Necromancer to appreciate just how much content there is already. You'd have no problem settling down there and playing for months

Should you feel like doing that, now would be a great time to start. The game's currently discounted a massive 75%, down from £30.99 to £7.74 (Someone's not scared of even numbers...). The reason for the sale is an unusual one. One of the founders is rather ill and they need someone to take a bit of the weight. 

And apparently sales really do bring in the money: "Our last sale went really well and allowed us to work with the indomitable Nick — the engineer responsible for most of the last year-plus of QoL (Quality of Life) improvements. Imagine what we can do with another Nick".

Even though I might seem to be cheerleading for getting in early, I have to say I won't be taking my
own advice where Coreborn's concerned. My experience with P:G tells me I'd be better holding off until the game's a lot closer to whatever counts as "done". Even the very brief and perfunctory look at the current EA build carried out by MMOBomb suggests it's pretty much the same game I played in Next Fest and that was definitely going to take a while before it was ready for primetime.

None of those caveats really apply to Sky: Children of the Light. It's not an in-development title at all. It's a popular, critically-successful live game already up-and-running on Android and iOS. The only thing that's new about it is it's imminent arrival on PC.

Sky, as I'm going to call it from now on, is currently celebrating it's fourth birthday and there's a party going on. Judging by the video developer That Game Company chose to put up on YouTube, it's one you'd be well advised to skip.

Seriously, it looks horrifically bad. Like someone took a blowtorch to a Roblox instance. Don't take my word for it. Judge for yourself.

Why anyone would use something like that to promote their game beats me. Maybe you need to be twelve to appreciate it - although even as I write the words, I realise I'm insulting tweens everywhere. It looks more like the kind of party a particularly culturaly inept parent might imagine a twelve-year-old would like. Thankfully, the video is at least short. 

The other video they put up to showcase in-game selfie feature, is is far more appealing. I like these kinds of built-in photo suites more and more, to the point that playing older games that don't have them is starting to feel a bit strange. I'd love to have a go with this one.

After I watched the video I went to Steam to wishlist Sky, only to find I already had. There was no news of a release date but as I was looking it occured to me that maybe I didn't need to wait. Didn't I used to play Android games on my PC with some app or other?

I did! For a while I played some mobile-only titles using Nox and I seemed pretty happy with the results.

Unfortunately, Nox doesn't seem quite to have kept up with the times. It's still there but it seems to be  stuck on Android 9. The current version is 12 with 13 due in August. I re-installed Nox and tried anyway but all I got was the old favorite, "This app is incompatible with your device".

Nox isn't the only Android Emulator game in town, not by a long shot. It's not even the best-known. That would be Bluestacks. Back in 2019, when I first tried doing this, Bluestacks was supposed to be a bit more effort to set up, which is why I went with Nox. I don't know if that was really true then but now it's incredibly easy. Unfortunately, Bluestacks won't run Sky for me either.I downloaded and installed Bluestacks X, the version that runs in the cloud and also Bluestacks 5, the one that runs on your own PC. That was the easy part.

The hard part was getting Sky to run on either of them. It was so hard, in fact, I never managed to do it at all. I spent the best part of two hours tinkering with all kinds of options, following suggested settings from the official Bluestacks website, from reddit, from YouTube... nothing worked.

After a lot of tinkering (Most of which I really enjoyed, if I'm honest, although I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if any of it had gotten me into the game.) I finally ran across a reddit thread that suggested Sky had been working fine on Bluestacks until about three days ago, when an update screwed things up.

 Timing. It's all about the timing.

There was a response to the thread from Bluestacks Support saying they were looking into it so I figured the best thing to do would be to wait and see if they'd fix whatever the update broke. I'll try and remember to give it a try in a few days.

If that doesn't work, I guess I'll just have to wait for the Steam launch like a normal person. It ought to be easy but of course it won't. You know the old, familiar feeling; you can have a hundred games ready, all of them just begging you to log in and have fun, but it's always the one that's unavailable for some reason that you just have to play right now...

Sod it. I'm going to go watch The Owl House instead.

Holding Pattern

One of the reasons I posted about three potential new games yesterday is that I feel like I'm in a bit of a holding pattern right now, when it comes to gaming. It's nothing new or unusual. I think most of us go through it at one time or another.

Krikket was talking about not being able to settle down to playing any particular game for more than a few minutes before losing interest and wandering off to something else. Syp, as usual, has been looking ahead, preferring the as-yet unspoiled excitement of gaming tomorrow to the frayed and worn familiarity of gaming today.

