If I Had A Hammer

It's relatively rare for me to crave any specific item in an mmorpg. As a rule, I'm usually content to make do with whatever comes to hand. It makes me largely immune, or at least strongly resistant, to those kinds of temptations and obsessions that lead players to spend more time or money than they feel comfortable with as they try to get that one specific object of desire.

Back when the genre was young, camping rare spawns for rarer drops was something people both did and complained about doing with equal fervor. I was mostly happy to leave them to it. I had a rough rule of three, meaning if I was interested in something I'd give it three tries before crossing it off my list. And that was only if it was reasonably easy to camp to begin with.

Similarly, I've never been much of a one for long drawn-out quests. If you can't get it finished in one session, two or three hours tops, is it really a good use of your time? If it's entertaining or amusing or fun, then yes, of course, carry on as long as that stays true, but if it's a chore and a pain then why bother? Gaming is supposed to be a pleasure not a punishment, after all.

The advent of token systems, whereby you do more routine, regular activities, such as killing mobs or completing tasks in order to earn credit with NPC vendors willing to sell you the kind of thing boss mobs might drop, did little to change my mind. I first came across such a mechanism in Dark Age of Camelot's Darkness Falls dungeon, where it was widely recieved with rapture and wonder. I was very sniffy about it. If I'd wanted to go shopping, well I'd be down at the mall, wouldn't I, not sitting at home playing an mmorpg.

In time, of course, the mall came to me. Cash shops became an established part of almost every game, whether or not you had to buy a subscription. Are there any mmorpgs left, Free to Play, Buy to Play, Freemium or Sub, that don't have any kind of cash shop at all? I can't immediately think of any.

The advent of real money stores inside games removed one of my two main objections: time. I couldn't say any longer that I wasn't prepared to spend hours and hours doing something I didn't really want to do just to get a pretty bauble or a useful tool. It only takes a few seconds to get a credit card out of your wallet and any time spent doing things I'd rather not have been doing had already long since been accounted for. I call it "going to work".

One of the biggest impacts of the introduction of cash shops to the hobby was to make it clear to me just how very low a value I put on imaginary objects. I routinely spend the same small amounts of money in real life on pointless, trivial, transitory pleasures that I would never contemplate spending in games. 

It turns out I don't want most virtual stuff at virtually any price... unless it's being given away "free", of course, at which point, apparently, I'll jump through as many hoops as you care to hold in front of me. But that's a different post altogether and anyway, I'm not here to psycho-analyze myself, attractive a proposition as that may be.

No, I'm here to say that for all my professed lack of interest, motivation and enthusiasm for both the methods and the rewards, there are exceptions. Sometimes I do see something I absolutely must have. To be clear, even then it also needs to be something I feel I can get without doing anything I positively dislike doing or spending money I feel is disproportionate to the enjoyment I'm likely to receive. But there are things I'm prepared to make more of an effort than usual to lay my hands on.

A few days ago, pretty much by chance, I happened across one such in Guild Wars 2 and it was in the most unlikely place: Super Adventure Box.

 

I'm not much of a fan of SAB. Belghast posted about the 8-bit emulation embedded in a 3D mmorpg the other day, saying "as much as I thought I would enjoy it… I am not really feeling it", which is not too far from how the event affects me, when it rolls around each year. It's extremely impressive that someone was able to build this other game inside GW2 and I have had some fun playing around with it but it's not really what I came to mmorpgs in general or GW2 in particular to do.

There was a fair chance I might not have gone to Rata Sum to see what was happening at all this year. Not much changes in SAB year to year and even if it does I can't usually see it. In all the time the event's been running I've never got further than the end of World One, Zone Three and I've never beaten the final World One boss, King Toad. I Gave up trying long ago.

I can look at the stock on the vendors, though. That's something I can manage. And as I said, although I usually give most things a pass, once in a while I'll spot something that really makes me feel the quickening of desire.

Nothing like that happened when I scrolled through the goods on the regular vendors. I'm not all that keen on the look of most Super Adventure Box gear and anyway I have a bunch of unopened SAB weapons boxes in the bank from the World vs World SAB Reward track. 

I did want the boom box when it appeared years ago, enough to make a considerable effort to get the necessary baubles to buy it, but even then I've always been happy with the basic model. It's not like I want to be able to play the tunes for the pleasure of listening to them. So long as I can see my character running around like an extra in a 1970s Blaxploitation movie, I'm good.

This year, though, there was a new vendor. A kodan, no less. Why a seven foot tall talking bear would be in Rata Sum at all, let alone hanging out next to Moto and his magic box, beats me and the spurious rationale the bear offers is scarcely convincing. Nevertheless, there he is, selling three weapons he claims to have crafted.

How a kodan came to craft weapons that look like rejected prototypes from some illegal, underground lab staffed by renegade Canthan bot-makers and Inquest weaponsmiths is something we'd probably best leave to the official reports. I suspect the bear is either lying or deranged, more likely the latter since derangement seems to be an ethnic Kodan trait.

Whatever the provenance, all three weapons are above average in terms of aesthetic desirability and one, the Hammer, is among the best I've seen in the game, ever. As soon as I saw it I knew I had to have it, even though I don't have a single character that regularly uses a hammer. Always providing it wasn't going to feel too much like hard work to get it, obviously.

The simple way to get the weapons is to buy them from the bear. They cost thirty Bauble Bubbles and four gold each. Someone who's good at SAB could get thirty BBs in a couple of days just by running the event as normal. Even I can get five or six a day at minimal effort. I already had seven in the bank from last year and just a couple of sessions after I decided to get the hammer I have sixteen.

I also have the hammer. 

 

I didn't buy it. I got it as a drop. If you talk to the kodan he explains that's a possibility but I learned it from Mrs Bhagpuss. I linked her the hammer in guild chat when I discovered it and she said "Oh, yes, I've got that one". 

After a bit of to and fro about how she'd come by it, during which she first thought it had been from the WvW SAB track and then corrected herself to say it was a drop in WvW, from a tower boss, we finally worked out it came from a Super Loot Bag, the reward for doing one of the new SAB achievements. It's all in the patch notes, which, unusually, I had neglected to read in full.

