Look, Ma! Both Hands!

It's possible, although I don't really think it's likely, that you might remember me saying earlier this week, that I'd bought an XBox-style gamepad. Ostensibly it was because my swerve away from all-mmos-all-the-time to more of a mixed gaming economy had me running into more and more games that support keyboard and mouse grudgingly at best. That was my excuse, anyway, although the real reason was the Prime sale was on and I really wanted to buy something... anything... fun because it sometimes seems like all I ever buy on Amazon are necessities.

The game that prompted my purchase was Ikonei Island, which did indeed turn out to be even more enjoyable when played with a controller. Unfortunately, open beta ended the very next day, so I only got to play once, very briefly, using the superior control system. Grrr. Gnash.

Brevity aside, I enjoyed the experience so much I started looking around for other games to try with the pad. I was under the impression I had quite a few but once I started looking, I couldn't find any. Hardly surprising, really. Most of the games I've bought or played over the last year or two have been some variation of point&click adventure, walking simulator or visual novel, none of which seems especially suited to the controller, although I'm sure there are plenty that use it anyway.

As for my staple diet, mmorpgs, of late, I've rather fallen off that wagon. I think I must have played fewer hours per week these last few months than at any time since the turn of the millennium, although that has more to do with external factors (New dog plus extended run of great spring/summer weather.) than any loss of interest or affection for the genre.

Mmorpgs, being very much a PC genre by historical development, tend not to be optimized for or even playable with gamepads but there are some notable exceptions. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember what they were off the top of my head so I had to do a bit of googling.

Among many others, I came across this list, which looked good, even though I didn't find it all that helpful or indeed trustworthy, what with Tera (Closed down) and Valiance (Not yet up.) along with a few titles that aren't mmos at all, let alone mmorpgs, plus a bunch I'd never heard of (Steambirds Alliance, anyone? KurtzPel?) Still, it was somewhere to start.

I thought I'd make a shortlist of mmorpgs with controller support that I a) already know b) have played and enjoyed and c) still have installed. From the two dozen on the list, that left four - five if you include another from the concluding section, headed "Best MMORPG with Controller Support", in which they bizarrely boil the choice down to four games, two of which they haven't even bothered to include in the main part of the article.

The games I ended up with were

• DC Universe Online
• Dragon Nest
• Final Fantasy XIV
• Lost Ark
• Elder Scrolls Online

I also considered Final Fantasy XI, a game I once tried very hard to enjoy despite it having hands-down the worst mouse/keyboard controls of any game ever. I wasn't going to subscribe just to give the controller a test run, though, and sadly, even after all this time there is no free-to-play option, although it does have a fourteen-day free trial. 

AThere's another consideration. After more than a decade I'm still traumatised from my struggles with Square Enix's infamous PlayOnline registration process. I don't think I want to go through all that again just for an hour or two's play and a blog post. Never say never, though...

ArcheAge might be a possibility in that I liked it quite a bit but it also played really well with keyboard and mouse. Like any other mmorpg, in fact. There doesn't seem a lot of point in re-installing a game that almost certainly won't feel more enjoyable on a gamepad than if I just played it in the regular way. If I want to mess around with something like that, I think Guild Wars 2 has some kind of controller support.

Trove was another theoretical possibility but I never really got on with Trove. I can't say I want to try again. For the purposes of the experiment, five games ought to be plenty, anyway, and it's fair to say that, while I've enjoyed playing all of them, four out of the five do feel like they weren't originally intended to be played on PC. There's a reasonable chance my experience might be improved with a controller.

The exception would be FFXIV, which I always felt played immaculately with traditional PC controls, but I've heard that it's also the best-implemented of all mmorpgs when it comes to gamepad support. Comba did feel a little off, now I come to think of it.... That might well feel a little smoother and more natural with a gamepad. Worth a try, anyway.

DCUO is a game I've always loved despite the control system clearly being designed for consoles. I would have made it my first stop, only I couldn't remember where it was. I haven't played since my hard drives all swapped themselves around and the icon has gone from my desktop. Obviously I could have gone looking for it but all the rest were there, staring at me, so DCUO shuffled off to the back of the line. 

It'd be funny if you could understand it.

 

I began with Dragon Nest. Things did not go well. 

I may have mentioned before just how many versions of Dragon Nest there are. I have played more than half a dozen of them over the years, including the original (Just called Dragon Nest although maybe we should call it Dragon Nest Classic now), Dragon Nest EU, Dragon Nest Oracle, Dragon Nest Origins, Dragon Nest 2019 and Dragon Nest Worlds. 

I have all of those except Classic still installed although Worlds is actually the mobile title and it recently closed down (Wipe away those tears! There's a Dragon Nest Worlds 2 on the way.). The icon on my desktop turned out to be for Dragon Nest 2019, which in turn turned out to be what I'd named the foder for Dragon Nest NA.

DNNA has an excellent opening cut scene with barely comprehensible captions but what the game itself is like I can't tell you because once you get past that it's solidly IP blocked. As the website explains, they only have the USA, Canadian and Oceanic rights. 

The EU servers closed a while back, when whoever it was that had them lost the rights and no-one else wanted to take over. Still, I was fairly sure there was some UK-accessible iteration of Dragon Nest still out there and I was right: Dragon Nest Origins.

I got that patched up, which didn't take too long. My old login details worked and it was wonderful to reacquaint myself with my highest-level DN character, Dora. I'd forgotten how far I'd gotten with her. She's level 27 (Out of seventy, I think.)

I fiddled about looking for the controller options but when I found them they were horrifically complicated, to the point where I closed the window in terror. I was so shocked I didn't even think to take a screenshot. I'd log in and do it now but I can't because Zenimax won't let me. Explanation follows.

I tried using the controller without the instructions. Some things were intuitive - movement, speaking to NPCs, jumping... Others weren't - scrolling through lists, selecting options, turning around.... I'm going to have to take a proper look at the enormous list of commands before I try and do anything more challenging than walk around town but since I always found DN fairly comfortable to play with the regular PC controls, I can't really summon up the willpower just now.

