Throne Alone

I'm forced to admit I'm having a lot more fun in Throne and Liberty than I expected. The reasons why are both complicated and contradictory. 

Looked at from the outside, it very much seems like a game that wouldn't do a lot for me. For a start, it's strongly biased towards grouping with a meta-game that's built for guilds. There's a clear expectation that you'll not only be willing to party up for dungeons but that you'll want to become part of a larger organization and engage in all kinds of competitive events so you can prove your worth both on the map and on a series of league tables

The whole game is designed to enforce both competition and co-operation in a way that appears to leave little room for individuals. Even open-world events, of which there are many, come not just with a running commentary like a sportscast but with scorecards throughout to let everyone know who's winning and who's won. 

Even if you don't make the top ten and have your name blasted all across the map, there's still no escaping the performance review: at the end you get a personal report telling you exactly where you placed in the table. I came 83rd in the event I did earlier today although it didn't say out of how many.

There's also a fairly heavy emphasis on non-consensual PvP. Outside of the safe areas like towns and villages, the world is divided into Peace and Conflict zones. In the former you can't be attacked by other players but in the latter anyone of any level can attack you without warning or penalty. 

Which area is under which condition changes all the time, so you can't just avoid certain locations. You have to pay attention to what state they're in as you travel to and through them.

The main story quest also does that annoying thing where it switches from solo to group as it goes along.  I currently have two quests that started solo but reached a point where the questgiver warned me I'd better gather some friends before carrying on. For one I'll need to go into a private instance, for the other a public dungeon.

The final stage of another longish questline that had up to that point been soloable ended with a demand that I kill world boss twice my level. Not on my own, obviously, but even so...

All of this is the exact kind of thing I always say I don't enjoy. So why am I still playing, let alone having a pretty good time?

I was wondering that, too. It seems odd, doesn't it? Counter-intuitive, for sure. Paradoxical, even. 

I had a think about it and I'm alarmed to say I suspect it might be down to intelligent design. No, not that kind. The kind where someone thought about how players might feel when they run up against these kinds of barriers and made an effort to mitigate the worst of the effects for those whose preferences might lie elsewhere.

Take that Level 40 world boss, for example. He's on a fixed schedule as are all the open world events. You can see the times of all of them on a drop-down menu attached to the mini-map. You can click on each entry to port to the nearest waypoint. 

It also tells you whether the event is Peace or Conflict and as far as I can see there's a non-PvP version of all of them. Interestingly, the reverse doesn't appear to be true so PvE players are actually better-served.

Unfortunately for me, the timings for the Peaceful versions of the boss I needed weren't ideal. I'd either have had to stay up to midnight or else wait until tomorrow morning. As I was pondering my options the three o'clock Conflict version popped very close to where I was standing, sending a massive column of red light into the sky. I thought why not? and morphed into my glide form to go give it a try.

And it was fine. I got ganked within seconds of landing and ganked again almost as soon as I got back but the respawn was barely ten seconds away and there was no penalty of any kind for getting killed so it was barely an inconvenience. 

On my second death I realised the event hadn't officially started yet. We were still in the five-minute "Come and get it" phase and the main reason I'd been killed was that everyone was standing around with nothing better to do than take pot-shots at late-comers.

I held off coming back a third time until the whistle went and this time everyone was too focused on the boss to bother with me. I found a nice spot at range and plinked arrows into him for a couple of minutes while his massive health pool slowly whittled away. Then I got in someone's way and got killed again.

As I respawned I saw I was part of a never-ending stream of resurrected players all throwing themselves off the cliff and turning into birds to fly back for another round. Dying and coming back was clearly all part of the process so I forgot about trying to avoid it and just let it happen. 

I got killed twice by the boss's massive AE and a few more times by other players. At the rate his health was dropping, it looked like the whole thing might take ten minutes or so. The event can run for almost an hour before he despawns so that seemed reasonable but around the fifty per cent mark another world event finished and a bunch of people from that one came across to join in on our guy, which just about doubled the speed we were killing him.

I died to some player with a lot of XXXs in their name when the boss was around 10% health so I just lay there and waited. By the forest of tombstones all around it looked like planty of other people had the same idea. 

When the final blow was struck a window popped up telling me I'd successfully participated in the event and my quest auto-completed too. I released and checked my inventory, where I found the rewards for the event, which were generous, given I'd done next to nothing. 

All things considered it was a productive and enjoyable experience. The fact that I'd been killed multiple times by other players seemed wholly immaterial. I've been killed far more frequently by mobs countless times, doing similar events in Guild Wars 2. Once you stop thinking of other players as anything different from mobs, it really makes no difference whether the event is flagged for PvP or not.

I'd been sitting on another quest for an open-world event, the wolf-killing one, for a few sessions and today I finished that, too. It was peaceful (Not for the wolves, obviously.) but highly competitive and it could have been a pain if it hadn't once again been for the thoughtful design. The event is scored by tallying the tails of wolves you've killed and miraculously every wolf has exactly as many tails as the number of people who helped to kill it. 

It's amazing how unstressful a competitive event becomes when the competition only relates to the final score not the contribution. If I'd wanted to make the cut to have my name up there on the leaderboard then I'd have had to make a very considerable effort but to notch up the required tails to finish the quest was simplicity itself. 

Similarly, those solo story quests that morph into "Group required"? There's a trick the game has to get around the problems and resentment that would normally cause. Every chapter comes with a flow-chart (Literally.) that shows you which sub-quest leads to which and the central narrative throughline, at least as far as I've gotten, remains solo throughout. 

Completing that gets you the achievement and reward for the chapter and marks it done. All the other sub-quests are listed as "Appendix" quests, making them optional in terms of the main storyline. To date, all the group quests have been appendices.

Inclusivity is all over Throne and Liberty, even when looks like the opposite. Take making a guild, for
example. One person can do it in about five seconds.

I usually try to make a solo guild in any game that allows it, which is by no means all of them. T&L does. I was quite surprised by that. I was expecting a game with such a focus on guild play to put some kind of protective fence around it but there's none. It could scarcely be easier.

There's no requirement whatsoever for making a guild other than having to reach Level 7, the same level you need to be to join one. No money changes hands, you don't need to have any members other than yourself, you don't even need to speak to an NPC. All you do is open the Guild window in the UI and click on Create Guild. That's it.

You are supposed to design your guild emblem at this point but I somehow managed to click straight through that part so my guild presumably has some random design or the default or no emblem at all. I don't know which because I haven't even worked out where you can see guild emblems yet.

