Old Becomes New Becomes Old Again

I thought I might expand a little on a comment I left over at The Ancient Gaming Noob, where I was replying to some thoughts by Wilhelm and Potshot on the opening of Cataclysm Classic. As the rollout of expansions continues, the successive iterations and refinements Blizzard imposed on the genre are being brought to light all over again

I think it's very easy to forget how strange and different some of the simplest innovations seemed at the time. Potshot, who always seems to remember better than most the way MMORPGs used to be, reminded me of the impact Blizzard's basic addition of quest markers over the heads of NPCs had at the time.

Whether all that pendant punctuation was an original idea developed by the World of Warcraft team I'm not sure. It would be unusual if so, since their normal modus operandi has always been to let others take the risks before moving in to reap the benefits, once the value of a new idea has been proved. 

Honestly, I can't even remember where first saw what Potshot calls the ""Christmas Tree” effect". It wouldn't have been in WoW.  I didn't play that game until mid-way through Wrath of the Lich King. I would guess that EverQuest II, which launched a couple of weeks before WoW, also used something of the kind but I have no actual memory of whether it did or not. The screenshots I took at the time prove nothing since I always turned the UI off for aesthetic reasons.

It doesn't really matter who had the idea first. It was undoubtedly WoW that popularized it and turned it into a genre standard, just as the game did with so many other features and mechanics. Even now, two decades later, the huge majority of MMORPGs employ many of the blueprints laid down by Blizzard devs and designers over the last twenty years. 

As long as I've been playing, there's been much discussion over whether the MMORPG genre or even the broader classification of MMOs is mass-market or niche. WoW had a huge footprint in its prime and games like Runescape and Lineage may well claim an even bigger impact in terms of sheer numbers but they still can't compete on the true mass-market scale with something like Call of Duty or Fortnite or Minecraft or League of Legends...

Add all the MMORPGs together, though, and it's a pretty big niche. It'd be tempting to assume it's a profitable business to be in, too, because people will insist on making the damn things. Then again, as we all must know by now, the best way to make a living out of developing games isn't always to end up with a finished product to sell.

Still, there are a lot of MMORPGs, old and new, and while there are considerable differences between them, they're mostly recognizable as part of the same family. Siblings, maybe. Certainly cousins. If they don't all have forests of punctuation points or even formal quest-givers, they certainly have some method for players to identify and access structured content with facility.

The MMORPGs that came before WoW tended not to bother with much - or any - of that. They preferred to let players work things out for themselves. Most didn't even have basic tutorials beyond "Press WASD to move". If you wanted to find out if an NPC had anything for you to do, you had to ask them. They certainly weren't holding up any "Help Wanted" cards.

By today's standards, the first wave of MMORPGs were astonishingly user-unfriendly. Developers expected players to have an enthusiast's knowledge and determination. What was then, pejoratively, often described as "hand-holding" was actively discouraged.

WoW's biggest innovation and the probable reason for its runaway success was the demystification of the process. While Classic seemed relatively challenging when Blizzard brought it back a few years ago, even that perceived level of difficulty was minor compared to what came before. 

In short, WoW from Vanilla through Wrath of the Lich King was, by comparison to contemporary expectations, easy and getting easier. But easier for whom?

As Potshot accurately describes it, Cataclysm represents the "the start of the era where we all play the single player game of WoW together." Almost all subsequent MMORPGs, other than the branch of retro-games trying to bring back the failed past, build on that beginning. Innovations like Warhammer's public quests and Rift's auto-grouping lead to the eventual, perpetual zerg of Guild Wars 2 and the flat, levelless world of Elder Scrolls Online. 

Over time, all barriers to entry are systematically torn down, with even the supposedly most challenging content being re-framed as available to all. Looking for Group becomes Looking for Raid or Instant Adventure. Storylines that once moved from solo to group to raid before the narrative concluded now reshape themselves into a series of Solo instances. 

Meanwhile, at endgame, developers double down on difficulty for the committed hardcore, creating a series of silos from which no-one escapes. Players either solo and accept that they're playing a somewhat inferior RPG purely for the benefit of having a little company while they do it or else they commit to a seeming endless round of self-improvement, trying to eke out incremental improvements to performance so as to be able to repeat the same content indefinitely at ever-increasing difficulty to no objectively discernible purpose.

Unsurprisingly, these choices do not appear to have even the same, minorly mass-market popularity as before. If you want a good, strong, narrative-driven, single-player experience with a coherent, meaningful story, there are better places to find it than in MMORPGs. And if you want to pootle around in your off-time with a few like minded friends, co-op gaming looks like a much better bet.