Proof of Concept

On to the next, which for entirely arbitrary reasons, I decided should be ESO. Big mistake. 

I knew there'd be some updating to do. It's been a while since I last played. I started patching at around midday and the damn thing was still going until about twenty minutes ago. It's nearly half-past six! 

For some reason the patcher kept downloading massive multi-gigabyte files and installing them even though I already had over 70GB of files in the folder. When I eventually checked the size of the finished installation it wasn't much more than 10GB larger even though it seemed like ten times that had to have come down the pipe.

Not only that but for a couple of hours the patching, installing and verifying was so intense it made my entire PC come close to locking up. I couldn't do anything more taxing than look at phones on Amazon and even that was a struggle. 

Eventually I went to lunch, leaving the patcher running, hoping it would fniish while I was gone. I came back an hour and a half later, just in time to see the PC shut down and restart. Whether that was something demanded by the patching process or the poor thing had just given up and rolled over I couldn't tell.

Another couple of hours later and the PLAY button is finally ready to click. I suppose I'd better go give it a try. It's a lot of work for a game I don't even care for al that much but I've started so I guess I'll finish.

Whatever happens when I get in is going to have to wait for another post so I guess this is going to turn into a series whether I want it to or not. I hope the rest of the entries end up a lot more interesting than this one but I have a worrying feeling they won't. There's only so many ways you can say "I tried it but I didn't much like it and now I feel like I've wasted my day".

Again Again Again

Today's Promptapalooza starter is

Do you “finish” games/hobbies/projects and move on or do you come back to the same things again and again?

Talk about shooting a barrel full of fish through an open goal while riding a very high hobby horse. I could bore for my country on this one.

But  I won't. I'll just state my case, of which I'm certain: doing something only once is tantamount to never having done it at all. Going back to that earlier prompt, the one about favorite quotes, I could so easily have gone with Mark E. Smith's "We dig repetition". It could be the motto of this blog. Maybe it is!

But I've said all this before, haven't I? I'll leave it at that. Wouldn't want to repeat myself.

Instead, since this used to be an MMORPG blog, maybe I'll list some of the games I've stopped playing but might get back to, some day. It's not like I've done that before...

Blade and Soul - This has been on my mind recently. Not sure why. I don't think I've returned to it once since my first run ended, back in 2016. Which is surprising, because at the time, I seemed to be enjoying it quite a bit:

"I've played Blade and Soul almost every day for a month now. My Summoner is level 30 so I'm averaging about a level a day. It's just a fun MMO. It isn't very deep or complex or  sophisticated or subtle - it's just fun to play".

Probably worth another shot, I'd say.

Star Wars: the Old Republic - I was enjoying  this one enough to sub for a while. After a month or so I'd put in "around a hundred hours so far, taking one character to Level 57 and another to 35".

The main problem I had was the incessant voice acting. It was okay in the spring but when we got to the summer and I wanted to have the cricket on in the background I had to mute the voiceovers, which kind of seemed to be missing the point a tad. Then I went on holiday and it just felt like a good time to take a break.

I was always planning to come back but as yet it hasn't happened. And it's cricket season again now, so it won't be happening for a while. Maybe in the autumn.

Twin Saga - I have actually been back to this one several times. I really like it a lot. The problem is... it's too hard.

Seriously, I stopped because I got stuck. Couldn't progress. Was dying too often. I waited a few months, then a couple of years but each time I went back it hadn't gotten any easier. Quite ironic, given my initial assessment:

"Twin Saga is a very comfortable game to settle into, with a very shallow, gentle learning curve."

Yeah, I think they call that "bait and switch".

Lord of the Rings Online - I took the trouble to log in and claim my compensation. Only fair for the extreme inconvenience I suffered, being locked out of a game I wasn't playing. Shame I wasn't on the server that had the huge rollback - I might have gotten recompensed for losing the progress I hadn't made as well. I'm sure I would have deserved it.

Now that the mysterious and elusive Standing Stone Games have decided to give just about the whole of the game away for free (and yes, I logged in that other time too, to claim my permanent free quests. Of course I did.), I sort of want to give Middle Earth another run. I think playing a Guardian might be the drag anchor that stops me ever getting very far. Perhaps I should try another class. They can't all be that dull, can they?

Also I guess I need to decide over the next week or so whether to buy any of the expansions on sale for 99 LotRO points. I probably have enough left for two or three. I should at least check that before the offer finishes at the end of August.

Final Fantasy XIV - And while we're on the subject of improved free trials...

Elder Scrolls Online - Hang on, wasn't I playing this one, like, a few weeks ago? I thought so! Talking about its prospects of staying on my "Currently Playing" list (it's notional - don't look down the side of the  page for it) I did say "I can't see ESO hanging on for long." I wasn't wrong.

I'm going to stop now because the ESO thing reminds me it's less than two months since the last time I did this. For years I've been making a practice of putting up posts where I tell myself which MMORPGs I might be playing, should be playing, could be playing but currently amn't.

Sidebar - I've always wondered why "amn't" isn't the commonly-used abbreviation for "am not". It turns up in the odd high-Edwardian novel, now and again but mostly everyone just jumps to "aren't", which is just plain wrong, now ain't it?.

Hmm. Now that's what I call a sidebar. A good editor would blue-pencil that entire paragraph. Shame I don't  have one. A blue pencil or an editor. Nor any shred of self-restraint, apparently.

Ahem.

I like writing posts like this because a) they do quite often nudge me into patching up and  logging into at least one of the games in question. Last time it was ESO. This time I'm really hoping it's going to be Blade & Soul. (Spoiler: downloading it as I type...)

And b) they're ridiculously quick and easy to write.

Also, as I believe I implied at the top, in answer to the prompt, yes I do come back to the same things again and again and again...

This post is the proof of that.

