Ride Your Pony, New World Style

I'll resist the temptation to moan on yet again about how I don't have time to do anything these days. Except I just did exactly that so I guess I failed the resistance check.

Anyway, I really don't have much time left for blogging today so I'll keep this short. It's just going to be one of those "What I've Been Playing" posts and since all I have been playing is New World and EverQuest II, that's not going to take long.

When I say I've been playing EQII, that's not strictly true. I did manage to get in one good session while the huge Extra Life xp buff was running. I decided not to bother grinding through the last five levels on anyone, on the very valid grounds that it wouldn't be much of a laugh. Instead I logged in Mitsi, my Level 67 Swashbuckler on a different server, and spent a very happy couple of hours taking her to 80 in Kylong Plains.

She drank a two-hour 100% xp potion and with the server bonus she was getting +375%. If they hadn't somehow borked the bonus for having multiple max level characters that would have been 425% but it was plenty anyway. By the time I finished, most things in the first part of the zone had gone green. (They were orange when she got there.)

I did plan to move her to a more suitable area and carry on but the opportunity never arose and now the bonus is gone so that's the end of that. Fun while it lasted, though.

The other very satisfying thing I did was copy all of my character files across from the old PC. I looked up what was needed but in the end I just copied every .txt and .ini file and let the game sort it all out, which it did perfectly. When I logged in, all my hotbars were back and correctly populated and all the weird tweaks to the UI I've made over the years were in force again. Everything just as it should be!

The new PC is also running EQII like a dream. Loading times are much shorter and everything moves like butter. Does butter move? Oh, you know what I mean.  

As for Overseer, which is mostly all I do at the moment, I'm a level and a half from dinging into the current tier, which I believe must be Tier 7. I might just about get there by the time the expansion arrives, at which point I'll need to do another ten levels to get to the new current tier. It never fricken ends!

Assuming there is another tier, that is. I don't see Overseer mentioned in the promotional material for Rage of Churath. Maybe it's going to become a legacy feature. I'm not sure if I'd be sad or happy about that...

Other than that, most of my gaming time - no, all of my gaming time -  has been spent playing New World. Or New World : Aeternum if you prefer. Not sure anyone does.

And again, I'm not sure "playing" really describes what I've been doing there. I've been doing time trials. Pretty much just those. 

I mentioned before that I'd finished the basic mount quest and acquired a horse. And that I'd done the first five races. They call them "races" but in my book a race requires someone to race against. Racing against the clock is a time trial so that's what I'm calling them.

The NPC who gives the first set claims they're difficult but they really aren't. I'm playing on the U.S. East Coast server, which is suffering some very bad lag, so I've been stopping dead and even rubber-banding backwards a fair bit and yet I've only failed one trial so far and that was in the second lot, which are supposedly even harder. The timers seem to be pretty generous.

When you complete all five of the first batch, the horse guy says there's no more he can teach you and sends you on to another guy, like they always do in these games. He warns you the next guy is weird and sketchy and that he likes to set really tough races but so far the second guy seems exactly as weird and sketchy as the first guy and the "races" seem no harder.

I've done three of those now and honestly I could keep doing these time trials for ages. I always enjoy races in MMORPGs although usually I'm racing against someone, which I always thought was kind of the point. I like time trials too, though, so this suits me just as well. 

One thing I've noticed is that I seem to have a huge number of talent points or whatever the game calls them left to spend. Like almost 250. And another 60 or so of some other kind of points. I'm guessing there must have been a reset at some stage while I was away.

None of it seems relevant to the content I'm doing, i.e. riding along roads on a horse and avoiding anything that looks like it might give me a fight, so I haven't done anything about it yet. I suppose I'll have to at some point but I can't say I'm looking forward to it.

New World is certainly holding my attention for now, anyway. It also runs extremely smoothly on the new machine, the only issues being the terrible ping to the servers. I initially blamed that on our ISP, Virgin Media, always a likely source of any problems of that kind, but apparently it's due to some wider issues at the server end. I certainly never used to have such a poor connection to the East Coast last time I played so I hope they fix it soon.

It doesn't make the game unplayable, though, or even particularly annoying. I've played through far, far worse. 

I plan on re-installing Once Human on the new PC soon and I already have Blue Protocol on an external drive but until I have time for one or both of them I'll just carry on with the riding lessons.

And when those come to an end, I think I'll go take a look at Nighthaven. I'll be way under level for it but when has that ever stopped me before? 

Alpha, Beta, Early Access, It's All The Same To Me: Ashes of Creation

There are eighteen posts here on Inventory Full with the "Ashes of Creation" label attached. The earliest is from the end of April 2017, just before the Kickstarter, when it seems my main interest in the proposed MMORPG was how good the housing was going to be. It seems an odd feature to focus on in a game that, at the time, I was repeatedly calling "Fantasy EVE",  but housing appears to have been my Big Thing back then.

Skimming those posts, it seems I was never all that keen on the project, not even when it was all new and shiny. In 2017, eight years ago, I described the promotional material for Ashes of Creation as giving the impression of "an MMO that would have looked about par for the course four or five years ago", the final big push for Western Mass Market MMOs. I seemed to think it would have fitted right in with the wave that gave us Guild Wars 2, Wildstar and The Secret World.

Even less enthusiastically, I was musing on whether or not to pledge, noting that "after reading the Kickstarter page, I'm actually less interested in the game than I was."

Somehow, I must have managed to overcome my reservations because a week later, on the day the Kickstarter went live, I was watching the numbers tick relentlessly upwards: "the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter had been live for a quarter of an hour.  In that time there was already $161,872 pledged of the $750,000 goal. Not bad for the first fifteen minutes." 

