Let's Go Round Again

Kaylriene has a long post up about rotations and one-button mode in World of Warcraft and reading it made me think about the whole twisty topic in something of a different way. I'm not sure if I have enough to say about it myself to warrant a whole post but let's see how it goes.

I used to get quite irritated at the very mention of "rotations". At first it just wasn't a term I was familiar with from MMORPGs I'd played so I was suspicious of it on a purely linguistic level. What did it mean? Was it jargon from one or two specific games, bleeding across and staining the others? Why did people keep throwing it into conversations as though everyone obviously knew exactly what it meant?

I didn't know what it meant, not from personal experience, but it became clear enough from context quite quckly; it seemed to mean the order you cast spells or used abilities in combat. Or, if you prefer, the order you pressed the buttons to make it happen. Same thing.

This seemed weird to me from the get-go. Why would you have any sort of set order for something like that? Surely it would always be dependent on too many outside factors, like where you were, what you were fighting, who you were with and so on? I found it hard to imagine many situations where it would be advisable, let alone necessary, to stick to a pre-defined set of spells or abilities rather than assessing the situation in real time and choosing accordingly, which was how I'd always played.

By the time I'd seen the term "rotation" often enough to take notice of it, I guess I'd been playing MMORPGs for maybe a decade and a half. I'd been through my grouping years and come out the other side. Even though I was pretty much a solo player by then, I had done a lot of group play in my time and anyway it seemed the "rotation" concept applied to solo play, too, although obviously there it was deemed less crucial since if you were doing it wrong, no-one was going to suffer except you.

And that was even weirder; the idea that you could do it wrong. It was strange enough to me that people thought there were sequences of button presses that ought to be followed to begin with, let alone that you could be ostracized for not getting it right. Then again, I was well aware that MMO players were perfectly capable of refusing to have anything to do with each other over things far more ridiculous than that, such as which race they'd chosen at character creation, based not on RP prejudice but on the tiny variation in starting stats.

Whatever, I thought it was affected and obnoxious to tell other people they were playing the game wrong, even if it was true that the way they were doing it was less effective than it might be. It wasn't that I thought it was a bad idea to give people suggestions on how to hit harder or kill faster. Helpful advice is always welcome, or should be. It was more that I'd always felt that it was other people's business how they played and that if I didn't like the way they were doing it the solution was not to play with them.

Which, now I come to write it down, does sound like saying ghosting someone is better than telling them to get lost. But by and large we rarely did either. What we mostly did, all those years I was grouping with friends, guildmates and passing strangers, was to put up with pretty much anything anyone did that didn't get us all killed. 

There were certain names that used to make Mrs Bhagpuss and I groan out loud when they asked to join a group we were in or who we'd see log in and hope they didn't start asking us what we were doing and if we had space, but when the moment came, we pretty much always invited them anyway and worked around whatever their peculiarities or incompetencies might be. I'm sure other people felt the same about us but we all generally just muddled along and had fun somehow.

One reason I was never really aware of any kind of pressure to perform was that I never went near anything that could be called top-end content. I didn't raid and I was mostly behind or just up to the endgame, which was a lot harder for anyone to get to in those days.

The other significant factor was that in all the time I was grouping as a matter of course, roughly from the turn of the millennium to about 2008, in maybe half a dozen or more games, I never had to deal with damage meters. There were parsers in use, particularly in EverQuest. I ran one myself for a while, when there was a fad for them in the guild I was in. It was fascinating to see who was doing what, but everyone treated them more as something to gossip about than an indication anything ought to change. 

That makes it sound as though we were all little plaster saints and we certainly were an easy-going bunch but also gameplay was very different then. If you were down the bottom of the parse for damage or healing it might mean you were bad at playing your class but it could just as likely mean you'd been doing something else equally important like crowd control or debuffing, both of which were abolutely crucial to success in some MMORPGs of the era.

There were two ways you could be welcome in a group back then; one was being good at your role and the other was being fun to be with. The first is self-explanatory. We'd put up with some fairly irritating personal behavior to have a tank who could hold aggro like the tar-baby and knew how to turn mobs, and a healer who could be relied on not to let anyone die was allowed a great deal of leeway when it came to being grumpy and sarcastic (Holds up hand!) 

I imagine that still holds true today. The second, though, I suspect was an artefact of the time. Group combat back then involved a lot more down-time between fights and there was a lot more conversation both between pulls and during combat itself. People talked non-stop, frankly. It was like being in a chat-room where every so often a mob ran in and we beat it to death for interrupting our conversation.