Guild names are limited to fifteen characters, which is really short. One letter shorter than the name I usually go with, in fact. Luckily I have an even shorter version to fall back on in cases like this.

I was assuming that making the guild would be the end of my involvement with the feature. I mostly only do it to stop people sending me random invites, which is what happens if you have the temerity to run around unguilded in most games. It's rare for solo guilds to be able to do much in MMORPGs for obvious reasons. That turns out not to be the case here, or not exactly. 

It seems my one-person guild can attempt everything a larger guild can try. There don't seem to be any restrictions. It's just very unlikely I'd have the patience to make much progress. I should, however, be able to get the guild to Level 2, which is when we (That's the Guild Leader "We" I'm using there. It's very much like the royal "We" and entirely appropriate, as I'm sure you'll agree.) get our own "base" or Guild Hall as every other game would call it.

Level 2 seems extremely generous for such a sought-after prestige perk. Even more generous is the amount of effort required or rather the lack of it. There are a few ways to level the guild up but the basic option is Guild Contracts. These give Guild Xp and at Level 1 a guild only has access to one kind of contract - Territory.

Territory Contracts just ask you to kill regular overland mobs in a specific region, something that's very easily combined with questing or world events. I tested it this afternoon. Killing boars, spiders and goblins seemed to give something like one point of Guild XP for every two kills, although it wasn't quite as precise as that. There may be a random element or some sort of variation related to the level or difficulty of the mob.

Whatever the specific mechanics, it takes just 700 points to level the guild up, a target that feels very comfortably within the reach of a single player, playing normally. I've already notched up ten per cent of the requirement since I created the guild and that's in just a couple of hours of play.

Put all of this together and it forms a picture of a game where the intent is to allow players of all persuasions to play in the way they feel suits them best without having to feel they're missing out. Obviously everything is going to be far easier if you have (Or make.) friends - it always is in MMORPGs - but there seem to be refreshingly few hard locks on content to keep loners from making at least some progress on most fronts.

I'm sure this won't last forever. MMORPG endgames almost always cleave towards more formal, organized, structured group content. It also only affects the kind of activities a single player could reasonably expect to succeed at, like finishing the storyline. 

Other parts of the game are likely to remain forever locked to organized groups. I believe a big part of the game revolves around taking and holding territory.  No-one would expect a solo guild to do well at that. Or to do it at all, probably. I'm not sure if there are raids but if there are I don't imagine anyone's going to be soloing those, either.

It's also an unfortunate truth that almost all MMORPGs, regardless of whether they paint themselves as solo-friendly or not, very quickly turn into grindfests of one kind or another. That's certainly going to stop most solo or very small guilds from leveling up too far. The xp required ratchets quickly to make leveling a guild without the numbers expected untenable for most.

The key in that last sentence, though, is "for most". With no hard lock, if you're determined (Or delusional.) enough to want to try, there's nothing actually preventing you from trying. Good luck with that.

And indeed all of this may yet prove to be the provenance of the lower levels alone. It's entirely possible that as my character level goes up I'll find more and more of the game closed to me through requirements I can't or won't meet while playing alone. If so, it will just put Throne and Liberty into the same box as most of the other MMORPGs I've played. I nearly always hit a wall in the end.

The point is, I thought the wall would be present from the start and it's not, something I find very refreshing and not a little endearing. I still think I won't be staying with the game for long but I'm already thinking that, when I do move on, it will be with fond thoughts and good memories of the short time I spent there. 

I certainly didn't expect that a week ago.

LFG? That's So Old School!

In a post about how he prefers playing ARPGs over MMORPGs these days, Belghast gave as one of the reasons the advent of "an era of progressively forcing you more and more into group gameplay". That surprised me somewhat. I'd have said the genre was still moving relentlessly in the opposite direction.

It's certainly true that there's been a proliferation of projects claiming to represent  a return to a lost golden age, a time when clearing even the smallest camp of Kobolds required a party of six, but all of those games are coming from independents, often with very small teams and limited resources. Most haven't even reached beta after years of development behind closed doors.

The last AAA MMORPG from a major games company that I can remember would be Amazon Games' New World, which I would say was very heavily focused on solo play. It has group play, of course, for both PvP and PvE, and at launch the main storyline included a fair amount of required group content, but changes patched in since have aimed to remove many of those roadblocks to soloing and open up more of the game to those with no taste for group play.

This, I would say, has been the trend for many years now and I can't say I've seen much sign of it slowing down, far less going into reverse. As Tipa reported recently, Final Fantasy XIV, or example, either the biggest or the second-biggest MMORPG in Western markets, depending who you believe, has been following a stated policy of  converting what was originally a group-required game into a group-optional MMORPG by re-working the entire core storyline to be playable with NPC henchmen instead of other players.

I rarely play Elder Scrolls Online, another of the more successful games in the West, but as I understand it from those who do, most of the content is readily soloable. Guild Wars 2's gameplay is based almost entirely on a kind of all-pile-on form of auto-grouping that effectively turns every encounter into solo-with-friends. Granted, ArenaNet did their best to retrofit a form of closed-group, instanced content into the model in the form first of Fractals, then Raids but both remain niche activities within the wider game.

About the only major mmorpg in Western markets that seems bent on forcing people into formal groups these days is World of Warcraft, a highly ironic trajectory for the game that was once seen as having opened the genre up for solo play. Given the extent to which WoW's playerbase appears to have contracted over the years, it's hard to imagine that choice being widely copied in the way the game's earlier, more accessible approach very much was.

As for the never-ending stream of imported games from China and South Korea, are there many - or any - that "force" players to group? There might be. I find it hard to say because although I regularly try these games out, I very rarely stick with them long enough to reach the level cap. What I can say with some authority is that if grouping is required there, it's not during the levelling process itself, which is pretty much universally a solo affair.

Of course, this is where my definition of soloing and Bel's may well differ. From everything I read on his blog, he consumes content orders of magnitude more quickly than I do and reaches the endgame far sooner, whereupon he runs into roadblocks to solo play I will never see. Playstyle heavily affects one's perception of how soloable an MMORPG feels.

As I've said many times, I always found EverQuest to be an excellent solo game, even back at the turn of the millennium. I'd been playing for a couple of years, very happily, before I ever really began to group as my main playstyle. I always found it very easy to set myself goals I could achieve without anyone else's help and I managed to keep myself very well-entertained for upwards of thirty hours a week just pottering around Norrath on my own.