Broken English : ESO

I knew if I made a list of things to do I'd end up doing at least some of them. Either that or I'd do some other equally "important" stuff instead, so I 'd at least feel I'd accomplished something.

That's the way my mind works. The very act of writing something down imbues it with an almost mystical significance. It's also why I try not to make "to do" lists unless it's lists of things I genuinely do have to do.

Fortunately, with my memory, if I don't literally have the list in front of me I forget what's on it in a matter of hours. Minutes, sometimes. Writing a list in a blog post that I won't look at again after the day it's published is pretty safe. Very different from a piece of paper that sits in front of my monitor and accuses me every time I glance down.

Even without the specifics, though, just knowing I wrote something tends to keep my mind focused. Since I made that list is that I've been extremely productive in several games. I've sorted out banks and upgraded gear and finished questlines. It's been fun and fulfilling and it's fired me up to get even more done.

As far as the projects and plans on the list itself, of course, I have made no progress whatsoever. Except for one tiny thing. I did manage to log into Elder Scrolls Online again.

It's an odd game, isn't it? What does it want to be? I can't tell. Maybe it becomes clearer when you get further in but I doubt it.

Pink moon gonna get you all

I had a little bit of a mini-rant in the comments over at Why I Game and while what I said has much more universal implications, it's no co-incidence I'd been playing ESO not long before. What I was complaining about was "the relentless growth of “story”" in games. Popping on my rose-tinted specs I said "Games didn’t used to need stories. They had situations and that was enough."

I'm not sure it was ever quite as simple as that but I do know that every game didn't used to feel like a classroom excercise, where a series of variously capable students take it in turns to read a story aloud. It's a serious problem for the form, which already has major disadvantages over most other narrative platforms in that it requires regular and frequent interruptions so the player can, well, play.

ESO is an extreme example but all video games do it to some degree. What I'm referring to, specifically, is the way the medium necessitates the portioning out of the narrative in discrete, disconnected chunks. It's particularly evident in games that use a lot of voice acting, which these days is nearly all of them.

What happens is that the player engages with an NPC, who then articulates a sentence or two, then stops. The narrative flow, such as it was, comes to an abrupt and immediate halt while the game waits for the player to reply, assuming a reply is permitted or required. Even if it's not, everything pauses until the player indicates with a mouse-click that they're ready to hear the next line.

That chevron over my pet's head, even with the UI hidden... Drives me crazy!

It's less of a problem with quests that are all text. There, it's not dissimilar to looking up from a book or turning the page. With voice-acted audio, at best it's like pressing pause in the middle of a scene, while watching a movie at home, something most viewers would try to do as infrequently as possible.
Mostly, though, it's like trying to stream over a poor connection. The buffering never stops.

Every conversation is stuttering and fractured, which would be difficult enough if the breaks came at meaningful points, but that would assume the dialog carried enough meaning or interest to sustain such constant interruption. It patently doesn't.

There's so much filler and so many of the breaks feel arbitrary. It drains all significance out of anything that's said. NPCs begin to tell you their fears, their terrors, their intimate nightmares, then they break off and wait for you to let them know it's okay to continue.Take a second or an hour, It's all the same to them.

Time stops in all narrative forms if the reader or viewer ceases to engage, of course, but in no other medium is that paradox so unapolagetically served up as part of the process. It does make me wonder, when I hear people express the strength of the emotions certain games have engendered in them, how they've been able to set aside the mechanics long enough to become engaged.

Pondering a career change? Bounty hunting! Always an option.

The imagination is a marvelous engine, though. It does most of the emotional heavy lifting. It really needs to, often as not. The writing and the performance offer very little help. Elder Scrolls Online is frequently cited as one of the better examples of narrative form in multiplayer gaming. I keep looking for evidence to support that view but I've yet to find any.

The plot certainly doesn't do anything to help ESO stand out from the crowd. I'm willing to accept that nothing very significant or unusual is likely to happen in the opening scenes, which are all I've experienced so far, but even by comparison with the same stages in countless similar MMOPRGs, there seems to be precious little of interest going on here.

That's not to say the narrative doesn't attempt to impart a sense of urgency and immediacy. The starting area I've just completed faces imminent attack by a superior force, necessitating the evacuation of an entire settlement by way of a frenzied flight through some dark tunnels filled with deadly traps. If it was the opening of a movie you'd be on the edge of your seat.

I remember daylight!

Only it's not a movie. It's an MMORPG, so any sense of urgency is entirely notional. Everyone tells you to hurry but if you don't, nothing happens. Even if you take the threat seriously, the game doesn't. The words are urgent but the action is anything but, and there's a shopping list of tasks to complete before you move on.

The voice actors, perhaps understanding the situation better than their characters, generally decline to express much in the way of emotion at all, even when the script suggests they should. Every delivery is much the same; measured, calm, controlled. Occasionally an actor will use just enough nuance to indicate the presence of an emotion without going so far as to employ it.

All of this sits awkwardly with the gameplay itself. I've seldom played any MMORPG where the narrative drove the gameplay so relentlessly and single-mindedly. Last night I wanted to stop a good half-hour before I finally logged out because there is simply never a point at which the narrative reaches a natural break. Every quest leads inexorably into another. It's enervating.

Since, as I already mentioned, nothing proceeds without the player's permission, any sense of urgency is entirely artificial. I could have stopped at any point short of the middle of an actual fight. It would make no difference whatsoever. It's not like the old days, where you'd have to reach a save point before you could answer the doorbell.

At this point the game instructs you to wait for the refugees to get to safety. I do what I'm told.

No, the problem is an aesthetic one. I like to get to the end of a chapter or an episode before I put down my Kindle for the night. I feel the same about gaming. You'd think that it would be easy to abandon something as uninvolving and arbitrary as this mid-scene but ingrained habits die hard.

