Drive, She Said

This morning, what I thought I was going to be posting about were my first impressions of an in-development MMORPG, currently in a testing phase for which access keys were being handed out like candy a short while ago. I figured with it being so very nearly an open test there'd be no problem writing about it but there I was wrong. 

Very wrong. It has one of the strictest, most comprehensive NDAs I've seen. It even forbids "intentionally implying" anything about the experience, which makes me think they must have read my posts on the first New World alpha...

Since I clearly can't say anything about my time with the game so far, not even how long I've spent playing it, since that would come with inevitable implications about my level of involvement and interest, I thought I'd post some pictures of my new ride in Once Human instead.

Once Human entered the penultimate phase of its first Season today, bringing in a whole new set of Seasonal goals and a refresh of the Commission board. I had a look through the goals, many of which are suitably late-game and out of my reach but one of which immediately struck me as being eminently achievable and also quite likely to be fun: Drive 30000 meters in a four-wheeled vehicle.

I didn't have a four-wheeled vehicle, having until now been more than satisfied to tool around on my "Street Motorcycle" but I had already investigated the possibilities of upgrading to a more comfortable means of transport, so I knew I had the option to build two four-wheelers: an off-road 4x4 and a retro coupe.

Obviously, the sensible choice would be the all-terrain vehicle. It's basically a Jeep and would be ideal for all those dirt tracks criss-crossing the map. So naturally I made the coupe because of all the Starsky and Hutch vibes coming off it in waves.

I could have made this car weeks ago or at least started working towards it but one of the nice things about going at your own pace and only doing stuff when you feel ready is that half the time, when you get around to it, you find you've already done most of the busy-work. 

To make the car, I first had to make several parts, as is the way of things in the game. Each part uses quite a few mats but I already had more than enough of all of them. In fact, all vehicles come in four quality grades, each using higher-level mats and I already had everything I needed to make the third tier so I could have jumped straight there.

I need those mats for other things, though, so it seemed like a bit of a waste, when I was sure the Tier II model would be more than good enough for what I planned to use it for, which was mainly cruise along the deserted and relatively well-preserved desert highways until I clocked up the requisite thirty kilometers on the odometer.

It took maybe ten seconds to complete the four combines and another second or two to fit them all together. Crafting in Once Human is quick. It's gathering the materials that takes the time. There were several more options to add things like fenders, something I definitely would like to do eventually, but once again I didn't want to commit the extra materials just yet so I put the hot-rodding on hold and stuck with the basic model.

Boy, does it look beat-up. The thing is basically a rust-bucket. In fact, it's probably only the rust that's holding it together. It also uses a whole heck of a lot of fuel compared to the motor-bike, which I am only now coming to realise is highly economical to drive. 

It goes, though! The bike will only break 90kph going downhill but the coupe purrs along at over a ton on the flat. It's reasonably easy to steer, albeit with a lot of drift going around corners at that speed but the best part is the way the smallest ramp sends it flying into the air, all four wheels off the ground, to land with a very satisfying thump and judder, eighties' action-movie style.

In a way, Once Human is the open-world driving title I was loking for when I bought The Crew. One where you just jump in drive and don't have to pass a fricken' driving test first. There are no controls other than steering and the brake, which I only discovered last week is the Space Bar. Before that I just hammered the "S" key and jumped off, letting the bike tip over and scree along the roadway on its side until friction brought it to a halt. 

I've never been the least interested in pretending to use the controls of an imaginary vehicle. All I want is the sensation of travelling in (Or on.) one at high speed without the real-life anxiety of impending injury or death. Plus something scenic to look at while I'm driving, of course. 

Once Human provides all of that more than adequately, especially since it has a choice of in-game radio stations to make the whole thing feel even more cinematic. The tunes are good, too, although each station only has a couple that go round and round. I just wish you could import tracks  from your own music library to play on the in-car stereo.

I drive in third-person view, which makes me feel like I'm in a movie. There is an option to go into first person, annoyingly tied to the Caps Lock key, meaning every time I use it I end up shouting next time I say anything. First person perspective is, as usual, more immersive but also brings on motion sickness very quickly so I've only dabbled.

I did discover, while using the in-game camera to take a screenshot from inside the vehicle, that in first-person the game only renders your arms. That was freaky. You can get some very nice shots from inside the car looking out but I don't recommend swinging the camera around to see nothing but a pair of disembodied hands clinging to the steering wheel...

It's as well that I really enjoy just crusing the highways in Once Human because thirty thousand meters, or thirty kilometers, turns out to be a lot further than I imagined. I used up most of a tank of fuel and about fifteen or twenty minutes just getting to 10km. Luckily the roadside is peppered with abandoned cars, many of which have spare fuel stashed in the trunk so I can largely replace what I'm using as I travel.

It should have occured to me somehow but never did that if the derelict vehicles have storage space in their trunks, so would my car, when I made it - and it has. In Once Human, your car is also a mobile storage unit, one of more than a few things in the game that reminds me of  Fallen Earth - all those nodding donkeys, wind turbines and red sand...