I was pondering on whether it might be worth ponying up $80 to get into the first closed beta, which at the time was predicted for December that year. Closed Beta 2, access to which cost half as much, was due by the following Spring.

I didn't even especially want to play the game. I just wanted to get in early so I could blog about it. $80 sounded a lot for that, though, so I was inclining against it. I thought $40 sounded more reasonable.

And then, just a day later, I was back to say that I had, after all, stumped up my $80, only it wasn't on a pledge that would get me into the earliest closed beta. I'd bought two $40 tickets to Closed Beta 2, one for me and one for Mrs Bhagpuss, who was at least theoretically interested, again mostly for the housing.

Fast forward eight years and Ashes of Creation is still in Alpha. Eight. Years. Later. Just think about that for a moment. Eight years and still in Alpha, when pledges were sold on the basis that Beta would start... eight years ago.  

The Kickstarter, famously, went extremely well, bringing in over $3m on an ask of just $750k. Three million dollars, though, doesn't take you far with an AAA MMORPG. I haven't been paying enough attention over the near-decade the project has been running to be able to say where the rest of the funding has been coming from, but it appears the well has finally dried up because as of 11 December, Ashes of Creation is going into Early Access on Steam.

The stated reason is to "expand the audience" but the sentiment among redditors is more along the lines of cash grab or just plain Hail Mary pass. 

Intrepid may be short of money and desperate but I don't think anyone could reasonably call it a scam. The game has actually been in non-NDA Alpha for about a year now, and the build that will come to Steam is going to be much the same, so it's not hard to find out what you'll be getting for your fifty dollars.

Not hard, but you will have to look. The thing is... no-one outside the bubble has really been talking about it. Literally the only blogger or professional gaming website of the 200+ in my Feedly that's done more than post the odd Press Release this year is Heartless Gamer and he hasn't been all that impressed.  

Still, the game going into Early Access is a big deal, especially on Steam. Bree at MasivelyOP, in that post I linked above, re-iterated the point made by numerous commenters on reddit that AoC is "one of the few major Western MMORPGs currently in development." That could be interpreted in a couple of ways. You might think it means a whole lot of pressure to perform for Intrepid Studios. Or you might, as I'm starting to believe, begin to wonder if it means the day of the Western AAA MMORPG is over.

I played New World Aeternum for a couple of hours yesterday. I had a good time. I did all five of the first set of time trials in the Mount quest-line. The game ran well, the scenery was glorious, chat was busy and there were players everywhere. All of this in a game that's not only in maintenance mode but which has been mostly seen as a failure since a few weeks after launch. You wouldn't really know New World was a failure. But it is.

New World was first revealed to the public as a game in development in 2016, about a year before the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter. It launched as a fully live game in September 2021, re-launched on Console as Aeternum three years later and went into maintenance mode a couple of weeks ago. 

The game, which as far as I can recall is the only AAA Western MMORPG to have launched this decade, has completed its full development cycle in significantly less time than it's taken Ashes of Creation to reach Early Access. Or get out of Alpha, for that matter.  Even though New World sold over four million copies on PC at launch and is also available on console, and allowing that it may have been a recent victim of larger restructuring at Amazon, it has not been widely regarded as a success.

It's not for want of trying. New World is an excellent MMORPG and for most of its lifetime it's had the resources of a huge, wealthy parent company propping it up. Millions of players gave it a chance, enough, it's said, to have recouped its development cost in its first month of operation. 

And yet it still could not hold an audience. It seems not to have remained profitable for long, either. Many older players and veteran developers remain convinced there's an untapped mass market for fairly traditional Western MMORPGs but the evidence to support that belief seems harder to find. 

Players flock to new games in the genre but they very rarely stay for long. Whatever it is they're looking for, they just can't seem to find it. Maybe Ashes of Creation really is the last hurrah for big budget Western MMORPGs. If so, I certainly wouldn't hold out much hope for the genre after that.

Back when I was pledging to the AoC Kickstarter, I was also interested in another would-be new entrant to the genre - Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. That game, which has been in development for about as long, preceded AoC into Early Access. It's done quite well there, attracting a peak concurrent player-base of around 7,000, very similar to AoC's reported peak alpha concurrency of about 8,000. 

These are solid figures for a niche game in closed testing or Early Access but they're not mainstream AAA game numbers. Not by a couple of orders of magnitude. All the big Eastern MMOs of the past few years have attracted millions of players. New World, as I said, sold four and a half million boxes in its first month. Concurrency on Steam peaked at more than 900,000. 

New World was considered a huge success. For a while. And then it wasn't. Build it and they will come. And then they will leave.

I'm coming around to the opinion that there will be no more long-running, mainstream MMORPGs produced in the West. There will be plenty of small, niche successes. There are lots of players out there, ready to pick a horse and sit on it as it plods along. But not that many. Success for those games is going to mean a loyal following in the low tens of thousands. At best.

And maybe that will be enough for Ashes of Creation. It is supposed to be the Fantasy EVE after all and EVE's concurrency is usually quoted somewhere between 20-35k. EVE is a long running, successful MMORPG, no question. But t's nowhere even close to being a mainstream game. 

All of this talk of populations and break-even points for commercial success and what it might mean for future game development in the genre is speculation, though. What we soon won't need to speculate about is whether Ashes of Creation is any good. 

Does it run well or is it a buggy mess? Does it look amazing or like the decade-old game it is? Is the gameplay fun or frustrating? Is the PvP balanced or is it a gankbox? And is that housing anything you'd want to live in?