In that scenario, being funny, amusing, witty, sharp-witted and a good conversationalist was about as likely to get you invited back as coming top of the parse for DPS. More so, in fact, since anyone can poke a sword into a monster from behind but not everyone can time a punchline.

In an environment like that the idea of a specific rotation designed to eke out the last few drops of damage seems like a luxury at best and a fantasy in most situations. While it's true that some groups did develop a rhythm that had them killing mobs like shelling peas, for the most part every pull was at least partly a surprise and every fight was likely to turn into a scramble for survival, with everyone living on their wits and their reactions. 

My persepctive as a Cleric in EverQuest also colored my understanding of what a fight was. I only had access to a limited number of spells and I had to choose them in advance. I had a lot more potentially useful spells than I could load so I had to try and predict which I'd be most likely to need. 

That meant a bunch of heals, of course, but also some cures, buffs and utilities, some of which would end up not being used at all. And there were plenty of times when things happened that I hadn't planned for, leaving me without the tools to do the job I'd suddenly been given. Many times I ended up leafing through my spell-book mid-fight, frantically trying to load a spell I never expected to want.

later, when I was playing a Beastlord, something I did for a couple of expansion cycles, I never even knew for sure what my role would be from fight to fight. As a swiss army knife class, I might be off-tanking, back-up healing, debuffing or adding DPS. Sometimes I'd be doing all of them in the same pull. The idea of a rotation would have seemed laughable.

With all of this in mind, later, when the concept became clear to me, I saw it is as restrictive, unintuitive, unimaginative and fundementally opposed to most of the reasons I'd ever played the games to begin with. Why would I want to limit myself to a set pattern of key-presses just to make a few numbers go up? 

My philosophy had always been the same; any fight that ends with the mob dead and the player alive is de facto a good one. The idea that there might be some kind of gold star on offer for doing it faster seemed nuts. TTK is another term I never heard used in those days.

Not that I was against efficiency. As a sit-and-heal Cleric of the strictest order, I used to rate my own success by how few heals I cast and how much mana I had left. A perfect fight for me would be one in which I sat and medded through the entire thing. With an attitude like that, you can see why the concept of rotation wasn't doing anything for me. 

As I was reading Kaylriene's post, though, something occured to me that I hadn't thought of before, whenever the topic came up: when I was playing my favorite class of all time, in any MMORPG, the Disciple in Vanguard, I did have a rotation.

Well, of sorts. It wasn't hard-coded. I did vary it a bit. But in essence, there was an order in which I pressed the buttons and I followed that order in nearly every fight. And it was great!

Why did I do it there, when I didn't do it anywhere else? Because the Disciple relies on builders and finishers and they are displayed on-screen in such a way as to be blindingly obvious and extremely easy to understand. You press some buttons to kick and punch and after a few of rounds of that some other buttons light up and you press those to heal yourself or debuff or do damage. 

It's a very simple system as used in countless games but the Disciple is by a long way the most intuitive and organic version of the mechanic I've experienced. It has an amazing rhythm to it that makes playing the class feel like playing an instrument or dancing. It's very satisfying when you get it right and as I read Kaylriene's post, which goes into great detail on why and how rotations operate, I finally felt a glimmer of understanding as to why people might not just feel getting one right was necessary but also why they might even enjoy it.

That was my epiphany, such as it was and with that insight, looking beyond that one class and character, I can now see elements of kinds of rotation in the gameplay of a number of classes I've enjoyed playing. The cyclical nature, the repetition and the predictability have a kind of zen-like appeal, particularly when you find a rhythm. Rather than being restrictive, the pattern frees the mind from outside interruptions and allows entrance to the fabled "zone".

Or it can do, when it works. On the other hand, when it doesn't, what you get is grindingly dull, slavish drudge-work, the hallmark of one or two classes I can think of (Looking at you, LotRO Guardian...) 

So, in conclusion, thanks to Kaylriene I feel I now have a clearer understanding of the rotational concept and a better appreciation of its merits. I'll try not to be so openly sneering about it in future.

I had something to say about the whole "One Button" thing, too, but that's going to have to wait for another time. Seems like I had more than enough to say about the subject after all.