That's not to say I never joined a group in those days. I often did but it was always my choice. I never felt the game forced me to group or even pushed me heavily in that direction. Grouping, even in EQ in 2000, was just another on a long list of interesting things you could do with your time, if and when you felt like it.

Thinking of the other immediately post-WoW mmorpgs I've played, from Star Wars: the Old Republic to Lord of the Rings Online to Rift to Wildstar, I get the feeling that the more grimly they hung on to the old concept of forced grouping, the worse they fared. What I remember from all of them is a perpetual retrenchment towards ever more accessiible content, requiring less and less commitment to any kind of formal group structure.

Even a game like Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, which modeled itself heavily on the original EverQuest, quickly shifted from a must-group policy to something far more lenient, although not soon enough to save itself. It remains to be seen how that game's spiritual successor, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen (Whose very name mirrors it's immediate ancestor.) will negotiate a path between the stated desire of players for group content and a commercial reality in which that often turns out to be the self-same thing that drives potential customers into the arms of less socially-demanding titles.

I'm wondering now if any of the numerous retro-revivalist mmorpgs we've seen Kickstarter campaigns or heard reports of funding rounds and capital investments for have actually launched. It's hard to be sure. I can't remember the names of many and anyway "launch" is such a flexible concept these days.

It's also quite a difficult topic to research. There's no widely-accepted term for these kinds of projects and searching for "new old-school mmorpgs" or "new retro-mmorpgs" mostly brings up lists of actual old games that are still running, of which there are many. I could comb through MMORPG.com's exhaustive list of titles or scan the Steam charts or page back through a couple of years of MassivelyOP news reports but life's too short for all that. We have AI now!

I asked the three big players, Bard, ChatGPT and Bing:

"Can you list all the in-development, early access, alpha, beta or just recently launched MMORPGS that claim to offer an "old school" or "retro" or "golden age" experience?"

The results were not particularly helpful but, at least in the first two cases, they were extensive.

Bard came up with a list of eighteen titles, conveniently alphebetized and bullet-pointed:

• Ashes of Creation
• Aura Kingdom 2
• Classic EverQuest
• Classic World of Warcraft
• Dofus Retro
• EverQuest II: Project 1999
• Lost Ark
• Mabinogi
• Old School RuneScape
• Peria Chronicles
• Project Gorgon
• RuneScape
• Ultima Online
• Valheim
• Vindictus
• Wakfu
• WoW Classic
• Zenith: The Last City

It then went on to offer a brief description of each of them, along with some of its usual, chatty commentary, signing off with "I hope this list helps you find the perfect MMORPG to scratch that old school itch." Bard really does want to be your AI pal.

Of the eighteen, I'd say only Project Gorgon really counts. It meets all the criteria in the prompt, being both an original mmorpg modelled on old-school gameplay and still being in Early Access. Old School Runescape, WoW Classic and Dofus Retro also sort of count but only because I didn't frame the prompt quite specifically enough to exclude actual revivals of older games.

The rest are either just old mmorpgs that are still running or don't seem to meet any of the criteria at all. The only one I've never heard of before is Zenith: The Last City, which isn't surprising because it's a VR game. It looks to be a standard mmorpg, not particularly retro. I'm kind of surprised we haven't heard more about it.  

ChatGPT offered me ten titles in a numbered list with brief descriptions of every game:

1. Ashes of Creation - This game is currently in development and claims to offer a unique and immersive MMORPG experience with a focus on player choice and agency.

2. Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen - This game is currently in development and aims to provide a classic MMORPG experience with a heavy focus on group play, challenging content, and a strong sense of community.

3. Crowfall - This game is currently in beta and offers a hybrid of MMORPG and strategy gameplay with a focus on player-driven worlds and intense PvP combat.

4. New World - This game was recently launched and offers a survival-focused MMORPG experience with a heavy emphasis on exploration, crafting, and player vs. player combat.

5. Legends of Aria - This game is currently in early access and provides a sandbox MMORPG experience with a heavy focus on player freedom and customization.

6. Gloria Victis - This game is currently in early access and offers a medieval MMORPG experience with a strong emphasis on realistic combat, crafting, and open-world exploration.

7. Fractured - This game is currently in alpha and offers a unique blend of traditional MMORPG mechanics and sandbox gameplay with a focus on player-driven content and exploration.

8. Camelot Unchained - This game is currently in development and aims to provide a traditional MMORPG experience with a heavy focus on large-scale PvP battles, player-driven economies, and deep crafting systems.

9. Starbase - This game is currently in early access and offers a sci-fi MMORPG experience with a heavy emphasis on player-driven economies, spaceship building, and exploration.

10. Project Gorgon - This game is currently in early access and offers a classic MMORPG experience with a focus on exploration, discovery, and deep crafting systems.

Crowfall is not in beta. It launched and then closed. It's in some form of undefined limbo right now. Legends of Aria was de-listed from Steam and is currently unavailable. Fractured was in Early Access but has now returned to closed development for technical reasons.

The rest seem like reasonable responses to the prompt, although I'd question whether Ashes of Creation or New World really count as "old school" or "retro". 

And finally, good old Bing. Bing really doesn't like to work up much of a sweat. Where Bard gave me eighteen possibilities and ChatGPT managed ten, Bing stopped trying after just three - but at least they weren't the most obvious three!

1. Ravendawn
2. Old School Runescape 
3. Aether Story 

Well, okay, Old School Runescape was obvious. I think literally having the words "Old School" in the name may have biased the results, so all credit to ChatGPT for not being drawn in to the easy option there.

I'd never heard of either Ravendawn or Aether Story, which turns out to be because they're both 2D, overhead perspective games and I pay no attention to those whatsoever. They do seem to match the general profile, though, and you can't get much more old school or retro than 2D top down gameplay.

All of which proves nothing much except that the current crop of AIs really don't make very good research assistants. In the absence of further evidence, I'm going to stick to my assertion that we aren't currently going through an era, or even a moment, where forced grouping is either the norm or a growing trend.

If anyone would care to offer the necessary evidence to refute that assertion, I'd be very interested to consider it.

Reading The Signs In Chimeraland

In a comment on yesterday's post, Redbeard expressed some surprise at the depth of  my involvement, not to say infatuation, with Chimeraland. It surprises me, too, although perhaps not as much as the complete radio silence across the rest of the blogosphere and the Western mmo press concerning the game's very existence. Am I literally the only one playing it?

