Relocation Due

Time for a quick progress report on Valheim. So many things happen so fast, it's easy to lose track if you don't keep notes. 

And since I don't keep notes, this is of necessity an impressionistic account. Everything in it definitely happened but I wouldn't swear this was the order it happened in. 

A lot of other things happened, too. I either deliberately left them out or I only remembered about them after I'd passed the point where mentioning them would make any sense. Lastly, I don't doubt plenty happened that I'm not remembering at all.

With that caveat, here's what I got up to yesterday. 

It was a day of mixed fortunes. I'd begun by taking the portal to the small hut on the edge of the swamp, where I'd set up my mining camp the day before. There was a sunken crypt just at the bottom of the escarpment. I'd ventured down to investigate and found it occupied by nothing more than a couple of blobs, no threat at all now I have my newly-fermented poison resistance potions.

When I struggled back up to the camp, bags filled with scrap iron, there was an unpleasant surprise waiting for me. The portal lay in ruins. The stockade I'd built around it was completely untouched. There'd been a huge thunderstorm. Could it have been struck by lightning? 

Who knows? I shrugged, rebuilt the portal from the debris and went to bed. 

When I awoke I decided to go straight back to the crypt to finish mining the rest of the iron there. That took a long time. It was only when I emerged, laden down with iron, that I spotted the green lights of another crypt not far away. I wanted to go straight there to see what I could find but it was late. I marked it on my map for future reference and headed back to camp.

Next morning I cleared out the rest of the first crypt and brought the ore back to camp. Then I went down to see about clearing out the second. There was an oozer hanging about but I sprinted past and ducked inside. The crypt seemed empty but I could hear the tell-tale buzzing of flies. Somewhere deeper inside,  a pile of rotting bodies festered in the dank, green water.

Exploring the first couple of rooms passed without incident. I took as much ore as I could carry and made the short run back to camp. I was getting low on food by now but the nearest supplies were back on the main island and I didn't want to take the time to portal there. 

 

The outer entrance to a sunken crypt: some wooden walls and a workbench and it makes a great temporary base camp.

The second crypt seemed even quiter than the first. I thought I'd chance it with the supplies I had on me. Back I went again.

This time all did not go well. The crypt was proving to be quite extensive. I broke through into a new room and the buzzing got louder. I could see the body pile but I guessed I could edge around it. My working theory was that draugr only woke if you trod on their decaying corpses. It's a theory still unproven.

There was a chest on a podium. I wanted to see what it held. I was hoping for iron and my hope was rewarded. Iron indeed and lots of it. I was loading it up when grunting behind me alerted me to the presence of something large. A draugr elite. I didn't see it spawn so I couldn't say if it came up out the pile of bodies or wandered in from another room. 

Its origins didn't make much difference. It was huge and powerful and my health was already low from not having gone back to get more food when I had the chance. Even so, I would have dodged the creature and escaped had I not found myself caught up on the jagged spikes of scrap I'd left blocking the doorway, when I'd rushed into the room in greed and haste.

Loot in haste, repent at leisure, as they say. I died at the draugr's feet. That was going to be a fun corpse run. I'd tried to follow the first rule of imminent death in Valheim - die in an open space as far from where the thing that killed you lives as possible - but by running I'd been hoist on my own petard, almost literally.

When I woke up in my bed my first thought was to rush straight back while I had the blessing of the gods. So I  did and at first it looked good. The run back was quick and easy. It even turned out the elite had wandered away from corpse. That would have been good news if where he'd wandered hadn't been right to the entrance. He killed me the moment I came through the door.

I tried once more but this time the oozer I spotted earlier had come back. It was squatting like a toad on the roof of the crypt. If oozes had eyes I'd have said it was staring right at me.

"It's always a troll" - Potshot.

At this point I had to stop for lunch. Me, the player, that is. Me, the character should have stopped for lunch long ago. Then all this might never have happened. 

A break to think things through in these situations is good. Get some perspective. I decided my best option was to portal back, eat, get dressed in my spare armor, bring a bow and some more poison resistance mead to deal with the oozer first. Then I'd go in and either kill the draugr or, better, if it had wandered into another room, grab my first corpse and run.

I logged back in and a troll was smashing down my portal. I don't know if that's how the first one got destroyed but this time the troll didn't leave the walls up. He knocked down the entire compound, flattened the portal and stomped off. Nothing I could do to stop him.

At this point I could have rebuilt the portal and carried on with my original plan but it was less immediately appealing than it had been. I didn't even have a hammer. I still had the immunity buff, though, so I thought I'd give it one more try.

And this time the gods smiled on me. The oozer had wandered off and when I entered the crypt so had the elite. I could hear him groaning somewhere but he wasn't at the front and when I got to my corpse he wasn't there either. I looted and ran.

Outside I put my armor back on, ate some sausages and a yellow mushroom, all I had, then stepped back inside. The draugr elite was standing at the far end of the entrance hall. I quickly swung my bow up and put a couple of ironhead arrows into him. It took half his life and sent him staggering back. 

As he righted himself I ducked back outside and waited a few seconds. Then I stepped back into the crypt and gave him a couple more. That took most of the fight out of him. He closed in and a blow from my axe finished him off. 