As Massively OP reported yesterday, a recent survey of 5,000 gamers revealed "over half of gamers play to unwind and destress". Perhaps more surprisingly, "46% also said they play for creativity and self-expression". 

Back when World of Warcraft began, the options for players to satisfy these desires were fewer. Gaming was more focused on challenge and competition than it later became. Players tended to be younger, have more time, better reflexes and be a good deal more willing to put in the necessary effort to "beat the game".

I think it's probably quite hard to credit now but when World of Warcraft blew up in the mid-2000s, a great part of its attraction was as a kind of video game you didn't need to be a gamer to play. So many grandmas played WoW to spend time with their grandkids it became a meme. And you didn't even have to have grandchildren in the game. I remember an interview on a radio show with a retired couple in their sixties who played WoW purely for the gathering and crafting and the point of the interview was that what those pensioners were doing wasn't as unusual as all that.

Most, if not all of that ground has been lost to the genre now. It's been ceded to a tidal wave of oddly disparate yet strangely similar genres: cosies, survivals, sims, sandboxes.

What they all have in common is permissiveness. They provide just enough structure for players to feel safe, while allowing them to set their own pace and choose their own path. You can burn through whatever narrative there is and climb whatever tech trees you're given and be done in a month or you can putter around, planting your garden and tending your crops, for a year. No-one cares. No-one judges. No-one tells you you're not playing the game the right way.

MMORPGs in 2024 are cursed with the expectations of endgame. Many have vast, explorable worlds filled with mystery and magic but there's no ostensible reason beyond natural curiosity to investigate any of it. Everything from the boosts in the cash shop to the exhortations of your guildmates tells you to climb the ladder to the top and be damn quick about it.

And when you get there, what's the reason to stay? Much less than there would have been had you been given a free hand to get there in your own time because there's no context to any of it any more. It's just there; a job waiting to be done. A job no-one is going to pay or even thank you for doing.

Potshot suggests this slide began as early as WoW's first expansion, The Burning Crusade, and reached terminal velocity with Cataclysm. If so, the genre's still in free-fall now. Nothing much has changed since then. Every new development in the genre seems set on closing down the possibilities, refining the process. 

And why not? It's a profitable-enough niche, isn't it? Why try to open it out, let alone carve a new one? Leave that to someone else. After all, there's no shortage of other developers, willing to try.

Unfortunately, recent developments, like Iron Gate's obsession with making Valheim harder and harder or Nightingale's imminent conversion from online multiplayer to offline solo, suggest this new, easy-going Golden Age may be short-lived. Enjoy it while you can. Lessons, it seems, have very much not been learned.

I just hope it's not another decade before the next ideological wave rolls in...

All In A Good Cauzzzz...

I don't have time for a proper post today but I'd like to get something out there. So, who fancies a quiz about bees?

Gamigo, apparently. According to them, it's World Bee Day and in honor of the event there's a competition in Rift, for which you have to answer fourteen questions about bees!

Why fourteen? Don't ask me! 

What do bees have to do with Rift? Don't ask me that either!

Also, when I say "in Rift", what I really mean is in Microsoft Forms, which is where the link from the Steam page takes you. 

And when I say "answer", of course I mean "Highlight, right-click and select "Search Google", which is what everyone is going to do, although having done it myself, I have to say it doesn't one hundred per cent work for every question.

And finally, when I say "It's World Bee Day", what I mean is it was World Bee Day on Monday. I didn't notice the event was on until tonight.

If you want to try it for yourself you can find all the details including the link on the Rift Steam Community page, where you can win 3000 credits to spend in the Rift Cash Shop, always assuming you a) have a character in Rift and b) are one of the three lucky winners.

Or you can just do it all for fun right here!

1.How many different species of bees are there?

2.How much honey can a single honey bee make in its lifetime?

3.What do bees collect from flowers?

4.How many pairs of wings does a bee have?

5.What color can bees NOT see?

6.Which common insect eats bees?

7.How many eyes does a bee have?

8.How many honey bees can you find in a hive?

9.Who are the members of the honey bee colony?

10.Which of these foods are pollinated by bees?

11.What is the dance called that honeybees use as communication?

12.How wide is the largest bee’s wingpsan?

13.Which family is the honey bee a part of?

14.What is royal jelly?

The actual quiz is multiple choice but really, where's the skill in that? You're just going to Google the answers like I did, anyway. And you're going to have to because I'm not telling you!

At least now no-one can say Gamigo aren't doing their best to keep Rift buzzing!

We're Gonna Make You An Offer...