All of which, perhaps surprisingly, is not to say I'm not enjoying ESO. It's... okay. The world is attractive enough, although the new zone I've reached appears to be drenched in eternal night, something of a shock after the previous one, where midnight felt like mid-afternoon.

The combat, which seems to be universally reviled, is still, at the inglorious heights of level nine, simplistic and not at all unpleasant. I spent a while trying to use the various spells coherently but eventually I realized that simply pounding the left mouse button killed everything about twice as fast as playing "properly" so for now I'm just doing that.

I've died once in four levels and that was because I got stuck on a piece of furniture. It's very likely I'd have died more if it wasn't that the starting zones are extraordinarily busy. Every quest step plays out like a conga line as three or four players arrive in quick succession. Areas that were clearly designed to be approached carefully and with caution are laid wide open as swathes of players hack and slash through anything that moves.

City of Eternal Night. Or just some backwater fort in the wolf hours.

I finally hit the infamous mats barrier, my inventory filled with endless body parts and other crafting essentials. It would be annoying but I've chosen to solve the problem by selling everything and doing no harvesting, mining or gathering at all. Perhaps that would be a terrible idea if I planned on staying for the long haul but I'm just a tourist in this town.

The game does have something, I can't deny it. It's enjoyable in the moment. I feel like I want to see more although I'm aware I've been here before. My first character felt much the same at the this level but it didn't last.

When I was him, though, there was no One Tamriel. I'm curious to see if combat becomes arduous and unenjoyable in the mid-teens, as it did with him, or whether making everywhere the same level also makes combat feel like this forever. I hope it does. If I can carry on mashing one button and winning I might get a lot farther this time.

That said, there were four other games on that list. I've managed to get as far as installing AdventureQuest 3D on my Kindle although I've yet to play it that way. DCUO I have lined up for August, when Wonderverse drops. Shintar pointed up some freebies in Neverwinter that I really don't think I ought to ignore. She also mentioned a bike race in SW:toR that sounds like my kind of thing.

I can't see ESO hanging on for long. Still, I think I'll play a little more today.

Pale Lilac Snow: Elder Scrolls Online

Yesterday evening saw my return to Elder Scrolls Online, a little over a year since the last login, when I stuck my head around the door of my free inn room, saw how dark and pokey it was and promptly logged out again.

In all the time I've played the game (can't be more than a few hours in a few years) I've only ever tasted a single race and class, Khajiit Dragonknight, levelled, painfully, slowly, sporadically to level twelve. All I've seen of the game is the starting area for that combo.

Or maybe it is. Hard to remember. ESO hasn't made much of an impact. About all I recall are some caves, a bit of woodland, a rocky island where some orcs live. Oh, and a beach. Maybe I might have seen a strip of desert once, on a boat trip.

To be honest, it's all a bit of a blur. I do know I haven't seen any snow before, though, so the place I found myself in last night has to be new.

With cat-people off the menu, the options that faced me at character creation weren't doing much. There seemed to be a lot of elves, never a happy omen. Some rather ordinary-looking humans. One of those viking/barbarian types.

Nothing really bit. The faux-authentic gear wasn't helping.

I don't know, time was when what I wanted from a high-medieval MMORPG was armor looking like the artist sketched it through dusty glass at a down-at-heel market town museum in some central European backwater but I've been spoiled. These days I'd rather come on like the sugared-up second cousin of a Ruritanian princess, tricked out for a tour with a favorite band of glam-folk troubadours, on the run from that day job in the circus.

I like a bit of color, in other words. Not getting much of that here.

So I chose the lizard. If you can't dress exotic, be exotic, right? And they get frills on their heads. Or punk rock spikes. I went with the spikes.

It looked good in character create but in most MMORPGs no character design survives contact with the game engine. The screenshots tell the old story here. Ninety minutes of play, I really only got a good look at my character once.

That was the oddly blurred shot above. I'm not even sure how it happened. Must have hit some chance combination of keys. It's the only shot where you can - just about - see the character's face. Not that a lizard shows much expression. And the face markings and head-spikes are hidden under the rough cloth cowl.

ESO is one of those games where the graphics look better in screenshots. It's funny how often that happens. Or the other way round. I was only saying the other day how The Hammers End looks better than the screenshots suggest.

It must be something to do with settings. I confess that's something I almost never pay any attention to in any game, although given the ridiculous number of screenshots I take I almost certainly should. I tend to shy away from getting involved too closely with things like that, for my own safety. The last thing I need is discovering something like Black Desert's super-sophisticated in-game photo options. No-one needs a virtual David Bailey.

Anyway, I wasn't really looking at my character. I was looking at the snow. It was pretty good snow and I'm something of an afficionado. Snowficcionado. It's a word, now. I once wrote a piece on Good Snow Art for a comics fanzine. I may have done something similar here, on this blog.

Snow does make everything look better. There's all that blue in the palette. I know humans can recognize more shades of green than any other color but green in games tends towards the bland, except in jungles. Blue has much more resonance.

Blue, white, red. Winter landscapes, there's sometimes a surprising amount of red, bleeding into the blue, leeching pale lavenders and mauves. All these shots drip with it. It makes the cold seem so warm.

Which is probably just as well because, lizard. Cold-blooded, yes? Unless Tamriel evolution is very different, which of course it may be because, magic.

Anyway, I was surprised to find my lizard, whose descriptive background had mentioned something about swampland, waking up in a log cabin somewhere in the frozen north. A quick conversation with the nearest person confirmed no more than I'd expected: shipwreck, washed ashore, unconscious, found by villagers, now pressed into service against imminent threat. Yadda yadda and like that.

Could there be a more generic opening? Well, I guess. I mean, lizard in the snow, that's a twist. Explanation as to why or even how any of it happened, though? Not forthcoming.

Of course, I did opt to skip the tutorial. Maybe it was in there. But the game helpfully told me I'd done it before on another character so I didn't have to go through it again and I took the offer, gladly. No matter it was half a dozen years ago and all forgotten now.  No matter I'd been a tiger, then, in another place. Let's press on.

