My Other Life : SW:TOR

Yesterday, when I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, I was struck by a mild irony. I'd just finished a post noting the blog's drift from fantasy to science fiction, quoting this game as proof, and what did I find myself doing? Placing runes on an altar in a dungeon to summon a demon.

And it didn't end there. In an entirely unrelated sequence of missions that took up much of the afternoon and evening I engaged in a series of ritual initiations so I could join a quasi-mystical cult, after which I delved deep into a vast mausoleum on a mission to seal tombs to keep ancient, dark spirits from rising.

Okay, I was killing the possessed minions with a rifle and sealing the crypt doors with a welding torch but that's hardly Science Fiction either. Action-adventure, maybe. More Indiana Jones than Han Solo.

I shouldn't really be surprised. TOR is "WoW in space", after all. And some old-school S.F. fans I know (and I know a few) would scoff at the Star Wars franchise being labelled "Science Fiction" in the first place. Even so, I found it disconcerting.

I was playing my second character, a Sniper, the ranged offshoot of the Imperial Agent class. I picked Agent because everyone seems to think it has the best story and Sniper because I'd read it had overwhelming AoE potential.

Those promises have, so far, been borne out in play. "Suppressive Fire", which is apparently the least-efficient AE, clears gangs of mobs faster than the Scoundrel can stealth past them. The only thing that slows me down is picking up all the loot.

I went with Engineering for the advanced spec. According to Dulfy's guide it's "the most challenging of the three Sniper specs", "very controversial" and "the hardest" - but only for PvP. Since I don't plan on doing much PvP that doesn't matter.

Another guide I like, VULKK.com, says the "recommendation for leveling would be either Marksmanship or Engineering. The former is better for target swapping, the latter excels at AoE". It was AoE I wanted so Engineering it was.

The disadvantage of the Sniper is that it has to use "Cover" for pretty much everything. Cover is a really irritating mechanic that I have rarely had to deal with in almost forty years of gaming. I know what it is but I can't recall playing a game that uses it. I've been lucky.

In TOR, the concept of "cover" is so attenuated it barely counts and yet I still find it annoying. If you boil away the flavor, what it mostly means is having to press an extra key every time you attack. Added to that there's not having your icons where you put them because a special cover bar replaces the regular one. The final indignity being stalked by a stupid green ghost that shows you where you can hide, mostly in some really stupid place you'd never pick in a million years and that's going to get you killed.

Or it would if you weren't so insanely OP, because those are the penalties you incur for being incredibly powerful in solo play. And I barely have any of the good skills yet. I can stand a few extra key presses to play a class that effectively one-shots three-spawns before they can even react.

I'm very happy with the class mechanics, even allowing for cover. I'm also increasingly interested in the story.

I haven't read any spoilers or walkthroughs but I have done a few searches on "best story". Agent is always in the top three; often first. The characters are stock and the writing and voice acting are at best solid but the plot is twisty, turny and unpredictable, which suits me.

Paradoxically, given my stated dislike of having to make "meaningful choices", I'm begining to chafe against the looseness of the bonds in TOR's faction system. I still can't always reliably predict whether an option will give Light or Dark faction, let alone whether my Companion will approve or disapprove. That's good.  In theory I wholeheartedly approve of the ambiguity. Since I learned that it really makes no difference to gameplay either way, though, I've started to wish that it would.

It's probably just as well it doesn't because, predictably, I find it all but impossible to make any response that makes me feel I'm not being polite, let alone take the ones that are clearly "evil". The way I'm heading, I'm going to end up playing Mary Poppins of the Stasi, floating in on my invisible umbrella, solving everyone's problems with a stern look, a few choice words of wisdom and a great deal of gunfire. Apparently that's a perfectly acceptable career choice in the modern-day (Evil) Empire.

So far walking the Imperial path hasn't been quite as uncomfortable as I expected. There have been a couple of "are you sure you want to play this game any more?" moments but nothing genuinely terminal.

I do find the casual, genre tone in TOR makes the nasty stuff more disturbing and less acceptable than the significantly darker, nastier material in The Secret World. I think it's because I never felt, while playing as a Templar, that I was expected to be complicit in abhorrent behavior. It might have been different if I'd gone with Illuminati.

There is some of that in TOR, although I'd have to say there's some in most MMORPGs. I usually play characters who oppose it, though. Or just ignore it by not engaging with the story at all. Playing Empire side in TOR seems to obligate a certain degree of complicity. I'm curious to see how long I can tolerate it.

There are no such problems with the locations. I started on Hutta, which was even more yellow than Taris, something I would not have believed possible. I like the Hutt. Well, I don't like them; they're repulsive. But they all remind me of Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, which helps a lot.

Hutta seemed to pass quite quickly, unlike the Imperial capital,  Dromund Kaas, where I feel like I've spent just short of forever. I realised I might have been there too long when I noticed that some of the mobs had already gone gray before I'd even made it out of the first area.

Level scaling in TOR is strange. I got annoyed by doing missions where all the mobs were giving me no experience so I went and looked up how it works but I still don't get it.

On the Republic side I can go back to Ord Mantell at 50 and get good xp killing Level 8 mobs but as an Imperial Agent, doing at-level missions at 17 with no level scaling in effect, the mobs I'm being asked to kill are too low to give XP. I'm willing to bet that if I come back in twenty levels and do those missions again I'll get the XP I couldn't get the first time around. That can't be ideal.

If you have to hang around, there are worse places. Hutta is acid yellow but Dromund Kaas is Kind of Blue. Or the city is, at least. There's a bizarre, rainy, round midnight, New York noir feel to the place. The New York of Man in the High Castle, that is.

I bought a Stronghold at the first opportunity (which messed up my "Have you ever thought of buying a stronghold?" mission) and the cinematic sets the tone perfectly. The moody shots on the rainswept balcony make me want to earn enough credits just to open that room before my subscription lapses.

Dromund Kaas took a while to get going. Like Taris, there are altogether too many circuitous paths to make cross-country travel a walk in the park. I seemed to be spending even longer than usual trail-finding, often ending up in a dead end or back where I started.

In time, though, the story opened out and I spent most of Sunday playing. I topped out at Level 21 with the Revan storyline on Dromund Kaas complete and my class storyline paused at what looked to be a crucial moment.

The whole thing would have gone a lot faster and more smoothly if it hadn't been so damned busy. The Empire seems to be a much more popular choice than The Republic. Dromund Kaas was positively heaving with people, which would have been great if it wasn't for another of TOR's old-school mechanics.