One death for a whole crypt filled with iron seemed a fair bargain. It would have been, too, if the same damn thing hadn't happened again. I'd made the assumption the crypt was clear by then but there was another bone pile. Also one of the heaps of scrap metal had a draugr entombed inside it and another led to a room with a couple more. There was at least one more death (mine, I mean) maybe two. It's all a bit of a blur, now.

Before. Suspiciously elf-like.

In the end it was very much worthwhile all the same. It was a big crypt. A lot of rooms. I spent an hour or more exploring it and digging it out. I came away with nearly two hundred pieces of scrap iron from altogether.

Now I had to decide what to do with it all. Another hour or so passed as I moved between shelters, picking up the ore I'd stashed in various chests to carry it back to the compound on the hill so I could consolidate my gains in one place. I'd made three short-term shelters during the operation, one the fortified front of one of the crypts itself, another under a fallen tree. I had chests filled with ore and gems in all of them.

I was pondering the complex logistics of getting the ore back to my foundry on the other island when the ground began to shake. The troll was back. This time I was fit to deal with him. He was battering the outer perimiter fence when I put the first arrow in him. By the time the atack was over the fence was still standing and the troll was down to the last sliver of health... and then he ran.

I followed him through the woods but I couldn't get a clear shot to bring him down and by the time I caught up to where I'd last seen him he'd vanished. It was odds on he'd be back so I set about making the camp troll-proof. 

It took me a couple of hours. I didn't just expand and strengthen the perimiter, I dug out a cave in the side of the hill and roofed it over, then I put the portal back up inside, underground. Let's see the bastard knock that down!

By the time I'd finished my little camp had turned into a secure base. I thought about the long and arduous trip I'd have to take to get the ore back to my log cabin deep in the south of the first island. It wasn't as though I could even bring the boat close and the terrain was utterly impossible for a cart. It would mean five or six overland journeys just to get the metal onto the ship, then a long sea journey, then several more overland runs. Hours and hours of work.

After. I might be part orc, y'know.

 

Or I could just build a new foundry where the ore was. It would only need a small amount of copper and tin and the mining camp was literally built on top of a large copper deposit with all the tin I could want in sight along the river at the base of the cliff.

So that's what I did.

With all the ore safely tucked away in chests I was free to use the portal network. I zipped about, grabbing everything I needed from my other houses. I dismantled a couple of non-ferrous upgrades at the original foundry and re-installed them in the new one. Everything else I made from scratch. It probably saved me more than eighty per cent of the time I would have spent shipping the ore home.

I decided I'd make the log cabin into my food warehouse and kitchen. The fermenter, the cauldron, the five beehives, the three cooking spits, they can all stay where they are. Having portals makes splitting bases by function no stranger or less convenient than having a bedroom, a kitchen, a workshop in different rooms of the same house.

Then I spent the rest of the day smelting iron. I deforested the entire clifftop for wood. The place looks like a logging camp now. It's not anywhere I'd want to live but it's finally dawned on me that in Valheim, where you live and where you work don't need to be the same. 

When I've finally made everything I can make out of iron and upgraded it all as far as it can go I'll close the doors on my cliffside foundry and re-locate to somewhere with a better view. And better neighbors.

For now, though, it's all hands to the bellows.

Glad It's All Over : GW2

Well, at least that's out of the way.

Is that what ANet's writers think every time they sign off on another episode of GW2's Living Story World? I only ask because that's generally how I feel when I get to the final cut scene.

This morning I finished the Season Three finale. I started it last night, when I got home from work. It took me about three hours to get to what I suspected would be the final instance. Knowing from bitter experience that there was bound to be at least one long, tedious session of kiting and dodging to come I chose to log off and start again fresh the next day.

Since I have a couple of days off work, as soon as I'd had breakfast I picked up where I'd left off. It took me another couple of hours, so, approximately five hours in total.

That five hours included doing my dailies in WvW and completing all the Hearts in the new map as required by the storyline. It also involved several "puzzle" instances, during which most of my time was spent trying to read mouse-over tool-tips while various NPCs and Security Devices tried to set me on fire plus some time tabbed out searching the forums for hints about why certain things didn't seem to be working.

If you subtract the trial-and-error/research time and the filler, I guess there might be a couple of hours of actual content. If I ever take a second character through it, which is unlikely, I guess I'll find out.

Now that we've hit the buffers, Season reviews are starting to pop up on the Forum. I thought about doing one but I don't have the enthusiasm or the interest to go into detail. It's over, let it lie.

What I would say is that the whole format is looking tired and formulaic and that the underlying conceit - trying to mirror the narrative structure of a TV show - simply doesn't work. A successful TV show pumps out far more episodes far faster with much shorter gaps between them. Intertwined plot lines have time to develop and resolve; characters have space to change and grow.

You can't do that with four to six episodes spread across an entire year. Or, I should say, there's no evidence that ANet's current team of writers and instance designers can do that.

There is abundant evidence that their artists and map designers can keep up the pace but even there I see a problem. It's been great to get a new map every two or three months - a huge step up from the way the world failed to expand during the first two seasons. Unfortunately, although the maps vary widely in their environments, covering everything from permafrost to lava, they are all structurally more alike than that would suggest.

Add to that the very similar content - the Hearts, chained events, rewards - and there's a strong sense of diminishing returns. Yes, these are gorgeous maps, soaked in visual flair and rich with detail. They're still beginning to feel samey.