Set Adrift On Memory Bliss: The Monsters&Memories Stress Test Is Well-Received By All

Over the weekend, Niche Worlds Cult, the developer of retro-classic mmorpg Monsters &Memories, ran a couple of stress tests to see how their servers, login processes and various mechanicals might stand up under pressure. The plan was to open the game to anyone who cared to download the client so they could wander around and try out such content as the project's pre-pre-alpha build had to offer. 

There were hefty advisories on the extremely undercooked nature of what was there to see and warnings not to expect too much but in the event it seemed like no-one who turned up had bothered to read them. 

Not that there were complaints - far from it. I heard very few in the ninety minutes or so I was there. No, it was more that everyone appeared to have decided to behave as if it was the launch of a new game - one they were really enjoying.

It was surreal, honestly. For a start it was really, really busy on the Saturday night, when I was able to play. I couldn't make the Friday time-slot due to being fast asleep but NWC had very sensibly and thoughtfully staggered the two events so as to make them available to a wider range of interested parties. On Saturday, the servers opened at 6PM my time and I was there, ready, with the client downloaded and patched.

It's like EQ and Vanguard had a (very inbred) baby...

There was only one server in the list so I hopped on that one and made a character. First signs were that the team might have been a tad... shall we say... ambitious? Character creation offered a choice of  a full dozen races - and eighteen classes. Of the races, only Gnome, Human and Ogre were available but all the classes were ready to play.

I thought I'd made a Gnome Elementalist but when I logged into the world it transpired I'd made a human instead. Whether that was a bug or my own ineptitude I can't say but either way it was a felicitous outcome. Gnomes, when I saw a few scuttling around, looked pretty weird and very small, a bit like hyperactive toddlers. I was happy to find myself playing a much better-looking human.

If you look really closely, you can see that Human is highlighted in green, something I did not notice at the time.

At this point you might be expecting an account of what I did during my hour and a half. It's coming - sort of. The thing is, I could easily sum up everything I did in a sentence: I ran around and took a lot of screenshots. That's it.

Okay, it's not absolutely all I did. I fiddled around with the settings and the UI a little because I just can't help myself. I also did the first quest hand in, of which more later. And I tried to fight one mob. Which killed me. Instantly. Oh, and I did a corpse recovery. Not sure why. I think I must have been swept up in the general enthusiasm. It was hard to avoid it.

Not everyone's as diligent about picking up their corpses as I am.

Since we're seven paragraphs in already I'll try belatedly not to bury the lede for once: Monsters&Memories isn't just an homage to mmorpgs of the EverQuest era - it's freakin' EverQuest Redux. Seriously, it's all but identical. Not just the ethos but the specific milieu. It's like an alternate-dimensional Norrath. And where it's not EQ Resurrected it's clearly Vanguard, which is very much the same thing.

Let's take a very specific example. One of the most universal experiences in original EQ was the note you handed in to your guildmaster. It just sits there in your inventory when you first log in, waiting for you to find it for yourself. When you do - and once you've figured out how to click on it to read - it it tells you go to go find a named NPC, the head of the guild for the class you've picked, so you can hand the note over to them. 

Nights are very, very dark. Humans do not have infravision. Or ultravision. Or a torch in my case.

For your effort, which usually takes a while because there's no map and no directional markers or even a punctuation point over anyone's head, you either get killed (If you accidentally auto-attack the person you're supposed to be giving the note to.) or you get a smudge of xp and a dirty vest. M&M follows this precedent precisely, apart from the vest. I got a belt instead.

But that wasn't all. I don't know what other classes get but as an Elementalist I also got a pinwheel and a box. I was supposed to wander around the city with the pinwheel until it started to spin, letting me know I was in the presence of a hungry Djinn. At this point I would light some incense and the Djinn would give me a pearl. 

It does look like the kind of place you might find a Djinn.

I had to do that three times to get pearls of water, wind and fire, which I would then put into the box, along with my pinwheel and my belt. Then I'd come back to the guildmaster and hand the whole lot over. To what end, I know not because I didn't do any of it.

Seriously - it's a stress test for a game that's not even in alpha yet! Why would I be doing quests? And yet everywhere people were doing just that. General chat was perpetually filled with the typical questions and demands of any busy starter area in a brand-new game. People were questing and levelling like it was going to matter!

And also like somewhere you wouldn't want to wear a padded jumpsuit.

You know what? Forget questing. They were forming groups! At Level 1. And doing dungeons. At Level 3! People were even flaunting their qualifications - "Elementalist Lvl 4 lfg. Have pet". Level frickin' four!? HOW??