Before I made my car, I popped over to Greywater and loaded upon all the Commissions I could get, namely five of them. They were very slightly more demanding than in earlier phases but only very slightly. It took me maybe ten minutes to finish all five, which jumped me from Level 39 to Level 43. 

I 've been able to make the highest grade of armor and weapons, Tier V, for a while but now I'm over 40 I can finally equip them, too. Whether I can be bothered, with only a couple of weeks left in the Season, is another matter. It hardly seems worth the effort since I'll lose them all when it ends.

Phase Four brought yet another Survey, at least the third since launch, focusing this time on the general topic of Seasons. I completed it with interest and enthusiasm. It was clear from the choice of questions the developers were trying not just to guage sentiment for the Season mechanic but also to test how well-understood it was and how much of the information they've been releasing about how it all works has sunk in.

Sadly, there was no grade at the end, so I don't know how well I did, but at times it definitely felt more like a test than a survey. I was fairly sure of most of my answers but I did find myself wondering just what materials and items can be carried over. I think almost none but now I'm not so sure of that as I was. 

Curiously, there was a question about what other "Seasonal Games" I'd played, which was multiple choice from a list that included familiar names like Destiny 2, Ark, Final Fantasy XIV and WoW, the latter two being the only titles mentioned that I had any personal experience with. I was unaware that either of those had any mechanic that could be compared, even passingly, with Once Human's slash-and-burn approach so now I'm even more confused about what Starry think they're doing with Seasons than I was before. I'm wondering now if they've confused limited-time, special rules servers like WoW's Season of Discovery with what they're planning. They seem like completely different concepts to me.

There was at least a write-in section where you could give your views on the whole thing so I expressed my incomprehension there. It's not that I think Seasons are a bad idea per se, it's more that I have yet to understand either exactly what they are or why Starry think we need them.

No matter, We'll all find out how it works, for real, soon enough. This phase lasts nine days and then there's just one more, which I expect will be shorter, most likely five days to round out six weeks exactly. By then I hope to be fifty and done with everything I wanted to do.

Whether I'll want to start over and do it again remains to be seen.

Playing By The Rules

I took a day off posting yesterday for the very good reason that I couldn't immediately think of anything I wanted to post about. I could certainly have come up with something if I'd tried but I didn't feel like trying all that hard so I didn't bother. Everyone always said that Bart Simpson was a bad influence. 

Today I'd normally be working, so I wouldn't be posting anyway, but I'm on holiday, so since I didn't post yesterday I guess I should today. Is that how it works? I don't know. I lost my blogging rulebook a while ago.

The only problem is, I don't really have much more of an idea what to post about now than I did twenty-four hours ago. Maybe I'll just do one of those Friday Grab Bag posts but on a Sunday. Actually, Sunday seems like a better day for it, wouldn't you say?

The First Rule Of Fight Club

Let's start with something with some socio-cultural heft to it, why don't we? Although the hysteria over Non-Disclosure Agreements seems to have subsided somewhat of late. I remember a while back when it was a hot topic in mainstream news. I guess it might still be. I stopped paying attention the news about, oh, I guess it must be eighteen months ago now. 

I get a ton of cultural updates on everything from gaming to movies to the arts from a number of sources but I opted out of all politics and general news channels, both online and off, towards the end of the second pandemic year. What with Brexit and covid it had all become so deeply inflected and recursive there seemed little point listening any more. If anything important I genuinely need to know about happens, it either seeps into my attention via cultural osmosis or Mrs Bhagpuss will tell me. Otherwise, I don't need to hear about it.

Back when I was less hermetic, I remember there being a lot of talk about how NDAs were very bad things that were threatening the future of free speech as we know it. That mostly seemed to apply to the kind of documents handed out by one celebrity's lawyers to another's or from some megacorp's legal department to someone's literary agent. No-one was really talking about the NDAs I get asked to sign from time; the ones you have to accept before they let you test a video game these days.

My problem with NDAs for unreleased games is that these days I pretty much only want to "test" them so I can blog about what they're like. Once upon a time, in the ancient past, I wanted to get in because it was so gosh-darned thrilling just to be accepted. Like joining some kind of elite club. If I got in, I took the whole thing as seriously as if it was an actual job. Later, when beta tests ran for months, even years, I wanted to get in so I could play the game as though it was already live.

Familiarity killed the thrill and the commitment. Early Access killed the need. Nowadays, I'm happy to wait until the gates open to the public, which is generally around the same stage of development I'd have gotten into an old school closed beta anyway.

No-one puts an NDA on Early Access or open beta so it makes sense to wait. As I said, my main motivation is usually the opportunity to get a few blog posts out of the experience. Games like Noah's Heart that I go on playing day after day, month after month, are extreme outliers. A swift flick through the blog's back pages will show my average stay in a new mmorpg or fellow traveler rarely sees out the month.