I don't think I've been KS'd this often since Ruins of Kunark. Over and over I found myself in the same area doing the same mission as two or three other people. No-one invited anyone to group (not that I can complain about that: I didn't either). We just all ran around leap-frogging each other, trying to kill the mobs or click on the things before someone else got there first.

There was one time when I literally could have joined a line to kill a boss for a Mission, something I last remember doing in the original Rift tutorial. I opted to go and do another mission instead. When I came back the boss was up but before I could attack him some crazed Sith leapt over my head with two elites chasing him and started to hack away at the boss with his Lightsaber. At least you get credit for the kill if you do enough damage, or so I discovered by going flat out with everything I had.

I guess this is evidence that the game is doing not too badly, population-wise. I'm playing on a North American server, too, so I'm not even seeing it at its busiest. Thank god!

I don't have a spaceship yet, nor the slightest suggestion that I'm likely to get one. The Smuggler story turns on getting your stolen starship back to the extent that, when it happened, I felt like I'd finished the whole thing. By contrast, and at about the same level, it seems as though the Agent storyline has barely started.

As must be obvious by now, I'm very much enjoying myself so far. I'm keeping my hand in on other MMORPGs but there's a good chance TOR will be my main game for a while. If I have any doubts they come, perhaps surprisingly (although perhaps not) from the stories.

Not the quality so much as the quantity. At times playing TOR can feel more like watching a TV show or reading a book than playing an MMORPG. You can sidestep that for a while by exploring or grinding mobs or running Heroics but the story is always going to suck you back in eventually. Like quicksand.

For now, that's okay. But I find the thought of six more class stories, not to mention the planaetary arcs and the story-heavy expansions to come, more daunting than encouraging. Looking at the Smuggler story, for example, I'm Level 51 and I haven't even got to the end of Chapter One. At this rate it would take me most of the year, playing all the time, to finish even the original class stories.

When I finished playing yesterday I told Mrs Bhagpuss I'd had to stop because my brain hurt. I wasn't tired in the way I often get in games from concentrating on the mechanics. I was reeling from too much storytelling.

I have never felt like that after a long session playing an MMORPG, not even story-heavy TSW. It's the enervating-yet-overfull sensation I associate with binge-watching tv or staying up too late to finish a novel, not with the supposedly relaxing pastime of playing games.

I think the truth is that I'm going to have to pace myself. At the rate I'm going I will burn out before I get to see the end of anyone's story. Also, when I return to work, as I will next week, I'm just not going to have the time to play the way I have been.

That's okay, though. I don't think TOR is going anywhere. I'll take my time.

Pushing Too Hard : SWL

Yesterday I happened to read something Telwyn posted about the new Anima Allocation system that was added to Secret World Legends as part of a recent "Quality of Life" update. Then I saw Syp talking about it too.

I had read about all this when it happened but at the time I didn't have a window of opportunity through which to look the changes over. Well, what better time than halfway through a lazy Sunday afternoon?

I logged in and went to check the new system, only to find that you need to be Level 20 to use it. I'd already forgotten that SWL, unlike TSW, has levels. I couldn't even have guessed with any conviction what mine might be.

It turned out that my one and only character was Level 18. That seemed close enough to fix so I pulled on my leveling pants (I don't actually have leveling pants although that's a merchandising idea right there...) and set to it.

I warmed up by doing The Black House. It was far shorter and easier than I remembered and yet I still managed to die somehow.

I'd logged out in the roadside store in Savage Coast. I thought I remembered a couple of simple kill quests there so I went to grab them...and they wouldn't give them to me! I conned a couple of mobs. They were only a handful of levels higher but the quests involving them were recommended for level 22 and hard-locked somewhere above 18.

Well. That's not fun. For all my droning on about "comfort gaming" and liking to do things the easy way, it's been my counter-intuitive practice of extremely long standing to push ahead of my level while leveling up.

Having developed most of my MMO habits in the five years before WoW appeared to reset the hobby I never acquired any innate feeling for "quest hubs" or "completing an area". To me, the only parameters to let me know if I should be where I am, doing what I'm doing, are whether anyone has anything they're willing to let me do and whether I can do it without dying. Much.

As a compulsive leveler, I am also always very aware of what constitutes good xp. That varies from game to game, be it questing, grinding, open world or dungeons, solo or group, PvE or PvP. It doesn't take me long to get a feel for it and in most cases you get better xp doing quests and killing mobs somewhat above your level.

I don't recall Innsmouth Academy even having a lacrosse court, let alone a quest for it. And my other Templar's an alumni!

On my run through The Secret World a few years ago the main limiting factor was gear. With no levels it was theoretically possible to push a long way ahead without scratching around for every last quest and as an explorer I am always eying the horizon.

I remember leaving Egypt, which had become a tad too tough to be fun, to go to Transylvania, which was harder still, because I found I could -just- kill the very first mobs (ghouls, I believe) inside the zone line. Those ghouls dropped gear that was a significant upgrade and with a few of those I was able to go back to Egypt and progress a little further.

That's how I have played MMOs since the end of the last century. That's my favorite gameplay - or my favorite solo gameplay, anyway.

Secret World Legends doesn't really let you do that. For one thing there aren't any gear drops to speak of but more significantly, not only is there now some very strict level locking on the content but the mobs seem to have been adjusted accordingly.

At this point in the questline every mob is level 22 while I'm 19.

At level 18, anything below me presents no challenge at all. I can just barrel into clusters of Level 16s and mow them down. At even con it's still straightforward but let the mobs go to 20 or 21 and everything changes fast.

It seems as though, in the quest to make the game more accessible and, particularly, comprehensible for an audience that didn't appreciate TSW, Funcom have decided to funnel players into a very specific channel. The quests may not be linear but the options for your character are considerably more constricted than they used to be.

One quest that didn't appear to be locked was the main storyline. In the New England section of the game that's Dawning of an Endless Night. I was on step 11 so I cracked on with that.

It seemed a lot harder than I remember. Not the celebrated/infamous puzzles, which I either remembered or looked up on the wiki, but the fights. Everything was three or four levels above me and mostly came in pairs or groups. Worst of all were the mages that summon minions, which sometimes found me fighting half a dozen mobs before I'd realized where they were coming from.

I died a lot, which didn't seem to matter in any way other than annoying me. It took me a lot longer than I expected. I had to stop to upgrade my gear, spend my SP and AP and fiddle around with my build, all just to try and get ahead. 

Eventually I brute-forced my way to the end of the Savage Coast sequence, dinging 20 at the same time. My quest indicator pointed me to the third New England zone, Blue Mountain, which is unnerving, considering the game otherwise doesn't yet consider me ready for the second half of Savage Coast.