In the ninety minutes I was able to play, which comprised a half hour when the server came up and an hour later in the evening, after I'd stopped to phone my mother and walk the dog (By which time the one available server had grown to three.) I made precisely no xp at all. Unless I got some for handing in that note. I might have. I didn't notice.

That water's looking pretty tempting around now.

For the longest time I couldn't even find anything to fight. Monsters&Memories has one the largest cities I have ever seen in an mmorpg. It's unfeasably gigantic. The main gates and the newbie grounds reminded me of Freeport but the rest is extraordinarily redolent both of Khal and Ahgram, the two middle-Eastern cities in Vanguard. It's hardly surprising. Vanguard always was the true sequel to EverQuest. Until now, apparently.

The city, whose name hasn't stuck in my mind, although I'm fairly sure it was mentioned, is extraordinarily well-realized for a game at this very early stage of development. It has all the necessary functions like banks and class guild halls but also statuary, boulevards and ambience. It also has guards you can ask for directions because of course it does. EQ had them...

I'd make a deposit - if I had even one copper piece.

Once again, I have to repeat that, for a game that's supposedly not even in a pre-alpha state yet, there's a surprising amount to do. I think the reason people were playing it like a game they'd just bought was mostly just because they could. There were quests and they worked. There was gear. There was progression. So what if none of it was going to stick around the moment the stress test ended? There was fun to be had so they were having it.

And those who'd knuckled down and got on with levelling were rewarded. On the Saturday when I played, the four-hour test was extended for a further four hours, for no other reason, I believe, than because people were having such a good time and saying so, enthusiastically and often. You can't buy a reaction like that but you sure can encouraage it when you get one.

The harbor's not nearly so inviting when you have to swim it in the dark - in your underwear.

There were devs in the channel chatting with players and they must have been ecstatic about how well it was all going. Not just the technical side, which seemed rock solid while I was playing - no lag, no disconnects - but the reception the game was getting from the crowd. They bloody loved it.

I loved it too but with an element of distance. It was wonderful to see such a faithful recreation of a thing I once worshipped, carried off with such success. I could feel the commitment to getting it right coming off the screen in waves. 

Speaking of harbors, this horseshoe-shape with a statue at each end is so Khal!

The thing is, though, I'm not sure it's what I want for myself any more. I'm not saying it's not. It might be. Certainly the mechanics and systems are exactly right for me - as far as they go. I love levelling every bit as much as I ever did, as evidenced by Mitsu, the EverQuest II character I've been turning into one of my most rounded tradeskillers in years these last few weeks. 

What I really don't think I want any more is the kind of exceptionally slow, ponderous and painful levelling that would be a necessary part of any faithful recreation of old EQ. My feeling is that those processes were accelerated for good reason. I know a lot of EQ vets think it's been all down hill since Kunark but I'm not one of them.

As they say in Qalia "Always pray for rain".

None of which will stop me for a moment from jumping into any open testing NWC offers for Monsters&Memories in future. What they've put in place already is a hugely impressive achievement and I'm fascinated to see where they take things from here. I'll be very happy to give them whatever help and support I can by playtesting or stress-testing and by recounting my experiences to whatever audience I may have.

If I'm ever going to put in the very significant number of hours necessary to do a new mmorpg justice, though, I fear it's going to have to be one with a lot more modern features than any genuine repro ought to offer. Like a decent map, for a start. And quest markers. And no corpse runs. 

"And on the surface of Norrath did Tunare create the Elves, creatures of limitless grace and beauty"

Yeah, I'm soft. But then, I'm also old. Life's too short to go get your corpse, especially when you respawn on the opposite side of the furshlugginer city. I had to run all the way round the outside walls and swim through the harbor to get back! And yes, I know it's very impressive that swimming is in and works already but it wasn't much of a comfort at the time.

And that's about all I have to say on the subject just now. For another view, Stingite at The Friendly Necromancer managed to get some time on days one and two. He got a lot farther than I did. 

But I bet he didn't take as many screenshots.

A Tale Of Two Emus

One survivor of my recent, involuntary desktop cull was the icon for the Vanguard Emulator. Seeing it exposed made me realize it's been a few months since I last checked in to see how things are going. 

Longer still since I visited the forums to read up on what's changed. It's not always obvious just from playing as the detailed and informative State Of The Game post from last October emphasizes:

"While, to the player, the game might seem to be finished, there is a lot of back end work that has not been set up yet. If painting a picture requires one to start with broad strokes and finish with small details - we are still on the broad strokes - but the players see the finished painting."