Still doesn't stop me applying for testing programs, though. For one reason it's rarely clear up front whether there's going to be an NDA or not. Some developers follow the old "All publicity..." homily, even now. And then, not all NDAs are the same. Sometimes they're tight enough to choke on but other times there's plenty of give. I'm more than happy to sign up to a "No Livestreaming" clause if I'm allowed to  wax cynical in prose.

In the past year or two, I've made my decision at the point of signing. If I get an invite, I read the NDA. All of it. Carefully. Mostly, that's the end of it. I decline to sign and move on. On that basis, I've skipped a couple of in-development games I really wanted to see, which I'll almost certainly buy and play when they release. In at least one case, I'm still not convinced declining was the best decision, either. 

Then, a couple of days ago, for some reason and none, I signed one. And that's the last I'm going to say about that. I have another couple of applications pending for games I'm arguably more interested in. If either of those comes through I'll probably sign up there, too. Or maybe I won't. Whether I do or not, no-one's going to know about it. These things are so strict you can't even tell anyone you've been accepted. 

Fight Club has a lot to answer for. 

I've never seen Fight Club, by the way. Or maybe I have. If I had, I wouldn't tell you, now would I?

The First Rule of Tufty Club

My god, that ages me. Or does it? Tufty Club feels like it was even before my time. I only heard about it. I never was in it. 

Oh, wait, does everyone know what Tufty Club was? Because I'm awkward and because it amuses me, I'm going to give you this link to explain it. Apparently Tufty was doing his thing right into the seventies but I swear I only ever knew him as something that happened before I was born.

Anyway, the point of Tufty Club was to tell everyone about road safety, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything I'm going to say here. I only mentioned it at all because I was trying to think of the antithesis of Fight Club and it was the first club that popped into my mind. Which, I guess, tells you plenty about what's in there. 

The extremely labored and unconvincing segue I was going for would have had something to do with secrecy and openness but I think we can all agree it's not going to come together. Also, the first rule of Tufty Club would have probably been "Look both ways before you cross the road", which is just confusing the issue even more. All it was supposed to do was introduce a little "What I've Been Playing" section, anyway. Geez! What a totally overblown and unecessary introduction for such a mundane topic. 

Anyway, we got there eventually. So, what have I been playing? Noah's Heart, obvs. I'm level 99 now, closing in on the big three figures. It doesn't stop there, either. I saw someone who was level 105 the other day. I could give you about a dozen more kinds of levels I'm chasing there as well but I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say I'm playing every day and enjoying it a lot, still.

Other than that, one of the big games of my week has been the really excellent Artifact Krewe, which is not only one of the most aesthetically pleasing, visually gorgeous games I've ever played but also a lot more nuanced and layered than I expected. Skrool, the develper, really ought to think about remaking it without the proprietary Guild Wars 2 content and releasing it commercially. It's more than good enough.

The other is Nine Noir Lives, which has also turned out to be deeper than I expected. Okay, not deeper. It's still a jokey, "wouldn't it be funny if everyone was a cat?", Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe pastiche. Nothing's changed there. The depth I'm talking about is the sheer quantity of dialog chains and the exceptionally diligent way the developers seem to have anticipated every possible interaction and crafted an appropriate response for it. 

There are some generic "That doesn't need peanuts" results when you try to add peanuts to someone's shoe (Just as a frinstance.) but most everything gets an individual outcome, which just makes me want to ram all the things together to see what happens. That'll be why I'm still in Act One but loving it.

Some of the puzzles are a bit too puzzling for me but I have a solid walkthrough to help with that. I've only needed to glance at it a handful times and only for long enough to get a hint. The solutions are all very fair, once you get a nudge in the right direction.

I did start Blacksad and liked the graphics, characters and writing quite a bit but it's waaaaay more actiony than I expected. The quicktime games are relentless. I'd have to be in the mood and I mostly haven't been. 

As for Baldur's Gate, I claimed it, downloaded it, installed it, made a character and logged out. It looks very slick on the screen. A good job of bringing it up to date, I'd say. I spent a while investigating voice packs to see if I could track down the old Daria set I used to have but since the top Google search for "Daria soundpack Baldur's Gate"goes to a post on this blog, I think I can forget about it. I'm never reliving that experience, sad to say.

The First Rule of Celebrity Club

Okay, I know "Celebrity Club"'s not a thing but it is really, isn't it? We all know it. Just like we all know the first rule there has to be "Have famous parents". 

There's been a lot of kerfuffle in my media feeds of late concerning "Nepo Babies", which is a band name if ever I heard one. It seems like the most ridiculous twaddle to me. So, knowing people in the line of work you hope to follow opens doors and having the same name gets you noticed. Big fricken deal. You still have to be able to Do The Work. 

Is it any different from a plumber or an elecrtrician or a garage mechanic? If it says Jenkins and Son over the door, does that mean Jenkins Jr. gets a pass on their HNDs or NVQs or whatever the hell set of initials you need these days? You still have to know which end to hold the spanner.