I'm feeling a little of both. Occasionally I wonder whether it's gaming that's losing its hold on me, not the individual games. It wouldn't be the first of my deep and abiding interests to fall away to nothing but bittersweet memories. 

There are a few such lost obsessions in my life. I can name them all because for a time I felt they defined me. I won't, though. Not right now. I'll save that for Blaugust. It'll fit nicely into Introducing Yourself week. I have a couple of ideas for that to avoid repeating myself from previous years.

Sticking to the point, for once, I feel that rather than losing interest in playing games per se, I'm a little disconnected from the process. Time was, the inside of a game seemed bigger than the outside. It's been a while since it felt that way. 

Although, actually, not that long, I guess, when I really think about it. Valheim wrapped me up for a while. I got drawn into Chimeraland's craziness for a couple of months. It can still happen.

It doesn't last, though. Not for long. It's weeks not months, months not years. Is it just a function of having done this for so very long, now? Is it an inevitable wearing-down of the receptors? Does the dopamine just not hit the way it did? 

Or is it the games? Does the way they're made-to-fit today leave too little room for wonder? When no-one knew what to do, did they do it better? Now there's a map do we miss getting lost?

All of that and more. And less. Sometimes a slow patch is just a slow patch. Shouldn't read too much into it.

Then there's anticipation. That's a double-edged claymore, isn't it? The future smells so sweet it makes the present taste bland, sometimes.

Take Palia. I didn't even want to play the game. I'd read a little about it and it sounded... okay. Not that interesting. I certainly wasn't hanging around waiting for it. Now I am, apparently. And Tarisland. It was just a curiosity until I got a taste and then they took it way and now I want it back.

I'm even quite... excited isn't exactly the word but it's headed in that direction... to get the Hildir's Request patch for Valheim. That's the one with the difficulty sliders. It's been on the Public Test Server for a month now. It must be due to go live soon.

I'm not sure if you'll be able to apply those sliders to an existing world. If you can, I'll finally be able to get my corpse. If not, though, I'm quite keen to start over with the world set to something much closer to a sandbox, so I can just concentrate on building and forget about surviving.

Immenence has its own issues. If something's way off down the line it's easy to put it aside for now. Shunt it into a siding of your one-track mind and let it idle there. When it's barelling down the rails right at you, getting bigger every day, it's harder to ignore.

Except when it's really super-easy. It was only when I read that post of Syp's I remembered there's an "expansion" coming soonish for Guild Wars 2. And I even wrote about the damn thing not much more than a couple of weeks ago.

I can't ever have been less interested in an upcoming expansion for a game I supposedly play, surely? And I do still play GW2, right? I mean, if not, why did I bother to claim that code for free dyes from Amazon Prime yesterday?

Rhetorical questions. There is no "play". There is only playing and I'm not playing GW2. I expect I will again, one day, but if I don't it won't matter. Everything has its season.

It isn't only games, either. Blaugust is sucking all the air out of the blogging room right now. I keep thinking of ideas and putting them aside for August. I did it just now. You saw me.

The upshot is, I have plenty to blog about but not much to post. Which is why you get to read this instead of something more interesting and why I'm going to stop here. Also, it's summer and it's finally stopped raining and Beryl just woke up so I think I'm going to take her for a walk.

I'm working tomorrow so I won't be back until Thursday. Let's hope I have something to post about by then or things could get ugly.

Three More For The Pot

With the Palia Closed Beta/Open Beta/Soft Launch/Whatever-The-Hell-It-Is looming, I figured it was time to start casting about for yet more free, in-development MMORPGs I'll never have time to play. Can't have too many of those!

There are three titles on my radar that I can't recall anyone else in this part of the blogosphere having mentioned, although since MassivelyOP has reported on all of them (One even from a tip I sent them.), some several times, I imagine everyone reading this will have heard of at least one by now. 

Whether anyone will remember anything about any of them is another matter altogether. I couldn't even remember the name of the game I sent in the tip for. I literally had to go to MOP and search for the article to remind myself what it was called, which turns out to be...  

UNYHA

No bloody wonder I couldn't remember It. I even mis-spelled it, copying it from the website, and had to correct it. Having worked in marketing once in the long-ago, it makes me wonder sometimes just who comes up with these names. It almost seems like they don't want anyone to know who they are.

Unyha is by far the weirdest of the three. It calls itself an "autochronicle seasonal multiplayer role playing game", which seems like another aggressively obscurantist move. According to the webiste, it's "the first-ever autochronicle online RPG". It uses a "unique Autochronicle AI" to generate "history and content... making it truly aware of its inhabitants activity".