As one of those players I completely concur. Every time I log in and play for an hour or two I come away with an impression of an almost fully-restored game. My Disciple is Level 13 and he can explore, quest, level , buy new skills, upgrade his gear, harvest, craft, everything you'd expect in the early levels. He can even work the levers of Civic Diplomacy.

Getting on for eight years since the Live game closed down, just to be able to do that much is phenomenal. As someone who tends to enjoy low and mid level gameplay more than endgame activity and who's very comfortable pottering around alone in a seemingly deserted world, I would be more than satisfied if the current iteration was as far as the team were able or willing to go. 

They wouldn't, though:

"...we are not finished, and we will not be finished for some time. We have come so far, but we have a long way to go. Our overall goal is to make the game as it was in its prime, pre-Free To Play Changes."

I couldn't say with any certainty what were the differences between the final subscription version of Vanguard and the first F2P ruleset. As I recall, the game began with a focus on group-play but then there were several, substantial revisions, first making the game easier, then much easier and highly soloable. Later, but well before the sunset, much of the former difficulty was restored and there was a brief focus on endgame raiding before the game went into maintenance mode and previously hard-to-get items like flying mounts were given away to anyone who wanted them.

Where the F2P conversion stands in all that and what kind of cut-off it represents for any given aspect of the game I have no clue. All I know is I found ways to enjoy every era almost equally so wherever the music stops is likely to suit me just fine.

This afternoon, when I logged in, I did what I usually do, namely saddled up and rode out to enjoy the gorgeous scenery. Even now, I find Telon one of the most beautiful virtual worlds I've ever seen. The graphics may be showing their age but, much like Lord of the Rings Online, the deep, fluid, emotional commitment behind the world-building makes the place feel preternaturally real.

By happenstance and good fortune, I ended up following one of my favorite routes in the whole game, along the riverside from Khal to Ahgram. The dry, sunbaked grassland between the two cities shimmers in a heat haze under the merciless blue sky. 

The brittle, yellow grass, taller than a young Raki, ripples in the hot wind coming down from the mountains. Dust cakes the hardened dirt road, where camels stand idle and towers cast welcome shade for the merchants as they pray for rain.

As I cantered across the plains, I found myself wondering whether the recent issues with my PC had somehow improved the graphics. Maybe the drivers I reinstalled? Everything looked even more magical than I remembered. Vanguard has always been a game whose screenshots don't quite do justice to how it feels when you're playing but I think the ones I took today come close.

I didn't do much more than ride the roads, stopping occasionally to kill a skeleton by the ruins of a temple here or a scarab beetle under a tree there. The login message explained there'd been a difficulty pass on mobs to bring them up to the required challenge level so I was curious to see if things felt tougher. So long as I stuck to the mobs I was meant to be killing solo, everything felt fine. 

When I reached the towering walls of Ahgram the sun was almost down. Long shadows darkened the waters in the harbor and the light was almost blue with dusk. It had been a glorious ride. I struggle to think of any mmorpg where I find so much pleasure in simply traveling.

Vanguard is one of the handful of online games I would miss like a friend if it wasn't there any longer so the persistence of the relationship beyond the virtual grave feels little short of miraculous. Another game I'd miss ferociously would be EverQuest II, which is worrisome, given that of all Daybreak's portfolio, EQII is probably the most at risk.

For some years I was concerned by the apparent lack of anything resembling a working emulator for the game. Although it can sometimes seem as if every lost mmorpg can be readily found again in the emulator greyscape, as Wildstar's exiled fans can attest, there's no guarantee.

With that grim thought in mind, I'm exceptionally happy to be able to confirm that today I took the Far Journey once again to disembark at the Outpost of the Overlord, where my latest ratonga necromancer, now a lofty Level 3, is resting after her efforts. It wasn't on any Live server. It happened on the EQ2 Emulator Project.

A companion to the Vanguard Emulator and linked on their website, I've looked at this one before but this is the first time I've been able to download, install and play the game. There are full instructions here, including the necessary links and I had absolutely no issues following them to get the game up and running in short order.

Once I'd made a character I was surprised to find myself watching a narrated slide show laying out the history of Norrath, from the Rallosian invasion to the Shattering. The emulator requires the Altar of Malice client, so I'm guessing this was the introduction you got back then, when you installed the game from scratch. 