 

Sometime yesterday evening, my Timerunning Hunter dinged twenty, bringing the shutters down on her unpaid progress through World of Warcraft's Pandaria Remix event. It took me four hours and forty-three minutes to get there, from which you could conservatively subtract maybe half an hour at the absolute outside for time spent AFK. Probably a good bit less.

For the sake of argument, let's call it four hours straight. That's two and a half levels an hour or roughly a level every twenty-five minutes. 

Is that fast? I'm not sure.

I could run a comparative experiment. I just happen to have another hunter already in regular, unremixed Pandaria. She's Level 14. I could play her to twenty and check the difference. But I'm not going to.

Partly that's because I'm not interested enough in finding out the result but mostly it's because Pandaria Remix is just more fun, so why miss out? And anyway, it turns out XP gain in the Remix isn't a constant, so what would it prove?

The factor I hadn't accounted for at the start is the Cloak of Infinite Potential, an item you get early on in the event, which continuously grows in power as you gain "threads". I'm not going to attempt to explain exactly how this works for the simple reason I don't fully understand it. 

There are plenty of discussions about it on Reddit and elsewhere, suggesting the process is a lot more complex than it first appears. Apparently it has all kinds of implications, particularly for other characters on the account. 

The only part that concerns me at the moment is the basic XP gain function, which for the cloak my Hunter is wearing, has reached 20% at Level 20. I wasn't paying close attention during the leveling process so I'm not sure whether that's a co-incidence or whether the gain keeps step with the level. I think it's a co-incidence...

Whatever it is, so far I haven't really noticed that leveling feels much different to what I'm used to in WoW. It always feels freakishly fast once you get into double figures. The Free Trial ends before the slow-down comes. 

I still don't have a max-level character in the game after all these years and that's down to the grind that sets in towards the upper reaches of the level range. Either that or I've never stayed subscribed long enough to get there. Actually that's probably the more likely explanation.

XP gain aside, the Remix does feel very different, mostly because there seems to be so much going on all the time. The constant drip-feed of rewards in the form of chests to open make it seem like something's always happening, even when it probably isn't. Then there are the talents to set, the gems to slot and the new appearances to goggle at. It's all designed to make you think you're having fun all the time - and it works!

It's a while since I last capped a character out in the Free Trial so I'm not sure if this next observation applies only to the Remix or whether the whole thing has been revamped, but I'm all but certain you used to be able to carry on gaining experience to the end of Level 20. After that your character would be locked and you wouldn't be able to play them again unless you subscribed.

Now, if you're a Timerunner, it looks as though you can carry on playing as long as you want, at least until the event ends. You'll just stay at Level 20 and won't gain any more xp. I did a quest just to check and it completed normally but I didn't get either XP or a chest.

Surprisingly, though, you can still get loot from mobs. I ran around Jade Forest for a few minutes this morning, popping porcupines and cranes with my bow, and all of them dropped Bronze, the Event currency. I thought at first it was only going to be coin but on about the seventh or eight kill one dropped a gem and a consumable, so I'm guessing they keep the same loot table.

That does mean you could farm the currency and improve your gear indefinitely on the Free Trial. Since you'd never level up, you'd never outlevel the mobs. I'm not quite sure where that would get you but I'm sure someone's already doing it.

What Blizzard want you to do, of course, is subscribe. They'd really like that. A window pops up right across the middle of the screen every time you log in, suggesting it. When you hit twenty, up it pops again,as illustrated, this time with added PvP value. 

The real hard sell comes after you log out. Within seconds I received a long email congratulating me on hitting the dizzying heights of level 20 and extolling the benefits of a subscription. Apparently, "Countless epic adventures and incredible rewards await" should I care to continue on my journey and should I choose to commit to a monthly subscription I'd be able to "collect companion pets, mounts, and transmogs; face the realm’s deadliest enemies; and take your place among the world's most legendary heroes!"

So far, so expected. The paragraph that really stuck out for me, though, was this:

"Your subscription is the key to endless adventure across Azeroth with access to four legendary games—including World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King Classic™, WoW® Classic: Season of Discovery, and WoW Classic: Hardcore realms. Each month of your subscription you’ll also get a complimentary 500 Trader’s Tender to spend on eye-catching collectibles offered at the Trading Post in World of Warcraft.!

Does that sound at all familiar to anyone? Because it certainly reminds me of something... four games for one sub... 500 in cash shop coin every month...

All they need to do is bang a 10% discount to cash shop purchases on the end and I think we have a viable clone!