Well, maybe around here I am, although my relentless battering at the gates seems to have triggered a flicker of interest in at least a handful of readers. I'm very much looking forward to reading the first First Impressions post from someone who's actually gone so far as to install the game and try it out (And got further than Character Creation, naming no names...)

Chimeraland may not have gathered much traction here in the West but as far as I can gather it's very much a hit in other territories, specifically Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines. I took the shot below of the server select screen yesterday at around seven in the evening. That's three in the morning over there, about the quietest time in any mmorpg.

Every server is flagged "Busy", the highest population marker available. The only exception is a new server that was just added and flagged "recommended" for new players. I tried to make a character there and it wouldn't let me. The server was too congested to allow more accounts to join.

Since the day I started, I have never seen my server at anything less than "Busy". There are houses everywhere, in all states of construction, from one slab dropped carelessly on the ground to massive castles.  Evidently a lot of people have been playing, even if they haven't all taken to home-ownership with equal enthusiasm.

Despite the evidence of occupation, I don't see crowds of people everywhere I go. Hardly surprising, given the local time, although it may have as much to do with the sheer size of the world. Chimeraland has four continents, all accessible immediately, making for a reported nine billion square feet of virtual land to explore and exploit.

The world around me isn't empty of other players as I travel, even so. Far from it. I see other people passing by on weird mounts. Trees fall around me as other players chop them down. At the one beast tribe outpost I know, there are always other questers, dropping by to pick up their dailies or buy things from the vendors.

I've seen plenty of big battles as players come together to bring down Noble or Grand beasts. As I mentioned in previous posts, I did try joining in a few times but it never went well for me. Now I just watch from a safe distance. 

Last night, though, I somehow found myself more personally involved in a communal enterprise. I was just along the riverbank from my house, looking for Green Rock to mine for Pale Jade, when I spotted a Totem. 

Lower-left, you can see a neglected, decaying home. It's made of wood and without repair moss has grown all over it. In the background is my house. It's made of stone and in pristine condition. I don't know how stone ages and I don't intend to test it on my own property.

There are various kinds of totems, two at least. If you activate them, waves of mobs appear, culminating in a mini-boss. There's xp and rewards to be had and they're quick, if not always easy. I'd been gathering for a while and I was in the mood for a fight so I set the thing off.

The first wave had barely started when another player came charging up and joined in. I have no clear idea how credit is allotted in Chimeraland but I've tagged on to plenty of big fights and no-one's sent me any angry whispers so I guess it's cool. Anyay, I was more than happy to have the help. 

Then something unexpected happened. A party invite popped up. I thought about it for a moment then shrugged and said "Why not?" Even though I don't do as much grouping as I used to, I'm never averse to a good PUG and I'm always more prone to accepting offers in a brand new mmorpg, if only so I can learn how the mechanics of grouping work, should I need to know later.

As with most things in Chimeraland, I still don't really understand it even after doing it. I accepted the first offer and another popped up to ask me if I also wanted to join Party Chat. I've never known a game that differentiated between speaking and non-speaking roles in a group context before. 

I accepted that as well, not that it made any difference. No-one ever spoke. Although, now I come to think about it as I write this, I never have a chat window open in the game. It's closed by default and I leave it that way. Maybe there was a constant stream of conversation going on the entire time. 

There certainly could have been because the party kept getting bigger and bigger. New players kept arriving and tagging in until there were five of us. Each time we reached the end of a set of three waves and downed the mini-boss, a big chest dropped. When I've done these totem events alone, that's when I stopped but it seems, as with most things in the game, my ignorance has been hiding things from me.

Each time, when I expected the fun to end and the party to disband, someone went to the totem again, clicked it and started another round. I didn't count them but there must have been half a dozen or more, each a little harder than the last. 

Finally, a really big mob appeared. I think he probably deserves to be called a Boss, not just a mini-boss. He took some time to whittle down and he had some impressive moves, not least the one where he flew about a hundred feet into the air and summoned a giant whirlwind. 

In the end we got him down and a more impressive, metallic chest appeared. We all looted that and suddenly I found myself all alone again. Everyone else had jumped on their various strange creatures and headed out in different directions. 

I struggled for a while, trying to find a way to leave the party, without success. After a couple of minutes there were just two of us and then there was just me. I went back to my gathering and mining, a little wiser in the ways of the world but not all that much. 

This is one of the stranger things about Chimeraland. I'm reasonably certain it's a well-populated, successful game at this early stage of its life and yet there's no evidence of the usual support structure I've come to expect. I'm used to even minor releases quickly generating wikis and guides and walkthroughs, especially when the official launch follows lengthy periods in Early Access or Open Beta.

Bless Unleashed, for example, was by no means a huge hit, when it launched last summer. Even so, there were plenty of resources available right from the start. I enjoyed learning the systems for myself because that's one of the biggest attractions for me of playing any new game, but I always knew that when I got stuck, as I inevitably did, I'd be able to go and look up the solution somewhere.

I think this excellent umbrella was a login reward but it could have been a drop in the totem trial. It's all a bit of a blur...

About the only semi-reliable source of information I've found for Chimeraland is the subReddit and that's as hit-or-miss as you'd imagine. Most Google searches I run for problems I can't figure out for myself bring up nothing but YouTube videos, very few of which are any help at all.

I wonder if this is at least in part the result of the cross-platform nature of the game? Are extensive wikis the province of PC players? Do mobile games also attract players willing to address themselves to documenting video games in obsessive detail or are they more likely to pull in players who just want to play?

For that matter, how many people are playing Chimeraland on PC as opposed to on a phone or a tablet?

Based on the original news release I read at MassivelyOP, which alerted me to the game's existence in the first place, I had been under the impression the January 6th launch was global. That certainly seems to be the case for the PC version but Kluwes mentioned in a comment that he hadn't been able to download the mobile version and it doesn't appear on Google Play for my Kindle Fire, either 

The headline of this article at GamingOnPhone clarifies matters: "Chimeraland is now live in selected regions", those regions being the ones I listed at the top of the post. The piece explains, if somewhat ungrammatically, "Since it is currently live only in these select regions so only the interested players residing in those regions only can play the game from their respective app stores" and then goes on to detail how players in other regions can get around the IP blocks.

Or you could just play it on PC. That works. Except PC players don't appear to be interested, which is both a pity and also quite odd. I guess this is exactly why games like this need to be on Steam.