Out of the cabin I ran around some. It was daytime, for a wonder. In the time I played, night never fell. It did get a bit less bright for a while, one time. It helped a lot, the sun on the snow, the brightness. I'm losing patience with spending half my playtime in thick twilight let alone deep night. It was nice, being able to see, for once.

I grabbed some quests as I happened across them. I didn't seek them out or linger. I don't like either the font or the background. Harsh. Dark. Abrasive. These things affect my enjoyment strongly. I have these issues with print, too. There are novels I just won't read because of the way the text lies on the page.

If it's good, you'd make the effort but the writing in ESO is ponderous. No, that's maybe not the world. Ponderous suggests uncertainty and quest text here is far from uncertain. Too confident, if anything. Portentous, that could be the word I'm groping for. Or pretentious, though usually I like that. No, it's portentous, all right. Portentous and leaden. Lies heavy on the line. A common failing of fantasy, transcribed here faithfully from those endless series that stretch an author's career across decades.

Although... let's be fair. The few quests I did last night weren't all that bad. Better, or at least, less wearing to read than those I remembered from the other starting area. More perfunctory, less long-winded. Mostly "go find this guy" and, when I found him, "go do this thing".

At one point I almost felt a sense of urgency. A ship sighted, an invasion anticipated. Danger blowing in on the wind. You wouldn't know it from the voice acting, of course, still as first table-reading as ever. I have a theory about this. It applies to video game voice acting in general, not just to ESO. I don't know enough about the process to begin pontificating. Yet.

I didn't do a lot of questing, anyway. Mostly I ran around in the snow, taking snapshots, killing stuff. I ran into a bandit camp early on. Expected to die, being only level two or three. Tried to con the bandits, couldn't figure out how, so I blasted one to see what would happen. What happened was I killed him.

So I killed some more. Quite a few. Got a hat, put it on. Burned some supplies, freed a captive. Bandit Camp 101. I dinged. It occurred to me this must be the famous equalization. One zone for all.. Makes you wonder why levels at all except I guess without them there'd be none of that drip drip drip, progress. I suppose now I can go anywhere, kill anyone, like in that old joke, the one about the army. 

My lizard's a sorceror. I thought maybe it would be easier than melee, given the awful, awful controls. It wasn't, actually. If anything it was harder. More keys to press, can't just spam LMB/RMB. But I lived, bandits died. Can't complain.

And it was fun, kind of. As much fun as the horrible controls let it be. I started thinking maybe I should get a controller and use that. Could hardly be worse. I was already thinking about it. I even looked at some on Amazon the other day.  

After the bandits I went to some kind of temple, swarming with skeletons. Again, I lived, they died Or undied. Whatever the verb is. I do like fighting bandits and undead at low levels. Simple pleasures. If these count as low levels, that is.

The game was kind of busy. Really busy, actually. There were players everywhere. It seems ESO etiquette dictates you just pile on when you see someone fighting. People were always "helping" me to kill stuff. I got the loot so that worked out. I didn't reciprocate, though.

I found all my runes, opened the crypt door, looking for the necromancer. If I followed the plot I think I was supposed to kill him but I never even saw him. There was a line. I didn't bother waiting, just spoke to a ghost. He seemed to think I'd done whatever it was I'd come there to do. Fine, then.

I grabbed a bit of paper that said something or other and left. Gave it to the guy who'd sent me. He was waiting right oustside, which saved me a run. He asked me to go back to the village, tell someone what had happened, not that I really knew what that was. I did it anyway and the guy said something bad was going to happen so it would probably be best if we all ran away. More of the supposed realism? Maybe, but it's going to be tough adventuring if all the quests go "check out if something bad's happening and if it is come tell me so we can all run away".

I said I'd tell a few other people and we'd be off but actually all I did was move five feet away and log out. I'm sure he won't mind waiting although on form so far it could be another year or two.

Or maybe not. It was kind of fun. I think ESO may well be another of the growing list of MMORPGs (FFXIV, LotRO) I enjoy the more, the less I quest. Now if I could just figure out a way to make the combat not actively annoying...

Another Part Of The Forest

There are plenty of MMORPGs sitting at the back of my hard drive, gathering virtual dust. Every so often I get the urge to pull a few out and take a look.

It's an urge I generally find quite easy to shrug off. The last time I made the effort to do something about it was in January last year, when I shifted a whole bunch of games from portable drives to my newishly installed third HDD. That was also just about the last time I played any of them.

One title I'm always thinking of revisiting is Elder Scrolls Online. I never really got on with it. Like many people I don't like the combat but unlike most I'm not sold on the graphics either. Throw in the dull, overwritten quests and the flat voice acting and it's a wonder I have any interest in returning at all.

I wouldn't, only I'm acutely aware I've barely seen anything of the wider game, having spent all my time with a single race in a single region. With the entire world having been rendered accessible from the get go, I feel I really should give it another try. I know it won't come to anything but at least I'd get a post or two out of the experience.

That could be the post I'm writing now if it wasn't for one thing: ESO is still patching. It's been at it for about two hours and I've gone right off the boil. You have to catch these impulses at the flood or they fade away.

Instead I'm going to say something about an MMORPG I've mentioned a few times in the past, one that absolutely no-one I have ever heard or read about plays. It's The Hammers End and I first wrote about it in June 2013, when my main interest was the extraordinary payment scheme. You could download the game for nothing, then you got a free hour's play before you had to pay a monthly sub of $14.95 if you wanted to carry on.

I played my hour and passed on the sub. A year later they'd extended the free trial to a more rational fourteen days and I tried again. I didn't have much to say about it but I took some pictures, which I used to illustrate a post on ArcheAge for some inexplicable reason.

By the time I mentioned The Hammer's End again it was 2019 and the game was apparently using "a straightforward F2P/Premium system". The more surprising fact was probably that it was still up and running but perhaps not as surprising as what I found when I clicked on the icon today.