Was it worth it?

The run took over two hours, so an hour a level, which is laughably, even unimaginably, short by Golden Age standards. I remember I used to allow ten to fifteen hours for a level in the twenties when I was playing EverQuest in the early 2000s.

Even so, it seemed slow, hard work and not a huge amount of fun. The cut scenes weren't as impressive as I remember them, either, the writing not as sharp. Even the voice-work, which I have praised many times, seemed to be considerably more stilted and awkward than I expected.

Maybe that's familiarity, maybe exaggerated expectations or the disappointing false glow of nostalgia. Whatever the reason, I'd had enough. I didn't even stop to experiment with the Anima Allocator. Instead I logged out and went to play EQ2, where my Bruiser is also fighting above his weight class.

The difference there is that he's winning, easily, which I find to be a lot more fun. The only downside is that questing above your level gets you drops you can't equip, a sure sign that whoever designed the quest didn't expect you to get there that soon.

That's a problem I'd always rather have, though. After all, if I managed to finish the quest or kill the mob, wearing what I'm wearing, well, I obviously don't really need those upgrades yet, do I?

Taking Sides

Syp started the ball rolling last week when he suggested MMORPGs would be better without side quests. As well as spawning its own lengthy comment thread, the modest proposal sparked replies at GamingSF and Endgame Viable along with a comprehensive and convincing rebuttal from Azuriel at In An Age.

I've been mulling all week. I find my own views are...complex. Contradictory. Conflicted.

My instinctive response was to leap to the defense of the "Side Quest" as a fundamental, structural component of the entire genre: one of those essential elements without which it would be awkward to argue a game was an MMO at all. That lasted about as long as it took me to remember all the MMOs that have managed passably well without one or more of those so-called "essentials". Levels, dungeons, races, classes - you name it and you can bet some developer threw it under a bus back in pre-alpha.

It would, then, without question, be possible to design an MMORPG with no side quests and still have it be, indisputably, an MMO. But would that be a good idea?

No. Not to my mind. For one thing, Azuriel's argument, that "Sidequests are the mechanism by which imaginary worlds are built" is persuasive.

Trapper Borgus? Trapper Bogus, more like!

So-called side quests are often the parts you remember best, longest and most fondly. I'd be pushed to recall a single line of dialog from the "Ages End" storyline that formed the narrative spine of EQ2 for a decade but certain phrases from far less portentous plots come back to me over and over, like restless ghosts.

Mrs Bhagpuss and I often croak "Oh, my aching back!" in imitation of the malingering dwarf who doles out a series of tedious "quests" at the entrance to Thundering Steppes. I recently added someone to my GW2 friends list purely on the strength of a conversation we had that began when I sent him a tell about his character, who he'd named after Baby Joseph Sayer. Only a week ago Mrs Bhagpuss, making a new character, named her after a quest-giver from a quest she hasn't done in a decade. I could go on. And on.

Side quests are like off-topic conversations in a movie. They bring both the characters and the world they inhabit to life. It's more than two decades since I last saw Pulp Fiction, for example, but the first thing that comes to mind when I think of it is the "Royale with cheese" speech.

That scene does absolutely nothing to further the main plot but it's of paramount importance as to why the movie had such an extensive and long-lasting impact on cinema. Seemingly irrelevant details like this make the difference between bumping your nose on the back of a wardrobe or pushing on past fir branches covered in snow.

Suuure you did. Got a doctor's note?

Apart from being the warp (or is the weft?) in the weave of the world, side quests are also integral to gameplay. Or they are if you want to have a particular kind of game. You can hardly call your game "EverQuest" and then not put any quests in it, can you?

And yet...

The original EQ did indeed have plenty of quests but you didn't have to do any of them, not if you didn't want to. You could level up, equip yourself and generally find plenty to justify your $14.99 a week without ever stooping so low as to do a favor for an elf or help a halfling out of a bind.

What's more, the game kept its quests to itself. There were no feathers over anyone's head, no question marks or exclamation points or slowly rotating neon donuts hanging in the air. If you wanted to find out if an NPC had something on her mind you had to ask - and not by right-clicking and listening to a voice actor or watching a cut scene, either.

No, you had to read a wall of text and then type in a reply. If you were good at spotting keywords or just sufficiently verbose you'd get an answer and on it went. And you had to pay attention. The game didn't record anything in a journal for you. There was no journal, other than the notepad and pencil you kept next to your 15" CRT monitor.

Well, you were either there and you know all this or you weren't and you really don't need to. We won't be going back there again, will we? Oh, wait...

Of course, those weren't "side quests". We didn't have side quests back then. We just had quests.

In fact, we couldn't have side quests. Can't have sides without a main and main quests hadn't been invented yet. I played EQ, Dark Age of Camelot, Anarchy Online, The Realm, Endless Ages - a whole bunch of early noughties MMOs. If any of those had a through-line or a central narrative or a Main Quest Sequence then I never tripped over it.

"Quest". It's "Quest"! For heaven's sake get the jargon right!

Come to think of it, that doesn't mean there wasn't one. Just that, if there was, I neither knew nor needed to know about it. The games themselves certainly made no attempt to push Story at me. What they served up was Lore and plenty of it. Also, world-changing events, but even those you mostly had to discover for yourself. If there was a story it was one we lived, not followed.

That pre-lapsarian world lasted a few years. Then World of Warcraft came along and changed everything. Or so the legend goes. And, yes, it's undeniably true that WoW's model of gameplay, particularly the level-by-quest format that's relevant to this discussion, was adopted so widely over the following decade that it came to constitute a new orthodoxy for the genre.

But it was WoW's unprecedented commercial success that irrevocably and inaccurately attributed the quest-based format to the first ever MMO, leaving every other developer toddling along behind, hanging on to Blizzard's shirt-tails . In fact, by the time WoW launched, the floodgates had already breached. EQ2, which launched two weeks before Azeroth opened its doors to the paying public, plumped for an almost identical system. Quest-driven gameplay was set to become the meta for the genre whether or not WoW got there first.

Over the years that followed questing became so ubiquitous, so unavoidable, that whatever luster it briefly enjoyed, tarnished. And yet, even as excitement over unfettered access to an infinitude of unrelated quests began to fade, along came Lord of the Rings Online, upping the ante with its inevitable foregrounding of a central quest-line so portentous no-one could hope to ignore it.

The final nail in the coffin of player freedom hammered home when BioWare joined the party; with their Fourth Pillar the assimilation was complete. MMOs had morphed into single-player RPGs that single players didn't have to play on their own. Go, socializers!