I am a little less than convinced by the "four legendary games" part. I'm not going to get into their legendariness, which is mostly a subjective judgment. I'm more concerned about whether they really count as four separate games. Aren't they more like four different modes of the same game? 

Also, should they really still be plugging WotlK Classic? I mean, okay, technically that was the status quo when the email arrived and still is now for almost another eight hours but maybe they might have gone ahead and pre-empted the inevitable by inviting me to subscribe for Cataclysm Classic, since that's almost entirely what I'd be getting. I wonder if the message will change? I'm almost curious enough to level another character to 20 to find out.

That would mean I couldn't carry on leveling up my Gnome Hunter later today, though, and I really would like to do that. I was having a great time. I'm quite keen on taking her all the way to 70. I'm pretty sure it'll be quicker, easier and more fun than getting that last level-and-a-half on my Berserker in EverQuest II, which was otherwise going to be my plan for the next few weeks.

I'm going to have another think about it but I'm very much minded to sub for a month. That'll give me time to enjoy the Remix and also dabble in Cataclysm Classic. I'd be quite surprised if I need more than a month to do either but only time will tell. In the meantime, I have a couple more characters to take through the Free Trial before I have to decide.

All things considered, I think you'd have to call Pandaria Remix a success, both in terms of the entertainment value it provides and in its main purpose of increasing interest and raising revenue. WoW is looking surprisingly spry these days. I have to say the unexpected flexibility suits the old warhorse a lot better than I would have expected.

A Hunting We Will Go or Be Vewy, Vewy, Quiet - I'm Hunting Pandas!

Somewhat to my surprise, I was at my PC at exactly six o' clock yesterday evening, when the timer ticked down to zero for the start of World of Warcraft's Pandaria Remix event. I logged in, partly expecting a queue of some kind, but there was none. It was straight to character select and the option to make a "Timerunner", which is what Blizzard has chosen to call participants in this glorious experiment.

Skipping ahead a step, the whole affair is typically garlanded with unnecessary trimmings. When I arrived in the world, I found myself immediately engaged in some kind of overly complicated, hard-to-follow narrative, involving dragons and time-portals and the inevitable ill-defined existential threat to natural order.

It would have been quite confusing enough on its own but since I was thrown into the middle of it all with what seemed like hundreds of other players, half of them riding mounts the size of busses (I'm surprised no-one was driving an actual bus...) it was positively over-whelming. 

This not being my first - or probably my fifty-first - server launch, I was able to handle it but I would like to go back and start over when things have quietened down, just to see if any of it actually makes any kind of sense. I tend to doubt it.

Going back to character creation, I'd forgotten just how basic a function it is in WoW. I'm so used to spending half an hour just trying to get my eyebrows right, it came as a bit of a shock to realize there was next to nothing for me to do.

Once you've set the trifecta - race, gender, class - there are just eight appearance settings you need to consider and half of those are colors. Given the paucity of options on offer it seems bizarre that "Eyesight" made the cut. Also, what the hell do they mean by "Eyesight", anyway?

In WoW's Character Creation, "Eyesight" means whether you you're blind in one eye, both or neither. I am honestly not sure whether this is Blizzard attempting to be culturally sensitive by offering a disability option or the exact opposite.

I'm assuming that blindness in the game is purely cosmetic, which certainly points towards the latter. If giving your character cataracts actually does impact gameplay, then I take my hat off to whoever came up with the idea. It would be quite radical.

I decided not to risk it. I felt I'd already taken enough of a cultural back-step by making my character blonde. 

Once I was in the game, everything proceeded smoothly. Very smoothly for a new server. At least at first. After about half an hour or so the disconnects began and eventually drove me out but until then, everything was fine.

By then I'd spent around an hour in the Remix, some of it on the Timeless Isle, which is where everything begins, the rest in the starting area of the Pandaria expansion, the name of which escapes me, even though I've been there twice this month already.

Last time I was playing a Goblin for the Horde. This time I was playing a Gnome for the Alliance. Both times I was playing a Hunter.

I was thinking about it as I ran around two-shotting mobs with my bow: the WoW Hunter has to be one of my all-time favorite MMORPG classes. I know it has something of a bad reputation but for all the right reasons. 

Hunters are self-sufficient to an infuriating degree. They can manage pretty well on their own in a genre where team-play is often deemed essential. Even more annoyingly, when played well, they can fit into a group with alarming efficiency. Playing a Hunter is often considered EZ-Mode and not without good reason. If what you're looking for out of your gameplay is relaxation and control, you could do a lot worse.

Given that WoW took a huge amount of inspiration from EverQuest and that many of the original design team had played EQ, I can't help feeling one of the reasons the Hunter is so good is that the Ranger in EQ was so bad.  