Looking back at my posts on the earlier episodes, my feelings a year ago were a lot more positive. I gave the first episode four stars out of five. I'd give the current one two stars for the storyline and maybe three for the map, although I haven't done map completion yet, nor fully explored it, so that's a tad premature.

Without giving any spoilers I would say that the storyline in this Finale is incoherent. That, however, is something we've come to expect and a lack of coherence is, frankly, the least of its problems. Much worse is the seeming inability - or possibly interest - in even paying lip-service to the idea that the player character has any agency, individuality or existence other than as a tool of the plot.

At one point, when words were put into my character's mouth that neither he nor I would ever utter, I shouted out loud at the screen in denial. I can only thank my stars I swapped from doing the Living Story on my Charr to my Asura because, had I been playing the Charr I might have thrown the monitor out of the window. I'm not alone.

Apart from that, the voice work seemed lackluster compared to earlier episodes, the dialog in general was often wooden, the persistently ironic tone seemed inappropriate and much of the humor fell flat. In terms of character and backstory I thought it was the least engaging episode to date.

As a "Finale" it fails completely because it doesn't finish. One - and only one, - sub-plot is resolved (in a way that presents serious moral problems that are simply ignored). Everything else is left to hang.

Instead of a resolution we get a commercial. The final cut scene is quite literally a trailer for the unnamed expansion. Or, more accurately, a trailer for the Official Announcement of that expansion.

At this point I have to say I'm about done with The Living Story as a narrative. It's pointless becoming emotionally or intellectually invested in something so arbitrary and etiolated.

Characters appear and disappear with no more than a half-line reference. Entire sub-plots proceed, climax and fade off stage. If we're lucky Taimi gives us a report in precis by cat-whisker. I read superhero comics for decades; I'm inured to this kind of thing but even I can't suspend this much disbelief or fill in this many plot-holes for myself.

Next week we get to find out the name of the forthcoming expansion and, presumably, what's in it. At this point I'm looking forward to some new maps that look and play at least a little differently. I'm hoping for some new Ascended weapons for each class because the "quests" for those were one of my highlights from Heart of Thorns. I'd like some big-ticket events as enjoyable as Dragon's Stand or Auric Basin. And that's about it.

What I'm really hoping is that ANet's A-Team has been working on the expansion the whole time and what we've been getting from Living Story for the last year is sloppy seconds. If so, then it's not been at all bad, considering. If it's the best they can do, though...

Life Moves At The Speed Of Information: GW2, Ashes of Creation

Well, it wasn't an official announcement with a firm launch date but Mike O'Brien did open the window for the launch of GW2's long-awaited second expansion. He began yesterday's AMA on reddit by saying:

"...today’s episode, Flashpoint, is the second-to-last episode of the season... there’s one more episode after this, and then straight to the expansion pack... our rough plan is to slot the expansion pack into the release cadence as if it were an episode..."

That would place the release somewhere between September and November.

He did allow himself some wiggle room, warning:

" ...shipping an expansion pack is a big deal logistically and will probably take longer than the 2~3 months we normally allocate between episodes."

Reading those runes I'd say it's nailed on for this year and I'd be surprised to see it arrive any later than mid-November. Sod's law dictates it will come out on the same day as the EQ2 expansion.

Wary of the major hit his game took after the botched handling of the first expansion, he was also at pains to re-assure a skeptical audience that there would be no repeat of the six-month content drought we had last time:

 "A lot of you have been wondering about the upcoming release cadence, given that last time around we took a long break from Living World releases to get Heart of Thorns out the door and then to support that expansion after release. The good news is that this time around we have two separate fully-staffed teams that are both hitting on all cylinders."

 We'll see if that means a new Living Story in February 2018 but by then I might be too busy with the Ashes of Creation closed beta to care. According to Cutie DarkFay in the comments to my post on the AoC Kickstarter, "early 2018" was the estimated start of CB2 according to the official Twitch stream. Sounds very optimistic. We'll see.

As you may surmise, I did finally hop off the fence to stump up my $40. I say "finally" but the campaign's barely started. Syp was wondering what's the point of backing one of these projects when it's already crossed the funding line. In my case I am quite literally paying $40 for closed beta access and I'm mostly doing that so I can blog about it. There'd better not be a strict NDA!.

The speed of the whole thing seems to have surprised no-one more than Intrepid Studios themselves. The would-be Savior of the Genre (Crowfall probably should have copyrighted that) funded in twelve hours and the developers seem to be in a state of delirious disbelief right now. I got an email from them this morning saying:

"We are in awe of the support everyone has shown us! Ashes of Creation has obviously struck a cord with the MMORPG community, and we could not be any prouder!"

 
Tyler F. M Edwards noted, also in the comments, that "...the fact they actually called a class "tank" is a huge red flag to me. It tells me that they're not putting much effort into immersion or world-building".  The fact they can't spell "chord" (or, worse, think the expression actually is "to strike a cord") doesn't inspire confidence either but they get a pass for over-excitement - this once.

On the other hand, the fact that their immediate response to unexpected success was to promise everyone a puppy makes me wonder if they have any clear idea who or what their audience is:

"At 6,500 backers, everyone who is a part of this kickstarter will receive a baby kitten/puppy pet in game! "

Also, "baby kitten"?  Is that one that hasn't opened its eyes yet? Am I going to have to feed it with an eye-dropper? Maybe we'll all get one of those if we hit 7,500 backers.