All of that is already open knowledge, of course, or should be, since there's been no NDA for a year, but in a few weeks anyone who cares will be able to put down $50 and find out for themselves. 

I will not be paying another $50 on top of the $80 I already gave Intrepid eight years ago. Luckily, I won't have to. 

I was initially irked at the thought that the game I backed so long, long ago was going into Early Access with an Alpha build, apparently leaving me still waiting for the second round of Beta before I could join in. I figured that had to be what was going to happen. They'd have sent me an email if my pledge qualified me for EA access, surely. Wouldn't they? They send me plenty of PR emails, after all. It's  not like they don't know where to find me.

Still, I thought before I started complaining I probably ought to check. And guess what? On the Ashes Moments Substack (Whatever that is...) it says "all Beta-1 and Beta-2 key holders will also be granted access to the Early Access launch on December 11th". That's my ticket in.

Actually, my two tickets because Mrs Bhagpuss has long since moved on and won't be playing this or any other MMORPG. I'll have her account to play with as well. Not that I want two of them.

It looks as though I won't be playing on Steam, though. Current testers and anyone invited in on later pledges when the game hits Early Access will reportedly have to use Intrepid's own launcher. If they want to play on Steam, they'll have to buy a $50 Steam Key like anyone else. I'm unclear as to whether we'll all end up on the same servers after that. 

I guess I'll find out come December. It'll give me something new to write about for a while, at least. 

Which is really all I paid for in the first place. Eight long years ago. 

So Much To Do Before I Can Do Anything

As promised, I downloaded New World Aeternum yesterday evening but I only had time to log in and make sure it was working before it was time to stop. I logged in one of my lower-level characters and ran her around a little just to see how the new PC handled things. 

It seemed okay, although there was that familiar hiatus at the start, where the textures load in sperately and very slowly, making the whole world look like it's either floating in space or flooded. It often used to do that on the old machine so I'm not reading anything into it. 

There were some hitches and stuttering that might have concerned me more had the conection to the East Coast server cluster where I have always played not been so awful. Given Amazon's pre-eminent position in the server rental business, I'm a bit surprised by just how bad it was. 

It was even worse today. Then again, I am on Virgin Media Broadband, which isn't all that impressive at the best of times, and recently it's been worse even than usual, so once again I don't think the issues I'm seeing necessarily have anything to do with my new set-up. I might have to swap to an EU server. It looks like you can chop and change at will now.

If you factor out those two elements - poor connectivity and New World's inherent flakiness, the new rig is handling things very well. Once the textures had loaded and whenever my ping was decent everything felt very smooth on High graphic settings. The game looked gorgeous as always and everything behaved just as it should.

This morning I downloaded EverQuest II, expecting it to be equally satisfactory, especially seeing as how it ran perfectly well even on the very old machine. Things didn't go quite as well. 

First off, a new installation of EQII these days defaults to the streaming system introduced a long time ago, whereby each new area only downloads as and when you enter it. That sounds great in theory but even with a fast connection it's a total pain when you experience it in action. 

It's not even zone by zone. It's individual areas within zones. Possibly every separate Point of Interest, of which there are thousands. Imagine the old loading times for zones fifteen years ago. If you liked waiting for those, you'll love how long this takes!

I was fed up of it by the time I'd sat through separate downloads for Character Select, my Mara house and East Freeport. I logged out and googled "EQ2 Full Download", which turned out to be harder to find than you'd expect.

In case anyone is likely to need it, I'll point you right now to the excellent Wiki page on Installation. That was where I learned that to download the whole game before you try to play it you have to open Advanced Tools from the tiny cog icon on the launcher and then click on the "Select Game Version" button. I had already thought of the Advanced Tools part all on my own but once I got there I couldn't see anything that looked like it was relevant. I certainly wasn't thinking of a download as a different version of the game.

When I got that started, I was impressed by how fast it was. The current EQII footprint is surprisingly small at just under 33GB and it took maybe fifteen minutes to get the whole thing onto my external drive via a usb cable. 

With everything already there, zoning times were hugely reduced. Very noticeably faster, in fact, than I've been used to on the old system. Big pat on the case for the new computer there.

What was less impressive were the graphics, which looked just awful. Digging into the Options showed me it had defaulted to Extreme Performance. I changed that to High Quality and things looked much better but there was a lot of hitching and juddering, none of which I ever had with the old machines. 

Once again, the Installation guide was very helpful. Apparently even now the game is optimized for single-core CPUs and has very limited support for the multiple cores newer games take for granted. My old machine did have multiple cores - four, I think - and the very old one had just two. I never even thought about it in respect to EQII though. The new one has six cores and twelve threads and apparently that's enough to confuse the poor old thing.

The wiki suggests using a "lower core index value" which is a setting in Options I'd never even noticed. Then again, it also says that's for Intel processors. It doesn't mention AMD, which is what mine is. Still, I thought I'd try it, so I shifted the slider back from 31 to 6. I have no idea what that even means but it seemed to make a big difference. The game is now running just as it did on the older machines.

EQII has always been a nightmare to optimize for graphic performance, though. There's a lengthy guide on how to do it stickied on the legacy forums. It goes back a few years - well, to the launch of the game in 2004 in fact, although it was updated in... er... 2014. I don't know how relevant it is any more but I might have a look at it if I run into any more graphic or performance problems.

Once again, it does appear that the main issues I'm likely to experience are going to have more to do with outside factors than any shortcomings of my new PC. Like, for example, the supremely irritating re-discovery that all the UI and character settings I'm used to in EQII are held client side not on the server. I'm going to have to set up my old PC again just to copy the .ini files onto a USB stick so I can transfer them to the new machine. Ah well. It's not like I haven't done that before...