I got a pop-up telling me my install was out of date and I needed to re-download the game. I followed the link to the website, which has been revamped once again but still retains its enviable simplicity, a single page with only the most essential information to get you in and playing.

In amusing contrast to my experience with ESO, it took me no more than a couple of minutes to download and re-install the entire game. That had to be done because it's now running on a new engine.

Adventure World Studios LLC, the company behind THE and about whom I can find nothing other than that they're registered in Aloha, Oregon, developed the original engine specifically for that game. I'm guessing they also developed the new one. It's called "Atmosphere Engine" according to the website, which otherwise says nothing about it at all. Google has no comment to make, either.

There has always been a huge mantle of mystery over The Hammers End. It's very professionally produced, a fully-fledged MMORPG with content and systems that work. The content may be quite generic and the systems unexceptional but in the era of paid pre-alphas and "Early Access" that never ends, releasing a game as finished and complete as this seems like a major achievement.

It's still not something you could easily imagine people paying $14.95 a month for. If, indeed, that's how much it costs these days. I can't actually say for sure because the website no longer mentions any fee at all.

Whatever F2P/Premium arrangements I referred to a year ago seem to have vanished with the winter snows. I wanted to see what the game looked like running under the new engine so I tried to log in using my old details. They were recognized but my account was marked "inactive" and to revive it I was directed to PayPal.

I declined to follow that link. Instead I took advantage of the fourteen day free trial option available to new accounts. I made a new account and logged in on that.

I like The Hammers End. It's simple without being simplistic, it's atmospheric and the gameplay is pleasantly redolent of the genre's early days. I harbor fantasies of one day playing long enough to see some of the dungeons that open up in the mid and higher levels. It'll never happen, of course, but it's nice to log in and run around once in a while.

The game looks fantastic. Not that it didn't look pretty good before - "a very atmospheric, attractive world" I said, back in 2013, adding "the art design seemed convincing and coherent" and finishing up with "it felt like a proper place."

All of that is still true but now it also looks, well, magical. It has a picture-book feel to it, while also reminding me quite intensely of actual forests and woods I've known. I took a lot of screenshots, which don't do justice to how beautiful the gameworld can be.

There's not a lot of variety, at least in the parts I've seen. It's mostly forest. The area where you start is autumnal but if you follow the road far enough you come to winter. The zones are big. It took me a good few minutes to find the end of the first one. If you want to take the tour, though, you don't have to run. There's a handy "travel coach" in every village who'll port you anywhere you choose, for free.

Character models are odd. There are nominally six races but that's two kinds of identical frogs, three identical females and a rat. The characterization options must be in the running for the most limited I have ever seen. Brownies, elves and faeries can change the color of their hair, frogmen and nocturni their skin and burwoods a kind of tattoo or marking on the side of their face. That's it.

Other than those minimal identifiers, every character looks the same. Which might be a problem if there were any other players. I didn't see or hear anyone for the hour and a half I was playing and when I checked the marketplace, where players can trade with each other, it was completely empty.

And that brings me back to my perennial question: how does this game exist? It's been running, to my certain knowledge, for seven years. The login screen offers a choice of four servers, although only one was online when I made my new character. It's even enjoying a new coat of graphical paint. It even has raid dungeons. Who are they for?

I don't suppose it matters. It's one of life's eternal mysteries. It would be nice to know, all the same.

What I'm Playing - And What I'm Not

I missed a day posting the day before yesterday, due to circumstances both foreseen and unforeseen. I had my second in-hospital chemo session, which only took up the morning, but then the car broke down on the way home. It stopped right on a busy junction and I had to get out and push it into a nearby car park. Not exactly what the doctor would have ordered.

With great good luck Mrs Bhagpuss managed to get it going - just about - and with even greater luck we were only about a quarter of a mile from the garage we usually use. Mrs Bhagpuss managed to limp it in and the mechanic diagnosed a shot clutch. It was set to take a couple of days to replace in the end they got it done a day early.

I felt somewhat out of it that day. My hands were affected and typing was a bit unpredictable, although it didn't stop me commenting on a bunch of blogs, so I decided to skip a day. It's not like we're in Blaugust after all.

Yesterday, when I was a couple of paragraphs into this post, we got the call to pick up the car. When I got back a couple of hours later I read the news about Daybreak and Amazon, which looked a lot more interesting than what I had planned (this post, so I'm really selling it.).

I thought I'd do a little "what I'm playing" number. I always consider these to be fillers although for many bloggers they seem to be much more like regular features. It might be useful for me, anyway, because some days I'm really not quite sure what I'm doing and everything seems to be even more random than usual.

The MMORPGs I'd consider myself to be actively playing this month:

Guild Wars 2
EverQuest II
Riders of Icarus
Secondhand Lands
Final Fantasy XIV

Games I thought I'd be playing but don't appear to be:

Star Wars: The Old Republic
Secret Worlds Legends
Black Desert Online

Games I keep telling myself I should be playing but never do:

Dragon Nest (the mobile version)
Villagers and Heroes (mobile and PC cross-platform)
Occupy White Walls
DCUO

Games that are nagging me to play them but which I am resisting:

World of Warcraft
Rift
Elder Scrolls Online
EverQuest

Anything not on one of those lists is probably out of luck, although FFXIV would have been nowhere near any of them a week ago and now look at it.

 Riders of Icarus

As far as time spent goes, Riders of Icarus is probably getting the most hours logged. It's the first game I fire up most days. I'm very keen to hit all 31 this month for the login rewards. They are without doubt the best I've seen anywhere.

This morning I got a Legendary mount, my first. The other login Legendary Familiar I got was a combat pet only, because you can't really ride around on the back of a maid. Actually, I wouldn't put anything past MMO devs but in this case they've restrained themselves.

The mount in question turns out to be an inflatable dolphin of the kind you see people drifting out to sea on at holiday resorts before being rescued by the coastguard, hopefully at considerable personal expense. At first I thought it was just a ground mount but then it occured to me it might float over water like a skimmer in GW2.