Why was I thinking about this? Because when you see something standing on its head it draws your attention. Last week NME informed me out of the blue that someone called Rob Grant had an album coming out. About the only person I could think of by that name was the guy who co-wrote the overrated SciFi sitcom, Red Dwarf. I very much would not want to listen to an album by him.

Setting Sail On A Distant Horizon - Rob Grant

The Rob Grant in question, though, is someone I find one whole helluva lot more interesting. He's Lana del Rey's father. 

Lana, as you will remember, started out as Elizabeth "Lizzie" Grant, before she changed her name to May Trainor, then Lana del Ray, before finally settling on the version we know today. Her dad, it transpires, is a bit of a piano player himself. He has a co-writer credit and also plays piano on one song, Sweet Carolina, on Lana's last album, Blue Banisters. 

Ahead of the June 9th release of ‘Lost At Sea’, Grant pere's debut album, two tracks have been pushed to YouTube for our perusal and they make for pretty pleasant listening. It's a stone certainty I'd never have given them a moment's attention were it not for his daughter's name but that would have been my loss. It seems beyond ridiculous to complain about fairness just because someone's playing the cards they've been dealt.

Off the back of this unusual twist, I was going to put a whole music post together featuring tracks by children of celebrities and I may well yet get around to that but for now I'll just drop this one in from my "What I've Been Listening To" slush pile.

Moonbath - Sateen Besson

I came across this organically, somehow. As I watched the video, which even now only has just over thirteen hundred views after four months on YouTube, I found myself wondering how she got that bed into the forest. It seemed like a little much for a home-made video for an unknown's first song.

It did, in fact, seem me like the sort of thing you might expect from a famous movie director known for startling, dreamlike imagery. Someone like Luc Besson, for example. So I googled her and of course "Sateen Besson is a French rising Instagram model, social media influencer, and actress who boasts a significant fan base on Instagram. Additionally, she is renowned for being the daughter of the famous French director and screenwriter Luc Besson".

It's a good tune and I'm glad to have heard it. I'm even gladder to have heard this one, which sadly doesn't have a dreamlike video to go with it. If Sateen's family connections add anything, it's interest above and beyond the work itself. You have to womder if she asked her dad for tips on how to get that bed out there. Not to mention how to get it back. 

In the end, everyone has a past, everyone has a family and as the saying goes, you can't choose your relations. If only, eh?

I have more but that's probably enough for a Sunday. Or any day, come to that.

Talking About Not Talking

There was a time when I'd have done just about anything to get access to a closed beta for a game I was looking forward to playing. Okay, not "anything". I mean, I wouldn't have gotten a gang together to steal a diamond necklace from a museum by abseiling down through a hole in the roof, just in case anyone was thinking of asking...

No, I mean I'd have been happy to fill in all kinds of forms and sign all kinds of waivers just to get to see some half-finished game before most other people got a look at it. I'd have been willing to enter contests and make new email addresses and register new accounts, all that bureaucratic malarkey.

Then, if I was lucky enough to get an invite, I'd dutifully have put in my hours, posted my thoughts on the forums, submitted my bug reports and feedback and generally played the role of a good little unpaid QA. My reward for all that self-effacing effort, other than the smug satisfaction of knowing something other people didn't, would have been the knowledge that most mmorpgs genuinely are better in beta. 

Seriously, they are. Or they used to be. But that was in the days when developers didn't just let anyone in. They didn't generally start sending out invites until the bones of the game felt solid. I did play one or two "betas" that barely ran (Horizons, I'm looking at you...) but mostly there was already a game there, waiting to be tested, not just an engine and some promises. 

These days, I'm not at all sure the old "better in beta" meme stands up any more. Most developers don't even bother waiting until they have what would have passed for a beta-quality product before they throw open the doors to anyone with a credit card. Early Access and Paid Alpha have all but done away with real betas.

Or so the theory goes. It's not a theory actually supported by facts but then who bothers with facts any more?  

This week I had an email inviting me to apply for access to a Closed Alpha for a game I am very interested in playing. A couple of days later I saw a news item at MassivelyOp offering access to an alpha preview for another game, one I hadn't heard of before but which sounded interesting. Both seemed like opportunities.

Had I signed up for either of them, I wouldn't be posting about it now. Well, to be strictly fair, I might have been able to mention the bald fact that I'd applied but that would have been all. Both games have positively draconian NDAs, one of which even requires a digital signature, the first time I've ever been asked to supply one for anything outside of my paid employment.

Both games have forms to complete that come with boxes to tick to confirm you've read the Terms and Conditions and Rules of Conduct. Being the suspicious, nit-picking, rule-fearing kind of person I am, I clicked through and did exactly that. Yes, of course I skimmed but I stopped and read in full all the sections about which I had concerns.

Having done so, I declined to proceed with either of the applications. I have to say, hitting the "Do Not Accept" buttons was a bit of a buzz. As Barbara Pym so aptly puts it in her first novel (Some Tame Gazelle, pub. 1950.) which I happened to be reading at the time, "there was a certain pleasure in not doing something".