What with the kittens and puppies and the very first stretch goal, already achieved, being "Parlor Games" in taverns, I'm getting a very blurry impression of what this supposedly PvP-centric MMO is all about. Should be fun finding out - in a year or so.

While all that was going on in the background I was playing through the penultimate episode of Living Story 3 - Flashpoint. That's where all the screenshots are from.

As always, there's not much that can be said at this stage without severely spoiling someone's enjoyment. Unfortunately, fear of spoilers also means by the time it's safe to discuss the plot everyone's moved on and no-one's interested any more.

That would be a shame because there's a lot to discuss. Blimey, Guvnor, isn't there just! One genuine gosh-wow reveal and a bunch of "well, I'm going to have to think about that for a while!".

The actual story part is very short. I know, LS2 and 3 chapters have always been that way. I've mostly been able to wrap them up in the first session. Still, even by those standards, this is a quickie.

In my opinion, though, it's all the better for it. For once there's no obvious padding and the inevitable Big Boss Fight at the end doesn't outstay it's welcome like they so often do: it's one of the shortest and least annoying I can remember. I really enjoyed the whole thing.

As well as the story there is, as we have now come to expect, a new map. It follows the exact design of all the other new maps - four repeatable Hearts, many, many dynamic events, a new travel mechanic, a new gatherable currency...

This process has become so predictable and formulaic it's almost funny. We complained for years about not getting any new maps and now we get the same new map once a quarter.

That said, this one, Draconis Mons, is fantastic. It's beautiful, bizarre and overwhelming. When I finish posting this I'm going to go and explore the entire thing. As long as ANet's artists can keep pumping out eye-candy this delicious they're going to keep me as a customer. Anything else is a bonus.

Oh yes, and they added some Legendary Armor or something but I don't suppose we'll be hearing anything more about that...

Keeping Up With Current Events : GW2

When it comes to publicity for GW2's PvE offer it's The Living Story or Raids that ArenaNet's P.R. department turn to every time. Dungeons are long forgotten and Fractals, popular though they are, haven't really got the same cachet with a wider gaming audience.

For my money, though, the real core PvE content over the last nine months or so has been something so unheralded, so unpublicized, so secret even, that not only does it not merit a single puff piece from the publicity department, it doesn't even get much more than a single line in the patch notes.

Sometimes, as in last week's big skill balance patch, it doesn't even get that. I'm talking about the ongoing sequence of "Current Events" that so far has included a lengthy series of skirmishes and full-scale battles with bandits, a whole slew of cross-map zerg events and a lot of odd little sidebars and scavenger hunts.

As I look back at my progress through the winter and autumn to last summer, it's not the strung-out chapters of LS3 that remind themselves to me; it's taking sides in the tri-partite race to gather ley energy, or chasing a running figure from map to map alongside fifty other excited players, or jaunting across Tyria with my Rift Stabilizer in hand. Those are the experiences I'll be referring to in years to come, not the stuttering storyline with its ponderous gravitas, occasional chuckles and predictably irritating set pieces.

Almost without exception the Current Events have been well conceived and well implemented.  You don't always need to own Heart of Thorns to enjoy them, either, although sometimes they venture into maps that do require that access. By and large, though, they provide repeatable content that deepens and broadens the original game.

Trahearne's Memorial. I give it a week before some Asuran progeny puts a traffic cone on his head.

The current Current Event is one that does demand ownership of GW2's only expansion to date, which is not unreasonable given that it wraps up one of the trailing threads from HoT's main storyline. At the end of the Heart of Thorns personal story your character was left with a seemingly useless item, the broken sword Caladbolg, an unwieldy name for an unwieldy weapon.

It had belonged to of one of the NPC characters, the ever-unpopular Trahearne, but with him gone no-one really knew what to do with it. Although you could equip it, as a Rare quality weapon, certainly no-one who could get it would ever want to.

I threw mine in the bank along with all the other relics of past events that I like to mouse over once in a while. More practically-minded players salvaged theirs for crafting resources. Some, I'm sure, simply destroyed the useless thing to save space.

Well, now Caladbolg's time has come. With no foreshadowing or pre-amble and not even as much as a cryptic hint in the update notes, when you log in a character who finished the HoT personal story a letter arrives in the mail. That begins a lengthy and extremely enjoyable scavenger hunt, the details of which I won't document here because Dulfy has done it already. What would we do without her?

I spent some of Friday evening and most of Saturday afternoon finding the necessary fifteen shards and motes. It involved porting back and forth all over Tyria as well as to and from my home instance, the Lab in Rata Sum on this occasion, since the only character who ever finished the storyline in Heart of Thorns was my Asuran Druid.

The whole thing took longer than it might have done because that character had never even set foot in some of the maps he was asked to visit. When Ridhais, the Sylvari who purported to be able to repair (or "heal") the weapon opened a map for me to show me the nearest waypoint, as often as not all I saw was a blank wash of watercolored blur.

Pssst! Dog! This way!

That just made the whole thing more fun. All of the motes were in secluded, tranquil locations. Several of them were in hidden, secret spots, at least two of which I had never seen before even after four years and seventeen max level characters.