While I was on the EQII website initiating the download, I remembered I hadn't yet gotten around to pre-ordering the new expansion, Rage of Churros Churrath. I have now. It was already very cheap at £25.12 (Nitpickingly accurate currency conversion there, I notice.) but as an All Access member I get a ten per cent discount, so it actually cost me just £22.61. And there's a level 130 Character Boost included, which I will happily use on one of my Level 125s.

Once I had all that sorted out, I went back to New World and played for about forty minutes. I logged in my original character, currently Level 60, and did the quest that gets you your first mount. It was easy and fun and now I have a horse called Moonshadow. My plan this afternoon was to post about that but things seem to have gotten away from me as usual so I'll save it for another day.

What I will say is that just a few minutes back in the world reminded me what an enjoyable game New World is and always was. I know it's often (Usually...) been quite buggy but honestly, if an MMORPG with as much going for it as New World hasn't been able to generate enough consistent and reliable interest among gamers to turn it into a profitable, long-term concern then I'm starting to doubt such a thing is even possible any more.

And that would be a really great lead-in to a rant about what's happening with Ashes of Creation right now. But once again, I'll save that for another post. I'll be pissed if I don't get a free pass into Early Access, though, I'll tell you that for nothing! (Edit: Apparently I do so just ignore me...)

A Quick Technical Update

There wouldn't normally be a post here on a Sunday because for me that's always a work day. Except when I'm on holiday. Which I am. 

But there still wasn't going to be a post today because a) I had two separate things to do in two other towns and b) when I got back I had my new computer to set up. 

There wasn't an awful lot to it. I bought an off-the-shelf machine from Dr. Memory via Amazon, where I paid less for it than that link shows. Either way, it's the cheapest "gaming computer" they do. It wouldn't qualify as any kind of gaming machine by most gamers' standards but these days I don't really qualify as much of a gamer, either.

It's a curious device. It has one of those new-fangled CPUs with its own graphics chip. It's alleged to be able to run modern games on its own and there are YouTube videos and benchmarks to suggest that, if you're not all that fussy about framerates and resolutions, it pretty much can. 

That's nice but I already have a halfway-decent graphics card that I paid nearly as much for a couple of years ago as I just paid for this computer, so I checked before buying it that the motherboard would accept it, that it would fit in the case, that the PSU could cope with it and that it wouldn't clash with the CPU graphics. 

All of that, so far, seems to be true. It was a bit of task getting it set up because the clever people who put the thing together hid all the internal power connectors so tidily away I thought for a while there weren't any. Once I'd found where they'd hidden them, though, it was all quite straigtforward.

Everything seems to be working now but because I always like to treat every new PC as a complete fresh start and never allow it to sync with any of my old ones, the next few days (And weeks.) are going to involve a lot of downloading stuff and signing in to accounts. 

The idea is that by doing it that way, the new machine will only have stuff on it that I actually still use, not ten years of kipple and clutter. It's a really annoying process and the "clean machine" era won't last long but it will at least give me breathing space for a while.

I do have some stuff on external drives I can connect via USB, so that will save some time. I've been playing games on those for a few years now and I can't tell any difference in performance from the ones I have installed on internal drives. 

I have a few Steam games immediately available that way, including Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, but right now, I'm downloading New World: Aeternum. That should make for a good test of how well the new PC performs. I really want to give it another try anyway, now they made all the content available for free.

When I get everything running how I like it, I'll probably report back on how well it's going. It'll be interesting to see how viable it is to play the games I play on a really cheap-ass rig. 

And that's all for now, I think.

Back to the downloading. 

It's Real If I Say It's Real

Yeebo dropped by the comment thread on the last post I wrote about Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, to mention how he'd started playing Honkai Star Rail a while back and was somewhat enjoying it, until he spotted a sale on Neir: Automata, which he'd heard described as "one of the best games ever created by humans". And that was it for his time with HSR.

That got me thinking about a lot of things, some of which came up in my reply, like how I really never get on with the combat in Honkai Star Rail and how any combat that isn't really easy puts me right off any game these days. Then I got to thinking about my gaming habits in general and how they've changed, both over the whole of my life and more specifically in the last few years.

I was going to write something quite specifically related to that today but then before I got down to it, I read this article at NME about a large-scale survey commissioned by French music streaming platform Deezer to find out if listeners really can tell the difference between music made by AI and music made by humans. And this one at GamesIndustry about the absence of player pushback over the use of AI in mobile games. And this one from the same source about Nexon suggesting everyone should assume every game company is using AI...

All of which made me think even more. Which is why this post is all over the place. I'm still thinking. But I have to start somewhere...

Let's begin with the shift from MMORPGs to Open World RPGs and Open World Survival Games, which for simplicity's sake I am going to lump together. I could also have linked a bunch of articles on that but I'm going to stick to my personal experience and some general observations because why do proper research when you can just wing it? That's how all the best columnists do it, anyway.

It seems hard to argue that these kinds of games, gacha or otherwise, haven't largely eaten the MMORPG sector's lunch. Still  as Sony/NCSoft's announcement of the in-development Horizon MMORPG, Steel Frontiers, proves, there is still a degree of interest in and commitment to the genre outside of its established, specialist niche market. MassivelyOP, who always nitpick over genre tags, were very keen to point out the acronym "MMORPG" appears right there in the title screen. 

And it is something worth mentioning. A lot of developers and publishers in recent years have gone out of their way to call their games anything but MMORPGs, believing to do so would harm their chances in the wider market.