That achievement gives three bags per day, one for each of the first three Champion mobs you kill anywhere in Tyria. All tower and keep supervisors in WvW are Champions, which is how Mrs Bhagpuss came to get hers. Some World Bosses also count. I got one from the Shaman at the Maw and three from the pre-event at Jungle Wurm, for example.

Regular champions, of which there are probably hundreds, work just as well. I've been soloing the Champion Troll in Frostgorge for one of my daily drops, when I haven't had the patience to wait for the Wurm.

The Retro-Forged Weapon Chest is a rare drop from the bags but not that rare. I got one on my third day of trying. Of course it was on the wrong account but still. 

And I do have a character on that account who can and quite possibly should use it. He's one of my Engineers and I took the trouble to spend the points to make him into a Scrapper back in Heart of Thorns, meaning he can wield a hammer. He never goes anywhere or does anything but he could always start.

He also has a well-defined, pirate-themed look that I designed for him many years ago. A glitching, technicolor magitech hammer doesn't entirely go with it. I may have to give him a full makeover because the hammer is that good. It really is.

The character I want it for is my Elementalist. The new End of Dragons elite specialization for her class is the Catalyst and the new weapon that goes with that class is the hammer. 

I'm not proposing to play her as a catalyst, heavens no! She's a staff Tempest and that's the way she's staying. The thing is, Elementalists got a second weapon slot a few years back, having been a class that didn't have one, and I have never used it. The universe is just conspiring to put a hammer in her hand. That hammer.

I'll keep killing the champions because I would anyway. If the box drops from the achievement, all well and good. If not, a couple of SAB runs each day for a few days should see me right with the bear.

My Ele will have that hammer. And when she does she will smite the daylights out of every creature that looks at her funny. Just to make the colors fly.

Yes, Of Course I Know How To Use A Hammer. You Hold It At The Long End, Right?

 

Just a very quick post on New World. Yes, really. Very quick. I promise. I was out most of the day, visiting my mother. When I got back I did my Guild Wars 2 dailies, then a couple of hours in New World. After that I had to eat and now it's getting late. I'd really like to get back in and do just a little more before the day ends, so yes, this is going to be quick.

Did you see the news about those pesky afkers? Their running into walls days are numbered! To be honest, I've seen almost as many people doing it in GW2 recently as I have on Zuvendis, where there's rarely any significant queue, at least in my playtime.

Why would people fake-afk in a game like GW2, where there are no queues at all? You might well ask, although, if you did, it would tell me you don't play World vs World. There haven't been queues to get into any other part of the game in living memory but WvW frequently has them, particularly at the weekends and especially in Eternal Battlegrounds. 

The maps only have a capacity of around a couple of hundred players or so it's believed. If you get three full squads running around, one for each team, and a smattering of roamers, the shutters come down and newcomers have to wait for someone to leave before they can get in. 

Last week there was a WvW event to tie in with the Alliances week-long beta test that ended up lasting all of two hours and whenever there's one of those we get inundated with PvE players, trying to farm pips for their various Legendary weapon requirements. Or something. I don't pay much attention to it so I'm not entirely clear what they think they're doing.

I do know that they all want to be on maps that have the Outnumbered buff because that gives them bonuses on top of the bonuses but most of them have no clue there are any other maps apart from Eternal Battlegrounds, so they all try to get in there anyway. Afkers aren't always the brightest, it would seem.

 

When ANet introduced the pip system there was an absolute explosion of this kind of behavior. You couldn't move in Citadel (the totally safe area) for people afking hour after hour. 

At that time there was no afk timer to speak of. There still isn't in the PvE maps. I can log my elementalist in after breakfast to do her dailies, tab out while she's loading in, get involved in something else, forget I was going to play her and leave her standing on the bearskin rug in Krennek's Lodge for several hours before I remember and when I tab back she'll still be there.

In response to the complaints from people who wanted to go fight people, not just sit at spawn for days on end, counting their pips, ANet eventually instituted a fairly short afk timer in WvW only. That was when people began running head-first into walls. Mostly they don't now because no-one really plays WvW except the hardcore masochists who haven't decamped to other games but on weekends and when there are bonuses you do see the occasional wall-runner.

Usually I log out of games when I go afk for more than a few minutes. It just seems tidy, not to mention polite. I was curious how long the timer was in New World, though, what with all the talk about shortening it or adding checks or whatever it is they're planning, so this evening I left my character standing around in town while I went to have something to eat. 

I still don't know exactly how long it takes before the game kicks you out but I can say it's not as long as it takes me to eat two baked potatos and a bowl of wholemeal pasta. And make a coffee. And read a few pages of On The Road Reluctantly by Dyan Sheldon (A surprisingly depressing read for a travel book by a children's author.)

In the couple of hours I did get to play today I made a whole bunch of random stuff at every crafting station in Monarchs Bluffs. I love the way the recipes pull straight from your storage but only the storage in that town. It's quite brilliant.

Mostly, nothing much of note happened except a lot of numbers went up, which as many people have noted is key to New World's astonishing success. People love making numbers go up. 

 

The one unusual thing was what happened when I smelted a whole load of iron and hit Smelting skill 20. I got an achievement for that, which didn't surprise me. You get achievements for turning round suddenly in New World. Not literally. Don't go trying it. You'll crick your neck.

What did surprise me was that I also got a title. Titles are much rarer. I only have the same four or five as everyone else, the ones you get for playing the game in the first place and for joining a faction. 

Only now I also have one for being extra super handy with a two handed warhammer. Which is nice. Or would be, if I'd ever used one. My character not only has no skill whatsoever in that weapon, she has never even equipped one. I do own a couple but they're in the bank along with all the other weapons I haven't tried yet.

I have no clue what triggered the achievement unless it's somehow incorrectly linked to the smelting one. I'm fairly sure, although not one hundred per cent, that it appeared at the same time. I was doing all kinds of things around then, though, and there was a bit of lag so who can say for sure?

Presumably it's a bug. I ought to bug report it, I suppose. There is a feedback option in game although I couldn't find a specific bug-reporting tool when I wanted to report the annoying notification window that appears when you leave an area with an event going on before the event ends. 