The idea appears to be that the AI tracks player activity and records it, feeding the details back to NPCs, who then react accordingly:

"Everyone you meet, each place traveled, every trinket discovered—they all have real histories. You hear the tavern maid tells tales of recent gossip; trade deals of mighty weapons between merchants, a rowdy bar fight, or a mysterious newcomer’s arrival". 

At least, I'm guessing that's the players its talking about. Maybe the NPCs all wander about doing stuff to each other under the direction of the AI and it's the players who have to deal. It's unclear.

Either way, since the game is also "seasonal", the whole thing resets periodically. But don't think that gives you carte blanche to start over with a clean slate:

"As seasons come and go and decades become centuries, your stories only grow stronger, forming myths and legends. It will be up to the next generations to rediscover the truth of these stories—and take the consequences."

Seasons last "between 2-4 months real world time" during which "your character ages from young to death." You then pick up again with "a new character, a descendant" and of course "family heirlooms". So far, so familiar.

Less recognizeable from other games is the allegation that "Your name and reputation shield you from desperates" (Whatever they are.) All gear is player-made but "Your very first sword" can somehow record "all the epic battles and vicious monsters you slay". The same sword can then be handed to your future characters as "an important family heirloom", suggesting that weaponsmiths, at least, are going to find very few takers for their work.

There's more but I already feel like I've paraphrased the entire "About" (Or "Immerse" as they like to call it.) section. It seems like a combination of ideas we've seen many times before only with the current "AI" buzzword attached. The last update to the Devlog on the website was in November last year so I'm sure things are all going swimmingly.

The other two games I'm going to talk (Hopefully briefly.) about are much further down the line towards becoming something you can actually play. One ran an open demo a couple of months back and is listed on Steam with a release date of "2023". The other is in "Stage Two Closed Beta" with a Buy-In option right now.

Dawnlands

I quite like the look of this one. It's "an Open-World Survival Crafting game with a massive world and epic lore" but then aren't they all, these days. Comments on YouTube suggest it looks like a mash-up of Breath of the Wild, Genshin Impact and Valheim, which is going to get a lot of people interested, if true.

It's set to be playable either with other players in a shared world or entirely alone in a world of your own. Even in solo mode it doesn't appear to be a pure sandbox. It looks as though there's some kind of plot or storyline and there's time-pressure involved, since"You need to find and defeat the darkness before it engulfs the land." I could probably do without that.

The game is cross-platform, as everything seems to be lately. You'll be able to play it on Android, iOS and PC. I've noticed that whereas a few years ago people would get quite excited about that sort of thing, nowadays they seem to be increrasingly suspicious, anticipating "cross-platform" will translate to "dodgy mobile port" or, worse, "crappy mobile game".

Dawnlands was part of the February Steam Next Fest but I missed it, most likely because it was tagged "Survival" not "MMORPG". I also missed the recent closed beta, which ended today. I applied but I didn't get in. 

According to the website, there's a PC demo available and you can indeed download and install the client as I did this morning. When you hit play, though, all that happens is the introductory movie plays and then a notice pops up to tell you the beta is over.  The movie's not that great so I wouldn't bother.

I have submitted an application to be notified of any future tests so if anything develops on that front no doubt I'll be posting about it. Unless there's an NDA. I really hate NDAs. Did I mention that?

Otherwise, I guess we'll find out what it's like when it launches. I have it wishlisted.

Age of Water

This is both the furthest along in development and probably the highest-profile of the three. It's being built by Three Whales Studio for Gaijin Entertainment, the Hungarian developer and publisher responsible for, among other things, War Thunder.

Age of Water has an interesting and appealing premise. "Set in a post-apocalyptic aquatic world", it's "the story of a motorboat captain, who explores the expanse of a completely flooded Earth of the future", in which "people are huddled in settlements built on what remains above water - like the tops of skyscrapers." 

It's Waterworld: the MMO, basically. Probably. Maybe. (Full disclosure: I have never seen Waterworld.) 

Age of Water also has a video and for once it's a really good. It sells the game hard:

On the other hand, someone who's actually played it left this comment in the YouTube thread:

"If your idea of fun is days upon days of heavily contested resource grind with boring, repetitive point and click combat, an unengaging storyline that you just spam E to get through and 90% just travelling between points. This is your game."

I think that's supposed to be off-putting but it sounds quite appealing to me, apart from the "highly contested" part. I think we established long ago that one person's grind is another's meditative groove and travelling between points can be relaxing, too. And obviously my eyes light up at the mention of point&click combat.

I'm certainly not going to be paying money for closed beta access to a free-to-play game (Been there, done that.) but I've put in my beta application for a place the old-fashioned way, so once again we'll see if anything comes of it.