Almost without anyone noticing there was anything odd about it, we woke up in a future where every MMO, even supposed sandboxes, had to have a plot. A story. A narrative. A beginning, a middle and an end. It was like a collective bad dream from which the genre is only now beginning to awaken.

Wait while I get you another pint, old-timer. Then you can tell me more about your fascinating life. Said no-one, ever.

How did it happen? And why, exactly? Why did just being in a world, killing monsters, leveling your character and getting better gear cease to be enough? How did MMORPGs sleep-walk into becoming a narrative medium?

Don't look at me. I drank the same Kool-Aid  everyone else did. And, like I said, I'm conflicted.

It's not as though I don't welcome some direction. I was never swept up by the sandbox craze that followed the perceived failure of the Theme Park narrative. I like to go my own way, sure, but the exhilaration of taking the path less taken requires there be a path more taken, too.

I've heaped enough praise on The Secret World's story, after all. I'm invested in the GW2 "School for Dragon Slayers" plotline even though I know it's incoherent nonsense. I've even found much to like in the ultra-linear central narratives of the likes of Twin Saga and Blade and Soul. I enjoy a good - or even not-so-good - story as much as the next addict.

Stepping back, though, trying to be objective for once in my life, I have to wonder whether, rather than putting side quests on ice, it isn't the Main Quest itself that should be deep-sixed. If side quests add breadth and depth to the world, don't main quests try to put that world in a box and close the lid? When it comes to exploring a new world, the contrast between side quests and main quests can feel like the difference between hitch-hiking across the USA and taking a "twelve cities in ten days" coach tour.

You'd better close that fourth wall - I think your meta's showing.

None of which is meant to suggest that side quests are perfect as they are. The love and attention the writers give to some side quests make reading the label on the back of the ketchup bottle feel like studying classical literature by comparison and, much though I love settling down to a good evening's rat-killing, I'd hardly describe pest control as "questing. I'd far rather see a bulletin board in the market square or a notice pinned to a wall, signed by the relevant council official, declaring open season on vermin, than have to listen to some NPC's spurious backstory, trumped up in an intern's lunch-hour to justify the slaughter.

As players we need stuff to do - but everything we do doesn't have to come with a tale attached.
That's why someone invented "tasks. Or "missions", if you still want to be able to pretend to yourself that what you're doing matters.

Quests, though; if you're going to dignify them with the name, quests require gravitas. Or humor. Or pathos. Something.

I'm all for improving the quality of side quests. Reducing the quantity, though? Or eliminating them entirely? Nope. I'm dead set against it. In fact, I want more and I want better.

As for grand, all-encompassing, over-arching Main Questlines, well, if there's a petition going around to get Main Quests out of MMOs and back into single-player RPGs, where they belong, show me where to sign! I've got my pen right here.

Welcome To The Museum : The Secret World

When I first heard that The Secret World was going to be giving every player their own museum it was the most intriguing and appealing news I'd heard about the game for a very long time. Prior to that almost everything seemed to be aimed squarely at end-game players and since I never even finished the main story-line from launch that was exactly what I didn't need.

I'm very fond of The Secret World. The worldscape is meticulous in its attention to detail. The writing, the cut-scenes and especially the voice acting are all significantly above MMO genre standard. There's no shortage of strong, memorable characters and stories. My character looks great and the game takes superb screenshots.

What's not to like, eh? Well, the combat isn't stellar and in a genre that relies on hitting things til they fall over that's a problem. Also it can be quite grindy and not in a good way. The very quality and intricacy of the quests makes the whole process seem even less meaningful than usual when you find yourself doing them for the fifth or sixth time just to earn some AP.

Also I'm just not very good at a lot of what I'm asked to do there. I find the gameplay significantly more challenging than almost any other MMO I enjoy and I am not a big fan of "challenge" in my entertainment. It's not just that I can't do some of the fights, although that's the most irritating part. Quite a few of the non-combat missions, which I can do, I don't much enjoy.

Nevertheless, on balance I do like the Secret World and I'm always keen to go back and have another run at it. The Museum looked, on paper, like an excellent reason to return.

Firstly, everyone gets their own instance. It's free and there's no pre-requisite. Not even a quest. You just open the door and there you are in your very own museum. It's a kind of housing. I've seen it compared to GW2's Hall of Monuments although now I've walked the corridors of the museum that's a bit like comparing a ruined folly at the end of the lower orchard to the fifteen-bedroom mansion at the top of the drive.

Secondly, the gameplay associated with stocking and decorating your museum seems eminently reasonable. Mostly it's filling out achievements, finding Lore updates and killing regular mobs. It sounds like something anyone can just pick away at in their own time, at their own pace. Perfect for my predilections.

I was very much looking forward to taking charge of my own museum as soon as it appeared in game but as it happened that coincided with the arrival of my new PC, meaning I didn't have the game installed. By the time I got around to locating the old drive with TSW on, first impressions of the museum had begun to pop up and they weren't pretty.

Syp, a big TSW booster, who'd been enthusiastic, was less than impressed, describing it as "a huuuuge grind and AP/PAX/black bullion sink". Others were less complimentary. 

The negative reaction did blunt my own enthusiasm and that, plus having a lot of other things going on, meant that I didn't get around to patching TSW up and logging in until this evening. I'm very glad I did.

Jogging through the London streets I noticed that TSW is beginning to show its age a little. Either that or it looked better on my older, less powerful machine. It still revels in the same stellar art design though, even if the textures are looking a little threadbare here and there. 

Once through the door the minimal, almost severe lines of the stone-faced exhibition halls work very much in its favor. There's a brief explanatory pop-up but really everything is easy enough to figure out. Empty plinths await your efforts at collecting specimens. Read the plaques to see what's required. That's about it.

I bought the relevant writ and opened the New England wing, figuring that would be the easiest since it's the game's starter zone. I was happy to discover that I'd already completed a good deal of the necessary requirements for most of the would-be exhibits. I don't even remember TSW having an Achievement system but apparently it does and I've done some.

Some people have taken strongly against the only exhibit that comes with the museum - a giant statue of your own character. I loved it. First thing I did was take several selfies standing and sitting beside my giant doppleganger. 

The Gift Shop was a bit of a comedown. It's mostly empty. I think it fills up as you add exhibits but it looks a little sad right now with all its half-empty shelves. The few plainly carved wooden toys look positively pathetic.

One very odd duck was the postcard stand. The postcards themselves were fine - it was the prominent price sign on the top that struck a false note. Since when did any London museum price postcards in dollars?

That was about the only cavil I had although all those old masters on the walls seem a tad out of place, come to think of it. You'd think something by Dali or Hieronymus Bosch might be a better fit.