That one stays until you log out. Even dying won't shift it. I did feed that back but I'd be more motivated to send in bug reports if there was an actual reporting tool. I can't imagine whoever reads the feedback is going to do much about it, if indeed any human ever sees it at all.

Not being one to turn down a free title, my novice hatcheteer and semi-trained sword-and-boarder is out there right now, running around claiming to be a "War Hammer Expert". If anyone asks I'll tell them I was a great Squig Herder in my day.

The other big excitement came when I opened one of the many level-based chests that come from questing and out popped my first ever Rare quality piece of gear. The chest was flagged "Level 23" and I'm only level 20 but I thought I might as well see if there was anything good inside. I've had several nice greens out of these things but never a blue, until now.

Curiously, the item was level 19, making me wonder whether the algorithm is one of those points-based ones, meaning the higher quality stole points from the level and forced it down. EverQuest II has a system that works just like that.

Then again, there's plenty about New World gear I don't yet understand. There's a Gear Score that's supposed to allow for easy comparisons but as often as not I find myself preferring the lower gear score piece I'm wearing to the supposed upgrade because of the specifics of the stat bonuses or the perks. 

I'm not really sure what the point of an automated comparison mechanic is when you have a design ethic that's so nuanced and situational. The blue piece I got is much higher level, much better quality and not surprisingly has a much higher Gear Score than the piece I'm wearing in that slot, but it's Light armor and I'm wearing Heavy, so it's a huge downgrade as protection and the bonuses strongly favor a ranged character, whereas I'm playing a melee.

I put it into storage with all the rest. I'd say one of my characters will end up wearing it some day but of course I can only roll one other character. There are only two character slots.

At least I still have plenty of room to hoard stuff. That's another thing New World gets right. For all the good things about the game I think it's a bit rich of me to complain about a few bugs here and there. So I'll shut up now. 

I said I'd make it quick!

What My Steam Achievements Tell Me About Bless Unleashed

 

Steam "achievements", unlike the ones you get inside the games themselves,  strike me as being not so much a tally of your own efforts as a commentary on those of other people. Right there on the front page, the moment you see them, they set your achievement in the context of everyone else who plays. It's an inherently competitive event.

When you play World of Warcraft or EverQuest II or Lord of the Rings Online and and an achievement message pops up, it's for you and you alone. It's congratulating you, personally. Often it's also telling you you've just earned a reward or a title or some points you can spend on something your character might be able to use. It's a progression mechanic, part of regular gameplay.

What it isn't telling you is how many other people have done what you just did. 

And now someone's going to pop into the comments to say that one or more of those games, or some other well-known mmorpg, does tell you exactly that. It's entirely possible. I freely admit to never having paid very much attention to Achievements and their equivalents in any game. I may well have missed something. Possibly a lot of somethings.

At this point, if I was going to do my due diligence, I suppose I'd log into all three of those games, look at my achievements there, such as they are and find out for myself. I'm not going to do that. This isn't the New Yorker. I'm going to carry on as if it had never occurred to me that I may have founded this post on a false premise because what the games do isn't the point. 

The point is what Steam does. 

Steam sets users up to compare their progress against everyone else who plays the same games. Or who plays those games through Steam, at least. It reminds me of when I was at school. At assembly, one Saturday each month, the Headmaster would read out the monthly form placings of each pupil, so the entire school knew where everyone stood in regard to everyone else.

All of this preamble feels like a set-up for a rant about the evils of competition but it's not. The competitive element neither excites nor angers me and anyway this is competition at its most generic. Hard to get worked up about something called "Global Gameplay Stats". You'd need something a lot more personal and I don't even know if it's possible to see other people's achievements. Maybe if you're Steam friends with them. I'm not Steam friends with anyone so I wouldn't know.

No, what interests me is what those percentages seem to tell us about the games themselves and how people play them. I started thinking about that when I got the That Tickles achievement for killing a monster far enough above my gear score to show a warning.

I figured that was something just about everyone would do as soon as they had the chance but it seems not. At the time I got it, which was at precisely 8.00 PM on the fifteenth of August (thanks Steam!) I believe only 13% or so of Bless Unleashed players had done it. As I write that figure has grown to 18.5%, which still seems extraordinarily low to me.

Steam continually updates the success rate for these Achievements in real time. Or I think it does. You can see the whole thing on a page called "Global Achievements" for each game as per the screenshot above.

I imagine everyone knows all this already. Sorry. I'm teaching myself Steam as I write, here.

Getting to the point (not before time) if you look at the numbers almost a month after a successful release and with the servers still, as I can attest, busy, bustling and full of life, only 16.8% of players have managed to level a character to 20. Only 9% to 30. Does that seem realistic?

I suppose it does. As for Level 40, still five levels short of the cap, as I write only 0.3% of players have made it that far. I think this confirms what I said the other day about leveling in Bless Unleashed being somewhat old school.

Then again, maybe the slow leveling is a function of engagement or lack thereof. Look at the stats for how many people have a mount. Just over half. 51.4% to be precise, which sounds like a lot until you remember,as I mentioned in an earlier post, the devs gave everyone a free ostrich to ride as compensation for downtime. Also, there's a free pony that turns up from somewhere, quite early on. And there was a free sheep for everyone who was in the open beta. Plus you can buy a mount for not much from an NPC.

I have four mounts already plus a double of the pony and I've done absolutely nothing, intentionally, to obtain any of them. They just keep turning up. In my experience it's would seem to be a lot harder not to have a mount than to have one in this game. If anyone's not riding by now I am guessing they're also not playing much. Unless they just started today. Or they like walking.

The one about expanding your bag by twenty slots is revealing. I didn't get that one until three days ago but I only started working on it when I was in the high teens. If I'd gone for all the chests from the start I'd probably have done it in a week or two, although the higher level you are, the more locations you can find, naturally.

To get that achievement you need to have opened eighty chests. There's one bag piece in every chest and you need to hand in four at a time for the NPC to add one slot to your bag. 

That only just over 13% of people have opened that many chests seems surprising. It's super-easy to do. There are chests everywhere, they're all marked on the map and they're unique to your character so it doesn't matter how many other people are trying to grab them at the same time. I know not everyone's a pack rat but almost 90% of players being satisfied with the storage status quo seems strange. 