Rangers in early EverQuest were deeply disappointing, weak in almost all regards. They got beefed up eventually but for years they were, at best, comedy relief. The WoW Hunter looks like someone asked the EQ Ranger Class Lead for a list of improvements that would make the class worth playing and then doubled down on all of them.

I didn't think about it at the time but it was probably quite important that I pick a class and race I'm comfortable with for this experiment. I'm feeling more and more inclined to re-sub for a month or two while the Remix goes on and if I do, it's not impossible this could end up being my highest character. 

It is apparently possible to level all the way to the cap in the event. When it's over, Timerunners will be converted to regular characters on your regular server, or wherever you made them, if you picked somewhere else. My current highest character on Live is 50 so he may well get overtaken if I decide to take this thing even half-seriously.

From what I've seen so far, I just might. Pandaria is a very enjoyable expansion. I've already played through a lot of it and I remember it quite fondly, which is more than I can say of several others. I certainly wouldn't mind pottering through it again, especially on fast-forward.

That said, I didn't find the xp rate that invigorating yesterday. I was expecting something a bit faster. As I said, I did two levels in about an hour, which is probably what I'd have guessed I would have gotten in the regular game at the same point.

Then again, there is all that Level Squish nonsense. I may be thinking of how many levels I used to get in an hour, back when there were twice as many. It's hard to keep track.

Other than the leveling speed, there's also the loot. A big deal has been made of the cosmetics but that doesn't mean much to me. Not because I'm not into playing dolly dress-up with my characters. As multiple posts on this blog can attest, I very much am. No, the problem is that I think most WoW characters look pretty bad, whatever they're wearing.

When I see people proudly sharing screenshots of their best-dressed characters I can rarely see what it is they think they're cerebrating. WoW has a particular aesthetic that definitely works but it does not shine in close-ups. I think my characters in almost any other MMORPG look better than even my better-dressed Azerothians.

I do like the new loot, though. The mobs drop little chests that give Remix-specific loot and it's fun to open them. I also like the gem system, which once again reminds me very specifically of Augments and Adornments in the two EQs. They seem like they'll be fun to play around with, not least because the mechanic for slotting and unslotting them is very straightforward.

I can't say the same about the weirdly overwrought system for scrapping items you don't want and turning them into Bronze, the Remix currency. To do that you have to spawn a portal in the world, then open it and drag and drop your items inside. It's very tactile and fun at first but I'm not sure how entertaining it'll be when you have to do it for the thousandth time.

All in all, though, I thought it was a promising start. I'm quite keen to get back and dig into it a bit more. I would think that by the time I hit Level 20, the kick-out point for freeloaders, I should have a pretty clear idea whether I want to subscribe for a month. 

If not, I can always just make another character and try again. It'll be a Warlock, I expect. If it's not a Hunter, it usually is.

On Provenance: Thoughts While Waiting For The Pandaria Remix

While Mrs Bhagpuss and I were out walking Beryl through some very muddy fields this morning, I had an idea that something was supposed to be happening today. I thought it might be the launch of the Anashti Sul server in EverQuest II, which made me quite excited. 

I thought, when we got home, I'd get that patched up, make a character, play for an hour or two, then write a blog post about it. I wasn't a hundred per cent sure I'd gotten the day right, though, so the first thing I did was check the launch date. 

I hadn't. It's a month away yet, not due to launch until 13 June.

Well, of course it is. I remember, now, writing about what a long beta it was going to be and how that meant Darkpaw had to be pinning a lot of hopes on the whole thing being a success. Just shows how much I listen to myself when I talk.

Still, I was pretty sure I remembered something was happening today and I was just about convinced it involved a new server starting up in a game I already played. I scratched around in the back of my mind for a while, trying to come up with a clue as to what it might be and then it came to me. Pandaria!

That was why I updated Battlenet and logged into World of Warcraft Retail a couple of weeks ago. I'd been thinking about taking a look at the Pandaria Remix event or, to give it its unwieldy official title, World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria.

And yes, that does indeed begin today. I'd be playing it now, with a view to writing about it this afternoon, except the doors don't actually open until teatime. The official start, which doesn't appear until the very last line of the lengthy official announcement, is 10.00AM PDT, which translates to six in the evening where I am.

That's fine, as far as it goes, although not great for me. I'll probably be eating quiche and watching the Chase about then, after which Beryl is likely to enter Evening Entertainment Mode and require an unhealthy amount of attention due to her innate Princessy tendencies. Even so, I should be able to get an hour or two in before bedtime.