Other than that everything looks just as it ought. I look forward to happy times in the woods slaughtering  Ak'Abs and ferreting out snippets of Lore like some Lovecraftian version of Gerald Durrell. Oh, wait, no - he'd bring them back alive, wouldn't he? Not much chance of that!

You've All Done Very Well! : DAW

Rowan at I Have Touched The Sky was musing recently on a perceived trend towards "meanness" among those who write about games, whether professionally or out of a supposed love for the medium. He bounced off a very good piece by Bhelgast , who was in turn reacting to a fascinating and thought-provoking interview with an anonymous "game developer in his forties".

There are some great quotes in that interview:

"Why do so many of the people who consume the things you make seem to hate the things they consume?"

I wonder that every day as listen to people in map or global or general chat complaining they're bored, that the game they're playing sucks or that some other game does everything so much better. I'm aware of the psychological pressures that mean some people really do feel trapped and without agency in the games they can't stop playing, while others crave attention and will do and say whatever they have to just to get it, but still...

"Most game journalists are lefties and a big percentage of the audience is right-libertarian."

Now, I have no way of knowing if that's statistically accurate but it certainly feels true. I wonder if it also applies to game devs and players? You might like to think that a huge, mass-market entertainment genre like gaming would attract a representative spread of aficionados from across the culture but:

"...look what our games are about. Killing each other. This is not a coincidence. We have the audience we deserve..."

Killing each other in the case of PvP games; killing AI-controlled semblances of each other, in industrial slaughterhouse quantities, if it's PvE. Either way it's surely going to have a significant effect on who's likely to want to play. Eldariel at StarShadow praises ESO, as others have before, for the way its quests can "...make you think about your choices and look past the obvious". Games that encourage or mandate that kind of "moral choice" always garner positive attention for doing so but the decision nearly always comes down to the same thing: "who do I kill?".

"The loudest, least reasonable voice dominates, and it seems distressingly possible that the loudest, least reasonable voice basically is our audience, writ large".

The squeakiest wheel gets the most grease, too. When you combine the above fear with the anonymous dev's earlier contention that "Most of the people I know in the industry, the higher up people, do not engage with videogame commentary at all" you begin to get a picture of a bunker mentality, through whose psychic walls only the loudest, most insistent cries have any chance of penetrating. Is it any wonder the quiet majority often ends up feeling unheard and, quietly, moves on?

The parts of the interview that revolve around presentation and perception mostly confirm things I already thought I knew or had heard about from other sources. Some of the detail is new, though, and disturbing. I hadn't realized that game devs had to be 'handled' by PR people during public interactions, much like screen actors or members of a boy band. I certainly had no idea, for example, that a games journalist doing a phone interview with a games dev could expect to have "a PR person on the line during [the] entire conversation", who would then call back later and request elisions and alterations.

As for the involvement, or even the existence of "videogame consultancies", well that was a completely new concept to me.

"Consultancies are mostly staffed with former game journalists, and so these men and women are being asked to come in and offer their expertise on what they think isn't working"

They appear to be something like flying squads of critics-for-hire, brought in to critique games in progress on the fly, submit a report to upper management and then vanish. It's not as if video games aren't hard enough to make already, just from a technical standpoint, without having the extra pressure of critical hired guns peering over your shoulder. I'm sure everyone does their best work that way...

There was another recent interview, much more lighthearted but also quite fascinating in some of the things it revealed about the process, in which three Daybreak longtimers looked back on mistakes they and others had made while working on the Everquest franchise. One idea they came up with, involving a zone with a timer that would be affected by player actions that would cause the zone to change dynamically, has been nine years in development and still hasn't made it to the Live game because, as Alan VanCouvering says, “It’s a lot of effort and we still haven’t figured out how to script all that”.

Something we probably all know but rarely acknowledge is that getting these things to run at all is a major achievement. Take an apparently simple concept like storytelling, for example. Many of us in this part of the blogging community, which is almost certainly one of the more thoughtful and positively-oriented corners of the wider gaming media web, have frequently criticized MMOs for their inadequate and unconvincing attempts to tell stories. I know I have.

The anonymous dev once worked on a proposed multi-player co-op game, something not even close to the scale of complexity of interactions between players that would be taken for granted in an MMO. It never got out of the studio. They couldn't even solve the problem of quest-sharing:

"It was all very dissatisfying, and illustrated to me and a lot of other people on the team how difficult it is even to pull off the simplest little thing in a multiplayer game that tries to include story".

He goes on to conclude that

"Games are impossibly complicated. I wish more gamers understood that".

It's a sentiment with which I can do nothing more than agree completely. I also think he's on the money with this final, philosophical apercu:

"Everything games are going through right now... is about this false struggle for authenticity and legitimacy....nobody wants innovation and creativity. Look at the sales of games that are genuinely interesting and innovative. Very few people buy them. Certainly not enough to fund an industry...Someone's not telling the truth about what they really like or what they really want".

Amen to that. 

Rowan's reaction to Bhelgast's piece and the original interview that provoked it was to announce the return of Developer's Appreciation Week. Several bloggers have picked up that ball and run with it, including Healing The Masses, The Mystical Mesmer, Harbinger Zero, GamingSF, Casual Agro and MMOQuests.

I've never been entirely comfortable with treating game developers as though they were analogous to rock or movie stars. The entire enterprise is far too collaborative to support that kind of adulation and idolatry and anyway I'm of an age when it just feels weird.

That's no reason to hold back from showing genuine and heartfelt appreciation for the countless hours of hard work, dedication, determination, imagination and creativity that just has to happen, day after day, year after year, simply to bring to life these amazing, magical, imaginary worlds in which we all spend so much of our time.

So, to all the developers, designers, artists, producers, coders, creators, technicians, managers and communicators of every kind, thank you! Keep on doing that thing you do and don't take it to heart when we take it apart. In this little corner of the blogosphere, at least, we only do it because we care.

I'll leave you with this. I think it sums up how I feel rather appropriately:

 









.

Oh, Why Won't You Just Die Already?! : GW2, TSW, WildStar

Here at Inventory Full we don't do "Quote of the Day" posts but if we did Syp's plaintive cry would be a hot contender:

"Really, my combat attitude is, “I want to point at something and make it die with minimum fuss.”

I often get that feeling and rarely more so than after this last weekend in which I "enjoyed" six instanced, solo boss fights.

My travails against The Presenter have already been documented. Next there were the two parts of Tassi's encounter with Bloody Prince Eddie, first taking him out of his box and then putting him back. That one I did on both accounts because I wanted the Candy Corn Cobs to spend on kittens and pails.