But then, a lot of people don't seem to be playing very intensely, if these stats are anything to go by. Only around a third of players either leveling up combo skills or unlocking new blessings? Those are basic elements of gameplay. You'd think it would harder to avoid doing either of those things than it would be to get the achievements. 

I got both on the 9th of August, just three days after the game launched. I find it very difficult to see how anyone could be playing regularly and not have done the same. I'd guess a lot of people never were playing regularly and now they probably aren't playing at all - if it wasn't for the concurrency.

Someone's playing. A lot of someones. As I write, the Steam chart shows just under 34,000 players online in the last hour with a twenty-four hour peak of just over 50,000. That's very good sustain from a launch-week high of 76,000. 

So the game is trucking along nicely even if it seems most players aren't really doing all that much when they're logged in. Standing around in town and spamming general chat seems like a popular activity.

They don't seem to be questing, that's for sure. Less than 20% of players have completed fifty side quests, a marker I hit in just over a week. And they don't seem to be doing much exploring, either. Only around 16% have the achievement for riding 42.195km (the metric length of an Olympic marathon). I notched that one up on the same day I finished my fiftieth quest, two weeks ago.

All of which begs the question, what exactly are all these people doing if they're not doing any of that? Fewer than a fifth of players seem to be doing anything worth mentioning, according to these figures. And yet there they are, all fifty thousand of them, apparently still having some kind of secret fun. They can't all be bots, surely?

There certainly are plenty of gold sellers but scammers don't hang around if there are no customers. Someone has to be buying. There's certainly a lively economy. Judging by the scrum I see around the broker every minute of the day there probably should be some kind of achievement for economic activity. 

Then there's dungeon-running.  Going by general chat, running dungeons is just about all anyone seems to care about, that and Gear Score and Knowing the Mechs. Maybe Steam's just handing out achievements for the wrong things. As for PvP, no-one much seems to care about it. There's only one PvP achievement I can see and so far 0.1% of players have it.

I wouldn't mind seeing these kinds of stats for a few of the other games I play. It could be quite revealing. Unfortunately, Steam's still by no means the first port of call for most mmorpg players, so any stats I could find there on EQII wouldn't be worth looking at. I don't believe Guild Wars 2's even on Steam at all. Most mmorpgs aren't.

I'll be keeping an eye on Bless Unleashed's achievement profile though. I'm not naturally competitive but it's weirdly heartening to see myself apparently doing so well compared to almost everyone else. Or I suppose it would be if  it wasn't because they've all got much more important things to do than ride hundreds of miles doing quests for NPCs while picking up old bits of bags to hoard more useless crap.

Still, I'm not complaining. It keeps me busy, And it gets me badges. What more is there?

Try Anything Twice

Sometimes it pays to ignore your preconceptions, to give yourself the opportunity to be proved wrong. When ArenaNet posted their roadmap for the summer I was positively scathing about the planned revisiting of Living World Seasons Two and Three:

"I would literally rather spend my evenings cleaning my oven than ever do any of LS Seasons two or three again and as for achievements I never did most of those in the first place so that won't be happening. Once again, good luck to them as likes it. I'll pass, thanks."

Extra sarcasm points for a brave use of "literally" there. Brave it may have been. Correct it most certainly was not.

This afternoon I completed the first of the four Seasons of the Dragons meta-meta-achievements, comprising everything from the opening of Dry Top to the apocalyptic cut scenes that preceded the Heart of Thorns expansion. On original release that content spanned the six months between July 2014 to January 2015. The rerun took just one.

Finishing the first of the extremely asymetric meta-metas netted me an Ascended Weapon chest. Also a metric ton of lesser loot but we'll pass over that for now. The halfway mark requires another six metas. If I can stand it 'til then I'll get an unlock for a guaranteed precursor for an End of Dragons legendary.

I've made no secret over the years of my lack of interest in Guild Wars 2's legendary weapons. And the armor or accessories come to that. Even so, I am interested in the lesser-quality precursors reqired to craft them, if only because of how insanely low the drop rate has always been. 

In nine years, playing two or three accounts each, logging in virtually every single day, Mrs. Bhagpuss and I have seen exactly two pre-cursors drop. One each. I must have had hundreds of thousands of opportunities, maybe millions. Just one came good.

I'm not going to pretend there was any other reason I started doing these "Return to..." missions a month ago. I looked at the rewards and decided I wanted them. I was prepared to shift my fixed position in the name of greed. 

 

I'm happy enough with that decision. I wanted some stuff. I got some stuff. What I wasn't bargaining on was enjoying myself while I did it.

Let's be clear: the parts of Living Story I never liked have not changed a jot. Nor have they improved with age. The awful, poorly-designed, poorly-implemented boss fights are as clumsy, tedious and infuriating as they ever were. The clunky dialog hasn't magically found a spark. The plot holes haven't healed over. None of that has changed.

The saving grace of these repeat performances is that the bad points are much easier to ignore now. The big fights take a fraction of the time because most of the bugs have been fixed, because my characters are somewhat stronger than they were and most importantly because there are accurate, detailed walkthroughs for everything. The infelicities, inconsistencies and outright insanities in the story don't jar the way they did because I don't come to them with the hopes and expectations I once did.

 

With those objections removed, the chapters are better able to stand or fall on their merits. They also benefit strongly from being exposed on a weekly rather than a bimonthly schedule. It's something of a novelty for me to be able to remember what happened in the previous episode when I start a new one.

Conversely, back when these episodes were first released, I was much more invested in the story they were telling. I also didn't know what what was coming next. There is a bit of the "yeah, yeah, let's move it along folks" to my appreciation of the material these days.

That said, it has been unsettlingly nostalgic at times to see these familiar passages play out once again. I'm quite surprised at the things I remember and the things I don't but perhaps what surprises me more are the nuances I must have missed. 

 

I recall just about everything from Fort Salma, the big reception in Divinity's Reach, the trip to Durmand Priory. The Inquest's attack on Taimi is just as distressing even when you know it's coming. Hearing Zojja's voice makes me angry all over again when I think about what's going to happen to her, the way she'll be gaslit and forgotten. 