Is that true? No idea. How would I know? Certainly, every new AAA game that claims to be an MMORPG seems to attract a million players on launch day. But then 90% of them are gone in a month and the rest a month after that. 

Was it because the games weren't MMORPG enough? Too MMORPG? Just not very good? Or were most of those people only there because it was the Big New Thing and a Thing can only be Big and New for so long?

Search me. No idea. And neither do the devs, apparently, because it keeps on happening.

What I can say, though, is that the naming of things is important. We should all know that as fantasy fans. To know a thing's name is to control it. 

Why, though? Why does a name, a true name, hold so much power?

It's all about authenticity, isn't it? That elusive, nebulous, indefinable quality that we know when we feel it. The Massively editorial team knows when a game is an MMORPG, regardless of what the press release they just received tells them. Just like we all know an NPC we're listening to was voiced by a human, not by AI. 

Except, do we? I can't help but think of the old Coke vs Pepsi test. That wasn't a notional thought experiment. It wasn't even something set up in some side-room in a University somewhere. It was an actual, physical test you or I could try for ourselves, when we went into town to buy an album or some new trainers.

If you search "Pepsi Challenge" you'll get the idea it only happened in America but I remember seeing the van parked in the shopping precinct near the bus and railway station in a city where I lived. I just can't remember which city... 

I didn't try it myself but I was always absolutely certain I could tell the difference. Pepsi is a lot sweeter than Coke, to my taste at least. Now, if it had been Coke vs Canada Dry, my all-time favorite cola, I'm not so sure. 

Which is kind of the point. Maybe I can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Certainly, to me, they don't really taste all that similar. Between Coke and Canada Dry cola, though? Those two are so close I wouldn't like to put money on it.

Whether I can tell or not, though, I think I know. Do I want to put it to the test? Not really. Why would I want to find out I was wrong? How would that make my life any better?

I have listened to a lot of music in my life and until very recently all of it was made by humans. There wasn't really any other option. Despite that intense and continued exposure, I don't doubt that, like 97% of the 9,000 people Ipsos tested for Deezer, I would not reliably be able to differentiate between music produced by AI and music produced by humans.

Mrs Bhagpuss says she can. She really likes the music I've made with AI but she says it all sounds "pink". She can hear the pinkness in it the way some people see auras. I cannot hear the pinkness. I did think about playing her something extremely similar that was made by humans to see if she still thought it sounded pink but that's an experiment that's going to stay firmly in my thoughts only.

She also says the vocals sound "too perfect".  I hadn't noticed that but after she pointed it out... I still couldn't hear it. What I think I can hear is the AI being imperfect on purpose sometimes, which isn't the same thing at all. And I certainly couldn't pick an AI singer out of an audio line-up based on perceived flaws.

But then, the AI vocals I'm listening to, the ones in the songs I've caused to be made, like a Renaissance artist overseeing a workshop filled with talented but anonymous craftsmen, are my vocals. The imperfections are frequently my imperfections, replicated as though they were intended.

I remember Tipa, who also uses Suno, mentioning a while ago that, while she liked the music she made with the software, she hadn't found much she wanted to listen to by anyone else there. I'd go further than that. I haven't heard anything there that I haven't found intensely irritating. The app defaults to playing the next tune on some playlist or other if you don't stop it, so I've been forced to hear snippets of lots of AI tunes and there hasn't been a single one I haven't almost broken the keyboard trying to silence.

But is that because they don't sound like they were made by humans or because they're just terrible songs? I could do much the same on YouTube and many of the tunes would be "authentic". They'd just be awful. A lot of people who can't play an instrument or sing also have terrible taste in music. Suno lets them share their lack of talent with the world, too. AI is really egalitarian that way.

What are we really lookng for when we listen to music or look at images or play video games, anyway? Authenticity or entertainment? Is a real, bad thing better than an artificial, good thing? And anyway, what even is authenticity?

At the moment I prefer Open World RPGs to MMORPGs and I prefer Eastern games to Western games. I'm not saying this is a permanent change or even a lasting one. It's a snapshot, like all preferences. It may stick or it may slide.

Looking at that preference as objectively as a person can observe a subjective preference of their own, I'd question some of the assumed positions on authenticity that come up repeatedly when games and especially RPGs are being discussed. There's long been a trend in the discourse over automation. It predates any queasiness over the use of generative AI, although that does seem to have intensified the and polarized the debate considerably.

MMO players in the West have tended to react very negatively to many of the things that are currently drawing me towards both open world RPGs and mobile ports and which a few years ago led me to appreciate a number of imported games that were calling themselves MMORPGs.  

One day I'll write a proper post about why I like these sorts of games but for now, here are a few of the more obvious reasons. 

 

I like the brighter colors and the flatter surfaces of the graphics, for a start. I like the cleaner textures. A lot of older or more traditional MMORPGs look gritty, somehow. Dirty, even. I can deal with that look but I'd rather not have to.

I like the stories, which seem a lot more modern and relatable than those in Western games. The characters are younger and more enthusiastic. The themes are stronger; the emotions clearer. 

There's a tendency to call them "anime" games but they could as easily be called "YA" games instead. I read a lot of YA novels (The acronym stands for Young Adult, marketing-speak for what publishers used to call "teen fiction".) and the characters in many of the games I'm now darting between remind me very much of the ones I meet in those books.

Ironically, these games, clearly aimed at a younger demographic than the traditional Western MMORPG, also tend to have a lot more time and respect for older characters. In most of the MMORPGs I've played, the characters are much of a muchness when it comes to age. 

The Elves all live forever so they're ageless. The dwarves are all old even if they're young. The humans are inevitably somewhere in their 30s or 40s. The anthropomorphic races (And the gnomes.) tend to be child-like. Mostly, though, unless a character has to be a specific age for a plot point, age barely even rates a mention.