A few bullet points on that:

• I'll be playing on my Endless Free Trial account, which allows me to make a character for the event but only level them to 20. 
• All Remix characters skip the first ten levels, stepping into Pandaland as fresh Level 10s. 
• A key selling point of this particualar dog and panda show is accelerated levelling. 
• The trip from ten to twenty is already over in a short session at regular levelling speed.

It is theoretically possible, then, that I might be able to log in, make a character, play for an hour, see enough to have something substantive to say about the experience and still have enough time left in the evening to put a blog post together. It'd be tight, though.

Which is why I'm writing this now, at midday, instead. Even though I don't really have anything new to say about the whole affair.

Ah, except I do. Last time I talked about it I'd only read the news reports and listened to some chatter. Now I've read the whole of that Blizzard news item I linked earlier and it's very interesting. 

Interesting to me, anyway, because the feature list reads like a Best Of from the last decade or so of EverQuest II. 

I'm not remotely saying these are ideas that originate there or that they haven't been used elsewhere, often, by other games. Plenty of them are generic to many MMORPGs. What I am saying is that I recognize versions of just about all of them from special ruleset servers in EQII that I've played on, as well as from the regular, Live game.

More specifically, a whole chunk of the Remix's remit seems to draw inspiration directly from EQII's Kael Drakkal server. In case you don't remember, that was the one where you started at 90 and all the content in the game was at the same level, which I admit doesn't sound very similar at all. 

This does, though:

EQII: "amazing new armor and weapon appearances made exclusively for the Kael Drakkel server"

WoW: "collect a variety of powerful new items and transmogs"

EQII: "Special loot drops along the way will allow you to upgrade your base gear as you progress."

WoW: "Each time you loot new items, you’ll have the chance for powerful new upgrades"

EQII: "Kael Drakkel armor appearances that will be usable on all characters on all servers"

WoW: "take your transmogs with you when you continue your adventures in World of Warcraft®:The War Within™"

 

All quotes verbatim from the two official announcements and the announcement for the update Kael Drakkal received nine months after launch.

I'm not saying none of this would have happened without Holly Longdale taking over as WoW's Executive Producer but it's getting hard to deny the equivalencies. They might not be immediately obvious to anyone who's only played WoW but as an EQII player, just about the first thing that comes to mind these days, whenever I hear about something new that's coming to WoW, is "That sounds familiar..."

Everyone spotted the debt dragonriding owes to Guild Wars 2 right away because GW2 is a much better-known game than EQII these days. A lot of the other innovations that seem to be changing the whole way WoW operates are coming in much lower under the radar, originating, as it seems they do, in a game most WoW players have probably never even heard of.

Whether this kind of cross-pollination is likely to create a stronger, healthier game remains to be seen. From my perspective as an regular EQII player who occasionally dabbles in WoW, though, it feels like a very positive development. 

I wonder whether the trend will continue in the next expansion. I do hope so. That would be interesting.

Into The Valley Of Ashes

Yeah... no. Not really. I cheated. Big time. If you're planning to visit the burning lands legit, you may want to skip the whole post. It's kinda spoilery. And you're gonna feel dirty after.

So, I read Wihelm's post on the arrival of Valheim's penultimate biome, the Ashlands, and I watched the weird, animated promo video that bizarrely looks like it could have been made for anime Valheim clone Dawnlands...

And then I thought "I suppose I ought to go take a look at it for myself". 

But I wasn't really feeling it.

Valheim was amazing when it first arrived. It came out of nowhere and I'd never played anything like it. I went in cynical and ended up spending nearly four hundred hours there. By the time I got to the end of the Plains, though, I felt like I was done.

After that, I played a whole bunch of games that were like Valheim but different. In some ways maybe better. Valheim has a clarity of purpose the Palworlds and Nightingales don't but after a while that clarity can begin to seem less like a virtue, more like a limitation.

I tried the Mistlands - very briefly - but as Wilhelm has made quite clear, the Mistlands aren't all that much fun. What's more, they're not intended to be.

Iron Gate haven't gone the full passive-aggressive dev route, snarling back at players who don't play the game the way it's meant to be played, but they have made their intentions very clear. There's a post on the official website entitled Getting Ready for the Ashlands and, while it's friendly and helpful enough in tone, it does let the mask slip now and then:

"We also want to remind everyone that Valheim is meant to be a difficult game"

I have no problem with that. Nice that they're being up front about it. I would just like to make it equally clear to Iron Gate that I have absolutely no interest in difficult games. I avoid them at all costs. 