Then again, Genshin Impact isn't and it seems to have done pretty well for itself. Remember when it appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, to huge interest and acclaim? Part of the narrative surrounding that unexpected success was that it might herald an era of free-to-play games that were actually content rich and polished rather than minimal effort cash grabs.

As well as flying me around, my Vultura has an astonishingly powerful fireball attack. I didn't get a shot of him in action but he did a huge amount of damage in the big fight.

Chimeraland looks very much to me like a fulfilment of that hopeful prediction. I'm sure it has plenty of flaws and it's entirely possible there's some whale-hunting or pay-to-win grind lurking in the end game, but as with Genshin Impact there certainly seems to be one heck of a lot of stuff to do before then and it all seems pretty well crafted and fun.

I'm definitely not in the business of promoting games. I just write about what I'm playing. If I sound enthusiastic about something it's because I'm enjoying myself, not because I have any agenda to make the game sound better than it really is.

I'm also painfully aware that I find a lot more pleasure in learning systems and mechanics in a new mmorpg than I'm ever likely to get from practicing and perfecting them. Most of my First Impressions and early gameplay posts are wildly over-optimistic about my prospects of playing the game long term. The truth is, I almost always wander off to play something else well before I even reach the level cap.

Even allowing for all of that, though, I think Chimeraland is something of a gem in the genre. I'm glad it's popular somewhere. Maybe if it rolls out that mobile launch around the world it'll even be popular here some day. And maybe then someone will start a wiki for it. I wish they would.

Maybe I'd even contribute, only I'd be the worst! As I'm coming to realise, almost everything I've written about the game so far is either factually inaccurate or a misunderstanding. I might have to do a whole post going back and correcting all the mis-assumptions and errors I've committed to print.

God forbid anyone googling for help should end up here!

Have Horse, Will Travel

 

I am still playing Bless Unleashed. According to Steam I've racked up almost fifty-two hours since the game launched three weeks ago. That's quite a long way short of how many hours I'd like to have played.

For some reason, even though I want to play, I keep finding myself doing other things instead. This isn't some kind of self-negating avoidance strategy or an indication that while I think I want to play I don't really. It's just that there's a lot going on right now and other stuff keeps getting in the way.

Even so, I have managed to play every day, even if it's only been for an hour or two. And I really have been playing. That Steam tally includes very little time spent idling at character select or tabbed out afk. 

There's a lot to do in Bless Unleashed and I don't mean busy work. I mean good, solid levelling and character progression. Levelling is as slow as I've seen in a new mmorpg for quite a while, although in part that's because I've declined to use any of the multiple xp boosts and buffs the game's been throwing at me. 

This is not to say it's poorly-paced; quite the opposite in fact. Levels in BU feel meaningful in a way that harks back to a much older style of mmorpg design. Each level matters. 

 

As a Priest, my spells are spaced out enticingly, with new abilities I very much want to earn sitting temptingly next to levels I have yet to reach. Other features and opportunities unlock as character level hits various markers. 

New dungeons and arenas open up every two or three levels. So far I've only tried a few but that already makes this one of the very, very few mmorpgs I've played in the last decade where I've willingly used a matchmaking system to pug a dungeon. And it's been... okay.

Since I've mentioned it, let's talk about my grouping experience so far. I've had one! That's unusual in itself, especially in a game that doesn't specifically require it. 

Actually, that's not wholly accurate. There have been a couple of quests that required me to complete an arena or a dungeon. I'm not sure the Campaigns in Bless Unleashed are quite as central to the game design as the MSQ in Final Fantasy XIV but I suspect you'd have problems if you tried to skip them entirely.

Even before the Campaign sent me there, though, I tried the matchmaking facility a couple of times out of curiosity. I was interested to see what my role in a group might be. 

 

I'm playing a Priest, supposedly a healing class, but I have almost no healing spells at all. Priests get one spell early on that summons a glowing ball of light about a meter away. It took me a while to figure out you have to go stand in it for a second or two, at which point it pops, gives you a big heal and puts a regen buff on you that lasts for a few seconds.

As you might imagine, that's awkward as hell to use in action combat, where half the time you're rolling and dodging and leaping about. I tend to cast mine inbetween kills to heal back up or ahead of time so I can run into it during a fight. 

In the couple of five-person dungeons I did I tried casting the heal bubble near other people as they were fighting or next to people who were low on health but only one person ever intentionally went into one to get a heal. I've seen people complaining in chat about how no-one in their dungeons understands how to use the bubbles and that's been my limited experience, too.

On the other hand, unlike most mmorpgs I can think of other than Guild Wars 2, back when people actually did dungeons there, Bless Unleashed doesn't care which classes make up a group. You don't need a tank or a healer. The matchmaker just slams the first five people it finds together without reference to levels or classes and lets you get on with it. Healing, at least up to the mid-twenties, does not seem to be a priority.

 

That's presumably why, even though there's an automated matchmaking system, general chat is full of people trying to put a group together the old-fashioned way. One person yesterday was offering his services repeatedly with the attention-grabbing tagline "I'm done grouping with matchmaking APES!"

For my money, the matchmaking is fine. Most of the two-person Arenas I've done have gone smoothly enough. There seem to be various incentives and reasons for higher levels to do lower level content so I'm always hoping to get matched with someone ten levels above me. 

All I have to do when that happens is stand back and press LMB while they kill everything, then pick up my loot and leave. Of course, now I'm in my twenties, sometimes I'm the higher level, so I have to do a bit more of the heavy lifting but that's fine, too. 

In the five-person dungeons it's a bit more nuanced. The wide spread of levels can mean someone's often dying a lot and someone else is doing all the hard work but mostly it's been a good team effort. No-one ever speaks, of course. And I mean no-one and ever. Okay, maybe once or twice, just a couple of words.

And yet, despite the apparent lack of social skills, a couple of the runs I've done have shown solid teamwork. People rez each other when they can, try to trade aggro, generally behave with a degree of attantion that goes beyond focusing only on what they're doing themselves.

I did one five-person arena where we had to fight a very large, very tough ogre. On the first attempt I loaded into the instance so late the gate had come down and I had to stand and watch through the wooden bars as the rest of my team tried and failed to beat the boss with just four. 

No-one yelled at me. No-one quit. When the last of them died they all respawned, the boss reset, the gate opened and we all went in, five of us this time. And wiped, after a long and arduous battle. Again, no-one complained, although one person left without saying anything. The matchmaker replaced them almost instantly and off we went again.