The open world rpgs and anime games give me stories across the full age range, from small children to the elderly. And those stories frequently reflect the kinds of concerns real people in those age ranges would have. It's not all gods and mosnters. Sometimes it's homework or rivalries at work or the way your hip doesn't want to let you climb the stairs like you used to.

That feels more authentic to me but I'm betting it's a black mark against authenticity for anyone looking for the traditional, high fantasy MMORPG experience. Still, a lack of authenticity in the story is nothing compared to what happens in the gameplay. 

As I said at the start of the post, I bounced off Honkai Star Rail partly because I found the combat too much like hard work. I dropped Genshin Impact because I literally couldn't beat a boss to carry on with the story. Not all of these games have Combat For Babies enabled. Just the ones I like.

After a quarter of a century and more, I think I can say I'm officially over finding combat in MMORPGs fun for its own sake. I never liked it that much but it did used to have its moments. Now, it's almost always a means to an end. The easier it is, the better I like it. I like one-shotting mobs. All of them, if possible.

The received wisdom is that making combat too easy turns players off. They get bored and go somewhere else if the challenge isn't there. Not me. I get bored and go somewhere else if the challenge is there. One of the things I like best about BP:SR is the auto-combat. I use it in every fight. It's even better than one-shotting mobs because I don't even have to press a key.

Except I do press some keys, sometimes, because that's fun, too. I dodge a bit now and then. Jump about. Change position. Not sure if it makes any difference but it makes me feel like I'm involved. Because you want to feel like you're doing something, don't you? You just don't always want it to be true. 

Authenticity is in your head. There may be an objective reality out there but you do not have access to it. You think Coke tastes better than Pepsi because your eyes tell you so when you see the label on the bottle. Your taste buds have no say in it.  

That NPC you hear, the one that sounds so flat and uninflected? It might be AI. Or it might be a voice actor who isn't doing such a great job. That song you like? The one that came up on that auto-generated playlist that's by someone you never heard of before. Are you sure it's a real person singing? 

Yes, you know. Of course you know. But how are you ever going to know?

And what about the fun you had, playing that game?  No, wait...   

I won't say the fun you had. You may not have had that fun. I'll say what about the fun I had, playing that game where the AI (Different kind of AI, of course. The old, good kind.) did all the fighting for me. It even did the running, there and back. All I had to do was take the quest and hand it in. Did I really have fun or was I just imagining it?

Maybe I was having more fun all those times I spent an hour trying to beat some stupid boss in a Guild Wars 2 Living World instance. One of those times I lost so often all my armor fell off and I had to give up and leave. That time I had a headache for an hour afterwards. When I felt like uninstalling the damn game, I hated it so much. 

That was some authentic gameplay there, right?

Yeah, I don't miss any of that. What is authentic isn't the experience but  how I feel about it. If the game feels like it was fun, it was fun. If the song sounds good, it's good. If the voice acting is convincing, it's convincing. 

And that would appear to be why I prefer the games I prefer just now. They're authentically entertaining. Whether they're any good...

Well, that's an entirely different question. 

Rag-Tag Grab-Bag. Sold As Seen. No Refunds

For once, I have several meaty posts I want to write but I can't seem to find the time to write any of them. Certainly not today. Tomorrow I don't have much planned, though, and it's forecast to rain heavily all day so maybe then...

For now, though, I think this is going to have to be a bit of an ad hoc rummage down the back of the bookmarks. Again. 

Let's start with a PSA.

Are You Experienced?

EverQuest II is.  275% experienced. From yesterday until 10.00AM PST on 19 November, all Live servers plus Varsoon and Zarrakon are getting a 275% server bonus to adventure and tradeskill xp. Anashti Sul, the Origins server, where players are supposed to enjoy the journey or something, I guess, are getting just 14%. 

This is in celebration of Darkpaw breaking $100k in donations to Extra Life this year. There's also a 45% increase in the chance of rare drops, double currency rewards and double loot drops in "current expansions". 

This is great news if you want to fill your bags with crap level a character up to 125. Before level l00, a 275% bonus on xp from mob kills and quests is huuuuuge. From 100 to 125 the xp from kills will be meaningless but as I understand it the bonus will still apply to quest xp, which is already huuuuuuge in some of the relevant expansions so presumably it will now be huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge! 

I haven't tested it personally, so don't take my word for it. Go try it for yourself. I also haven't confirmed what I've heard about the final five levels to the 130 cap, which is that in the expansions aimed at those levels, bonus xp does not apply to quests at all. That's by design, not because they've been specifically excluded.  

I have tested it on a Level 125 character in the expansion before the cap went to 130, though, and it seemed to work there. I was getting almost 10% of the level for a basic kill quest hand-in, which seemed like a lot. 

If I can find a gap in my schedule, I'll put in some time and see how far I can get a couple of characters who are sitting at 125. It would be nice to have them at 130 for the new expansion.And I might get one of my lower-levels out and blitz some dungeons just for fun. When it comes to xp, I like big buffs. I cannot lie.

The Whole of the Luna

As I suspected, Amazon's recent withdrawal from the games market has indeed put paid to Prime Gaming. I got one, presumably final, email from the Prime Gaming blog that handed everything off to the Luna website and since then... nothing. I guess it's up to Prime Members to remember to go check to see if anything new is available from now on.