I'm not sure whether I ever saw it before. Bits of it seemed vaguely familiar but that could be because I already know the story or because I've seen very similar introductions in other games. 

Whether or not it was really new to me, I watched the whole thing with both interest and pleasure. The illustrations are sumptuous, the voiceover is mellifluous and the whole thing makes for a very good primer on how the world got to be the way it is. 

Whether a genuine first-timer would get as much out of it as a veteran is another matter. I tend to feel having new players sit through long lore cut-scenes before they get to play their characters can be something of an own goal but then I guess it never did Final Fantasy XIV much harm. Compared to that carriage ride, this is barely a bump in the road.

The EQ2 emulator as it is right now, based on the very small fragment I experienced, feels considerably rougher around the edges than the Vanguard emu. Nothing wrong with how it looks or plays, more in the technicalities. 

I ran into several UI glitches in the half hour or so I spent there. None of the icons on the bar at the foot of the screen worked and I couldn't open my inventory with the keyboard shortcut. I suspect I may have glitched something by running ahead of the tutorial prompts and clicking on things before I was told to.

I'm not complaining. It makes me feel safer just knowing the emulator exists, especially since there's also the option to set up your own server. With that, it feels highly unlikely EQII fans will ever end up slumped on the Wildstar bench, out of the game for good.

I have no intention of playing on the EQII emulator regularly. I probably won't even check in on it every few months, like I do with Vanguard. I'm happy playing - and paying for - the Live version. But if that ever goes away...

I'll Get Off This Blasted Allod If It's The Last Thing I Ever Do...

Y'know, I think I might make a good subject for hypnosis. I'm certainly suggestible enough. All I had to do was spot a passing reference to Allods Online in a blog post about something else entirely and next thing you know I've patched the thing up and logged in.

I can't even remember whose blog it was. Oh, wait, yes I can! It was Gnomecore, writing about finishing the Shadowbringers expansion in Final Fantasy XIV. He happened to mention that in Allods "...you could walk through the older leveling dungeons with a generic group of NPCs filling the missing roles... You barely needed to sneeze in enemy’s direction, and trash packs and bosses died in mere seconds"

Gnomecore didn't like that much but I thought it sounded great.  

MassivelyOP has a discussion thread up about whether mmorpgs should be "hard", based on something Damian Schubert said on Twitter, reported by MOP as "...Vanguard was set up as the anti-WoW/EverQuest II, the hardcore solution to “soft MMOs for wimps,” complete with brutally punishing corpse recovery as in the Old Days."

I think the ethereal drain's blocked again

I contributed an irritable correction to that partial and mainly inaccurate description of why Vanguard failed but I don't disagree with his premise, which if I understand it correctly, seems to be that to be truly "massive", mmorpgs need to be easy or at least highly accessible.

It depends, of course. On what? On everything. That's the mmorpg dev's dilemma. The genre predicates on accessibility. Massively multiple implies everyone. If you let 'em all in, though, they don't necessarily want the same things and, people being people, they'll clique up and lobby to have it their way.

The trick, it seems to me, is to remember that as an mmorpg developer your business is running the mall, not the concessions inside it. The company is the landlord, management's the operator and each design team owns a franchise.

And all those franchises have their own clientele, who need to be given appropriate, individual service. Sure, you'd like the other customers to feel curious as they walk past. You'd like them to step through the open doors, wander around, try things out. There are potential synergies you don't want to ignore.

Where did you get that hat?

What you don't want is for the only access to the ice-cream parlor to be directly through the jewellery store, which is what happens when you put raid mechanics into social content. Not an exact analogy. Know your audience is what I'm saying.

Then there's mood to consider. As a player I don't always feel like playing the same way. Some days I want to chill out with something easy or repetitive or both. Other days I feel energized, ready for a challenge. Sometimes I want to relax, sometimes I want a rush. It can change from morning to evening.

I could modify my experience by playing different games but that's the last thing the developer wants. The developer wants me to keep playing their games and if they're an mmorpg developer chances are they only have the one so they'd like me to keep playing that. Unless I'm a minor in China, of course, in which case they just want me to go away before someone sees me.

Making every activity in the game feel the same is asking for people to go outside the ecosystem, which is why the really big, truly massively multiple mmorpgs try to be everything to everyone.Which also has its problems.

Ever get the feeling someone's got their eye on you?