I used Dulfy's guide so I knew exactly where to go and even if I hadn't, the aforementioned in-game hints included a pop-up map with the nearest waypoint highlighted. A true explorer archetype might turn up their nose at such a catered tour but for me it was perfect. If Bartle had thought to add a "Sightseer" archetype I'd probably score 100%.

If this current event had limited itself only to a trip around this well-chosen selection of obscure visual delights it would already have been the highlight for me of this year's GW2 offering so far. The visit to the Nolan strawberry farm, of which I was, until yesterday, quite shamefully ignorant, was enough on its own to beat the entire last episode of Living Story for sheer satisfaction.

You can never have too many shafts of sunlight. Or free strawberries.

It's also well worth emphasizing that, although several of the stops on this trip around Tyria's most beautiful hidden treasures do also feature POI's or Hero Challenges flagged on the main map and required for map completion, several of the most impressive do not. The hidden cavern in The Grove, like Ayna's strawberry farm, have no reward other than the sheer thrill of discovering them. (Well, and the strawberries, of course).

With its foregrounded emphasis on map completion GW2 has always taken criticism for offering "Exploring by Numbers" but that's an interpretation only an Achiever archetype could place on what has to be one of the most intricately detailed, deeply rewarding imaginary spaces available for virtual exploration. If you aren't finding uncharted wonders you just aren't looking.

For the life of the game so far the best-kept secrets of ANet's formidable art team have been just that - secret. While this opens a few up to a wider audience it's merely a taster. There are so many more to discover if you take the time to find them.

Sometimes I roleplay Calvin and Hobbes, sometimes I roleplay William Brown. Mostly, though, I can't maintain that level of complexity and ironic detachment.

As I said, if this was all the Current Event had to offer it would have been plenty but there was more. A lot more. Once all the components had been collected there were not one but three boss fights to complete. When I read that on Dulfy my heart did sink a little.

ANet's idea of a solo boss fight for a storyline is generally a twenty minute war of attrition that leaves casual players angry, frustrated and with a thumping headache. The rightly vilified final fight of the latest LS3 chapter is a sadly typical example.

Whichever team is responsible for Current Events, however, shares absolutely none of the Living Story developers' penchant for grim, claustrophobic misery. Each of the five fights (it transpires you have to battle the first two bosses twice) was fast, fun and didn't outstay its welcome. Every one took place in a large, open space that allowed for full use of the Dodge mechanic.

See what happens when you give me room to breathe?

Best of all, there was no "clever" mechanic, transformation or trick required to win. All you have to do is play your character using the skills of the class in the intended manner, just as you would in any other part of the wider game. So very refreshing. If only whoever designed these encounters could be put in charge of all the solo instanced combat scenarios in the game, how much happier the broad mass of the playing public might be.

So, we have a lengthy, entertaining event that culminates in several enjoyable and satisfying fights. Could it get better than that? Why, yes it could!

If there's one thing that GW2 has taken consistent flak for over the years it's the inadequacy of the reward for the effort required. A few bags of crafting mats and, if you're really lucky, a Rare quality item that will go straight to salvage and that's your lot. Maybe, once in a while, if the RNG gods are in a really good mood, you might get an Exotic.

Look at my sword, Dog. Look! This way! Don't eat that!

Not this time. The reforged Cadalbolg, when you complete the full sequence, comes back to you as an Ascended weapon. Ascended is the top of the tree when it comes to loot in GW2 and few people have as much as they'd like. Getting anything Ascended as a reward is a guaranteed dopamine hit.

Of course, you'd want it to be something you can use. How fortunate, then, that at the end of the final fight five NPCs appear to offer you a choice of weapons - Longsword, Scepter, Shield, Sword or Dagger.

Even though the NPCs warn you to choose wisely, naturally, in the aftermath of such a heated battle there are going to be players who click on the wrong thing. That's not speculation - someone was wailing on the forums about having done exactly that within a matter of hours.

Okay, Dog. Fun's over. Come on. Come here! Don't make me come get you...
Alright, I'm coming to get you.

Well, the exemplary team behind it all had thought of that, just as they'd thought of all those players who would have destroyed the original, broken Caladbolg they'd need to get the whole thing started. Those players were able to get another Caladbolg from Miyani at The mystic Forge, while everyone who completes the event gets a letter the next day inviting them to meet with The Pale Tree.

With that meeting out of the way, Ridhais takes up residence in the player's home instance, where he will swap your weapon for a different one as often as you like provided you come up with a thousand Unbound Magic each time to power the process. It's an elegant safety net for a problem that good design has in any case largely prevented from happening at all.

Like all the somewhat inaccurately labelled "Current Event" content, this is now a permanent part of
the game, at least as far as anything in an MMO is ever permanent. It's also good enough in just about every way that I feel motivated for the first time ever to finish up the HoT storyline on other characters just so I can do it again. I could very much use those extra Ascended items and I would very much enjoy another afternoon going through the steps it takes to get them.

I have no idea how many developers and designers it requires to create and curate this Current Event content but whoever they are they put the rest of the game to shame. How I'd love to play the version of GW2 these people would make if they were in charge of the whole thing.

For now I'll just keep scanning the patch notes each time, hoping for the one line that hints of something unusual. That's where all the fun is going to be.