I learned new things, too. Much of the lengthy series of flashbacks showing Caithe and Faolin's early years struck me much more forcibly this time around. Retrospective foresight casts a weird set of shadows.

One of the really unexpected pleasures has been the interstitials. GW2 is moderately famous for the quality of its art team but most of that praise is directed at the environmental artists. It's very easy to forget how evocative some of the cut scenes and, especially, the loading screen art can be. If the game ever does get the player housing system it so obviously deserves, many of these illustrations would make wonderful wall art.

The Living Story missions only make up about half of the necessary achievements for the meta. The rest come from open-world activities in whichever new map was introduced with the chapter in question. That's almost been more fun than revisiting the story, having a reason to do some of the content I very much enjoyed when it was fresh.

 

Over the past three or four weeks I've completed the whole of the Dry Top meta several times and the Vinewrath meta in Silverwastes as well. I shouldn't really have needed the crutch of the current event to open any of this stuff up for me. ArenaNet are quite possibly the most successful of all the major mmorpg houses at keeping older content in play and you can find a map full of people doing these metas without too much trouble most days. 

The thing is, I never do that. There's a lot of older content in GW2 now and I tend to need a prod to revisit most of it, even though I almost always have a good time when I make the effort.

Overall, I have to say this whole "Return to..." event has far outstripped my expectations. It's even made me reconsider the role and function of structured, personal narrative in mmorpgs. I wonder sometimes if I really know what I want. I'm all but sure I don't always know what I need.

 

Whether this mellow mood will extend to the next set of returning Living Story chapters does definitely remain to be seen. These, after all, were the direct lead-in to Heart of Thorns, the expansion I really liked, and the story at that point was comparatively coherent and compelling. Season Three was the preamble to Path of Fire, the expansion I really didn't like, and if I remember anything about it at all it's not with much affection.

But that's almost the best reason to stay with the process. The rewards may have been why I started but now I'm getting an education. I'm learning new things about the game and about myself and that's a lot more than I expected to get out of something that, when it was announced, looked very much like filler. 

If I find I'm not enjoying it any more then I'll stop but for now I find I'm actually looking forward to each "new" weekly instalment. The next drop should take us to Bloodstone Fen. I spent a lot of time there, once, and I had some very complimentary things to say about it. 

It'll be nice to see the old place again.

Reelin' In The Years

I had fun in Dry Top yesterday. It was busy and bustling, lots of people crashing around, rushing from event to event, chattering excitedly in map chat, some of them scolding each other for not doing what they should, others calling out help and advice. Today, after I'd done my dailies, I decided I fancied a bit more of that. 

It was always on the cards. I wrapped up my post on Guild Wars 2's "Return to Living World" event by wondering whether I might "turn it into a long-term project, knock off a mission now and again, whenever the mood takes me". The mood did take me but mostly I was curious to find out if the instanced content had gotten any easier in seven years.

Not that I could remember all that much about it. I get flashbacks about some of the really bad boss fights once in a while but I have a feeling most of those were in Season Three. I really couldn't remember anything that happened in Season Two.

I started on the first part, Return to Disturbance in Brisbane Wilds around ten o'clock this morning and finished the last part, Return to Fort Selma around four this afternoon. Over two days the whole thing probably took me about five or six hours.

I have some thoughts and observations.  In no particular order, here they come.

The achievement window is misleading. I looked at it quite carefully when I was writing the post yesterday and I had the impression it would take four meta-achievements to complete. It doesn't. It takes twenty-four. That is quite a difference.

The wiki explains it much more clearly: 

There are a dozen achievements in the first meta-achievement and completing them all does not get you an Ascended Weapons chest. Completing those twelve achievements gets you a choice of one of a set of weapon skins or six mystic coins. It also counts as the first of the four meta-achievements you need to complete Tier One of the Seasons of the Dragons meta-meta-achievement. That gets you an Ascended Weapons chest.

If you look at the chart above, Tier One is the shortest of the four. Tier Two and Tier Three require six meta-achievements each and Tier Four takes eight. I'm not at all sure we know yet just how that breaks down in terms of distribution cadence but if every one of the two dozen meta-achievements is going to be released as a separate instalment lasting one week, as the first two are, the whole event is going to last six months.

And if that's true, and if you take it that the Return to Living World event is effectively the pre-launch build up to the expansion, you could read it as confirmation of a minimum six-month wait before we see the release of End of Dragons. Considerably longer than I was expecting.

Or you could ask why, if this is the pre-expansion hype train, the token that gives you an EoD Legendary precursor is the reward for Tier Two rather than Tier Four. On a weekly release schedule you can get that one in fourteen weeks, which takes us into the begining of September, which was round about when I was thinking the expansion might drop.

So much for speculation. How about the experience?

The first meta-achievement was much faster and easier to complete than I was expecting. Dry Top being so busy made completing the six achievements there very straightforward but I don't think it wil be very much harder even when things quieten down. The achievements all set a very low bar.

I was expecting a lot more trouble with the instances but they positively whizzed by. I took my newly re-built asura ranger, now using the official Metabattle Basic Ranger build and fully kitted out with ascended armor and weapons. Apparently the people who come up with these metas do know what they're doing. Everything just melted. 

It was not like that first time around. As I moved through the chapters it all came back to me, the story and the fights. I could recall all the parts where I'd struggled originally. Seven years ago I described the fights as "tough and messy". Back then I was duoing  Living Story episodes with Mrs. Bhagpuss and I commented that "it often felt like two people were needed". This time around it all felt very easy with just me.

Clearly either I have gotten better or the content has become comparatively easier in the light of changes made to the game by the developers  and the theorycrafting done by players. I'll give you a clue which it might be: I have not gotten better.

With the fights on fast-forward, the drag anchors are your companions. Other than in one or two cut scenes there's no way to skip the dialogue and since these are story episodes there's a lot of talking. Worse, there are many situations when the mission can't progress until all the NPCs are in the correct position and some of them like to amble along like nuns at the seaside. (I've seen nuns at the seaside - trust me, no nun ever stepped lively with ice-cream in hand).