Clearly there's some discrepancy here, what with my four hundred hours played. I can clear that right up. I didn't find Valheim as it originally appeared to be "a difficult game", in the same way I didn't find EverQuest circa 2000 to be "a difficult game". People might say that but it wasn't my experience.

I found the two quite similar in some important ways. I found they required more care and attention than other games and they certainly took up a lot more of my time. You had to play them slowly, carefully, thoughtfully. I found them to be games that could, on occasion, make me quite cross. I did not, however, find them "difficult".

As Wilhelm's report on the Mistlands makes plain, the difficulty in that biome comes primarily from design choices rather than through gameplay. The land is jagged and unnavigable, while the field of view is obscured. It makes doing just about anything a pain in the neck.

That is the kind of difficulty I prefer to avoid, which is why I haven't attempted to play through the Mistlands content properly and am unlikely ever to do so. The new Ashlands content looks somewhat more manageable in that you can at least see where you're going and the terrain is flat but given that access to it is somewhat gated by completion of the Mistlands content, nopeing out of one effectively bars you from the other.

It may still be possible to make it across the burning waters (They literally set fire to ships other than the special one you have to build just to get there.) and limp through the opening encounters in your best Plains gear. It was certainly possible to explore the tougher biomes in the original game while still wearing armor from much earlier. At a certain point, though, it will surely become inevitable that you gear up from the last biome to do the next one and that means eating all your Mistland greens before you get your Ashlands pudding.

I am not going to do that but I still want to see the pretty new places. And they do look quite... well, not pretty, exactly. Impressive, let's say.  

Fortunately, although Iron Gate are keen to have everyone play their game properly, they're also unusually lenient in lending out their tools so you don't have to. Not only does the game have some fairly powerful difficulty settings up front - you can make all mobs non-aggro for example - even better it has a hidden set of developer tools that allow for even more radical rule-changes.

They did make the tools a little harder to find. You used to be able to bring them up just by pressing F5 but that probably caused a few too many customer service issues so now you have to make your alterations in the host platform, be that Steam or Game Pass. It's still extremely simple to do, though. There are full instructions in this PCGamer article.

The dev command I needed to go visit Ashlands was the one that lets you fly. I didn't decide to use it until I'd tried to get most of the way on my own. I knew it was the only way I was going to do the last part, across that fiery ocean, because I certainly wasn't going to be building any flameproof boats, but I did think I might be able to get as far as the opposite shoreline to take a screenshot of the smoldering land across the water.

I didn't do too badly, either. I ported to my southernmost foothold from back when I was playing regularly and headed further south overland from there. That took me through a swathe of Mistland, where I met some Dvergr Dwarves and had several conversations with Odin's Ravens, Hugin and Mugin, all of which was quite entertaining.

I also ran into an Infected Mine within the first five minutes, something that took Wilhelm a great deal longer. That's one of the more annoying aspects of Valheim's procedurally generated content. I had the same issue with one of the biome bosses - Moder, I think - who somehow eluded me for much longer than it seemed to take anyone else to find them.

I strongly advise against going into an Infected Mine just for a look-see. It has to be one of the most repulsive places I've ever visited in a game. Not the "mine" itself - the architecture is really quite impressive. No, it was the "infected" aspect that made my skin crawl.

Coming back out pretty swiftly, I carried on south until eventually I ran out of both land and light. I was stuck on a pillar of rock when night fell and I couldn't see anything at all. That was when I decided to quit pretending I was exploring and just take the tour.

With flight enabled I was able to swoop over the ocean above a forest of rocky spikes rearing out of the water to land on the grey/black/orange/red shores of the Ashlands. And they are impressive, if you're into hellscapes.

I won't bother describing the view. That's why I took all the pictures. I will say that the place is a great deal more built-up than I was expecting, with stone arches and runestones all over the place, along with some quite substantial towers and forts. 

Skeleton warriors and archers stand guard, large animals lumber around, firebirds whirl overhead. The place is teeming with activity. I imagine with mob aggression switched on it would be a slaughterhouse.

Since I had them all quieted down, I assumed I was completely safe to explore. That'll teach me.

I was standing under an arch, watching some orange globule do something or other, when there was a surge and a roar and suddenly I was dead. I still have no real idea what killed me. It won't have been a mob so my guess is a spume of lava erupted from the flow nearby and incinerated me. 

Or I could have died of heat exhaustion. I had the UI switched off for taking screenshots so I wouldn't have seen any warnings. Just goes to show you can never let your guard down in Valheim. Even when you think nothing's out go get you, something is.