If You Like This Sort Of Thing, This Is The Sort Of Thing You'll Like: GW2

What is there to say about the fourth installment of GW2's third Living Story season? I've been pondering that question for a few days and I'm not sure I have much in the way of an answer but the phrase "More of the Same" keeps pushing itself to the front of my thoughts.

I share a considerable frustration and discontent with Jeromai, who's posted several times on the update already, over the general direction and approach the game is taking. There was a brief period following the sudden departure of Colin Johanson, when it seemed GW2 might be returning to the inclusive, casual-friendly, supposedly mold-breaking tenets of the now-infamous Manifesto, but those days proved to be short-lived.

GW2 in 2017 is primarily a game of instances. The original concept of a sprawling open-world game in which "you can just naturally play with all the people around you" is long dead. Or, rather, part of it is entirely dead, fenced off in Raid instances accessed only by the typical self-appointed "elite" that clusters in  the velvet-roped curated spaces of every theme-park MMO, while much of the rest is on life-support, sustained by the artificial stimulus of map-specific currencies and daily rewards.

Jennah's first dome: created without explanation and later expanded without explanation to cover the entire city. I want to play that Mesmer.

Indeed, each of the new supposedly "open-world" maps added with the four chapters of the current Living Story might as well be instances. An ANet developer was reported recently as saying that open-world maps in GW2 represent historical periods rather than the current timeline, something that is self-evident yet rarely acknowledged. With these maps, tied as they are to a fixed narrative, all of which plays out in personal instances, that has never been more obvious.

The thrilling promo video for "Head of the Snake" led many to hope, some to fear and a few to assume that Divinity's Reach might be due for the treatment previously meted out to Lion's Arch. A re-run of Scarlet's assault on the pirate city seemed altogether too much to hope for and indeed so it proved.

At risk of spoilers, although it's apparent from the screenshot at the top of the post, which is the view of the Human capital as seen from Lake Doric, the walls of Divinity's Reach do not fall. In fact, contrary to the evidence of that video and the in-game cut scenes, they don't appear to suffer any significant damage whatsoever.

Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose

When Scarlet was rampaging across Tyria, pulling godlike ex-machina plot devices from her seemingly bottomless bag of tricks, she was roundly condemned as a Mary Sue of the worst possible stripe. That assessment was, I always felt, tempered somewhat by the later discovery that she was the catspaw of an actual, quasi-godlike entity, the elder dragon Mordremoth.

Who, then, perhaps we should be asking ourselves, stands behind Queen Jennah's newly-acquired, miraculous powers? How is it that this former poster-girl for hapless, helpless love interest, the Penelope Pitstop of Kryta whose plaintive calls for help caused Logan Thackeray to abandon Snaff to his death, collapse all hope of defeating the crystal dragon Kralkatorrik and bring to a chaotic and acrimonious end the dragon-slaying guild Destiny's Edge, can suddenly cause instant death with a flick of her wrist and raise and maintain an impenetrable dome across an entire city at a moment's notice?

It may be that, as with Scarlet, there is at least a semi-coherent explanation but if so it remains, like the influence of Mordremoth, at best dimly sensed and obscure. Or it could just be bloody awful plotting. Either way, we are not getting a two or three month long version of The Battle for Lion's Arch. We're getting a permanent map that forever records the short few hours of Minister Caudecus's futile revolution.

Let me talk to him, Your Majesty. I'm fluent in the universal language of quest-markers.

Kind of a living tableau rather than a Living World. Disappointing. Unambitious. Tame. Also practical and apparently very popular if both the current buzz in map chat and the outpourings of praise on the forums are any guide.

The sad and inevitable conclusion seems to be that not enough people wanted the vision of that manifesto. As we have discussed many times, the distance between what people claim they want and what they actually want is like interstellar space.

I have a worrying feeling that had ANet chosen to make their sequel to GW2 something that followed rather than broke with the existing MMO conventions of it's time then it might have become the closest thing to the fabled "WoW-killer" the genre has seen. It could have been FFXIV: A Realm Revisited a year earlier in other words.

Backwards into the future? Here's hoping.

They did not choose that path and they have paid the penalty. They made a game that wasn't quite what their market segment wanted and when they shifted to accommodate those expectations the market itself changed away from them. If someone in ANet towers is drafting a design doc for GW3 right now I imagine the words "survival" and "sandbox" are somewhere prominent.

We are, as they say, where we are. Not only is there no hint of a GW3 (and since the official position is that GW2 will run as the company's primary product indefinitely that's not a hint we're likely to be given for a long time yet) there's still no official news or even announcement of the second expansion.

What we have are these increasingly formulaic assertions of "content" that arrive under the flag of the Living Story. It's not nothing. It is, arguably, an improvement on Living Story 2, although I struggle to recall, without going to look it up, what actually happened in that season.

If only all of Kryta looked like this.

The new map is a fair size and quite interesting. The events are, perhaps, less rigidly organized than Bitterfrost or Ember Bay. There is, to some slight extent, a more organic, unpredictable pace.

The art department, ANet's one indisputable star asset, has done its usual, expected best but this is Kryta they've been given to work with and there's only so much you can do with scrub grass and dirt. Not to mention there's a war going on.