If so, here's where to look. I'm not going to go through the slate for November one by one but just for completeness' sake, here are the games, the dates they become available and where you can claim them from:

Already available: 

New Tales from the Borderlands [Epic Games Store]
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun Series [GOG Code]
Gas Station Simulator [Epic Games Store] 
Lovecraft's Untold Stories [Epic Games Store] 

From November 13: 

Another World: 20th Anniversary Edition [GOG Code] 
Fallout 76 [PC via Microsoft Games Store] 
Fort Solis [GOG Code] 
Dark City: Kyiv Collector's Edition [Amazon Games App]

From November 20:

PlateUp! [Epic Games Store]
Dungeons & Dragons: Krynn Series [GOG Code]
Dream Tactics [GOG Code]

From November 26:

Big Adventure: Trip to Europe 6 Collector's Edition [Legacy Games Code]
Gunslugs [GOG Code]

I don't remember seeing the Microsoft Store come up before as a place to claim Prime giveaways. Not sure I like that development much. Also, I notice there's only one game you can play through the Amazon Games app itself. I imagine that's on the way out, too. It'll all be freebies from third-party platforms by 2026 or that's my bet.

Stranger Than Strange

There's a new trailer out for the final season of Stranger Things. It's the first five minutes of the first episode, which seems to be a thing now. Netflix did the same for Wednesday back in the summer.

I haven't watched it and I'm not sharing it. I watched the Wedneday one and posted it here, because it was really good. But I regretted it later. Watching it, mostly, although if I regretted watching it then logically I should also regret sharing it, unless I was trying to give people a degraded experience when they came to the show itself. (I wasn't, by the way...)

The problem with the Wednesday First Five Minutes Trailer (And this is a spoiler of a kind, if you haven't watched the show yet, although if you haven't gotten around to it by now I'm guessing you 're not really going to care...) is that it raises completely inappropriate expectations for the rest of the season. It makes it look as though in Season 2, Wednesday is going to be working as a kind of bounty hunter, tracking down and capturing dangerous criminals. 

That is very much not what the rest of the season is about . The trailer is basically Wednesday's "What I Did On My Holidays" report. When I came to watch  the full first episode I was a little irritated by what felt like a bit of a bait&switch by the marketing department. It definitely fed into my mild disappointment with the first half of the season.

I have no idea if the Stranger Things trailer plays any similar tricks but I don't intend to risk it. I'm really looking forward to the show and I'm more than happy to wait until it arrives before I see any of it.

I will happily share this with everyone, though:

That's a trailer for the upcoming Stranger Things animated spin-off series, Tales From '85. The Duffer brothers said a while back that they planned on doing more with the Stranger Things IP and this is one of those things. 

It's a cartoon that's supposed to remind everyone of the kind we all watched in the '80s, which makes sense. When Stranger Things first appeared, all the publicity about it went on and on about how it was either an homage to or a recreation of the 1980s. It was one of the things that put me off watching the show until much later.

In the latter seasons that whole eighties vibe seems largely to have vanished. The action may take place in the same decade but all the focus is either on the weirdness or the military, neither of which seems particularly grounded in any time period, not on the everday small-town lives of a bunch of young kids in the decade of Madonna and MTV. Plus the kids aren't so young any more, either.

The cartoon show, which has a completely different cast of voice actors, has the opportunity to reconnect with that original, nostalgic concept. Whether it will, or whether we'll want it to, is another question. We won't have too long to wait to find out. It's coming in 2026, although exactly when it will run is still a mystery.

And Finally

Anyone remember a song called iPod Touch that I included in a music post a while back? I thought it was great. I still think it's great. It's by Ninajirachi and it's from her album I Love My Computer, which is also great. 

At the time I thought she was some obscure hyperpopper I'd been lucky to discover. If I thougt about it at all, I'd have guessed hardly anyone was listening to her. Although actually I didn't think about it at all. 

Turns out she's a much bigger deal than I knew. She just won Australian Album of the Year at the TripleJ awards. She also won Australian Music Video of the Year for Fuck My Computer, which you can find in that post I just linked so I won't link it again here. She won Australian awards as a teen, too. She's a big deal in Oz, apparently.

This will explain.

I didn't even know she was Australian. 

Tomorrow, a proper post. Maybe. Let's hope so. 

Blue Protocol: Star Resonance - Death And Fractures

The elderly PC I'm limping along with until Black Friday arrives and I buy myself a new one is surprisingly happy to play most games I've tried, including a few I didn't expect it to be able to run. Most surprising of all is Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, a game that only came to the West a few weeks ago and which I thought would be well ouside my old PC's comfort range.

Instead, it runs beautifully. Smooth as ice cream and as cool. The fans don't even start up. Which is a good thing because BP:SR is my go-to game just now.

Not that that's saying much. My gaming time is still way down, although I expect that to change as soon as I get a new computer. But when I do decide to play something, Blue Protocol is what I choose.

There are a few reasons. One is indeed that it runs well but that's kind of a passive buff. It wouldn't be enough on its own. 

Another passive is that the world is very nice to look at. Better than I realised at first, when I thought the visuals looked a bit under-cooked compared to similar titles like Genshin Impact or Wuthering Waves. I still think there's less detail but the slightly washed-out, pastel color palette has grown on me and now I think it looks subtle and sophisticated rather than bland.

A third, more active reason I'm enjoying BP:SR is the gameplay. It's engaging but very low-key, a combination that suits me perfectly at the moment. 

I've noticed in recent times, when I'm doing First Impressions posts or generally recounting my experiences with newer games, that I quite often make mention of there not being all that much combat in them. I'm not sitting here with a stop-watch and an abacus, counting and timing the fights I have in every session, but my strong feeling is that since I started the game I've hardly had to do any fighting at all.