These things are really starting to pile up, now. I have three more MMORPGs or close enough on my Steam wishlist (Nightingale, Coreborn and Cinderstone.), all either already in some form of Early Access or due out this year. There's Tarisland on the way very soon as well as Wayfinder, about which I am contractually obliged to say absolutely nothing. And, of course, Palia, right around the corner. 

I could list a dozen more but this isn't that post. It beats me why people keep saying the MMO is dead. (Which they do. I swear I've seen that at least three times in the last week alone.) If it's true, why the hell do so many companies keep making them? They can't all be tax write-offs, surely.

Commercially, the genre is clearly far from moribund. Artistically and creatively... well, that's another matter altogether. I can't say any of the games I've mentioned look to be genuinely fresh in ideas or imagery except perhaps for Nightingale, whose unfamiliar premise we now know is at least partially derived from a pre-existing IP. 

At best you could say the more imaginative developers are putting the prefabricated pieces together in a somewhat different order. Then again, as I've often said, novelty is highly overrated. I'll settle for quality, craftmanship and enthusiasm. 

And I'll count myself lucky to get any two of those.

It's Friday. Grab Yer Bag!

A Friday Grab-Bag post on a Friday? What the.. ?! Who's driving this thing?

No intro. Straight to the verse.

Palia Closed/Open Beta

Everyone seems to have been a bit taken aback by the sudden announcement that much-hyped "cosy" MMORPG Palia is going into Closed Beta in just over two weeks. Even more surprising (Astonishing, gob-smacking, dumbfounding, flat-out nuts...) is the news the Closed Beta will only last a week before they throw the doors open and let everyone in.

What's more, the Closed Beta will have no wipes. All progress will carry over to Open Beta and then to whatever they decide qualifies as "Live", making the CB effectively a soft launch. 

I'm still struggling to process this. I can't remember the last MMORPG of any stature that went from small scale, invite only, behind closed doors alpha (Which is where Palia has been for the last two years) to effective release in a week.

It's so peculiar I had to read the announcement several times beforeI understood it. At first I thought the "No Wipes" part referred to Open Beta, which made the idea that anyone would bother to do anything much at all in the one-week Closed test look highly fanciful. 

On closer reading, I realized there wern't going to be any wipes from the start of Closed Beta onwards, effectively making that the soft launch. About the only logical explanation I can come up with is that Singularity 6, the developer, is so confident in the state of the game as it leaves alpha that all they feel they have left to do is test the robustness of the infrastructure at scale. Letting in increasing numbers during the short, Closed Beta gives them the last remaining info they need before they throw the doors wide to anyone.

That analysis would be strengthened by the decision to do away with any kind of NDA for the Closed Beta, were it not for the fact that the damn thing's going to be over so fast it makes no practical difference whether people talk about it or not. It's going to be too late to change anything, anyway. 

Unless it's a disaster, obviously. Then I guess they'd have to pull back.

Given the timescales involved, I hadn't planned to bother applying for the Closed Beta at all but it turns out I already did: twice. I received two emails from different email addresses, inviting me to fill in a few more details on applications I'd already made. I have no memory of doing it but they didn't just randomly pick my email and send me the info so I must have.

I've filled out one of the new applications so we'll see if I get in before Open Beta begins on 10 August. I don't really know anything about the game, other than it doesn't feature combat, and I'm not remotely hyped about it like some, but I am curious to take a look. If nothing else, it's perfectly timed to give me something game-related to blog about during Blaugust.

Dead Gaem

I read a news item at NME this week headlined "Study shows 87 percent of classic video games are unavailable to play right now". Given the popularity of such platforms as Good Old Games, websites offering "abandonware" and the prevalence of emulators, I found that a little surprising.

The detail behind the headline clarifies the situation somewhat. The figure comes from a study commissioned by The Video Game History Foundation, in partnership with the Software Preservation Network, two organisations hitherto unknown to me. The research was carried out by Zendo.org (Ditto.) and can be read in full here.

It's over fifty pages long. I have skimmed it but I haven't read it in full. I can tell you the criteria it used, though:

Well, that explains it. We're talking about console or home computer games that largely predate the era of digital download; the dark ages, in software terms.

The report makes much of comparisons with other "at-risk" media such as "pre-World War II audio recordings" or "American silent-era films" but it might as well bring in medieval ballads or eighteenth century broadsheets. 

Popular culture is, by nature and definition, ephemeral. It's not designed to endure and in most cases durability would not be desirable. The culture moves constantly forward, often leaving little or no trace. Try looking up the top twenty best-selling paperback novels for every year in the 20th Century some day and see how many you've ever heard of. Then check how many are still in print.