Aaand... wiped a third time. No-one spoke. I was sure the group would fall apart. I was about ready to call it myself. I didn't think we were going to get any further than we'd managed so far. We hadn't been able to get the Ogre down before he enraged and when that happened it looked like we had no hope at all. 

No-one else seemed to be giving up, though, so I went another round. And we won. People seemed to have learned from the failures. I know I had. We avoided some of the bad stuff, were more ready for the big attacks, more mindful of each other. And we all poured on the damage in the phases when it mattered. Nothing was discussed, people just observed, learned and acted. 

It was... good. Not as good as grouping with people who chat and discuss tactics and get to know each other, like we did back in the olden days. But still... good. I enjoyed it. I'll do some more. 

Going back to what I was saying, before I interrupted myself with tales of teamwork and the unexpected pleasures of pugging, levelling in Bless Unleashed has direction and purpose. It doesn't just feel like a makeshift way to keep people hanging around. It feels both absorbing and satisfying, in and of itself. 

When levelling matters, outlevelling becomes a viable option for circumventing obstacles. At level twenty-three I ran up against another solo instance in the Campaign involving a fight I didn't feel entirely confident I could win. It might have been possible but rather than bang my head against it to find out, I opted to carry on levelling. I'm hoping that another two or three levels should tip the balance in my favor. 

If not, I can always get a couple more but first I'll need to find some new quest hubs. In pursuit of those and other sources of xp, I've been exploring, ranging further and further across what's turning out to be an extremely large map. We're talking Black Desert distances here. 

I finished all three of the introductory questlines for the three NPC "Unions" (aka factions), all of which conclude in the immense, imposing and very beautiful city of Sperios. I thought about it as I rode through the broad avenues, opening teleport stations and taking in the sights, then I decided to throw my lot in with the crafters union, the Artisan's Society. 

 

They immediately sent me on an initiation quest that took me deep into unknown territory, opening up huge swathes of uncharted countryside and any number of villages, towns and settlements, in several of which NPCs were just waiting for me to come along and sort out their problems with spiders, wolves, errant girlfriends, over-protective boyfriends and the like. 

By the time I got to the third part of the Union quest I was facing mobs four or five levels above me. Once again I had to withdraw to more appropriate territories to hone my skills and add a couple more levels.

My immediate goal is to get to twenty-six when, if my sources are correct, I should come into possession of an Estate. I don't know just how Bless Unleashed's "housing" works but I've heard it comes with a significant amount of storage and that's more than incentive enough.

As for this post, I'm going to leave it at that for now. I'm very conscious still of just how much about the game I don't know, let alone understand. I don't want to sound as though I have it all figured out when I absolutely do not.

I will say, though, that I think Bless Unleashed is the most satisfying levelling mmorpg I've played for a quite a while. It feels very old school in that respect, without feeling at all old-fashioned. I suspect I'll be levelling a couple more characters of different classes before I'm done with it. 

For once, it feels as though that wouldn't be a complete waste of time.

Fight For Your Right (To Party): WoW CLassic, EverQuest

There was a time for me when weekends in MMORPGs were all about grouping. Admittedly, we'd be going back a long way. All the way to 2000-2001, I'd guess. I tend to think of my early days in MMORPGs as being mostly a solitary experience but that was never really the case.

I did solo a lot, partly out of choice, partly out of necessity. When I came back from the game store on that fateful day in November 1999, clutching the oversized cardboard box containing the EverQuest CD-Rom and accompanying book-sized manual, which I'd been reading on the bus journey home, I was more than a little nervous about where it might take me.

Stepping out into a virtual world was all well and good. I was up for that. I wasn't worried about the fantastic monsters that might try to tear my character limb from limb. I was much more wary of the real people I was likely to meet, people who might want to talk to me about... well, who knows what?

The first couple of sessions were so chaotic and confusing that talking to anyone, real or imaginary, was scarcely an issue. Working out what the heck was going on occupied all my mental bandwidth and then some.

After a few days I got the hang of the basics and started to plan. Yes, in those dim, distant days I did make plans... kind of. I read a lot of online guides about how I should approach this weird new world. I'd done quite a lot of research before I even bought the game, trying to decide between the then Big Three, Asheron's Call, EverQuest and Ultima Online,  a decision later tested to destruction when, inevitably, I bought both the others to see if I'd made a mistake. I hadn't.

Long before my curiosity got the better of me I had to work out what to do with the game I'd chosen. I knew it had some social elements but even a cursory search on Netscape Navigator (for which I probably have as much nostalgia as for any MMORPG I've ever played) brought up plenty of suggestions on how to play EQ as Billy No-Mates.

Most of those suggestions, some of which I still have, printed out and preserved in one of the three lever-arch files that sat next to my 14" CRT monitor as I played, were awful. Not just unhelpful but plain wrong. Whoever thought Dwarf Cleric was the best choice for a solo class/race combo in EQ in 1999 needed a sound slap with a wet haddock.

So I made a Dwarf Cleric. It took me two weeks to get to Level 11. Probably about 40-50 hours at least. It would have been 80-100 but by then I was already sharing PC time with Mrs. Bhagpuss. Looking over my shoulder as she played, at least as soon as she'd managed to stop laughing, she decided she had to play too.

For a couple of months we took it in turns, sharing an account in flagrant contradiction of the EULA and any shred of logic. Sharing an account is not a good idea for so many reasons.

One of us would play while the other sat in an armchair and watched, giving "helpful" advice and making "amusing" comments so, in a way, I wasn't even soloing when I was soloing. There was something of a team effort going on - or a sitcom.

Blackburrow, on one of EQ's Prog Servers. I forget which. Not exactly the authentic experience.

In game, I didn't really talk to many people directly. I tried a few groups early on, mostly in Blackburrow. They were disasters. I died so much I couldn't really see the point. I went back to making my own way, where I died less but levelled even slower

Meanwhile, Mrs Bhagpuss was networking. In no time at all she'd found a crew to hang with. I can remember a couple of their names even now. I carried on my own sometimes merry way, trying different classes, different servers, reading yet more mostly misleading guides.

By the time Ruins of Kunark, EverQuest's first expansion, appeared in April 2000, we had a computer each. Mrs. Bhagpuss played upstairs and I played in my "study" on the floor below. We still watched each other play now and again but mostly we were, literally, in our own worlds.