Then there was the final fight with The Shadow of The Dragon in the Pale Tree's sanctum, which concludes the last episode of The Living Story. I did that months ago on one account, when it was new, and it was so teeth-grindingly tedious I have been putting off doing it on the second account ever since. Mrs Bhagpuss still hasn't done her second run, she hated it so much the first time round.

With the next episode dropping today, though, I thought I'd better get it over with. It was even worse than I remembered.

Here's the problem: all four of the fights use the same basic mechanic. They have something happen. Then it stops and another thing happens. Then the first thing happens again. Then the second. That cycle then continues until a win condition is achieved, usually either a set number of rotations completed or a sufficient amount of damage done to The Boss; often both.

If it's all the same to you, Rox, I'll stay out here with Taimi.

The first rotation can be quite exciting: you don't know what's coming and you have to react, counter, learn. The second rotation can be quite satisfying: you know what to do, now you just have to do it. From then on it's all down hill. Or should that be up hill?

There are generally two ways the fight can go from that point. The bad version is that the same fight just goes on and on for as long as it takes you to complete it. Doesn't matter if or  how often you die; you just respawn and run back to a fight that remains in the same state you left it. In the very bad version, if you die, the instance resets and you have to start over from the beginning.

I am blessed as a player of MMOs in that I have not one tiny jot of the Completionist gene. If I'm not enjoying something I can easily stop, leave and never come back. I don't feel any nagging pressure to finish anything in a video game. If it isn't entertaining me it can go die in a ditch. I can still get irritated by having wasted whatever time I have already spent on a futile exercise, though, and solo instances that reset when you fail them are deeply irritating.

Tassi's instances do that. Fortunately I found them reasonably easy to complete without dying so I only had to endure one reset on four runs. The Presenter also resets, as does every instanced boss I can think of in TSW. That's why I have never finished the Tyler Freeborn sequence and gave up somewhere near the end of the 29 steps in the main sequence storyline quest, when I hit a fight I couldn't finish.

Fat lot of help you were, Pwincess.

I might go back to those two now I have better gear, come to think of it. I'm a big fan of overgearing or overleveling to get past annoying roadblocks. It's one of the things I most like about MMOs and one of the reasons I am such a fan of expansions that raise the level cap. Usually I reserve that kind of behavior for soloing or duoing content originally intended for groups, though. Such tactics really shouldn't be necessary to finish content intended to be soloed.

Of the two designs, solo boss fights that just grind on and on until you win are the lesser of two evils. At least you know you will only ever have to do them once. They are, however, if anything, even more idiotic in terms of design. Think about it. The designer has created a fight in which the outcome is never in doubt. You know you are going through the motions and he knows it too but through those motions you just have to go. After you've died a few times the utter pointless of what you are doing gets kind of rubbed in your face. That's bound to leave a good feeling.

All of the instances I did this weekend were designed as solo battles although you can group for all of them if you wish. Other than the Living Story episode they are all holiday content too, which you might imagine would be intended primarily to entertain rather than challenge. Assuming a basic level of competence and averagely-appropriate gear most players won't find them overly-challenging in terms of DPS checks or skill. Any problems I was having turned out to be either from unpreparedness or inattention.

I was still using sub-par gear on my re-match with The Presenter. I'd yet to go to B&D (TSW's combined bank and auction house) to sort out my gear deficiencies (See previous comment thread for details). Even I, however, badly-equipped and fresh from a very long lay-off, was able to knock him off air without too much trouble once I'd jimmied my build. That, even without noticing I was meant to smash the radios that were spawning all the ghosts, something that didn't occur to me  until I was writing the previous paragraph. Shame I didn't think of it at the time but I didn't actually notice the damn radios until the fight was over.

Ahem. I digress.

Yes, well, if you hadn't opened it in the first place...

So, the problem here isn't with difficulty. Nor is it with the length of the fights per se. Back in the glory days of Everquest all fights went on and on and mostly I liked it. The difference from my perspective is that a) almost all of those fights were straight-up, no scripts, drag-out beat-downs and b) we did them largely standing still. At its best combat in EQ achieved a knd of zen-like calm. In contrast, as Syp has been finding out over in WildStar, an endless diet of dodging telegraphs and rolling around can get tiring. Fast.

Open world combat in GW2 is, ironically, some of the least fatiguing and most enjoyable I've encountered in an MMO. It's nice to have the freedom to dodge and strafe, all guns blazing, but if you're feeling tired or lazy you can stand still and make progress just fine. The problem of fatigue only really arises in set-piece fights. In WildStar, as Syp tells it, there's no relief from the pressure: "Every fight is some sort of small epic war played out on a tiny battlefield".

There was a fascinating link on Massively yesterday to a series of employee reviews of Carbine's management practices. A number of times the point is made that WildStar is a great IP if only management knew what to do with it but I suspect that even stellar management would have struggled to interest a mass-market audience in "sketchy endgame content chained to a long defunct business model sneeringly aimed at a demographic that no longer exists" to quote one of the anonymous Carbine employees on the thread.

Carbine talked up their fast-moving combat style a lot before launch. Trion barely mentioned theirs when promoting ArcheAge. The localized Korean import garnered huge attention for all sorts of reasons but the best thing I've heard people say about the combat mechanics is that they're functional. It's tab-targeting of the old school and no-one is going to rave about how innovative or exciting it is.

I could just have watched it on YouTube you know.

The people who are excited by AA are excited by the virtual world and the possibilities it opens up. Probably the most successful MMO of the last year or two has been FFXIV: ARR, another stand&cast, tab target conservative. The poster-child for twitter quests, telegraphs and hyperactivity, meanwhile, is on the ropes.

I worry for EQNext. Having scrapped what was probably a traditional tab-target MMO and retooled for the new ARPG revolution, by the time the game finally appears in 2016 or 2017 will SOE find the pendulum has swung far away from the all-action, "Heroic Movement" model that seemed so dominant back in 2012? H1Z1, despite also being a late jump onto a different bandwagon, is actually looking the more likely of the two make something of itself right now, with its emphasis on slow and subtle over fast and flashy.

Meanwhile we soldier on. There is no perfect time-to-kill. No combat style is going to please everyone. Your thrill is my sore shoulder. My relaxing session is your paint drying. At least we have plenty of choice nowadays. If it's not fun we don't have to keep doing it until we brainwash ourselves into thinking it is.

Although that attitude won't get the dragon slayed, now will it?