The argument seems to be that everything that can be preserved should be preserved, something that's certainly happening with many written and recorded artefacts, and there's no real reason not to support the presevation of every cultural artefact in theory. Anything might be of use or interest to someone, someday.

For all practical purposes, though, this stuff is unavailable for a reason. People got what they wanted from it and moved on. For academic purposes it's enough that records are kept and representative samples retained, preferably including as much as possible of the best along with samples of the ordinary and the sub-par. To try to keep it all is both unrealistic and self-indulgent. 

Let's be honest here; the main market for this stuff is the nostalgia market. Once everyone who played these games as a kid has died off, who's going to want to look at any of it?

Compared to other media, video games do suffer from a particular problem in that there has never been a single, universally-adopted platform on which to play them. The situation has improved somewhat, with a much smaller number of manufacturers making hardware or operating systems than was the case in the 1980s and 90s, but there are still numerous, discrete iterations. The likelihood of even libraries or museums being able to maintain all of these in good working order is slim and the possibility of such hardware being widely accessible to the general public or even academia all but impossible.

Then again, just how real is the problem, anyway? If you want to play Commodore 64 games, there are seven thousand of them waiting for you here. Almost every extinct "ecosystem" has multiple emulation projects offering more games than anyone is likely to play in a lifetime. 

I'm not convinced the situation is as "grim" as the report claims. Or that it would matter as much as they seem to think, even if it was.

Wait! Are We The Bad Guys?

The Classic Games report mentions "piracy" as one way of accessing old games. I suspect it's referring to those emulators I was talking about. I'm theoretically opposed to piracy but I confess that I'm not always entirely sure what it is and I'm not particularly scrupulous in finding out.

This week I decided I wanted to watch a TV show called The Owl House. I first heard of it when I was looking for clips of Dead End: Paranormal Park on YouTube to use in a post a while back and The Owl House kept cropping up in the recommendations. 

I figured the two shows might have creators in common but actually it appears they just share a number of thematic and socio-political features: adolescence, LGBTQ+ rights, demons.... that kind of thing.  

Dead End: Paranormal Park was cancelled after the second season. I'd been meaning to try The Owl House as an alternative but before I'd gotten around to doing anything about it, I came across this article at Vanity Fair. It made me even more interested to see the show for myself so I started googling to find out where I could watch it.

My preference would have been on one of the streaming services I already subscribe to but neither was carrying it. It's on Disney+, which I don't currently have. I keep meaning to sub to it because there's plenty there I'd watch but I don't want to add a third channel and I haven't found a sensible point at which to drop one of the two I already have.

I was very willing to buy a box set of the three seasons of the show on DVD but there doesn't appear to be one. The closest I could get would be a digital download from Google Play but although the show originally ran as three seasons, for some reason it's been split into five, all of which have to be purchased separately. The total cost comes to almost $70, which seems outrageously inflated.

I watched the first episode, available free and legally on Disney's own YouTube channel as a tempter, and while I liked it, I didn't like it enough to pay seventy dollars to see the rest. Even if I'd been willing to spend the money, I can't find the show on the UK version of Play so I'm guessing it's not even available to buy in this region.

I was about to give up and forget about it when I noticed a link in the search results to the Internet Archive. Curious, I clicked on it and it took me to this. Seasons One and Two are available in full under "Community Video", a section of the archive to which "thousands of videos were contributed by Archive users and community members." 

It hadn't previously occured to me to look for currently-available material in the Internet Archive. I use it now and then to find stuff that seems to have vanished from the web. I thought that was what it was for. That you can use it to watch material that's already out there on commercial platforms is news to me.

Maybe something about the way the Archive operates makes it okay or maybe no-one who would care has noticed. If so, does that make it "piracy"? I dunno. I'm watching a couple of episodes a day, anyway. It's a good show. I'll review it when I've seen them all. Well, the first two seasons, anyway. Still don't have a source for the third. Maybe someone will have "contributed" it to the archive by the time I get there...

Not Very Rock and Roll

I keep reading stories about bands and artists cancelling performances and abandoning tours for reasons related to their physical and mental wellbeing. Some of the cancellations are wholly understandable - Celine Dion has a neurological disorder called Stiff Person Syndrome; Lewis Capaldi is still adjusting to the impact of Tourette's Syndrome. 

Some, however, don't seem very... how shall I put it... rock and roll. 100 Gecs have cancelled the whole of their European tour because "we're physically and mentally worn out". It's true  the tour was a relatively lengthy one by modern standards: fourteen dates in twenty days in cities as far apart as Dublin and Milan. There would have been a far amount of travelling. A bit like one of those old "fifteen cities in fifteen days" European Vacations.