It wasn't just bloody-minded awkwardness that led me to turn down the offers. Nor was it any lingering concern that to play now might spoil my pleasure later. No, what put me off participating in the testing was something much more straightforward, a purely pragmatic, practical concern: the NDAs for both alphas absolutely forbid any kind of reporting whatsoever.

The last time I signed an NDA for an alpha was for New World. As it happened, I really liked what I saw in that first test; anything I might have said would have been highly complimentary. Ironically, by the time Amazon Games were letting people into testing without an NDA, the game had changed to the point where I was no longer quite so sure about it.

That was an educative experience. I fully appreciate why companies don't want opinions to be formed by early builds that will almost inevitably change out of all recognition by the time the game launches. This isn't a complaint about the existence of NDAs in this context; asking would-be testers to sign them seems to me to be an eminently sensible precaution.

What I learned from New World and now from these two games is that I personally am no longer sufficiently interested in the process as a player to abide by such restrictions. It came as something of a minor epiphany. I think it's entirely possible that I now play games almost wholly because they give me something to blog about, not because I want to play them in their own right.

Not being able to blog about New World during the first alpha irritated me no end but at the time I was still sufficiently motivated to log in and play just for the experience. It's hard for me to imagine doing that now. If I'm not going to write about something, these days I don't generally feel the urge to bother with it at all.

Conversely, when I do play something new, I get twitchy if I don't have a way to take screenshots at a moment's notice. Almost the first thing I do in every new game is to open the Settings and look for the screenshot commands. If I can't find them, which is disturbingly common, especially in games still in a pre-release version, I immediately exit the game and fire up FRAPS. If that doesn't work, I prepare myself for the laborious process of using PrtScr, cutting and pasting individual images to Paint.net as I go, which makes playing the games feel juddery and disjointed and not much fun at all.

And yet I persevere, because what really interests me is reporting on what I see and do in the games, not just seeing and doing it. It's been like this for a while, now, and once again I'm not complaining. My suspicion is that if I wasn't blogging about most of these games I wouldn't be playing them at all.

Which isn't to say I wouldn't be playing any games. I'd be playing far fewer games, that's true, and probably I'd be playing the games I did play for fewer hours, but I haven't lost my interest in or love for the genres I favor - mmorpgs and adventure games in particular. It's more that I'd be doing boring things in them that no-one would ever want to hear about... even more than I do already.

And that's why tests with NDAs really aren't going to work for me, not so long as I'm writing this blog. It'd just be too frustrating. The thing about hotly-anticipated games that haven't been released yet is that they make for really good copy. It's not so much that posting reveals draws a crowd; it's more that new stuff is really, really easy to write about.

It's self-evident in the choices I've made here over the last two or three years. I enjoy writing about games when they're new and confusing. I find the learning process compulsive and I like to go over what I'm learning at inordinate length, partly because it helps me clarify things but mostly because i just like the sound of my own voice.

Eventually, when things start to become clear and the shine of the new has faded a little, I can settle into just playing for the fun of it without feeling I have to write everything down. That's about where I am with Noah's Heart now. Athough there's still an uncomfortable amount I don't understand, I no longer feel compelled to discuss my lack of understanding in front of an audience. I just do my dailies and enjoy it.

To sign a legal document forbidding me to share my thoughts and opinions about a new game here would be to condemn myself to an indefinite period of frustration, which is reason enough to opt out,  but there's another reason as well. 

I'm not at all happy about some of the exaggerated claims of ownership over anything I might write about the game even when permitted. I understand I'm playing off other people's copyrighted work here and I'm very willing to respect things like image rights over the screenshots or video I might take in the games but when it comes to writing about my time playing, my words are my words. 

It's not just NDAs for testing environments that make these land-grabs, either. I've uninstalled more than one released game over content creation rights clauses in the EULA. I may not be making any money off the things I write here but I'm damned if I see why anyone else should.

This, then, is most likely the only post I'm going to get out of these two games until they hit some kind of open access testing, if not launch itself. I remain interested in them but I'll defer any comments until I'm allowed to make them freely and without restraint.

I'm not even going to mention which games they are.

Just A Preview: New World

The access code and instructions for Amazon's upcoming New World preview popped up in my inbox this afternoon. In keeping with all the previous tests it looks to be a highly organized and efficient affair, if somewhat over-complicated.

I never did get around to using my code for the recent stress test, or "Density Test" as Amazon like to call it. The times were very inconvenient for me. I don't think any of them co-incided with a period when I would normally be at the keyboard. I knew that when I decided to download the game, although I did think I might make the effort and stay up a little later than usual just to see what was what. In the end that never happened. I like my sleep too much.

Even so, I thought it would be worth the trouble of installing the game since I was going to have to do it for the Preview anyway. And then Amazon announced the Preview would be using a different client so we could go ahead and delete the one we'd just installed. It seemed a bit odd in as much as you'd think the information gained during the Density test  would relate to the iteration of the client used in the Density test but I'm sure they know their business.

There's what seems to be an unecessarily complicated matrix explaining who gets to play when:

 Looking at that, couldn't it be condensed into two lines? 