The promised challenging, group-oriented "leather farm" (oh, the mental pictures that conjures...) turns out to be a big hill with hundreds of fast-spawning centaurs. As Jeromai reports it benefits from a full zerg rather than a mere "group" but since what's farmed turns out to be almost entirely the wrong kind of leather, whether zergs will be easy to come by seems less than certain.

Anybody fancy the Leather Farm? Guys? Please don't report me!

As for the story, the usual fear of spoilers prevents me from going into too much detail. Suffice it to say that if Queen Jennah is not being mind-controlled and if Countess Anise is not revealed to be a major villain at some point then we as players are effectively being asked not just to condone but to endorse fascism. It's a queasy scenario. I hope the writers know what they are doing.

The story arc of the chapter, something most players take to be intended as solo content, ends with one of ANet's trademark annoying, pointless, attritional boss fights. These are always inappropriate to the context but we are all by now inured to them. This one, however, was so execrably tuned that forum outrage erupted (again) and a very swift and quite severe nerf to difficulty followed.

I completed it on the first attempt under the original difficulty. This is not any indication of my skill as a player. I happened to be doing it on my heal-specced Druid and I simply bored the Boss to death. Even so I died about half a dozen times. Mrs Bhagpuss, on hearing about it, declined even to attempt it and now hasn't logged in to the game for three days.

This made me laugh.

There were plenty of things I enjoyed. Some of the dialog and cut scenes were above par. Countess Anise infuriates me so much that I literally shout at the screen when she's on. That has to count as successful writing or voice acting or both. Canach has become one of my favorite NPCs. I laughed out loud several times at his snide, drawling sarcasms.

There were also plot developments that surprised and intrigued. I do think that trying to tell a coherent narrative in this extenuated, disparate fashion would challenge even the best of writers and video games do not generally attract the best of writers or, probably, the second or third best. Still, they are making a fist of it and I remain involved.

But then I'm a sucker for meta-textuality.

Mechanically there was one worthwhile innovation. At various points there are interactive objects or even creatures that respond only to one class. I spotted a turret only engineers could use and my druid was able to tame an attacking mob mid-fight and turn it on its trainer. That was oddly satisfying.

Also of note is the addition of vendor-purchasable paintings and furniture that can be placed in Guild Halls. Our tiny guild has no guild hall (although the large WvW guild I'm also in does) so the reason for the excitement this awoke in me when I happened upon it isn't perhaps obvious.

You really want that thing in your personal instance?

I'm calling it here: this is laying the foundation for some kind of personal housing in the expansion. As is the otherwise incomprehensible obsession with cats. There are a couple of new ones in the update - a ghostly one in Lake Doric and a very odd, bloodstone-tainted example in Caudecus's Manor. If these aren't future housing systems undergoing live testing then Anet are even more inscrutable than I imagine.

In summary, then, "Head of the Snake" is not by any means a bad update. It's adequate; satisfactory, even. Had it been the first chapter of this season I imagine I would be almost fulsome in my praise. The problem is one of diminishing returns. Having found a format that the playerbase appears to deem more acceptable than either the open-world sprawl and bi-monthly cadence of LS1 or the shut-down, buttoned-up isolation of LS2, ANet unsurprisingly seem keen to play it for all it's worth.

I'm just not sure how much that is or how long the goodwill can be sustained before the inevitable ennui takes over once again.

The Snake That Eats Itself : GW2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dragon Nest Oracle
Allods
Black Desert
LotRO
ArcheAge
Blade & Soul

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

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

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

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

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

Added Value : EQ2

As predicted, A Crack In The Ice, put something of a crimp in my progress through Kunark Ascending's main quest sequences. The crafting timeline had already come to a standstill pending acquisition of the nine crafted items required to complete Proof of the Pudding but I was still making steady progress on the Adventure side until GW2 butted in with the latest installment of what we are now apparently supposed to call "The Living World".

One of the many joys of GW2 these days seems to be the complete abandonment of any sense of temporal congruity. I have a post simmering concerning time in MMOs, the idea for which came to me partly from a dementedly complicated time-travel novel I read recently and partly from GW2's increasingly inaccurately named "Current Events".

There's plenty of good stuff to be had from the crafting timeline even if you can't produce your Earring of the Solstice as evidence of your Grandmaster status. Having a goblin gardener with his own quest line in your house is reward enough.

I'll save the analysis for that post, if I ever get around to writing it, but suffice to say for now that if there's one thing GW2 no longer suffers from it's any sense of urgency. There's always a desire to rush through anything new (a desire not shared by everyone) but once I've been through the story instances on a single character and opened all of the new map I feel entirely free to come and go as I please.

Yesterday I changed frontiers, giving Bitterfrost a break, returning to a semi-structured amble through Obolus Frontier instead. It's really an excellently designed zone;  a pleasure to explore. Mob density is very comfortable and there are many safe spots where you can relax and enjoy the varied and detailed scenery. Visibility can sometimes be difficult, what with the lush vegetation and the designers' infatuation with color filters, but compared to the plethora of aggressive wildlife and the ultra-harsh weather conditions of Bitterfrost, Obolus feels almost literally like a walk in the park.

I've done two of the solo instances so far and they have both been excellent. This is Crypt of Dalnir, which could more accurately be called "Sewers of Dalnir". I would probably not have made it without the wiki walkthrough and even with it it took two hours but it never felt too long or too difficult.