 

Since I mentioned the characters and the story, here's what I thought about it the first time: "I enjoyed it a lot". I thought the characterization was "coming along nicely" and the voice acting was "good". As for the writing, well, we'll get to that.

It seems I was more easily impressed back then. Or maybe standards have actually improved. I think it might be that, believe it or not. Listening and reading today, most of the dialog seemed quite flat. There were one or two jokes that didn't land and a lot of lines came dangerously close to being filler. 

The voice acting didn't seem anything like as good as I remembered, either, but that may have been because the characters still seemed to be searching for the people they were going to become. I'd say both the writing and the acting are generally of a higher standard nowadays, at least when everyone's not off working on an expansion.

The really strange part was how different the characters were. Almost without exception, everyone came across as less experienced, less confident, less jaded and less worn down. That's something of an unexpected compliment to how they've been handled across the years. They really have lived through some stuff, haven't they?

Especially Taimi and Braham. I'd completely forgotten just how young Taimi was back then. Everyone treats her like a child and she acts like one, too. Braham indulges her, Rox dislikes her and makes no effort to conceal her feelings. Taimi whines, snaps and behaves like a hyperactive twelve-year old. She's petulant, impatient, self-obsessed and lacks all the confidence, gravitas and pathos I associate with the character now. 

Braham, on the other hand, seems older, calmer, less... insane. He seems like a steady kind of guy and a solid big brother figure. Of course, at this point he hasn't had his mother murdered in front of him while he watches helplessly. Rox is her old, unhappy, insecure self. A little bitter, a little angry. I'd forgotten she was like that once. 

As for Marjorie and Kasmeer, the second chapter, Entanglement, is the one with the unfortunate incident involving Marjorie's sister Belinda and a large mordrem tendril. At least Marjorie doesn't have to watch it happen. I remember that scene well. I'd forgotten how freighted with nuance the dialog is, though. Boy, that was going somewhere. I don't recall if it ever arrived.

Here's the thing about the story, the characters and the dialog in these episodes: it may not be great writing (it really isn't) but it means something in the context of the game. In my original first impressions piece I described the plotting as "somewhere around journeyman comic-book level (that's a good thing) with the dramatics hitting a solid soap-opera groove". That might not be a ringing endorsement but it's a much better review than I'd give the second half of the Icebrood Saga, not to mention most of Path of Fire and the interminable Joko storyline.

I wasn't entirely sure I was getting the full original experience at times. Once or twice it felt like scenes were missing. There's one part where everyone leaves Taimi in Scarlet's hideout to carry on her research. Something happens that scares Taimi and sends everyone rushing back to check on her. The dialog is all about some big, scary event but as far as I could see, nothing had happened. I also hit one bug when all the characters just stood around, motionless and silent, and nothing would make them carry on. I had to log out and redo that section from the beginning.

Overall, though, it all went pretty smoothly. I can't see much prospect of my making it all the way through twenty-four sessions of it, especially not once we get to Season Three, which I remember being much less fun than Season Two. I would like to get as far as the free precursor. That looks doable, maybe.

And finally, on yesterday's theme of doing it for the money, even though I didn't get an Ascended weapon chest, there is one hell of a lot of loot to be had. I could barely stagger away with all the bags that were thrown at me. It's not very good loot but there's a lot of it. And the first meta-achievement itself is worth nearly twenty gold in Mystic coins, if you're strapped for cash, always assuming you don't want the weapon skins. Not a bad return on time invested.

All things considered, I'm quite looking forward to the next two episodes of Return to Living World dropping next week. That's something I never thought I'd hear myself say.

Make It Worth My While

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

An ascended weapon chest

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

A 32-slot bag

A legendary amulet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe they could put that on the poster.

Gallic Shrug

This morning Tobold posted something about his Steam library and how many unplayed games there are in it. It's one of those blogging perennials that come up now and then, here and there, predictable and ineradicable as weeds.

Time was when I could indulge myself with a smug, hipsterish drive-by, something along the lines of "Not a problem I recognize. I don't even use Steam". Yeah, those days are long gone. I've had to find other ways to annoy people. 

I'm not sure when I got myself a Steam account or when I started using it regularly, although I do know the latter came a good while after the former. I use it most days now. I've succumbed, slowly, at first reluctantly then later with some small enthusiasm, to its much-vaunted convenience. 

I'd still generally prefer to have games in standalone launchers on my desktop. It seems quicker and easier to me. Since Steam lets me launch individual games from my library from their desktop shortcuts, though, that's something of a moot point.

I only asked for the bill!

 

What is undoubtedly easier is buying games through Steam. It saves having to make new accounts, fill out new forms and come up with new user IDs and passwords. For that reason alone, if there's a straight choice between buying a game direct and buying it via Steam I tend to go through Valve's portal.

For all that, I don't yet think of myself as a Steam person. And neither does Steam. That was made objectively clear to me this morning when I tried to use the Steam Calculator Tobold linked to find out what my Steam stats might be. 

The calculator offers more than a dozen ways you can identify yourself, none of which meant anything to me. Never mind all that: "Just sign in via Steam and we'll do it for you." Yeah, no you won't. Apparently having a valid, recognized, working account isn't enough. You have to have a Profile too. 

I don't have one and I wasn't planning on getting one. I suppose I could have filled out the necessary paperwork but since avoiding paperwork is the primary reason I use Steam in the first place that didn't really appeal. Instead, I thought I'd do it the old-fashioned way. Just look at my Library and count the games.

Damp dufflecoats, patchouli and despair?

I can see why Tobold didn't do that. He has 445 of them. I have a nice, round fifty. I can almost see them all without scrolling down. 

Of those fifty there are just two that I've never played at all: Mixed Messages and Age of Wonders III. They were both free. The first I got because at one time a lot of people were blogging about it and I thought I might too but I never got around to it. The second looked like the kind of game people often blog about so... you get the picture.

Of the remaining forty-eight, I have finished twenty. I know! Surprised me, too. Although some of them are very short. 

Fourteen more are mmorpgs, meaning they can't be finished. I'm still playing all of those, at least for some value of "playing". I'm never not playing any mmorpg I have ever played unless it's actually closed down. Just not playing it at the moment. 

