Fifteen Again

Paeroka has a helpful post up running through some of the many free gifts and bonuses available in various MMORPGs during this time of trouble. She mentions the free questing in Lord of the Rings Online, now extended to May 31st, something I tried and found I didn't like. I find that particular game suits me better the fewer quests I do.

She also has also a nice picture of the free cape available in the Guild Wars 2 Gem shop. I logged all of my accounts in today to grab that one, including the third account that's largely dormant these days and my free to play account that I haven't used in several months. While I was there, I took the opportunity to credit the F2P account with the Saga of the Icebrood episodes, a totally pointless excercise since a) it would require Path of Fire to play, which I have no intention of buying even with the current 50% off and b) I only ever play Living Story/World/Saga content on my main account anyway.

Still, free stuff is free stuff, a point I believe I have made many times before. There's certainly a lot of it about right now but, for once, the giveaway in GW2 isn't related to the lockdown. It's part of ArenaNet's celebrations for the fifteenth anniversary of the original Guild Wars.

That set me thinking. I can't remember precisely when Mrs Bhagpuss and I decided to play Guild Wars. I know it wasn't at launch. We thought it was a PvP title and although by then we'd both had plenty of PvP experience in Dark Age of Camelot and elsewhere, we weren't really interested in another round of virtual fisticuffs.

By April 2005, though, our love affair with EverQuest II was very much on the rocks. Almost everyone we knew had left and we were finding it a real grind, leveling solo and duo in a game that was still designed almost entirely for groups. Plus EQII ran like a pig with a broken trotter on my PC.

My memory tells me we went from EQII back to EverQuest and I also seem to remember that when we were playing Guild Wars it was late summer or early autumn. That would fit the timeline, being maybe four or five months after Guild Wars launched.

I recall reading a piece on some gaming news site about the way the game had taken an unexpected turn from PvP to PvE, attracting a much greater number of players interested in the latter. That piqued my interest. I remember suggesting it to Mrs Bhagpuss as a game we might try as a direct result of that news item.

She agreed, I bought two copies, we tried it and we both liked it. It wasn't really an MMORPG. It arguably became one but in its initial form it was definitely a lobby-based dungeon crawler for PvE players with a well-developed PvP battleground alongside.

Belghast has a post up about what a mistake it is for developers to mix PvP and PvE in the same game. I don't entirely agree but I do think it's definitely better to keep the two modes separate where possible. Guild Wars and GW2 both do that very well but one thing that people rarely mention about the first game was that, at one time, you literally couldn't play the PvE campaign without first playing a little PvP.

Someone will probably pop in and correct me if I'm remembering this wrong. It was around eight years ago when I last made a new character in Guild Wars so my memory is hazy. As I recall, if you're playing Prophecies, as the campaign in the original base game is now known, when you reach the end of the pre-Searing introduction (itself one of the greatest bait and switch openings in MMORPGs, and there's some heavy competition for that), you have to enter a PvP battleground and complete a match.

If you don't you can't carry on to the campaign itself. It's a fairly harmless trial by fire. I don't think you can fail it in any way. You just have to endure it until it's over and then you never have to think about PvP again. But just that once you have no choice.

I remember being mildly irritated but not because I objected to the intrusion of PvP in principle. No, my problem was that PvP in Guild Wars is so insanely fast I can barely even understand what's happening when I watch a match, let alone do anything meaningful if I'm in one.

The game has a spectator mode which I used to use quite often when I played. Watching a match gave me the impression of two teams of tasmanian devils having a fight in an exploding fireworks factory. I did try playing a few matches but it was utterly hopeless. Given that, over the years, I've played with reasonable facility and moderate success in battlegrounds in DAOC, World of Warcraft, Warhammer, Rift, The Secret World, GW2 and EQII, just to name the ones I remember, I think it's fair to say Guild Wars PvP is on a different skill plane altogether.

Guild Wars is currently in maintenance mode but it still celebrates whatever anniversaries and holidays it had running when it was under active development. I read on Massively:OP that for this notable anniversary the handful of people keeping the lights on and dusting the furniture have made a special effort, adding a new boss and some elite skills.

I did think I might make the effort to see that for myself, which is how I came to be back in old Lion's Arch earlier today, but although I managed to find the NPC who hands out the doohickey that lets you fight the new boss it all looked like considerably too much work. I always forget just how complicated everything in the original Guild Wars has to be, involving all kinds of items and NPCs and fiddling about in menus and inventories.

Instead I contented myself with watching the hourly firework display then finding the Xunlai Gift Giver so I could exchange my Birthday Present Voucher for actual birthday presents (told you it was fiddly). I had this year's and last year's in my bag and I was fortunate enough to get a gold and a purple mini for them.