The irony, as Wilhelm often points out, is that overreach often leads to failure. Not many developers have both the talent and the resources to roll out good content in many styles consistently and reliably. To do that you need to be Blizzard or Square Enix and as we've seen of late even Blizzard couldn't keep it up forever.

I had plenty of time to think about all that this morning as I tried to get back on the Allods horse. Patching up wasn't a problem. I still have the game installed and my MY.games password still works. I just have to hope they never send me any emails that need a reply because the email address I used, which is also my username, expired years ago. 

The Allods client is charmingly small compared to modern-day bloat. If I'd had to reinstall it would only have been a 12GB download. As it was, I just needed a 2GB patch. The news ticker on the launcher talks about a "new platform", arriving on December 4th but for now the old one works just fine.

I'm not sure when I last played Allods. Oh, wait... I have a blog... looks like the last time I patched was almost exactly six years ago. I do remember that for a while I was playing it on a tablet, where it works surprisingly well.

I think he's part Pointer.

That was six months earlier, in March 2015, when the game added a new race. I believe I made the account I'm now playing then, too, because when I logged in the only character waiting for me was a Priden, the first race added to the game that doesn't automatically fall into the clutches of either the Alliance or the Empire.

I would hesitate to recommend starting as a Priden. There's nothing much wrong with the race itself, "A hearty race that seemingly prefers to run around naked on four legs like an uncivilized tribe of half-beasts", according to the official website. The problem isn't who so much as where

Priden begin on their own island or, I guess, their own allod. They have a very detailed, some would say over-detailed origin and backstory, all of which plays out in a lengthy racial questline. In common with everything in Allods there's a lot of reading to get through before you kill anything.

As well as the seemingly numberless elders and trainers and wise ones, all of whom can't use ten worlds where a hundred will do, there are delegations from both the main factions, the aforementioned Empire and Alliance. As you will have guessed, assuming you've ever played any other mmorpg, at some point your character is going to have to make a choice between the two and throw in with whichever looks like the least horrible.

Even the pet pays respect.

I thought that would happen at level ten. It did not. Then I thought it would surely happen at level fifteen. I was guessing. I couldn't be sure because at level thirteen I ran out of quests. That's why I stopped last time. And the time before that.

I was enjoying myself a lot until then. Allods, as I have said every time I've written about it, is a very good theme park mmorpg. In my opinion it's the best of the WoW clones that popped up like mushrooms in the late noughties and early 2010s. It's like World of Warcraft if it had been made by crazy Russians, which is pretty much the elevator pitch.

The elvator pitch for my Priden experience the last couple of times I played would be "Imagine WoW with no quests at all and the only zone is Mulgore". I did try grinding mobs to get to fourteen to see if a new questline opened up but it was so slow I just couldn't do it. And I like grinding mobs for xp.

After ten minutes in game this morning I was about ready to give up again. I still couldn't find a single NPC who wanted anything done and the spiders I killed gave no xp at all. As I was set to leave the game for another five years, I thought to check my bags to see if I'd missed anything. 

This might be the game where I finally play an elf...

There were no quest starters lurking in the corners but I did find a consumable that said it would boost my xp by 30k. It looked like it meant it would give me a boost per kill until until I'd made that much, which wasn't great but might at least do something to help. 

I must have misread the instructions because I clicked on it and BOOM! Instant level 14!

Yeah, level fourteen. It's no big deal, is it? Doesn't even end in a five or a zero. But it changed everything because at fourteen there it is! The next racial quest! And from there they just keep coming.

I spent the next two hours very happily questing away, vaguely trying to follow the increasingly baroque storyline and struggling to keep up with the never-ending torrent of upgrades. Every quest gave me something new and at one point I got more than a dozen boxes all at once, every one of which had an upgrade to a different item.

Probably should have saved those for later but based on my history with Allods "later" could be a long time coming. I've had this account six years and I've played one character and my total played time is eight hours and eight minutes. There are mmorpgs where I've played longer than that on launch day.

Advertisement for an expansion I'm never going to see.

When I logged out I was level seventeen. There was a heady moment around level sixteen when I thought I'd come to the end of the racial storyline and maybe I was going to get to choose a team but it was just the end of a chapter not the whole tale.

I finally went and looked it up. Priden don't get to leave the island until around level twenty-five. At this rate thta's going to be some time in 2025. 