We're in France. It's not like it doesn't happen.

Come to think of it I think three of those mmos (Stash, Dragon Nest Europe and Bless Online) have closed down. I should probably uninstall those.

That leaves fourteen. Five of those I am still planning on finishing some day (Yonder, Tanzia, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Kingdoms of Amalur, My Time At Portia), one is Valheim, of which no more need be said, and one is Broken Sword 5, about which this post was originally meant to be and still will be when I get there.

The residue are demos plus one game I tried and instantly disliked but never got around to uninstalling. That one's called What Never Was, appropriately.

How much the whole lot might be worth I can't say, neither what I paid for them, nor the market value, high or low. I can say that of fifty titles I paid some amount of money for eighteen of them. Two others (Rift and Project: Gorgon) I paid someone else money for then linked them to Steam. I'd be very surprised if I've paid more than a couple of hundred pounds for the lot although I did probably buy more than half of them in sales.

Trust me, I'm not a doctor.

Of all the unplayed (or underplayed) titles, Broken Sword 5 stands out. It was a birthday present that I asked for many years ago, suggesting I was, at least at the time, pretty keen on playing it. More to the point, it was the reason I signed up for a Steam account in the first place. You can't play it without one, even if you have the thing on DVD. Which I do.

Bearing that in mind, I thought maybe I should have another crack at it. The last time I tried I got stuck and since I didn't want to use a walkthrough I took a break hoping inspiration would strike. It didn't.

Not so much an achievement as an essential plot point.

Or at least that's how I remember it. I even remember roughly where and how I was stuck. Steam doesn't. When I went to log in and restore my most recent save there wasn't one. Instead I had the choice of starting a New Game at the Tutorial, at Chapter 1 or at Chapter 2. 

Hmm. Maybe I was at Chapter 2. Don't remember it that way but if I hadn't already finished Chapter 1, why would it even give me the option?

So I tried that and got a cut scene and a voiceover full of plot points that very definitely must have happened further on in the narrative than I ever reached. To avoid spoilers I quit out of that and tried Chapter 1 instead. It seemed... completely and utterly new. Not a single thing there that I recognized, other than George and Nico. 

Ah, but who cares? It was gorgeous to look at at and fun to play. The dialog was witty and amusing, the plot was intriguing, the puzzles were exactly the right difficulty so I kept going. It didn't seem to match anything about my memories of the previous times I'd played but what the hell. 

You can't beat a good joke about les évènements, that's what I always say.

I played for an hour and a half until I reached a convenient stopping point and then I stopped. I'd gotten a few achievements so I looked at those to see how many other people had managed them. 

It would appear a lot of people give up on the game right at the start because two of the achievements were for discoveries material to the plot and only sixty per cent of players have those. Pretty sure you can't get any further if you don't. Then again, maybe the rest just skip straight to Chapter 2 since apparently that's allowed.

Then I noticed I had another achievement. It was for completing the tutorial. I did that in October 2016. Maybe that's what I vaguely remember although since I also remember not being able to finish whatever it was I was doing that doesn't feel like it could be right.

Learned how, yes. Played the game, no.

Only just under thirty per cent of players get that achievement, suggesting most people skip the tutorial. Seems fair enough. By the time you get to the fifth game in a series you've probably figured out how to play.

We'll see how far I get this time. I do want to find out what happens although the mystery that really interest me isn't so much who stole the painting and why as what happened to my saves and the game I thought I was playing.

I imagine it'll all come clear in the end. Maybe I'll do the tutorial again and see if there are any clues there. I could probably use all the help I can get.

Last Days Of Disco

Well, that was an anticlimax. Is what I said last night when I finished Disco Elysium and sat back to watch the credits roll. Seriously, guys? That's it?

According to Steam the whole thing took me thirty-eight hours but you can knock three off for the time I left the game open in the background while I was writing a post about it, so call it thirty-five in total. I hadn't looked to see how long it had taken other people but that's about half what I was expecting.

I had noticed the pacing was off. For the first couple of dozen hours my journal was stuffed with half-completed tasks. I kept adding more. It seemed like I was never going to get on top of my caseload. 

Then, quite suddenly, a whole slew of investigations and side quests sorted themselves out, ticked themselves off and left me with just the bare bones of the main storyline to consider. 

At one point I ran out of things to do altogether. Time moves very slowly if you're not active. I'm not even sure it moves at all. I found myself visiting the bookstore to buy a book just to pass the time. I read it cover to cover half a dozen times just waiting for night to fall.

After that, things began moving again. Fast. Big, set-piece events arrived, one after another. There was a climactic moment where I thought the game had ended with my character's death, but no. On we went, options narrowing, until...

Everything stopped. Murder solved. Loose ends tied. Everyone into the car and back to headquarters, only there wasn't even a car. Just Game Over. 

Jarring doesn't cover it. Disappointing, frustrating, lazy, half-assed... all of those. It's conceivable the effect was intentional but if so I'd have to question the commercial wisdom of building expectations so high only to let them to collapse at the climax.

It's a difficult thing to discuss, of course, and for two reasons. There's the obvious issue of spoilers. I worked very hard not to learn anything about the game before or while I played it and I don't imagine anyone would thank me for tossing out unsolicited reveals. Even now I'm loathe to go look anything up because I'm acutely aware that another run-through might be very different. 

That's the other issue. In a game that relies so heavily on branching storylines, any detailed discussion even between people who've played it to the end is going to involve a great deal of unshared information. I'm not a great one for replaying narrative-driven games but the first thing I wanted to do when I finished Disco Elysium was start over and try again.

 

Sticking to spoiler-free generalities, I was expecting something more numinous. Much mention is made thoughout of cosmic themes. There's a fin de siecle feel to the world, an attenuated ennui, stretched to encompass the end not just of the century or even the millennium but of time itself. Even, perhaps, of existence.

Given the relentless emphasis on mysterious, arcane, unseen forces it came as more than a mild let-down to find that in fact all I'd been doing was solving a near-motiveless murder and that all the shadows following me were mundane ghosts from my immediate past. And by ghosts I mean bad relationships and poor life choices.