That leads me on to the main reason I'm playing and enjoying Blue Protocol, which is the story. It isn't original or even particularly compelling but it makes sense and it's linear, meaning I can follow it both literally and metaphorically. And while it may not be a great story, it's entertaining enough for me to want to know what happens next.

The narrative also takes some unexpected turns once in a while. Disturbingly enough in one case that there probably ought to be a trigger warning.

This next part is going to get pretty spoilery so it might be time to quit reading if you plan on playing and care about plot twists and the like. Also, I wouldn't even look at the screenshots in the rest of the post if I was you. Just in case.

Okay, now those folks have left us, let's get to it.

Fairly early on in the plot, as the player character, you run into a brash and mouthy kid called Narulo, who claims to be a hero. He challenges you to a competition and gets roundly beaten because you are a hero and he's just a kid but he still claims you ought to be his sidekick rather than the other way around.

This goes on for a while, with the kid popping up numerous times to make brash or outrageous claims, but as the story moves along he starts to realize how outclassed he is and what a mistake he made by thinking he could match up to you in the first place. The two of you then start to develop a very comfortable kind of big sister/little brother relationship, aided and abetted by some of the other NPCs, and the whole thing gets to feel very cosy.

Then some bad stuff happens and, as they say, shit gets real. A war starts and the part of town where the kid lives gets reduced to rubble. He steps up and becomes the hero he pretended to be, helping the refugees to safety, which is what he's doing when you arrive.

You makes several attempts to persuade him to get somewhere safe himself, while you go off to deal with the crisis, what with you being a true and actual hero and all, and he tells you he will. But then, of course, he doesn't. He finishef getting everyone out of the danger area, then doubles back and tags along behind you, keeping out of sight until eventually you discover him, hiding in a barrel.

By this time it's too late for him to get out of the combat area. You're too deep in and it would be more dangerous for him to go back on his own than to stay, so you very reluctantly agree to let him stick around, so long as he stays close, does what he's told and keeps out of trouble.

And he kind of does. At least, he's well back when the big fight with the boss starts. Just not far back enough. 

I wasn't even sure what happened, to be honest. It was very fast. I think he heroically but idiotically rushed in to save me from being struck  by lightning from behind, only to be burned to a crisp himself but some of the dialog later suggested he was just too close and got hit by sheer bad luck. 

Either way, he's dead. Which was a shock. I certainly wasn't expecting it.  And it had some impact. The narrative tends to be thin, as in there isn't a great wealth of detail and discussion the way there is in Wuthering Waves, but what there is absolutely hits all the nodal points it needs to establish an emotional reaction. The writers do the work and the effect they're going for lands.

It's not unusual in a game like this. Setting up a sympathetic character to reap the emotional payoff when you kill them is Storytelling 101 for RPGs. 

What doesn't tend to happen is having to deal with the fallout. It felt a lot less like a cliche when I met a middle-aged couple later a short while later, in the course of what seemed like an entirely unrelated sequence, and found out in the course of a conversation about something else that they were the kid's parents. 

And that they didn't know he was dead. And that I had to decide whether or not to tell them. It didn't help that the parents had just been talking about how their son was late and how worried they were about him. 

It occurred to me about then that the slightly etiolated nature of the prose was a good thing. It offered some protection against getting too emotionally evolved. Otherwise that part really might not have been much fun at all.

All of which is just an example of why I'm finding the story worth paying some attention. When something like that crops up it does make you wonder what might be coming next. 

Although what actually did come next, or pretty soon after, was a comedy moment that made me laugh out loud. It also worked well as a counterpoint to the tragedy the PC and her friends had just witnessed, which was clearly the writers' intention. 

What happens is that there's another big fight, during which another of your new friends gets crushed by the boss, rushing in to save you. He ends up flat on his back on the grass. He's lying there, saying his last emotional goodbyes and making something of a meal of it, when another of your pals points out  he's just broken a bone or two and  he's going to be fine as soon as the healers get their hands on him. Bathos as catharsis. Clever writing.

I bet it works even better in the original Japanese. The translations in BP:SR are decent but not entirely idiomatic. I've seen much, much worse, though. Whoever's behind these is doing more than enough to bring the emotional weight across. Still, I bet it's better in the ur-text.

So much for the quality of the story, which I would describe as being consistently at least as good as it needs to be and frequently quite a lot better. How's it for quantity, though?

Pretty good. There's a lot more story than I was expecting. I seem to remember reading it was short but it's not feeling that way. Steam says I have more than eleven hours played and I can't actually remember doing anything other than following the MSQ.  

I really haven't done any exploring other than what I've had to do to get from one story location to the next. I haven't done any crafting. I learned how to fish but I doubt I've spent more than ten minutes doing it. 

I haven't even spent any significant time on upgrading my gear or spending my talent points. As I said earlier, combat has featured so rarely up to now that I've not felt the need to improve anything. The few fights there have been seem either to be with trash mobs that pose no challenge or with bosses where the result is scripted anyway. Why bother upgrading when you don't need to?

There's a boatload of other things I could be doing, as in all these sorts of games, but so far I've found more than enough to keep me occupied just following the plot. I'm happy to carry on like that for now, although at some point I'm sure the game will have other ideas.

When I last logged out I left Floradelle standing outside a pair of huge gates, disguised as a member of an isolated, secretive tribe, waiting  to go through them into a Forbidden Zone. Maybe that'll be a dungeon with a lot of fighting and I'll finally have to sort out her gear and spend her talent points.

I'm betting it won't, though. I bet it'll be a lot more chatting and maybe some sneaking and eavesdropping, with a little light puzzle-solving on the side. 

And that will suit me just fine.