I happened to be in Divinity Shore, the fishing beach, so I tried that out and the dolphin, whose name is Black Dooly (might be its species, actually), promply poofed, dumping me in the water. I took it for a spin around the Hakanas Highlands and after a while I noticed it was floating in the air whenever I rode it over a drop.

Turns out not only is Black Dooly a flying mount, it has a huge ceiling of 1200 meters, making it by far my best performer, Vulkanus the dragon being a distant runner-up at 450 meters. I'm just beginning to hit the point where the game takes off - literally - so it couldn't have come at a better time.

The more I play Riders of Icarus, the more I like it. I'm wary of making it sound better than it is because it's very much what you probably expect it to be. It's currently the game I'm enjoying playing the most, though, so there will be more posts about it, at least until I inevitably stop playing suddenly with no explanation or comment and don't mention it again for months, if ever.

 Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has seen a resurgence of interest chez Bhagpuss almost entirely off the back of Dragon Bash. I like most of the activities the event has to offer, the achievements are largely achievable and there are some rewards I quite want.

I've finished the metas on one account and I'll get them both done on a second account before the event ends. I've ditched the third account for the duration to prevent burnout but I did log in the 4th, free to play, account to get a few AP there. I've particularly enjoyed the mount race (ironic, considering my well-documented loathing of mounts in GW2).

Dragon Bash ends next week but its immediate replacement is the very quick return of the World Boss Rush event. I really didn't do this event justice last time it was around but it's exactly the kind of thing I enjoy and this time there are significantly improved rewards, including tiered community targets, which should keep the whole fizzing.

I'm very happy to see that someone at ANet has finally recognized the importance of giving people plenty to do between Living World instalments. Shame it took them nearly seven years to work out what every other MMORPG seemed to understand from the get-go but better late than never.

EverQuest II

EverQuest II gets played most days. I have a ton of stuff to do there, not least finishing the Signature Questline from Chaos Descending, something I still seem to be subconsciously avoiding. I'm on the final step, too, but that step is, as they say, a doozy.

As has happened before, in commenting on one of Telwyn's posts about a bottleneck in EQ2 I did some research that told me stuff I didn't know. As a result I took another long look at my Berserker's gear and now I have some kind of plan on further improvements. That needs work.

As I mentioned yesterday, I might even go back to Test and pick up a couple of questlines I never finished - or I might start them on Live. That would be a project because one of them is sixty steps long and took me weeks the first time around.

Secondhand Lands

Secondhands Lands is my EQ substitute right now. I log in and grind some mobs to fill a quest quota. Now that I'm in areas where the creatures are aggressive I have to find a safe spot and pull singles carefully, which is something few games made after about 2006 require you to do. It's very satisfying.

I got a large number of hits to my original post on the game after Massively:OP gave me a lovely plug in the piece they did off the back of the tip I sent them. No comments though and I don't know if it's resulted in anyone actually downloading and playing the game. It was interesting to see the effect on numbers here from a main article on M:OP as compared to a mention on Syp's Global Chat column, which barely registers.

FFXIV

Final Fantasy XIV came out of nowhere. Like Syp (him again) I had pretty much decided I would never play this again. I even commented to that effect on the post. I haven't even logged in for any of the recent free welcome back weeks. Then I read about the Trust system (Endgame Viable. whose post I entirely agree with, is just the latest to weigh in on the topic) and next thing I knew I was patched up, in and playing.

And enjoying it. As often turns out to be the case, I find the extended free trial version of an MMORPG more to my taste than the full game. cf World of Warcraft. I've been pottering around and leveling up. I'd like to get to the trial cap of 35 and then do a second job.

The Rest

Of the games I'm not playing, the one I really should get back to is SW:TOR. I had absolutely no intention of stopping but there's a specific reason why I'm not playing this month. TOR has a lot of voiceover. It's quite well-voiced and I like to listen to it.

But not while I'm listening to the Cricket World Cup on the radio. There's been a match virtually every day for the last six weeks and it quickly became too annoying to have to keep tabbing in and out to pause the commentary so I could hear the quest dialog. There's cricket all summer with the Ashes coming up so it might be the autumn before I get back to TOR.

SWL and BDO just fell off the radar after their events drew me in. I had plans for both but they faded. I've been watching the entire eight seasons of Monk on DVD in bed on my portable DVD player so I haven't even had the Kindle Fire on for weeks. That's put paid to both Dragon Nest and Villagers and Heroes. I did get as far as recovering my login details for the desktop version but I don't see any characters there so I'm going to have to start again and I can't be bothered right now.

Everything else is thoroughly on the back-burner. I'm undecided about WoW Classic but I imagine I'll resub for a month just to be there. Not expecting to hang around long.

I do have one new (to me) title downloaded and ready to start, Eternal Lands. It's an old game I thought I'd already tried but looking at the screenshots and some video, I don't recognize it at all so I imagine I'm confusing it with something else. I'm trying to resist starting it yet for obvious reasons but when I do there will be first impressions here.

That's where things stand. Next week it will probably all be different. Or tomorrow. Or this evening.

Who needs a schedule? Not me, apparently.

The Snake That Eats Itself : GW2

This is going to be one of those posts that rambles on about how there's so much going on in the MMO world no-one can possibly have the time to get around to it all so how can anyone say the genre's in the dumper, I mean, honestly, you guys! Well, maybe not exactly one of those but you have been warned.

I am a really bad witness for this sort of thing and not just for MMOs either. I've been told (by another grumpy fiftysomething) that I'm extremely atypical for my age because I think modern music is every bit as good as the stuff I grew up with and because I think the writing in young adult novels in the 21st century doesn't just stand up to anything I was reading when I was "that age" but gives most contemporary adult fiction more than a run for its money and basically because I think doors are opening not closing most of the time.