The capper - and this is a spoiler, albeit one of the most dismal you're likely to see - was the disclosure that, in my much-ballyhooed former, forgotten life I'd been... a high-school gym teacher. It was at this point I realized the writers must be taking the piss.

As I mentioned in my first impressions piece, I'd made a snap decision, almost immediately after at character creation, to play my character as straight-edge as possible. No drink, no drugs, no rock 'n' roll attitude. Just the facts, ma'am. Just doing my job.

I didn't entirely manage to keep that up. I never took a drink, never smoked a cigarette, never ingested a substance other than the basic equivalents of mana and hit point potions. I did flirt briefly with the idea of being a superstar but I gave that up early on.

Whenever there was the chance to "Say Nothing" that's just what I did. If anyone tried to get me take sides I'd tell them I had no opinion or emphasize I was just there to solve the crime.

After a time voices in the game and occasionally the game itself began commenting on how boring I was. There were digs about how I'd always pick the option that didn't really answer the question: Option D - "None of the above".  

There are twenty-five achievements in the game. I got seven of them, including "The World's Most Laughable Centrist", "Goodest of the Good Cops" and "Literally the Sorriest Cop on Earth". I'm not convinced any of those is meant as a compliment.

I did also get "Hyperstellar Law Official" for picking seven "deranged superstar lines" and "Il Coppo del'Arte" for choosing five things an "Art Cop" might say but in both cases I quickly changed direction when I realized I was in danger of becoming interesting. 

What I'm left wondering is how much those conscious, role-playing decisions controlled the eventual direction of the game I played. It seemed to me that the longer I went on, the less original and outrageous the game became. By around two-thirds of the way through it really could have been just about any well-made murder mystery. It would still be a very fine game by any standards but groundbreaking? Definitely not.

 

And I have to suspect I made that happen. I wanted my character to be boring and I got what I asked for. And along with a boring character I got a boring ending. Unless and until I play through the game again as a reckless, self-aggrandizing speedfreak or a depressive, incompetent lush, just two of the personalities the game seemed keen I should try, I don't suppose I'll know. 

The idea that I might spend another thirty-five hours cannon-balling around Revachol, taking drugs, getting into fights, making lunatic claims and ignoring every kind of precedent and protocol, only to end up finding the result is just the same - a murderer caught, case closed, everyone back to the station - is a risk I'm not sure I'm prepared to take. I could go watch some other peoples' play-throughs on YouTube or read some of the commentary I'm sure must exist. But that would defeat the object, wouldn't it? Assuming the object is to be entertained and enlightened rather than merely informed.

Outside of the metagame I have some smaller problems with the process. The nearer games like this approach some kind of existential meaning, the more glaring become the inconsistencies of the form. In some ways the quarter of Martinaise feels crunchingly real but as hour after hour went by I found it harder and harder to overlook the unnatural state of stasis that prevailed there. 

It's one thing for a shopkeeper or cafe manager always to be at the counter but for a woman to spend five days smoking on an open rooftop, never moving even when it rains or snows? In Revachol no-one feels the cold or the passage of time, even though once in a while they might mention feeling either or both. But they don't act on it. A lorry driver stands in the street, staring at nothing, day after day after day. A woman waits on a boat. A man leans on a pillar. Another balances on a railing. Lucky the minor character who gets to sit down.

There has to be a better way to facilitate player agency while also maintaining a sense of reality. Or there does if you want players to feel they're doing more than playing a game. The problem Disco Elysium has here is that it does some things so very well (when NPCs do interact with their environment - just getting up from a chair or using a keyboard - it may be the best I've ever seen) that the things it does just in exactly the same way all other games do stand out as wrong.

I'm also highly suspicious of some of the self-referential writing and the occasional winking at the fourth wall. I was willing to give all the stuff about role-playing games in a role-playing game a pass when I thought it was going somewhere but in my playthrough it went nowhere at all, which made it feel false. Perhaps in another run that won't be the case but should games be predicated on the expectation they'll be replayed? 

Perhaps they should. Probably they should. In essence it would be a reason to tell stories this way rather than another. There will, inevitably, be a lot of failures that way, though. We're back to the concept of the "good ending" once again, only on methamphetamine. 

I could write a lot about Disco Elysium. If I play it again I'll write more. It's an annoying game in that it demands to be discussed at inordinate length and in extraordinary detail but the options for doing so are necessarily limited. It needs a group of people who've all played it to sit around afterwards and argue it out over drinks until the sun comes up or the bar closes, whichever comes first.

To sum up, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a fine game and I unreservedly recommend it. It's also intensely irritating for the reasons I've given and a whole lot more I haven't mentioned. 

I feel quite pleased with myself for playing from start to finish without using walkthroughs of any kind other than a couple of times when I thought the game might have bugged out on me and I had to check if that was true. It wasn't. 

 

I'm also very pleased with myself for completing the whole thing without dying. Apart from that one moment, when I thought I'd been fatally shot but apparently it was just a flesh wound, I never even felt I was in any real danger. That's what happens if you always pick the most boring option, I guess, but it's worth it to get the"this really happened" sensation a single-threaded run always accords.

Perhaps most satisfying of all was another achievement, "Recruit Junior Detective Kuuno de Ruyter". Only 2.2% of Steam players have unlocked this, which is probably because Cuno is one of the most unlikable characters I have ever encountered, with his potty mouth and his screeching Scouse accent.

He swears, unimaginatively and ceaselessly, usually in your face. He insults you and ridicules you. He whines and complains and generally behaves like a foul-mouthed four year old even though he's supposedly an adolescent. 

There ought to be an achievement just for tolerating him long enough to wring the information you need from his sneering, snarling face. To come to understand his pain and bring him finally to redemption deserves sainthood. Or at least a qualification in social work.

What I disliked most intensely was the writers' seeming disinterest in outcomes. Stories blossom then die. There's no closure. As a player I wanted closure and I felt it was needed, structurally. Too many endings were teased then not supplied. 

If the point is there are no neat endings then don't give such a neat ending to the main story-line. The case may have been closed but all the doors I'd opened along the way were still wide open, banging in the wind.

Unless I left them that way. Maybe I did. 

Oh, well. Too late to close them now. 

Maybe in another life.