I'd set the death penalty to the minimum, so I respawned wearing all my equipped gear. I had very little on me anyway. It doesn't matter if I get it back in any case because I'm as sure as I can be that I'm done with Valheim, at least as a game I actually play. 

I will almost certainly return to potter about in the original biomes (Okay, maybe not the Swamp.) but nothing I've seen of the Mistlands or Ashlands makes me feel it would be worth the time and effort required to master and tame them. I might fly around some more to see the sights. I might even put up a portal or two for easy access but I'm only ever going to be a tourist there.

I'll be very happy to hear about other peoples' adventures, if anyone has any. There were certainly plenty of people writing about Valheim a couple of years ago. At the moment, though, it seems as if the only blogger still interested in adventuring there is Wilhelm. 

Even though it's still technically in Early Access, I get the feeling Valheim has pretty much done all it's likely to do, commercially. I see from the Steam Charts that the arrival of Ashlands has pushed numbers up but it's still only around 10% of the game's peak. 

I suspect I'm not the only one who feels they've done Valheim and it's time to move on.

Moving On...

Following some helpful advice in the comments to my last post, this morning I took advantage of the dying hours of World of Warcraft Classic's free weekend to move all my characters off their current server, Hydraxian Waterlords. 

Not that I wanted to move them anywhere. I would have been perfectly content to leave them where they were. Hydraxian Waterlords has been a very pleasant place to play. It makes little difference to me whether it's busy or quiet. I mostly play WoW as if it was a single-player game anyway.

But it wasn't my choice. Hydraxian Waterlords is scheduled to close when Cataclysm arrives. Not that I'd have known if it hadn't been for Pallais and Shintar explaining the situation. 

In fact, I still can't nail down an official confirmation from Blizzard. There are some very recent forum threads asking Blizzard not to close it and trying to rally support to keep it as the only EU-RP server but although everyone acts as if it's a done deal, no-one bothers to link to an official closure announcement.

Working on the dubious assumption that it's better to jump than be pushed, I made the decision to take my characters' fate into my own hands and move them anyway. Maybe they could just have sat tight and nothing would have happened but who knows?

The Free Transfer process is both simple and confusing. For a start, you have to somehow magically know about it already to access it. If the server really is about to close and free transfers have been offered, I would have expected either an in-game notification or an email to my account address. Then again, I have a suspicion free transfers off Hydraxian Waterlords may have been open continuously for a couple of years now, since the last time Blizzard threatened to close the server, so maybe they sent out notices then.

Once you know the option exists, you have to go through the cash shop to take advantage of it. That's how it's worked in most MMORPGs where I've done something similar in the past, although there have been cases where I was sent a token in the mail, which seems like a more elegant way of doing it. 

Blizzard gets points for not asking for banks to be cleared or guild permissions reset or auction house listings to be removed or any of the myriad other fussy housekeeping tasks I've had to fiddle about with in other games. It's a straightforward change of address with no complicated paperwork.

Unfortunately, they lose points for the all-round kludginess of the whole thing. I moved seven characters to two different servers and at no point was I ever entirely sure if the transfers had gone through correctly. The feedback from button-presses is all but non-existent. 

My confidence in the process wasn't improved when the first transfer I tried crashed fairly spectacularly, spitting out a chunk of incomprehensible code. Along with the error message there was a button to Reload UI. I pressed it and it dumped me back to character select, where the character I'd been trying to move had vanished altogether.

It was only a level 10 priest I will almost certainly never play again so I wasn't all that bothered but it made me apprehensive about moving the others. In the end, they did all transfer successfully, with no further crashes, although there was an unnerving moment when I went to log into the new server, only to find I had no characters there at all.

If in doubt, relog. I started over and there they all were, so that was fine. More worrying was the string of gibberish attached to the end of one of my characters' names.

It hadn't occured to me that someone on the destination server might have prior right to a name I was using. I rarely have much trouble with that sort of thing. I tend to pick names no-one else would be likley to think of so I'm generally safe. 

And that was how it worked out for six out of seven of them this time. The exception, naturally, was my highest level character. It bloody would be.

I renamed him and with that I was done. I now have four characters on Pyrewood Village and three on Mirage Raceway.  Those were the only available options under the free transfer system, which made me think I'd been wasting my time. 

They're both PvE servers, or "Normal" as Blizzard calls them, both with similar-size populations and similar faction balances. I can't see it makes any difference which of the two becomes my new home. I might just as well have done nothing and let the automatic relocation shunt me on to whichever it felt like, if and when Hydraxian Waterlords does finally close.

It's done now, anyway. In the not entirely likely event that I resubscribe for Cataclysm Classic, at least I know where I'll be.