• All Pre-order Customers- August 25.
• Everyone else - August 25-29.

I guess it's friendly of them to over-explain. Better than the other way around, at least.

Also, 2016? Were they really taking pre-orders in 2016? If you'd asked me, I'd have said it was no more than a couple of years ago that I first heard of New World, but that just shows either how time flies or how poor my memory is. Both, probably.

A quick check shows I was writing about the announcement almost four years ago. Not to honk my own horn but I called it from the start : "It does seem unlikely that Jeff Bezos will want to restrict the potential to the relatively small FFA PvP market when there's a much greater restricted PvP and pure PvE audience to tap." Yeah, got that right, although I don't guess Jeff Bezos intervened personally. Then again, maybe he did.

I'm very keen to get my hands on the current shop-window edition of New World, partly because I've missed playing it. I was a little miffed never to get an invite to the second alpha, not least because the trickle of information that leaked out seemed very encouraging. Mostly, though, I'm looking forward to the Preview because for the first time I'll actually be able to talk openly about what I see there.

Not being able to blog about my time in the first alpha was frustrating; not being able to post any of my gorgeous screenshots, even more so. Now, finally, I'll be able to say whatever I like and put up pictures, too.

Still can't talk about anything that happened before, which is mildly annoying because comparisons of how things have changed would obviously be meaningful and illuminating. I imagine some unavoidable subtext will leak through, even if unintentionally. Hard to preclude it completely and I'm not sure I'm going to try all  that hard.

Checking Steam, the new client seems to have updated while I was writing this post, so now all that's left to do is wait. As a pre-orderer I should be able to log into the game on Tuesday at around five in the evening, a highly convenient and sociable time.

There are five regions for the Preview:

It's a long time since I played an MMORPG that gave me a choice of East and West Coast U.S.A. For cultural reasons, I always prefer to play on American servers if given the choice but from the U.K. ping to the Eastern Seaboard can often be better than ping to Central Europe so it's a done deal.

The Preview lasts a generous ten days, which should be more than enough to give it a good shake. I'm looking forward to it.

Watch this space for further revelations. Er, better make that just revelations, I guess. Not like I ever revealed anything before. No, not at all.

More Fun In The New World

This could be a very short post. Very short indeed. It's tricky, writing about something, when you aren't allowed to describe anything you see, anything you do or how anything works. I can't even tell you what the "something" I'm not describing is called. The post title? Oh, that's just some old thing by X. Don't go reading anything into it...

And there's no use going show instead of tell, either, because even though I may have taken a portfolio of pictures, I absolutely cannot show them to anyone. Don't even ask.

NDAs have been in the news a lot this week where I come from. I switched the radio on as I was making breakfast yesterday and listened to a journalist explaining what the letters stood for and what the process meant as though it was some new species of bat just discovered in a cave previously unknown to man.

Obviously no-one reading this needs the acronym explained. NDAs have long been part of the DNA of MMOs. I've lost count of the number I've signed up to over the years. It must be dozens by now and technically I've breached them all, since I've always chatted to Mrs Bhagpuss about what I've been up to behind the chainmail curtains. Occasionally she might watch me over my shoulder and a few times I've even lent her my log-in so she could take a wander round.

What I have never done, though, is break the terms of the NDA in any way, shape or form that anyone outside of my own house could know about. In the days when NDAs for testing MMORPGs were routine, it was never much of a concern; back then I didn't have a blog.

And until now having a blog hasn't posed any problems with NDAs either. Since Inventory Full began, seven years ago, I've been in any number of alpha and beta tests for new games or expansions to old ones but I can't, off the top of my head, remember any that I wasn't allowed to post about.

Along with plenty of other MMO veterans I've occasionally bemoaned the lack of "proper" beta testing that isn't either a glorified free trial or a barely-concealed cash grab. How ironic, then, that now that I'm finally in one that's none of those things, I'm finding it more than a tad frustrating.

I'd really love to write about my experiences so far in excruciating detail. I have plenty to say, that's for sure. But I can't, even though I'm pretty sure any PR person would be happy to sign off on what I'd write.

Whatever the NDA says (and I have to imagine the exact terms because, although I've looked quite hard, I haven't as yet been able to find them) I'm confident nothing can bar me from talking about how I feel about testing pre-release games in general. If anyone wants to infer that I might be speaking from recent experience that's up to them.

There's a point in any alpha or beta test when you have to decide whether you really want to become invested in what you're doing. There's the reporting of bugs side of things, which is both a public service of a kind and a shrewd investment in your own entertainment futures, but other than that there's the question of how much time to spend on character progression in a testing environment that has no permanence.

It gets quite difficult. There's a lot to consider. If you're finding that you want to log into the alpha or beta test more than you want to log into the Live MMOs you're currently playing, or if you find that the development of your alpha or beta characters is more compelling and satisfying that that of their Live counterparts, then you have something of a dilemma.