I took those to my Hall of Monuments and placed them on the podium. I'm not sure how many more I need to place there to get another HoM point for my Hall of Monuments in GW2 and it's rather a moot point these days anyway, but you do these things, don't you? Or I do.

It did surprise me that after I'd done that I still had both minis in my bag. I thought placing them meant you lost the use of them for good. There's even an in-game warning that suggests as much. Maybe they've changed it.

If I can summon up the willpower I might log in all my other characters. I believe they all get individual birthday presents. The minis are tradeable so I could, if I was feeling particularly insane, log in both accounts simultaneously and hand all the good minis from my old account to the one I have linked to GW2.

That might be taking the whole free stuff idea a little too far. I don't mind logging into games I don't play to get things I won't use but I have to draw the line at logging in to games I don't play to get stuff I don't need so I can use it to get stuff I still won't use in different game altogether.

Tunnel Visions: GW2

Reviewing each episode of Guild Wars 2's Living Story as it appears has always been something of a tradition here at Inventory Full but I was thinking it might be time to bring that tradition to an end. Who even plays GW2 any more, anyway? I barely play it. These days even posts about EverQuest II seem to draw more interest.

I was certainly feeling that way after I'd played through the first few sections of the new story drop a few days ago. The overwhelming feeling of sameness was stultifying. The latest chapter of The Icebrood Saga, Shadow In The Ice, takes place in the same map as the previous one. A hitherto unrevealed part of that map, sure, but it soon transpires that one end of Bjora Marshes looks much the same as the other.

In some ways that's a good thing; I said some very complimentary things about ArenaNet's art department in my original assessment of the marshes and standards haven't slipped. Even so, as impressively as the team evoke the overpowering desolation of eternal winter, some of the impact inevitably dissipates with familiarity.

Seen one set of fallen arches, seen 'em all.

As I plodded through the narrative (and yes, there will be spoilers) that sense of déjà vu grew until I was seized by an overwhelming ennui. We've not only been here before, we've been here many times. So many times...

A subset of the regular cast bicker and kvetch about personal issues while trudging across a wilderness in pursuit of a distant quarry. A disembodied voice, laden with distortion, maintains a fractured and fractious dialog with the player character, while in the background looms an existential threat in the form of yet another a dragon.

In principle I don't have a problem with repetition. I certainly don't have any issues with thematic focus. If the core of the game's story is dragons and their metaphysical relationship to the continued existence of the world and everything in it then I'm down with that. Or I could be.

Only does it have to be so pedestrian? So lacking in urgency? So quotidian?

Now that's what I call an interstitial!

We have reached the stage in the narrative where slaying elder dragons is just what our characters do. Dragons and gods. Even characters we meet for the first time now take it as a given. "Oh, I know who you are. You're that guy who kills dragons".

Any story that makes dragon-killing into a day job is in trouble, even if we do kill the odd god on the side, when the dragon-killing goes slack. Still, it is what it is. And I can't complain, or I shouldn't. I was one of those who advocated getting back to the main plot all through that long and tedious digression with Palawa Joko, after all. If dragons it must be then let's get to it.

Except, of course, we don't. We don't get to killing dragons because in Tyria dragonslaying is always and inevitably preceded by a plethora of busy-work. Busy-work and talking. Which we call "preparation".

For the new Saga-shaped iteration of the Living Story, ANet have done away with Hearts once again. We had them in the base game, then they went away for years, then they came back. Some people liked that, some didn't. The current version seems like an attempt to please, or at least not annoy, both factions.

Yeah, yeah, I heard it all before.

There are no Hearts as such in Bjora Marshes, old part or new, but the storyline uses beats that are functionally indistinguishable. Before we can pursue the renegade Charr leader, Bangar, or mount an attack on elder dragon Jormag's champion, Drakkar, first we have to go do this and that, here and there, all around the new map.

Instead of completing tasks to fill a Heart we have to participate in Dynamic Events. Or, as some would far more accurately be called, Static Events, given they take place in a fixed location and have a visible on-screen timer telling you when to expect them. Participating fills a green bar in the top corner of the screen. Green bar, yellow Heart. Same difference.

I won't go over the details of what the events are or how they work save to say that they're simple to complete and only mildly irritating. I was consumed with a palpable sensation of box-ticking as I knocked them off, one after another. High adventure it was not.

Once again, I feel it would be churlish to complain. After all, I made it quite clear I'd had more than enough of the more "challenging" requirements of previous Living Story seasons. This approach is unarguably much closer to what I said I wanted. Maybe I've just seen it too many times, now. It's been more than seven years. Familiarity takes its toll on enthusiasm.