The decision contrasts spectacularly with something I read this morning in a book about the year 1982, from which I learned that Iron Maiden, having swapped out their original singer for Bruce Dickinson the previous year and just having charted in the UK with Run To The Hills, were about to set out on a 184 date world tour that would take them from February to December.

The book in question isn't particularly well-written but it's extremely well-researched and stuffed with both hard facts and fascinating anecdotes. The image it paints is of a music scene fueled by drugs, alcohol and a general determination to do anything the hell necessary to become famous, successful, respected or popular - preferably all of them at once. 

It's very clear that absolutely no-one was taking responsibility for their own health back then, either mental or physical. You just plowed through and hoped you didn't die before you finished the tour. I am absolutely not suggesting "it was better in the old days". I'm very pleased that musicians and performers are both willing and able to take the necessary steps back from a punishing lifestyle to look after their short and long term wellbeing. Maybe it'll lead to me reading fewer obituaries of drummers dying in their forties and fifties

I'm just saying it's a very different world, that's all. No wonder Lana's so nostalgic about the 1970s.

And finally...

You Need Jesus - Yung Gravy, bbno$ (BABY GRAVY)

I dunno. I thought it was funny...

Peace Out!

Blaugust's Back, Baby! Better Get Ready!

It's that time of year again. Yesterday, Belghast took time out of his extremely busy schedule to post the details of this year's Blaugust Festival of Blogging. I'd been wondering if we were going to be doing it all again and now I know. We are. YAY!

If you'd like to sign up (You know you want to...) here's where to go. Other than that, everything you need to know is in Bel's post.

I really enjoy Blaugust for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's super-lively with dozens of bloggers generating more posts than anyone has time to read. Oversupply and reading exhaustion has been something of a theme these last couple of years but far better that way than the other.

Secondly, it give me a chance to do something I love to do, namely blog about blogging. I mean, I do it all year round anyway, but for a month I don't have to feel self-conscious about it. I do love talking about process.

On that note, last year I found myself struggling a little to keep up. I was determined to hit the full thirty-one posts but unlike previous years I hadn't prepared anything in advance for those days when I just wasn't feeling it or when I came back from work and was just too tired to write.

This year I've been thinking about what might make a useful fallback position for days like those. Here are a few ideas I came up with so far, with pros and cons:

My Favorite Bands (Then And Now) 

Making lists of favorites was a big thing back in my APA days. I thought I might dig out a couple of old lists and do a current version, too. Maybe compare and contrast. See how much my tastes have changed, if at all.

Pros: 

1. I love lists. 
2. Half the work's already been done.

Cons:   

1. Might be some stuff in those old lists I'd rather not own up to.
2. Making a new Favorites list is more work than you'd think.

 

 

My Favorite Bands (Lifetime Edition)

While my favorites change all the time, there's a static, historical list to be compiled of the bands or artists that make the Lifetime cut. Those are the ones that fire up some specific neural pathway every time I think of them, telling me they're "IMPORTANT". They're frequently not commercially or culturally successful, they just had some peculiarly personal, subjective impact on me that never really went away.

Pros:

1. I absolutely know what goes on that list so it would be very easy and quick to compile.
2. I have a ton to say about all of them so the posts would be easy to write.

Cons:

1. Because I have a ton to say about all of them, the posts might be easy, but they would not be quick.
2. I have written a ton about most of them here on the blog already. It's well-trodden ground.
   

 

 

RAM - Random Access Music

A couple of ways this could go. One, which I've used before, involves using Windows 10's "Select Random" option to pick from my vast reservoir of bookmarked tunes. Or I could go physical and pull random albums or singles from the several thousand in the front room. 

Pros: 

1. Very quick and easy to write the posts. It's just one embedded video and a paragraph.
2. Would be a lot of fun for me.

Cons:

1. Might not be a lot of fun for anyone else (Although if I start applying that criterion too rigorously, the entire blog is going to fall over...)
2. I know from experience that getting acceptable results "randomly" actually requires a good deal of editing and fact-checking. Could all too easily spiral out of control.

 

 

Tune of the Day  

Pretty much self explanatory.

Pros:

1. Just means converting a couple of posts I'd have done during Blaugust anyway, turning the popular (/irony) What I've Been Listening To Lately feature into a bunch of single-song posts.
2. Each post would take barely five minutes to put together.

 Cons:

1. Almost insultingly obvious.
2. Smacks of making no effort.

 

 

My Life In A Bag Of Buttons

Or badges, as we call them over here, although that doesn't make for such a snappy title, somehow. I have a literal bag of buttons/badges next to me right now, from when I used to wear them all the time. I stopped doing that in the eighties so they go back to my adolescence and college years. I thought I could stick my hand in, pull one out, photograph it and write a couple of paragraphs about why I would have worn it. 