In the "Cons" column, firstly, there's the impermanence. Yes, I do believe that fun is fun and no time is wasted if you enjoyed its passing but it's impossible not be aware that the goal you are working towards is ephemeral even beyond the insubstantiality common to virtual worlds.

Secondly, there's the prospect of repetition and with it burnout. Plenty of people have made the mistake of going hard at an alpha or beta test and then finding, when the game has gone Live, their will to do it all again has eroded, taking their interest down with it.

On the "Pro" side, there's pleasure in the moment. If you're having fun then you're having fun, aren't you? Why trade fun now for fun down the line?  It's fresh and new and you're keen. Why take the edge off?

Perhaps most importantly of all, there's that infamous meme: "better in beta". Well, it was, wasn't it? There's often a sweet spot in the development process - sometimes several of them - when systems are more forgiving or more challenging than they're ever going to be in Live. Also weirder. Testing environments are inherantly more volatile and volatility is both intriguing and exhillarating.


And then there's the vibe. In proper (closed, under NDA) alpha or beta tests communities are frequently - I would say usually - better-natured, more cohesive, more patient. People cut each other more slack. In a game with open PvP and full loot that might add up to a significantly different play experience.

There's a strong chance, then, that a closed test might offer the most enjoyable version of the game you'll ever see but against that you have to set the inevitable and possibly imminent deletion of your characters and the destruction of all the progress you've made. As I said, a difficult balance to strike.

Based on my past experience, when I've become both attached to my characters and immersed in their progression during pre-launch testing, I've gone on to have a good run in the game after release. That was the case in some of my very favorite MMORPGs of all time - EQ2, Vanguard, Rubies of Eventide...

I don't think I can remember any MMO that I enjoyed in testing but disliked when it launched. There's been the odd case, Rift being a particular example, where changes made soon after the game went live detracted substantially from what made the game so satisfying in testing, but even then it's been a matter of degree. I still enjoyed live Rift, just not as much.

In the case of the game I might be writing about there's a very definite chance that the Live edition won't suit me as well as the version I'm able to log into right now. Live games are generally more intense than tests and that's not necessarily what I'm looking for these days, particularly whenit comes with full-loot PvP attached.

All the same, as things look right now, I will be along for the ride when this thing goes Live. Whether I'll stay long, who knows? The bottom line is, I'm having a lot more fun than I expected. I plan on riding that while it lasts and hoping at least some of it carries over when the real game arrives.

And that, I think, is about as close to the wind as I care to sail. Shame I can't use the pictures I've taken, though. Some of them are gorgeous.

World Shut Your Mouth

It's been a very long time indeed since I was last invited to join an alpha or beta that had a strict NDA. I'm not sure it's happened during the life of this blog. Just as well, given that the main reason I sign up for the things nowadays is in the hope of getting few posts out of the experience.

It would get even more awkward if the NDA went so far as to forbid any mention of the fact that an invite had been extended and accepted. Although, I guess, just accepted, really.

After all, if you chose to turn the invite down, there'd be nothing to stop you talking about it, would there? By definition you wouldn't have agreed to the terms so you could hardly be bound by them, either legally or morally. Ironic to think you'd have more freedom to talk about something you had no personal engagement with than something you did, but there you go.

Then, if it's been a long time since I was under strict NDA, it's even longer since I was subject to a non-disclosure agreement that I actually believed would be enforced. Usually it feels as though no-one's really taking it seriously. Once in a while, though, there's tangible evidence someone very much is.

I'm trying to remember when was the last time I saw a personalized watermark on a screenshot. I think it must have been in the closed beta for the original version of Final Fantasy XIV. I think I still have some of those, somewhere. Probably not allowed to show them to anyone, even now.

If you go back far enough, there was a time when no-one questioned the idea that the terms and conditions of an NDA were there to be enforced. Even so, I've always wondered just how "strict" the punishment would turn out to be if all you blurted out was something along the lines of "well, this is a lot better than I thought it would be" or "I'm enjoying myself - it's surprisingly fun".

I'm not sure how much damage you could do to the prospects of a game by telling people something like that, even at a very early stage of development. Is it really worth kicking someone out of the program for letting on that  the game looks good, plays well and is easy to understand? Or that it feels like it has potential? You'd think most companies would be happy to get that kind of endorsement.

Anyway, if I was in such a test, I couldn't say any of that. Indeed, if I was in a test with a very strict NDA I couldn't even say I was in the test at all. So, I guess there wouldn't be much point going on about it. It would certainly make for a very short, very vague blog post.

With no pictures.

NDA? We Don' Need No Steenkin' NDA! : Landmark

Color me astonished. Less than 24 hours after the EQN Landmark alpha began John "Smed" Smedley declared the NDA null and void. That officially makes my Founder's Pack purchase worthwhile right there.

No time to write anything (one in the morning here) but isn't it lucky I loaded up FRAPS right from the start and took some screenshots even though I thought no-one but me would ever see them?

Yes. The answer is yes. Yes it is lucky.