Pretty much what you'll be looking at for the next thirty minutes.

With the outdoor prep done it's off to the instances we go; a series of tunnels and caverns that conspire to be unremarkable and visually appealing at one and the same time. ANet's artists are very good at ice but ice can only hold your attention for so long.

Progress through the ice tunnels goes as you might expect. The Commander (as the player character is known, by dint of a military appointment that can surely only be honorific at this stage, since the last thing we ever do is command anyone to do anything - or, if we do, to have them actually do it), accompanied by Rytlock, Ceria and Braham, push on past various icebrood minions towards this episode's Big Bad.

Pacing here is decent. Waves of low-quality grunts attempt to swarm the team and are summarily dispatched. Stronger cannon-fodder follows and meets a similar fate. Finally a Champion appears for a fight that lasts a minute or two.


Real story spoilers next - look away if you might play.


I did wonder for a second if that was it but no. This is an episode with multiple endings. It's also almost an homage to endings we have loved (or loathed) from episodes in the past.

When you can switch the UI off and stand in melee range to screenshot the sub-boss's big attack...

There's a dragon whispering in the ears of the weak - and indeed of the strong - threatening to turn friend into foe. And succeeding. There's a dragon's champion visible only as a disembodied head poking through a wall. There's a segment where The Commander has to fight and defeat a vision of themselves.

Seriously, it's like a Greatest Hits compilation, although it's a lot better than that sounds. It's like a cover album of the greatest hits of a band you never much liked but done by a bunch of bands you like a lot more. And best of all they all only do one verse and a chorus then it's on to the next number.

It motors right on through, in other words. None of the dismal rule-of-three that made previous seasons such a misery. Best of all, even though the baddies still paint the floor with every kind of circle and splodge, even though they spew balls of light and columns of ice and bolts of lightning and blue fire, none of it really does much.

The dark blue one that looks like a slug is Jormag's Whisper. The skeletal head sticking out of the wall is Drakkar. Dead Drakkar. We just killed him. We just killed him. Bangar did not kill Drakkar. Let's get that straight right now!

You can dodge it if you find dodging exciting. I did for a while. Then I stopped and just stood there and it made precious little difference. I barely ever went under three-quarters health.

Some people will surely complain that this is insulting to their great gameplaying skills but I find it entirely appropriate for solo storyline instances in a casual MMORPG. It took them a long time but ANet finally seem to have realized who their core audience is, for the narrative at least.

If that was all there was to Shadow In The Ice I might not have bothered writing it up at all. I might have let this be the breakpoint that ended the tradition. But then something happened, right at the end, and it surprised me. The story took a turn I didn't expect.

Why, you devious little...

In the last few minutes, most of which comprises in-game conversation between NPCs and some rather well handled uses of the game engine, two or three things happened that caught my attention and re-engaged me with the narrative.

After a sequence of fights and a plethora of false endings and minor set pieces, Jormag's champion Drakkar is down, Jormag's Whisper (don't ask) is at death's door and everything looks set to resolve itself satisfactorily. And then, out of nowhere, Bangar and Rytlock's son, Ryland Steelcatcher, appear. The very two renegades we were chasing across the marshes. And between them they kill the Whisper, nearly kill The Commander and leg it out of the caves to take full credit for everything the good guys (that's us) have done!

I definitely did not see that coming. Neither did I foresee the coda, where my character wakes up in a refurbished Hall of Monuments, now re-purposed as Aurene's Lair. At least, I think that's where it was. It certainly looked like it. Didn't see my stuff there but still...

I like what you've done with the place, Aurene.

To cap it all off, Aurene then posits the idea that Jormag, whose insidious draconic blandishments The Commander has been exhorting his colleagues to be firm of spirit and resist throughout, may actually have a point of view worth listening to. Can you ever trust a dragon? Even Aurene?

According to celebrated data miner that_shaman, as reported by MassivelyOP, we may be in for "six more episodes with a two-month gap between each, leading to a year’s worth of content" . If it's all of a kind with this latest chapter I guess things could be worse. Eight weeks between drops would be just close enough to maintain momentum; the gameplay, while scarcely riveting, is demonstrably more to my taste than in previous seasons and I am at least mildly curious to find out what happens next.

I'll give ANet a pass on this one. And I guess I'll keep on doing the episode reviews. For a while longer, anyway.

Unintended Consequences : Guild Wars

When GW2 was not much more than a twinkle in Mike O'Brien's eye and a seemingly endless series of press releases, I thought it might be a good idea to go back and take a look at the original game.