My opinions are perhaps not the best standard by which to judge EQ2 expansions. The original Kunark expansion, 2007's "Kunark Rising", now regarded as a high-water mark for the game, irritated me so much on first release that I stopped playing EQ2 entirely for six months and went back to EverQuest instead.

When I returned and did Kunark again I loved it. Like almost every part of Norrath I now think of it with fondness. That's the extreme example of what has often been my reaction to additions to the game: cool at first, warming to approval, even affection, over time.

A change in design philosophy of late has broken that paradigm somewhat. Almost unnoticed, those ambitious, sprawling, often overwhelming expansions of the first few years have given way to a tighter, more focused, directed experience. Chains of Eternity, Tears of Veeshan, Altars of Malice, Terrors of Thalumbra - in some ways they all play more like single-player RPGs than MMOs.

For example, I'd completely forgotten about destructible walls, first introduced all the way back in The Bloodline Chronicles Adventure Pack in 2005. I walked right past the deeply recessed, raised alcove I needed to break through and it was only when I'd cleared everything and was stumped enough to go to the wiki that I realized you do need to look up now and again.

In terms of how I approach them, the sequence, reported in some detail on this blog, is straightforward: I buy the new expansion. I play through the Adventure and Crafting Timelines. That takes somewhere from three to six weeks. If there's an increase to the level cap I may also do a little more to top that off. I potter around for a bit longer and then I drift away until the next update arrives.

For an MMO that is no longer my main time-filler, one that I play for a dozen hours on a heavy week rather than thirty or forty, that's exactly what I need. It's fun, manageable and satisfying. I have a single character (yes, I suppose I must admit it, a "main") as far as Adventuring is concerned and two or three Crafters at the cap. The rest of my extensive roster isn't troubled by recent content at all.

One big difference between Kunark Ascending and previous expansions is the tying of both the Adventuring and Crafting Signature questlines to older content. At first I was a little wary of being pushed into doing some lengthy quests like the Greenmist Heritage and the aforementioned crafter epic "Proof of the Pudding" that I'd previously avoided.

I admit to feeling a ridiculous sense of satisfaction at this point.

Having made my way a good distance through both KA timelines, however, I have to say that having these pre-reqs is a jolly good wheeze. Although I'm still approaching the content in solo-RPG mode, the whole storyline feels significantly more integrated into the virtual world by dint of those hark-backs to earlier times.

Having to prepare for the expansion adds weight, texture and even a little gravitas. My Berserker feels part of the story in a way that's qualitatively different as a direct result of having taken part in the build-up. I hope this trend continues and is expanded upon.

As must be obvious by now, I'm pretty happy with Kunark Ascending. I liked last year's Terrors of Thalumbra well enough but this is a big step up from there. A cursory look at what's offered in a modern-day EQ2 expansion, either under SOE or now as they arrive under the DBG imprimatur, might suggests a diminution in content and a concomitant reduction in value but that would be a false impression. The reverse is the case, at least from the perspective of a mostly-solo player.

All modern EQ2 dungeons are constructed on a scale that makes the older ones feel poky and claustrophobic. I strongly feel that the increased headroom and sense of space makes dungeoneering a much more pleasant and enjoyable experience.

The design brief for expansions, not only in EQ2, used to tend towards several overland areas which would accommodate all of whatever solo content there might be, often in tandem with some group or raid content as well. The rest of the new zones, whether instanced or open, would be "dungeons" scaled either for groups or raids.

Sentinel's Fate, for example, added fourteen zones to Norrath but even though EQ2 was at that time my main MMO and I had a number of characters at the level cap, when I bought and played the expansion at launch I was able to make use of only two of them. Kunark Ascending, by contrast, comes with just seven discrete zones - Obulus Frontier, Arcanna'se Spire, Crypt of Dalnir, Vaedenmoor, Kaesora, The Ruins of Cabilis and Lost City of Torsis - but all bar the raid zone Vaedenmoor are available for both solo and group play.

This sarcophagus is interactable but I couldn't figure out why. I do like an unresolved mystery.

The upshot of all this is that I find the newer expansions to be both much better value and a lot more fun than the old ones often were. EQ2 has become a very specific kind of MMO, very well-tailored to the players it has, playing to its strengths and making the most of its limited resources. Ironically, in doing so, the game has also become more accessible and better-suited to new players than it ever has been.

The expansion comes with a max-level character, geared appropriately to begin current solo content. I wouldn't necessarily recommend learning the ropes that way but if you want to cut to the chase you can. More usefully, the re-fitting of most of the existing dungeons in the game to a "Level Agnostic" format that allows almost all levels to group together has opened up a dozen years of co-operative content at a stroke.

Photo-bombed by a pony. Again.

Were it possible to send the current EQ2 back ten years, configured as it is now, I feel it would stand every chance of being a major success. Sadly, it took those ten years to get it to the point where it might have a hope in a very competitive market. The window of opportunity has closed. Few gamers are interested in giving older games a chance unless it's for a brief nostalgia hit. Especially games whose optimization and graphics can't help but show their age.

Fortunately I don't have to concern myself with how many new players EQ2 can attract. Not, at least, while the game retains enough old players to keep the lights on. For my $34.99, Kunark Ascending is shaping up to be a top notch expansion, one that I'm very happy indeed to have the pleasure of playing. Highly recommended.