Pros:

1. Probably the most unusual and potentially rewarding idea I've come up with.
2. Should result in some posts about stuff I otherwise wouldn't have thought to write about.

Cons:

1. Almost certainly going to be too much work for a bunch of fill-in posts.
2. Sticking my hand into a bag full of rusty old badges with sticky-out pins is potentially hazardous to my health.

 

 

My Life As A Parade (Of Characters)

Similar to the Lifetime Bands idea only this time it's characters I've played in MMORPGs. Once again, I can immediately tell you which have been the most significant of all my myriad characters and I have lots to say about them all. And I have pictures. Probably.

Pros:

1. It's game-related, for once.
2. It'd be a lot of fun revisiting them all.

Cons:

1. Seriously, dude? That's a fuckton of work!
2. Do I really want to put all those character names out there now, when I've made the effort to keep them private all this time?

 

 

Cute Dog Pic Of The Day

Pictures of Beryl. Simple as that. Maybe with some text. Probably with some text or it's not really a post, I guess.

Pros:

1. Everyone loves a picture of a cute dog!
2. Super quick and easy to put together.

Cons:

1. It's not always as easy as you might think to take a picture of a cute dog, especially when the dog isn't into it.
2. Might be quick and easy to put the post together but taking the photos and getting them off my phone and onto the computer could be time-consuming and annoying. 

 

 

An AI Writes

Stick a prompt into Bard or ChatGPT, cut and paste the result. Get NightCafe or StableDiffusion to illustrate it. Add a little commentary. Job done.

 Pros:

1. Someone (Something.) else would be doing almost all the work.
2. Would amuse the hell out of me.

Cons:

1. Kind of feels like cheating on the Spirit of Blaugust.
2. Some people really hate AI-generated content.

 

 

And that's all I've come up with so far. It's been very useful writing them all down like this. At the very least, now I have a list of options to choose from. If I just pulled one post from each category, that'd give me over a week's worth of posts.

I might end up running some of these as separate features outside of Blaugust, too. Maybe I should do this planning ahead thing more often.

Nah. Don't think so.

Is It That Time Already?

It's probably about time for a quick update on how things are going in EverQuest II.. Past time, really. I'd normally have put up something about this Summer's Producer's Letter when it came out a week ago but as Wilhelm suggested in his post, there wasn't all that much to say.

There was the part about rolling another three expansions into the free-to-play offer. That surprised me a bit but only because I thought the whole thing already worked on a rolling "two expansions behind the current one" plan, whereby a new-old expansion opened up for F2P every time a new-new one went on sale. 

I suppose that would be far too simple and straightforward for a F2P plan; not just EQII's - anyone's. Ever since the concept of giving the game away then clawing the cash back somehow took over the genre, there's been a drive to make the whole process as fiddly, complicated and annoying as possible, for obvious reasons.

Four legs good, six legs better. My new Familiar

It's been a while since I played EQII for free. For years I was in the peculiar position of paying a subscription for an account that I rarely used while playing full-time as a F2Per on another. I won't rehash the convoluted chain of circumstances that led to such an  idiosyncratic, not to say idiotic, choice. Suffice to say I eventually swapped the sub over to the account I was actually using and managed for once not to mess it all up again. Well, on EQII, at least. Different story when I was playing EverQuest at the same time but we'll gloss over that...

Due to the way the both the game and I have changed over the years, it seems unlikely I'd ever go back to playing multiple accounts. I do still, very occasionally, log in on my old ex-sub account or even one of the half-dozen other F2P accounts I made for... reasons. My days of logging in multiple characters on multiple accounts just to get free items or do holiday events are (Almost certainly...) over.

That kind of behavior is and always has been a significant aspect of EQII culture, though. My handful of accounts and couple of dozen regularly-played characters were evidence of restraint and self-control by the prevailing standards of the playerbase at one time and I don't believe all that much has changed. I knew people who did all the new holiday content for every festival, every year, on every character, on multiple accounts. Some people had characters on every server and worked hard to keep all of them current. 

It still goes on, although the way the levelling path was narrowed to a single track a few years ago, making it mandatory to gain all of your xp from the main questline in the latest expansions, put a crimp in many peoples' desire to run a huge stable of adventuring alts. Nothing's really changed for crafters and decorators, though, and they were always the demographic most likely to run multiple accounts and play scores of characters.

Didn't I get this letter last year?