I played on Brell Serilis, then Test and later Luclin, Lanys T'Vyl and eventually on almost new server SOE opened to meet the ever-rising demand. Mrs Bhagpuss stayed on on Prexus, where we'd started, until somehow, a few years later, we ended up on the EU server Antonius Bayle. There we grouped together for almost two years. We made a whole raft of mutual friends and associates and it became the peak of my grouping career, but all that was still far in the future.

Kunark changed things for me in a number of ways, not least in how it changed my willingness to group. Within a few weeks of the expansion's launch I was in the habit of soloing my Druid in the mornings before I went to work and then again in the evening, when I came home. I got her into the twenties and started to hang out in what was, at the time, thought of as the armpit of Norrath, Lake of Ill Omen.

LOIO was the pre-cursor of The Barrens in World of Warcraft and of Paludal Caverns in Luclin era EQ.  /ooc was famously salty and ribald. The zone was always packed. There were always multiple groups forming and recruiting to work the many recognized camps, some of which were effectively small, open-zone dungeons.

I can't now remember how my confidence grew to the point where I felt not just able but eager to advertise myself in /ooc as available for healing and support duties (not that we called what a Druid did "support" in those days, but it was often the role I took, all the same). I'd taken to duoing quite often with a French-Canadian Paladin, hunting along the shores of the lake, so maybe that eased my social anxiety, which was, perhaps, higher then than it is now, although it's always been more a desire to have complete control over my time than any nervousness about talking to strangers.

My concern in accepting groups has always been "How do I get out of this when I want to stop?" rather than "What am I going to say to these people?". As must be evident from this blog, I rarelyl run out of things to say.

The pick-up groups (another term I can't remember us ever using back then) in Lake of Ill Omen solved that potential problem. They were fast-forming and fluid. People came and went all the time. Because most of the camps were either outdoors or in ruins with multiple entrances, when someone needed to leave it wasn't like trying to get a replacement down into a dungeon.

Sadly, all my screenshots from EQ before about 2005 seem to be lost. Here's one from round bout then.

Saturdays and Sundays became the time when I grouped. Particularly Saturday after breakfast until lunch, then again around late-afternoon. I'd have breakfast, log in, and see if anyone was recruiting. If they weren't I'd /ooc "22 Druid lfg". Just that, usually.

Contrary to Belghast's excellent and highly-recommended guide on getting groups, in EQ back then, public channels always got you groups fast. Well, they got me groups, anyway. I don't recall having to wait more than a few minutes most sessions. Sometimes I'd get a tell asking me if I wanted to group before I'd even asked. Druids were in demand back then.

I used to have my preferences. I loved the Sarnak Fort, especially Back Door. It was fast, frenetic, frenzied and you could run if things went totally south. As they often did. If I couldn't get the Fort I'd take whatever came. There was always something.

As I recall it, grouping like this didn't move my xp bar all that fast. There wasn't a lot in the way of exciting drops, either. It was faster than soloing but, at least for a Druid, one of the best solo classes, not by much.

What it was, though, was fun. Really good fun. Exciting, amusing, entertaining and, eventually, exhausting. About two hours at a stretch was enough for me. I'd break for lunch then solo in the afternoon, playing any of my army of characters on half a dozen servers, before coming back for another group session after tea.

When Scars of Velious arrived at the end of the year my Druid was just barely high enough to meet  the entry level requirements. In more than six months, playing anything up to forty hours a week, I'd managed to advance from the low twenties to the very beginning of the thirties. I did play a lot of characters but even so, leveling was slow back then.

Lake of Ill Omen, for which my Druid was now almost too high, gave way to Iceclad Ocean, where I spent my time pulling Dervishes from the base of the ominous Tower of Frozen Shadow. At the very bottom of the level range I found it harder to get groups and there was more waiting around but every Iceclad group needed Harmony and Ensnare so I usually got picked up eventually.

From there on the barricades were down. I zig-zagged between solo and group play at will and whim for the next few years, eventually ending up grouping more than I soloed for around eighteen months at the height of the Planes of Power/Legacy of Ykesha/Lost Dugeons of Norrath era, late 2002 to early 2004.

After that my desire to group faded, slowly. I grouped a good deal in EverQuest II for the first few months but my PC struggled in dungeons and I was playing second cleric to Mrs Bhagpuss on main heals, which wasn't ideal.

When EQII's population all but collapsed under the impact of WoW's far greater accessibility and much superior gameplay (before Scott Hartsman rode in on his white charger) we went back to EQ, where we changed servers and made a new set of friends for a while.

We stayed about six months, grouping sometimes but nowhere near as often as we had done on Ant. Bayle. We returned to EQII, where we played mainly on Test. We went to Vanguard at launch and stayed a year and a half. We came back to EQII yet again, moving to the Freeport F2P server when it opened, where we stayed until finally moving to Guild Wars 2 in 2012.

Another thing about grouping... I hardly take any screenshots. Someone tends to die if I do. Usually me.
Much safer to take selfies solo.

All of that I remember as the Duo Years. We learned to play as a highly effective and versatile team of two, plus pets, often playing classes that weren't ideally suited for trying to do with two people what the game expected would need four or five. I main healed as a Necro for years with Mrs Bhagpuss tanking as a Bruiser!

Duo play is a form of grouping, of course. Bearing that in mind I can honestly say that over twenty years, even though I tend to think of myself as a solo player, I have repeatedly chosen group play over soloing when given the chance. Even then, I bet I've spent far, far longer soloing.

In the last five years I've barely grouped at all. The all-pile-on open group/zerg playstyle introduced in Rift and exemplified by GW2 has made formal grouping seem almost archaic. I only group now if I absolutely have to.

It's a mindset WoW Classic is doing its best to change. I don't think it's any kind of exaggeration to say that in the last two weeks I've been in more groups than I've had in the last two years. They're classic pick-up groups like the ones I remember so fondly from Lake of Ill Omen. They last as long as they need to last and when I want to move on I say "thanks for the group" and off I go. I feel free, empowered, not trapped and claustrophobic, as I did in FFXIV Main Quest treadmill a few years back.

I spent much of Sunday afternoon dying in a determined but not very competent (no healer for a start) group in Redridge. All my armor fell off. I ran out of food My bear was complaining bitterly and threatening to leave. I had a great time. Everyone was upbeat and in the end we got what we'd come together for in the first place - the head of some orc with an unpronounceable name.

Then I spent forty minutes duoing in some orc-infested cave with a very competent and cheery Paladin three levels below me. I would have carried on longer only I had to stop for tea.