Handsome Devil

Blue Moon

Running Up That Hill

In A Hole

The Whole of the Moon

Red Light Indicates Door Is Secured

Nothing Comes To Mind

It's The Beginning of a New Age: EQ2

 I know, you were expecting the Velvet Underground. Well you're Kinda Outta Luck.

Tuesday is the dawn of the Age of Aquarius Discovery and the NDA is down, so here are my thoughts.

 I hadn't planned on doing the Beta. Over the years I've come to the conclusion that it's generally a bad idea to beta expansions for MMOs that I'm already playing. While I do really enjoy testing stuff it feels too much like opening the presents before Christmas Day.

I didn't even apply for this one. Which didn't matter because I got added without asking. Since I had access I figured it wouldn't hurt to take just a little look at the Freeport revamp. And the Dungeon Maker. Oh, and Mercenaries. Just a little peek. I just peeled the wrapping paper back an inch or two, really. I hardly even opened the box...

Freeport Revamp.

Even Lucan can't stop the rain

Not strictly part of AoD, you get this whether you like it or not when GU62 rolls in on the same day. As I mentioned I was more than a little apprehensive about this one. I am delighted to report that the EQ2 team got almost everything right that the EQ1 team got wrong.

The new Freeport is absolutely the old Freeport. Pretty much everything is where it should be, looking like it should look. Yes, Lucan's had the decorators in and the builders too. There's been some re-zoning, a few buildings have gone and some citizens have been re-housed. But it's still Freeport, just smartened up and with all the doors open!

I wish they'd knocked down The Jade Tiger instead of The Blood Haze Inn because I purely loved that terrace, but East Freeport is so much better it balances out. There's a marvelous souk where the broker used to stand in his little cubby hole. Execution plaza now comes complete with an actual execution (which I deliberately haven't seen yet). The big ship in South Freeport had to go for technical reasons, but I can't say I missed it.

Overall, a big thumbs up for Freeport!

Dungeon Maker

I could have sworn it was bigger

I played with this one quite a bit and I really like it a lot. It comes with a small number of preset dungeon layouts. Crushbone was one. Literally the ground floor level of the actual zone as far as I could tell. I knocked up a perfectly serviceable dungeon in half an hour. I was really impressed by how easy the tools were to use. I was anticipating that only dedicated decorators would really get much out of this feature but just about anyone should be able to throw together something worth running.

That said, it's going to be a decorator's dream. Not only do you get a ton of dungeon-origined placeables but you can also place pretty much anything you'd be able to place in a house. Station Cash furniture doesn't always work - I couldn't place my Rivervale set that I bought with my free beta 999,999 SC allowance. (Generous or what?). You can even name all the creatures and give them dialog  (or will be able to - not sure if that's in for launch). I foresee some amazing creations. Having many of the items for the Dungeon Maker drop as tradeable loot from adventure content is a brilliant idea, too. Nothing like a gold-rush to spice up the economy.

There's one major downside that's been much discussed, of course. For balance reasons you can't run your own characters through the Dungeon Maker dungeons. I was worried that might make them feel like EQ1's Monster Missions, which I loathed, but it really doesn't. I found it very easy to associate with my Drolvarg avatar and the Bellywhumper was... well it's a Bellywhumper for god's sake!

Another big thumbs up.

Mercenaries

Mercenaries are my favorite ever addition to EQ1 so I had very high hopes for this. I only tried one Mercenary, a Ratonga Inquisitor called Stamper Jeralf. I was playing a very low level bruiser and with Stamper helping me I was pretty much invincible. In fact, this Gnoob video, which I took to be a parody, turned out to be pretty much on the nail. If I'd let him Stamper would happily have power-leveled me all day so long as I didn't run out of silver.

I'm calling Trading Standards about you, Jeralf.

Unlike EQ1 mercs, these all come with proper names and back-stories and they seem to be less focused on their jobs than their counterparts from half a millennium ago. Despite hiring on as a healer, Stamper pretty much never cast a healing spell. At one point I began to doubt he even knew how. He mostly liked to hit things with his hammer and cure me of any possible ailment I might have picked up over the last few seconds. Since his buffs were so overwhelmingly powerful that pretty much nothing could hit me I guess he didn't feel there was much need for healing.

It looks very much as though EQ2 mercenaries are being tuned to be less useful than their predecessors, but they still look pretty darn useful all the same. Apparently they are quite expensive to run at higher levels. I'd bet that after a while the usefulness gets tweaked up and the cost down.

One thumb up and the other hovering ready for the fully-tuned version.

I didn't try a Beastlord but the vibe on them in beta seems almost universally positive. Even the folks who couldn't find anything good to say about anything else grudgingly acknowledged that Beastlords were going to be a big hit. For my money and from everything I've read in and out of beta they aren't Beastlords at all, but so long as they're a fun class, who cares?

Tradeskill Associates and Reforging I also skipped. But... Othmirs!

All in all it looks fantastic. Has the potential to be the best expansion for years for the EQ2 demographic that's had to take a backseat since Kunark.

NDA is still up on all beta screenshots so these are all official SOE issue. Mine would have been a lot better, but there you go...