I'd like to think I'm well past my own dabbling with such behavior. Ironically, now I'm semi-retired I seem to find a lot less time to play video games. Not sure how that's happened. Still, I have been making time to work on the Summer Jubilee content, specifically the new Plume slot. 

The Scorched Sky Celebration holiday ends today and I just ran the repeatable Summer Jubilee dungeon again, right before I started this post. I'm not sure how many times I've done it but I must be closing in on the ten runs needed for the first Plume. I'll certainly finish that off when the third and final summer holiday, Oceansfull, arrives in August but I don't think there's much chance I'll get the twenty runs needed for the upgraded version.

There were a few other things I wanted to during Scorched Sky but I haven't gotten around to doing any
of them. I started the big, centerpiece dungeon but I didn't finish it and now I'd have to start again, which was never going to happen. I've done all of it before and anyway it'll be back next year, so my motivation is not the highest.

I've blown my chance for this year, anyway. The game is down for "Extended Maintenance" today, after which Scorched Sky will have gone. EQII usually  patches or resets on a Tuesday but this week it's Wednesday and instead of the usual couple of hours, it's going to be down all day. 

The extensive patch notes mostly cover a sweeping upgrade to the Epic abilities that were a cornerstone of last year's Renewal of Ro expansion. Needless to say, I haven't even glanced at those. I have no clue how you get them let alone what they were before the patch or why they needed to be improved. 

I'm increasingly of the opinion that trying to keep up to date as a solo player in EQII is a mug's game. It's rarely necessary for anything I do and even when it is I can't ever get ahead. New rungs get added to the vertical progression ladder so frequently it makes a lot of sense to skip one or two, then clamber up over them later. 

This is the first year for a good while that I haven't finished the main expansion Adventure quest and it's clarified something I'd been wondering about for a while. Every year we get the Panda quests that reward a full set of armor, weapons, accessories and augments that upgrade the main questline rewards from the previous expansion. Then, when the new expansion drops, now only a few weeks later, since the Panda quests got moved to Autumn, we get a full set of upgrades to the Panda stuff in the Tishan's Box next to the first questgiver.

This instance has been a great source of crafting books.

It never made much sense to me until now but I finally realize it allows sluggards like me to overgear and finish the solo content from the outgoing expansion before the incoming one arrives. There are a number of reasons why you might want to do that; rewards and perks other than gear, various flags set on your character for future content etc. etc. Plus it's just tidy to finish up the last one before starting the next.

Mostly, new expansions start clean, but there's always some crossover and the leg-up right at the end allows for a smoother transition. In previous years I haven't needed to think about that but this year it seems like something I'd appreciate. That's my current theory for why it's the way it is, anyway.

The patch notes had a few amusing lines I'm going to share. I always enjoy a good, snarky patch note.

Call to home now functions correctly for those that call a dirty cave in the ground their home "city".

I think that's a dig at Betrayal, the questline that allows you to change faction from Freeport to Qeynos or vice versa. I did it once, a very long time ago, and I seem to remember that for a while you are stateless and have to skulk in a hole with minimal facilites until you re-align with your new city-state. Or it could be Gorowyn. I never liked Gorowyn.

Corrected an issue where the Replica: Wanted Poster wanted to be a guild amenity, and would vanish from homes after being placed. It now wants to be where it is wanted, instead of where it wanted to want to be.

And now I want to know how you get a Replica: Wanted Poster. Going to have to look into that.

Newly created illusionists once again have a sharp pokey thing to stick into those that annoy them. Or do they? Maybe it's all a figment of your imagination?

I've never played an Illusionist past about level 30. Maybe that's something I ought to try. I like poking things with sticks.

Oh, yeah! I was going to do this one, too! Too late now.

Looking ahead, there's another major Update in September and I haven't even started the content from the last one. It was too tough so I gave up. My spirit animal is Bart Simpson. Also, see my earlier comments about the steepness of vertical progression in this game. I probably could give the instance from the last GU another try, now I have the gear from running the Summer Jubilee dungeon, which I'm very happily cheesing using the mentoring system. Shame that doesn't work for the regular instances.

And finally, there's all the great charity work EQII and Darkpaw do, namely Extra Life and Daybreak Games' Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion initiative. I know all the big gaming companies like us to know how socially aware they are but I find Daybreak and especially Darkpaw more convincing than most. Let's hope that doesn't come back to bite me...

There's probably more that I've forgotten but as Wilhelm said at the end of his post on the same topic, the world keeps on turning. We'll be back here again soon enough, talking about the Autumn/Winter Producer's Letter, by which time I'd expect us to know the name and theme of this year's expansion.

It'll be more desert. I'm calling that now.