I remember a whole load of kerfuffle over trying to get my old account back. I hadn't played it since about three months after Guild Wars first launched. I'd finished the original storyline, which I don't remember calling "Prophecies" back then, hit max level at 20, stood around aimlessly in the Ring of Fire for a few days (the irony!) and then left.

Mrs Bhagpuss lasted a couple of weeks longer, finishing up the Ring of Fire and whatever else there was to do, then she stopped too. I forget where we went next but neither of us ever thought to go back. I don't recall even noticing the various expansions as they appeared over the next few years.

ANet did manage to recover my account - their customer service was excellent - slow but thorough. By then, though, for some reason I forget, I'd decided to make a new account anyway. I bought the DVD pack with the base game and all the expansions, which was selling for next to nothing at the time, and started over from scratch.

I tried Nightfall first. I made a Dervish and couldn't play him. I struggled to level four then gave up. Instead, I played through Prophecies again. Like everyone else I loved pre-Searing Ascalon. It was delightful to pay another visit to that pre-lapsarian eden. This time, though, when the Charr arrived to burn down the gates of Heaven I had a vague idea who and what they were. I knew they were cats for a start, which is more than I had done the first time around, when I took them to be some kind of demon - literally, not metaphorically.

 I left it there for a while but later, as we were getting close the launch of GW2, I came back for a third bite.  It was busy as I recall. The Hall of Monuments thing, which we all obsessed about for a while, was going on and everyone wanted a piece of that pie.

The Hall of Monuments was part of the Eye of the North expansion. I liked that one. Mrs Bhagpuss joined me for a while and we got pretty much to the end of the storyline. I'm not sure we ever quite finished it together - I think we got as far as you needed to open the Hall and probably lost interest after that.

In the end I got enough HoM points for the armor, a flaming sword and a cat, all of which I have characters in GW2 using to this day. As you might have expected, for all the enormous fuss made over the Hall of Monuments in the weeks and months before launch, a nanosecond after the game went live no-one ever mentioned it again.

Five years later, here we are with the second expansion coming over the hill. Unlike the last one, which was magicked out of whole cloth, it feeds back directly into the elder game. Not just the lore but the story too.

Supposedly GW1 veterans who played through the Nightfall expansion will find much to please them in Path of Flame. Well, we have a few weeks. It's not too late to catch up.

Or so I thought when I was going through my various hard drives last night trying to remember where I might have left my GW1 files. Coming up empty after half an hour of plugging drives into enclosures I decided it might be quicker just to re-install.

I could see the box right there on the shelf. It was just one DVD. How long could it take?

Eight hours of my life. Eight frustrating, annoying, infuriating hours.

Firstly, new PCs don't come with DVD drives any more. I remembered that when I went to put the DVD in and found the front of my machine is a flat, blank panel. That's why I bought a USB DVD drive last year.

I went and retrieved that from where Mrs Bhagpuss had been using it to watch Horrible Histories. I plugged it in and it whirred a bit then...nothing. I fiddled with it for a while and still nothing. It was at that point that I made my fatal error.

Perhaps it needs its own power source, I thought. With the drive still plugged into the USB socket I unplugged the power lead from the HDD enclosure and stuck it into the DVD drive, which had a hole exactly the right size and shape.

The monitor went black, the PC made an unhappy noise and powered down. Luckily there seemed to be no smoke, flame or even any smell of burning so, fingers crossed, I unplugged the thing and rebooted.

Everything seemed okay except for a strange sound like static on an old radio. That was my speakers. Which my PC no longer recognizes. Oh, and a completely innocent USB drive that just happened to be plugged in at the time seems to have been fried. Collateral damage.

To cut a very long and exceptionally tedious story short, somehow the power outage left my computer unable to recognize when or if it has speakers plugged in. Many, many trial and error tests, Google searches and a lot of swearing later and it still won't recognize them.

Apparently this is something Windows 10 does now and then. In the end, rather than futz around with it any longer, I went to buy a USB soundcard from a local PC chainstore. I checked online that they had one in stock at that branch before I drove to get it. They did indeed, the guy in the store confirmed when I got there. Their database said they had exactly one on hand -only they couldn't find it.

A lengthy conversation with their customer service department confirmed that neither of the next two nearest stores had one they could actually find either. The nearest one that did I deemed too far to drive so I went back home and ordered a soundcard from Amazon instead, taking advantage of one of Jeff Bezos's periodic attempts to lure me into becoming one of his Prime customers by means of a free trial. That should be here tomorrow.

In the meantime, because I cannot under any circumstances play games without the sound, I had a bright idea. I thought I'd reinstall Splashtop, stream my PC to my laptop, plug the speakers into that and Presto! Sound!