It's odd. I would never have painted my own portrait with my glass half full. I'd have thought I was no-one's vision of an optimist. It was only about fifteen years ago that I finally stopped describing myself as a nihilist (I must post the free verse nihilist manifesto I wrote when I was seventeen or so sometime - it's only six pages of A4 and it has tigers).

I'm still not sure that tearing everything down and starting over's such a bad idea. It's more that I'm getting too old to relish the inconvenience the way I once would have done. Still, somehow I seem to have ended up on the kittens and rainbows bench and I never saw that coming. I guess the culture has just moved past me when it comes to cynicism and black despair.

So, if you ask me when  the Golden Age of MMOs was I might as easily say "tomorrow" as anything else. And today's looking pretty golden too.

I'm sitting here freestyling this, listening to the blandly-named but rather chunky Rah Rah, one of the flurry of Canadian, Indonesian or Korean indie bands the wonderful world of YouTube has opened for me these last few days, as I eagerly anticipate the arrival of GW2's fourth episode of Living Story 3, "The Head of the Snake".

There's something about Canadian indie that seems almost unbearably sweet. I love all the home-made videos set in the woods or in small towns that don't look quite of this world. It reminds me of Northern Exposure and yes I know that was Alaska, even if most of it was filmed in Washington State. It's all Northern, innit?

Where was I? Oh yes, GW2. So, apparently Divinity's Reach is next in line for the Lion's Arch treatment. Is there any MMO developer so blase about trashing its own best work as ArenaNet? They do seem to take a positive joy in self-destruction.

We'll know in a few hours whether those siege engines are really going to wreck one of the most perfectly-realized cities in MMOdom. My money's on not. Either way, that video got my pulse racing, which was, I guess, the intention.

 I was also sufficiently motivated by the news that the promised housing update for The Elder Scrolls Online has gone live to go ferreting among my loose hard drives looking for where I had the thing installed. I had three hard drives in my old PC but when I replaced it last spring I took them all out and stacked them by the bookcase.

Seems ESO isn't on any of them. Nor is it on either of my two USB portable drives. Nor my 64GB USB stick that I use to take the MMOs on holiday that I never play. I have no idea where it is. It must be somewhere because I almost never uninstall MMOs. I just buy more drives. I still have two full installations of Landmark. I think I even have Zentia somewhere "just in case"...

If I can't find it, and it looks as though I can't, then I suppose I'll have to download the entire thing again. It's not something I want to do because MMOs these days are huge. Also, as I was discussing in the comments over at Going Commando, I might want to download SW:tOR sooner rather than later and I bet that thing has a footprint like a yeti.

SW:tOR is one of a short list of MMOs I don't particularly want to play but feel I probably should just for completeness sake. Aion's another. And EVE of course. It's always easy to keep shoving them to the back of the list because I don't actually want to play any of them, I just think I probably should. Space settings don't appeal to me much and there was something about Aion that just put me off right at the start. I think it was the colors. Or maybe the name.

EVE going F2P means I really don't have much of an excuse not to try it eventually but equally it means there's no urgency. SW:tOR is arguably a more urgent case since BioWare, these days one of my less-loved developers although I can't really put a finger on what they might have done to offend me, upped the ante with a two-month xp blitz and not any old double xp either but a 250% ramp.

Paradoxically, as someone who professes to prefer low levels and slow leveling, I'm a real sucker for accelerated xp. It pushes all my bargain-hunter buttons, makes me feel I'm getting something for nothing, even though what I'm likely getting is rushed through content I'd enjoy more if I took it slower. Oh well, a rational consumer I'm not.

For an MMO I don't especially want to play anyway, though, I guess it does make some kind of backwards sense. If I don't like it it would be over faster and if I do I can stop and come back later when the foot comes off the pedal.

Let's be realistic here. I don't have time for ESO or SW:tOR. I added Legion to my WoW account three months ago and any window of free time that opens up between now and the next GW2 expansion (where IS that, anyway??) is penciled in for Azeroth.

I'm about finished up on the last EQ2 expansion at least as far as my Berserker goes. The main story's all done and he's nicely geared for solo. Next comes the gear grind to upgrade everything, the spell grind, the faction grind, all that good stuff that keeps people subbed 'til next time. I can skip that.

There's a level 100 Inquisitor and Necromancer to take through the story though. I might chip away at them over the coming months. And there will be a new "Race to..." server soon, I'm sure. Always something going on in Norrath. No urgency right now though.

The Revelation Online beta got extended by a week but I've not played any more. I like it but not enough to whittle away on characters that won't be around in a month or two. I'll get back to it when the launch comes, which can't be long. Then forget it in a matter of weeks and never play again.

So fickle. But there's just so much to choose from and so much of it's so interesting.

Here's a little list of the MMOs I want to be playing enough to think about them but not enough to, y'know, log in:

Dragon Nest Oracle
Allods
Black Desert
LotRO
ArcheAge
Blade & Soul

And those are just the one I have installed on my main drive.

I patched up Rift yesterday. Been a while. And going to be a while longer, I fear. After a 3Gb download I logged in to find my character in freefall between the above-the-sky and below-the-world on an infinite loop. Nothing would stop it, not even the /stuck command. I even joined an Instant Adventure, as recommended for stuck players in the in-game tips, and was able to complete quests and gain xp all from an entirely different zone while still falling. Trion: leading developers of the idle MMO.

Dragomon Hunter also eludes me since I lost my log-in and password. It's from Aeria Games who also publish Twin Saga, which I have downloaded but have yet to try because I wanted to use the same details. I guess I should make a new I.D. and start both from scratch but I'm not sure I want to play either of them that much.

Anyhooo... that killed an hour while I wait for the GW2 content patch to drop. Not that we're content-starved in Tyria you understand. (Where's that frickin' second xpack???).

If I ever actually get any of these games updated and get around to playing them I'll maybe have something to say about it. Meanwhile, have another from Rah Rah. No, thank you - for getting this far.