Dead Air: TSW

As the discussion in the comments following yesterday's post makes it painfully clear, when it comes to playing MMOs, "builds" are not my strong point. If you're going to play an MMO designed around a giant skill wheel, however, there's no point whining about it, you just have to knuckle down, read the mouseovers and get theorycrafting.

Naturally my first recourse was to google for someone else's work but as this Reddit thread complains most of the builds that come up on a search are long out of date. Fortunately there was someone I could steal from - me!

Presenting The Presenter!
The one and only screenshot I managed to grab

For all I said about The Secret World being an easy game to come back to it does still rely on the returning player having some vague memory of what happened last time around. Last night I knocked off the rest of The Meowling without incident and fought my way into the abandoned soviet bunker in Transylvania for the showdown with The Presenter to conclude this year's new Halloween quest, The Broadcast.

Only The Presenter had other ideas. I fought him twice and lost twice, each battle taking ten to fifteen minutes. If I concentrated on survival I could still be fighting him now - he and his coterie of broadcast-bedazzled spooks together struggled to take me under 90% health. On the other hand, he wasn't showing much sign of dying either, since I seemed to have the approximate DPS of an elderly rabbit dual-wielding limp lettuce leaves.

If it wasn't for his incredibly irritating habit of running from room to room and making me chase him while his spectral fan club whaled away at my unprotected back this so-called fight might have gone on even longer but in the end sheer tedium wore me down and he got the better of me. Half an hour of that and I'd had enough.

It was apparent that I'd need to rethink my build or get better gear and  wasn't convinced I wanted to see the end of the quest enough to do either. Last year I ran into exactly the same issue with The Vanishing of Tyler Freeborn. I put a lot of effort into fixing that and my hard work got me nowhere. It's an experience I wasn't keen to repeat.

Scuse me! Coming through!

After I'd moaned about it passive-aggressively at some length in the comments here, Sylow very kindly offered to help me figure out a build that would bring my time-to-kill into single figures (minutes that would be, not seconds). By the time I read his comment, though, I'd figured out a build all by myself. Or rather, I'd stumbled across the five builds I'd worked up the last time I had this problem, all neatly tucked away in the Gear Management tab I'd completely forgotten existed.

I found it right after I'd spent maybe an hour going through Actives and Passives trying to match Builders and Consumers, affliction and impairment, Blades and Assault Rifle until I'd made myself thoroughly cross-eyed and confused. At least I was able to confirm my own consistency of approach because the new build I arrived at was extremely similar to the one I'd stored away under the name DPS+Leech.

Just as well, too, because I was so eager to take a look at it I didn't think that slotting it would wipe the one I'd just spent an hour working on. Never mind. It was good practice. Or something.

Equipped with my old-new build (the one that had so singularly failed to progress me past my 50k hit point roadblock in the Tyler Freeborn quest, something I was conveniently choosing to leave forgotten) I raced through the black tunnels of the festering underground facility, ducking ghosts and knocking over barrels of irradiated waste until I was once again face to face with The Presenter.

I died, of course. Only this time he was at least taking damage at a reasonable pace. And I thought I knew where I needed to improve to make progress. First off, get my back to a wall and stop those ghosts getting behind me. Second, figure out an actual rotation for these skills that would get those synergies flowing.

And it worked. Almost all the damage I took occurred on the between-room runs when the ghosts had free shots. Other than that my health stayed up while his went down, just as it should. It got quite close near the end, when I panicked because I thought I might actually win for once and fell off my rhythm, and I did have to drink a couple of Elixirs along the way because of those darn ghosts, but in the end I was still standing and he wasn't and that's all that really counts.



The quest itself had a somewhat muted coda. As is usual in TSW it left me feeling little the wiser about what had been going on and feeling that I'd almost certainly missed something important. I love that feeling. It's one of the best features of the game.

How much more I'll be playing I wouldn't like to guess. I took a quick look at my gear and it's more sub-par than I remembered - mostly green Q10s with one or two blue Q9s. I have a green Q10 blade but my rifle is a Q8 blue - I have a Q10 green rifle but it lowers all the important stats in comparison to the Q8. What all that means I'm not really sure.

I think I saw Rick Wakeman play this thing on Tales From Topographic Oceans

This is the thing with MMOs: as Alysianah at Mystic Worlds confirms, the grind is real. If you want to do more than dabble then there nearly always comes a point when you just have to get your head down, read the guides, study the tool-tips, farm the mats, kill the mobs, knock out the dailies and do all those other things that make playing in virtual worlds feel like having a imaginary, unpaid job.

The Secret World has the best stories in MMOs but that's a lot of work, even for a good story. Also for a waistcoat, which was the reward I got.

Radio On : TSW

I'd like to thank our collective corner of the blogosphere for nudging me to do something I've been meaning to do for months - log back into The Secret World. Several times of late I've patched up and sat looking at the password screen for a minute or two before deciding it was too much trouble to go find my old log-in details. That'd be a whole thirty seconds of my life, right? Who has that kind of time?

Both Syp at Bio Break, whose Secret Adventures series  has been pressing my nostalgia button for weeks, and Rowan at I Have Touched The Sky are consistent advocates so TSW never drops off my radar. Ysharros at Stylish Corpse recently gave in to the same prompts and jumped back in, thereby adding to the welcome, gentle pressure on me to return but it was Aywren at Clean Casuals whose pithy rundown of the current Halloween events finally tipped me over the edge.

To be precise, it was Aywren's account of a new event, The Broadcast, a recreation of 1940s radio drama, that caught my full and undivided attention. I've long been fascinated by the Golden Age of Radio. Obviously I never had the chance to listen to it first time around (I'm old but I'm not that old!) but I grew up in its hinterland, getting glimpses of that lost world from movies like Radio Days, Garrison Keilor's ironic re-creations and the countless revisitings and retellings of the panic inspired by Orson Welles' Mercury Theater production of War of the Worlds.

When they called it The Black House
they really weren't kidding

The all-pervading influence of the Internet and the World Wide Web has changed just about every aspect of our lives over the last couple of decades and one of the greatest changes has been a previously undreamt of access to the past. When I was writing articles for comics fanzines in the 1980s, if I wanted to send an editor a thousand words on 1940s cinema adaptations of comic book characters it would take me a week of research in the Central Library of a large city and even then I'd be lucky to find what I needed.

Now I can get up, make a coffee, sit down in front of this screen and have more information in a few mouse-clicks than I could possibly use, on just about any subject I could dream up. What's more, as evidenced above, writers of journalistic nostalgia don't need to describe things in detail any more; instead they can simply link to the originals and let their audiences experience those things for themselves, unmediated.