It felt like the old days. Weekend casual pugging for fun. When I finish this post I'm going to go do some more. It's so busy stil I bet there's a weekday pug scene. What could be better?

You can call it nostalgia if you like but I'd prefer to look at it as good game design. Whatever it is, I'm just going to enjoy it while it lasts. I might even try a dungeon run.

After all, what have I got to lose apart from the cost of repairs?

Trust And Hope: FFXIV

This morning I succumbed to peer group pressure and logged in to Final Fantasy XIV. Everyone's been talking about the latest expansion, Shadowbringers, for weeks now. It's having a similar effect on my willpower as water has on stone.

Oh, wait, no it isn't! It takes water centuries, millennia, to wear away stone. This is more like water dripping on a wedding cake someone left out in the rain.

Hang on, I'll go out and come in again.

So, obviously I haven't bought the new expansion because why would I? I didn't buy the last one or the one before that. I have a dark and troubled history with FFXIV.

I was entranced by the original trailer for the first version, way back in 2009. I applied for and was accepted into an early phase of what was to prove a rushed and hurried closed beta. There I found a game that, while appealing in many ways, was very clearly nowhere near ready.

The mood on the beta forums was volatile. Many, many testers pointed out, at length and in detail, all the things that were wrong, all which desperately needed fixing before launch. Others claimed everything was fine or if it wasn't it soon would be. Square Enix responded enigmatically or not at all.

In September 2010, after a brief open beta, Square Enix launched the game, virtually unchanged from the dry, slow, dull and, crucially, incomplete build we'd been telling them wouldn't fly. The critical response was savage. Players liked it even less.

I knew how bad it was because I'd been playing it all through beta, albeit not often and less and less as it became apparent nothing was going to change. And yet I still bought it. At least I think I did. I guess I must have, because the original CD is here on my desk as I type. Perhaps there was something magical about the world I didn't want to let go.

The same absolutely could not be said of the gameplay, which was stultifying. Square must have agreed because they extended the "free month" that came with the purchase of this subscription MMORPG, first by one more month, then two. 

By December 2010 the game, which continued to receive a mauling every time it was mentioned, (infrequently by then) seemed little improved. The subscription fee was waived indefinitely and the game effectively ran as a Free to Play title for the next two years.

While it was free, I dipped in and out. It became one of those games where I enjoyed sightseeing and hanging out but didn't feel the need to level up or really do anything beyond wander around taking screenshots. At least, I assume I took screenshots. I always take screenshots. Where they are now, though, I have no idea.

By January 2012 the game, which had finally received enough work to bring it up to minimum standard, was deemed good enough to charge money for. You needed a subscription to play, so I stopped.

As everyone knows, that wasn't the end. New director, Naoki Yoshida, had already deemed the game unsalvageable in its current form. He was deep in the process of rebuilding it from scratch, a project which took another year and a half.

In November 2012, FFXIV closed with a typically impressive trailer and an even more typical shambles in the game itself. A much lengthier alpha and beta schedule than the rushed version I'd been in followed but I chose not to subject myself to it. In retrospect that was probably a mistake since, as Giant Bomb puts it, "Unlike the original release's beta test, where nearly no feedback was taken into account, the game underwent a great many changes while in beta testing due to player feedback."

But once bitten... Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? Apparently not. When the open beta arrived I played it and persuaded Mrs Bhagpuss to try it as well. And then we bought two copies when the game went live in August 2013.

FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, as it was now called, was a huge improvement in many ways, not least in the gameplay itself, which had evolved from what critics once derided as "dull, tedious, and outdated" (Giant Bomb op cit) to something that might, charitably, be described as "traditional".

In fact, combat still felt quite slow by modern MMO standards but it was undeniably an improvement. The world itself was much better. Gone were the peculiar invisible walls and the extremely obvious repeated tiles and textures. In came a wealth of quirky, characterful detail.

We were on sabbatical from  Guild Wars 2, which we'd been playing for a year. GW2 was a great MMORPG but we'd maybe kinda burned out a little. There was a non-trivial chance we might have chosen Eorzea over Tyria.

We didn't. There were a number of reasons but chief among them were two hardwired requirements: a) to progress through the main questline and b) to do it by grouping in instanced dungeons. Contrast that with GW2, where even now, after seven years, three accounts and seventeen Level 80 characters, I have never finished the original Personal Story, nor felt I needed to. As for five-player dungeons, far from being required, they're all but forgotten.

In FFXIV, as far as I know, you still have to go through the same progression via the Main Story Quest unless you choose to skip it entirely. You can begin in the expansion of your choice if you prefer: that's an option.. What you can't do is play through only the parts that interest you. Neither can you play through the dungeons on your own, using some kind of "story mode", as is common in other MMORPGs.

Or, I should say, you can't yet. One of the less-heralded features of the new Shadowbringers expansion is the "Trust" system. I paid very little attention in the lead-up to the expansion, so the first I heard of it was in this post at Blessing of Kings.

It reminds me strongly of the original Guild Wars, where you could choose to play group content with a team of AI-controled NPCs rather than rely on the vagaries of pick-up groups. The mechanic is being promoted on the basis that it helps players, especially those with DPS characters, to avoid long LFG queues, something you'd imagine wouldn't be a major problem in brand-new, required content in the latest expansion for a popular game like FFXIV.

It seems like an excellent solution to a problem much more likely to exist lower down the game, that of getting new or returning players through existing content rather than encouraging them to skip it altogether. It also seems like a good way to encourage a demographic that has, until now, very probably looked at FFXIV with some suspicion to take another look.

As yet there's no word on whether the Trust system will be retro-fitted to the rest of the game but I would lay odds it will. Eventually. I have some issues with Naoki Yoshida's hyper-paternalistic approach but one thing I will give him credit for is this: he knows how to manage an MMORPG for maximum effect over its anticipated lifetime.

FFXIV is being run in the way ArenaNet claimed they would run GW2 but never have: in the expectation that it will last for many years, both holding an audience and attracting new players. Yoshida often alludes to certain changes not being appropriate or necessary yet. He seems to have a sound understanding of what existing players will put up with and for how long and what needs to be done to bring in new blood. So far it seems to be working very well.

Unfortunately from my own point of view, that means I'll haveto wait a long time before I get what I want, which is a Final Fantasy XIV largely free of top-down controls over what I do, when I do it and who I do it with. But we're getting there, slowly.

I just have to hope I live long enough to enjoy it when it comes.