Which would have worked perfectly - if there hadn't been this annoying bug whereby, even though you have a perfectly valid account and you know and use the correct password, Splashtop won't recognize one or other of them. I could stream from my laptop to my PC just fine but using the very same account on both I got password errors every time I tried to do what I needed to do and stream the other way.

Finally - FINALLY - I remembered I once installed Splashtop on the Android side of my dual-OS tablet. I booted that up, tried it and it worked! After a whole day of frustration, at last I found myself happily playing GW2 with the sound only a millisecond out of synch.

In the middle of all that, when I had the sides off my PC, I installed one of the loose HDDs that were lying around and guess what? Hidden inside a folder cleverly labelled "MMOS" was my original installation of GW1. So I've been playing that, too.

Well, I say "playing". I logged in, checked my bags, found them entirely full, checked my bank, found that was full too, tried to sell some stuff then remembered you can't just "sell stuff" in Guild Wars. Instead I deleted enough things I no longer remember the uses of, assuming I ever knew, until I had room to open all the Anniversary presents that had piled up while I was away, took a couple of screenshots and logged off.

Whether I ever return we shall have to wait and see. If I do, it's not going to be as a Dervish, I'll tell you that much.

So Sue Me: Guild Wars and GW2

Hall of Monuments? Pfeh! Not interested. Don't care about that stuff. Can't be bothered. When I play Guild Wars 2 I'll just start from scratch. New account, nice and clean.

That's what I said or something like it on several blog threads over the past few months when people were banging on about their plans to collect this or achieve that or maximize the other. Meant it, too, at the time. Then ArenaNet had to go and make their Hall of Monuments Calculator.

One Point Walking

Yes, well, it's different when you can see it all laid out like that, isn't it? Suddenly it all gets a bit "Look at what you could have won" . And it's such a nifty little toy. You play with it for a while and cogs start whirring in your head and you google around a bit and see how you could hoover up a few points for doing next to nothing. Honestly, it would almost be rude not to, wouldn't it?

Look! I have three points already and I didn't do anything! How did that happen? Oh, that's because it can see I already have a Guild Wars account since I just typed in the name of one of my characters and it's assuming I'm going to use the same account in GW2. Well I hadn't planned on it but alright, if it makes you happy I suppose I could.

Don't do that! It's tinder dry!

Only, which account? I have two. It's that Clean Start thing again, you see. When I got the Complete Collection summer before last and thought I'd play through all the campaigns I didn't want to use the old characters so I started over. Then I got distracted by something, EQ2X probably, and last I saw of her my new ranger was Level 14 in Lion's Arch.

Quick check. Yep, that's where she still is. What's she got in her bags? A present? And inside it a little hydra. That must be one of those minis I read about. Whirr go the cogs. If she has a one-year present, what do the six-year old characters on my old account have? Bags full of presents? Yes they do! All four of them were made in the first month after launch so that means six birthday presents each!

Does he ever stop buffing himself?

Slight problem - that account doesn't have Eye of the North. Got to have that or you don't get a Hall of Monuments, can't place the minipets, don't get any credit for them in GW2. Putting the complete collection on a new account is looking like a really bad decision right now. Except, wait! People keep going on about buying these pets. That means they must be tradeable! 

Two dozen unwrapped presents, some map-clicks and a flurry of furtive exchanges in Ascalon City later, problem solved. Why Ascalon City? It's the furthest two of the four Elders ever travelled. And ever will, most likely. Warp back to Eye of the North and in we go. Talk to Gwen (what's she doing in there anyway?) hang a tapestry, place the pets.

Oh! A Kitten!

Another point! That's four!

I just need five points for a title. Traveler. That's a good title. I'd use that. And I have M.O.X. He's a free point if I can place him on his pedestal. Only to place him I have to hang another tapestry and that pool in the middle of the Hall isn't spitting out any more free ones.

Which is how I came to spend most of yesterday afternoon working through the primary quest sequence in the Eye of the North campaign. Made almost two levels. Wiped on Scorch Maulclaw about ten times. Gave up. Going back today with different tactics, if I can think of any. I'll get him in the end. Then it's on to Doomlore Shrine, rescue Pyre's warband and get my tapestry.

Because he'll get me a Tapestry, Gwen! Try to keep up!

We've got, what, three months before GW2 is likely to land? I want to finish the main questline in Eye of the North by then, learn to see the Charr as something more than the faceless monster hordes I remember from Prophecies. Meet the Asura. Those are the two races I plan on playing in GW2 so I probably should.

Not to mention I have my eye on that Orange Tabby Cat siting there waiting at nine points.