I always found Radio and MMOs a good fit, both for me and for each other. I may have missed the Golden Age but I grew up listening to the radio. From Radio Luxemburg on my mother's battered transistor and my grandfather's shortwave stations on his 1930s Bakelite valve set throughout my childhood, through the Radio One soundtrack of my adolescence to the thoughtful, eclectic, intelligent rumble of Radio Four that marks the background to my adult life, radio has been a constant presence.

When I began playing MMOs I settled into two audio habits right from the start: I always left the in-game music playing and I often supplemented it with radio in the room. For more than a decade I'd slay monsters, craft armor and explore imaginary lands to a sonic melange of looped synth samples, yelps of pain, explosions and Melvyn Bragg quizzing a bunch of professors on Nuclear Fusion or the Haitian Revolution.

I found websites that opened portals to radio stations all over the world and I'd often sort my inventory on a Sunday morning to a soundtrack of local news from Saskatchewan or some such impossibly exotic locale. Best of all I discovered archives of radio shows from long before I was born and listened to episode after episode of Academy Award Theater or The Adventures of Philip Marlowe as I murdered orcs or battered gnolls through Azeroth, Norrath or Telon. 

I used to do that. Then I stopped. Why? Because of The Secret World.

If it starts to shake put a bullet in it.

When TSW arrived back in the late spring of 2012 I found myself unexpectedly caught in its mysterious web. Along with a darkly twisted contemporary setting, drawn with astonishing visual detail and verve, came a thick, nested audio track that demanded full and undivided attention.

It wasn't just that quests were fully voiced - SOE trumpeted that little achievement for EQ2 all the way back in 2004 for all the good it did them. It wasn't the mere fact of embedded audio in game - music emerging from jukebox diners and skatepark boomboxes - Anarchy Online had both audio and video playing on in game wallscreens back in 2002.

When it comes to voiceovers and audio, TSW has never expected, like the proverbial dog walking on its hind legs, to impress us just by the act of doing. It's always been about doing it well and in that they have frequently surpassed all reasonable expectations. For the three or four months I played The Secret World as my primary MMO it was simply not an option to listen to the radio at the same time. The in-game audio was just too good to miss.

I did try. I'm good at multitasking audio. I've had decades of practice. I can usually filter all those tunes, triggers and conversations and extract the meaning I need. Always something's going to get lost in the mix, though. With such a consistently high quality of  voice acting and the complexity of the narrative threaded through so much of the game it just wasn't a viable option any more.

So I turned my radio off. Then, when GW2 came along a few months later, another visually and sonically rich MMO, only bright and bold where TSW was dark and subtle, I left it off. Over the past two years I've only occasionally played MMOs with the radio on and even then only Test Match Cricket, which is more of a background hum than something that demands close attention.

You might consider it both ironic and appropriate then that last night I spent the best part of three hours listening to the radio inside The Secret World. What goes around comes around.

First I had to re-orient myself. It didn't take long. TSW is a remarkably easy MMO to drop back into because not all that much seems to change. That might not be great for players hoping to make it their full-time virtual home but for fairweathers like me it makes for a fine welcome back each time I put the key in the old door.

I did notice a few changes. There's a Pet system now that allows you to store your pets in much the same way you store your minis in GW2. That freed up a few welcome bag slots.

The reason I was fiddling around with my pets to begin with was because the first things I noticed when I got to the Agartha were all the cats. Everyone and his uncle had a pet out and most of them were cats. My character has a cat. I'm suggestible. So it goes.

When I'd gotten all my pets safely kenneled I turned to the two messages in my mail. One was from Dave Screed, who seemed unusually freaked out even for him over some short-wave radio broadcasts he'd heard; the other was from Madame Roget about some trouble she's been having with her cats.

The most surprising thing was that I immediately remembered who they both were and where they both lived. That in itself is testament to the strength of the writing in The Secret World. I was able to go straight to Dave in his New York Launderette to get started without needing to look anything up although once I was under weigh I did open a walkthrough because the puzzle-solving aspect of TSW only amuses me when I'm making progress.

As it turned out I barely needed to refer to the cheat sheet. Not because of my Sherlockian way with a clue but because I spent most of the three hours I was playing standing motionless next to a radio listening to some almost supernaturally accurate recreations of 1940s radio drama complete with station identifications and commercials. It was weird, compelling and also genuinely spooky.

If you think waving a katana around in a church is inappropriate behavior you clearly haven't spoken to the priest.

The first broadcast I listened to from inside the Kingsmouth Congregational Church. Not because I was too scared to stand in the Graveyard where I eventually found the radio but because, like a real radio signal, these broadcasts fade and break up as you move around. Inside the church was where I first found the strongest signal that let me hear the audio clearly. Also the stained glass windows are awesome.

The second I heard while standing outside The Black House in Savage Coast. I started off standing next to the radio inside the burned-out ruin but the racket from occasional fights as players less interested in retro-radio than I triggered the ghost that turns up at the end of the quest drove me to stand outside on the porch.

In her post Aywren says the broadcasts last 10-15 minutes but I think it's more like a full half hour. I'll time the next one and see if that's just a subjective impression or whether it really is that long. Either way they are incredibly impressive pieces of work. Frankly, the two I've heard so far are every bit good enough to be broadcast on PBS or the BBC. The sheer quality of the media work, the narrative and the writing in TSW is so far ahead of any other MMO I've played (100+ and counting) it's a joke.

The entire time I was listening to the broadcast those people in the woods were having some kind of party. Weirdos.

It's a tragedy the game hasn't been successful enough both to allow a much faster and more extensive pace of development and also to generate a feeling in the MMO industry as a whole that sharp, literate, sophisticated writers and creative artists are worth hiring. Comparing the quests in TSW to the ones I've done recently in ArcheAge, for example, is akin to comparing an exhibition in a smart, downtown gallery with the pre-schooler's crayonings pinned up on your next-door neighbor's fridge. And I like the quests in ArcheAge...

Never mind. At least we have this. And how fine it is. I'm two-fifths through The Broadcast and halfway through The Meowling (which has been in the game since 2012 but which I have somehow managed to miss until now). More reports to come, assuming there aren't any parts in either where I have to, y'know, actually win a fight, because the one part where the game and I don't really hit it off is the combat.

And yet even here TSW wins. After the first radio show ended and I clicked on the radio to progress the quest a ghost spawned. It was my first fight after my long lay-off and I couldn't remember my synergies so I died in short order. When I got back to my corpse the radio wasn't playing golden age repros any more. As a ghost I heard what Dave Screed had heard: a Numbers Station.

Would I have heard that if I hadn't died? I don't know. Does it mean anything? I don't know.

I like not knowing. I like The Secret World.