Or maybe it'll be this weekend. Just so long as the quests keep coming. Allods is fun. Always was. I might keep playing. I would like to see some of those dungeons, with that team of NPCs that mows down everything without me having to lift a paw. I've never been in a dungeon in Allods since beta and that didn't go well as I remember.

No promises but I might be back. At least long enough to get off the damn island.

It's All Just EverQuest In The End, Isn't It?

At one hundred and twenty hours in, I'm starting to feel I have some idea just what it is about New World that makes me enjoy playing it so much. It's basically EverQuest. Or maybe Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, which was EQ 2.5. No wonder I like it.

I guess you could say New World is the latest addition to the EverQuest family, although I'd stop short of calling it EverQuest 3. Or EQNext god forbid. Could have made a great clickbait title out of that. Amazed I managed to show some restraint.

No, it's more like a cousin than a sibling or a daughter but it feels as though it's very much in the same bloodline, just like Star Wars: the Old Republic and Wildstar felt like they were in the same family as World of Warcraft. Which, of course, makes them second cousins to EverQuest, too.

Let me be a little more specific about what I mean. Here are a few of the more significant things I remember about about early EQ as it was when I played in 1999-2000.

• There was no central narrative.
• Any story there was came from quests, few of which seemed to have much to do with each other.
• The world was sprawling and mysterious, filled with mysteries from a deep, forgotten past.
• Travel took time and felt dangerous.
  
• Gameplay revolved around leveling your character and not much else.
• Skills, including weapon skills, leveled on use.
  
• If you wanted to buy something you had to go to where it was sold.
  
• Dungeons required groups but there was no automated means of finding one.

Most of those things also existed in Vanguard and now I see them in New World. I haven't seen all that many of them in any new mmorpg I've played over the past decade. The last time I noticed something similar would have been WoW Classic, the version of WoW that really does show its EverQuest roots, and that also grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go, until an external Blizzard scandal spoiled the illusion.

All of the above relate mainly to adventuring but EverQuest also had a crafting system from the start, although in those early days it was comparatively limited. It was a click-to-make process rather than a hands-on operation although it was nerve-wracking, too, with the relatively high chance of failure and material loss.

New World's crafting shares the fire-and-forget nature of the EQ crafting stations (Although thankfully they don't eat your mats if you use the wrong one.) but it drops the anxiety-inducing risk of failure in favor of a much more welcome chance for bonuses. It also speeds everything up hugely with the machines churning out hundreds of items in a matter of seconds.

Essentially, though, it's very much the same process. You supply the right materials and the machines turn out the product. In EQ each combine gave you a chance at raising that specific craft skill by a point. In New World you get a set amount of xp per item for the craft skill it requires. It removes the random factor but otherwise it feels very similar.

Both games involve a large amount of redundancy. In EQ you needed to make countless items in order to skill up. A few you might be able to sell to other players but most you sold back to NPCs. If you were lucky you'd break even. Mostly it cost you money. Vanguard sidestepped the need to go and sell  by making most of your combines part of consignments requested by NPCs in the first place.

New World doesn't have any NPC merchants willing to buy players' old cast-offs or overproduction spillage and the only orders you can get come from the town boards, which are ultimately controlled by other players. Other than a pittance for doing your civic duty, if you want to make money you either sell to other players or you don't sell at all.

Since most of what you'll be making to raise your skills no-one will want to buy at any price, there has to be some way to dispose of it and that's salvage. You rip it up and use the pieces to make more of the same. It doesn't feel a lot different to what I did in the older games.

If adventuring and crafting remind me strongly of EverQuest, gathering reminds me of Vanguard. EverQuest, unlike its nominal successor, EQII, had no real gathering other than a smattering of ground spawns (Iron Oxide, anyone?). Almost all materials were dropped by mobs as loot or bought from NPCs. 

Vanguard was the first game I remember playing where you could chop down trees for the wood, use your sickle on plants for the fibre and smash up boulders for the stone. It was also the first game where you could skin the animals you killed, something I found almost unhealthily enjoyable. 

My raki disciple was a skinner and a leathercrafter, two disciplines I absolutely loved. I eventually levelled skinning all the way to five hundred, not once but twice on the same character. It took me weeks if not months and the reason I did it twice was because I foolishly believed you could change gathering skills to retrain in another without losing the progress you'd made in the first. You couldn't. Yes, I am still annoyed about it, thanks for asking.

As well as skinning animals you could chop up treants for wood and mine elementals for stone and metal. You can do all of that in New World. Well, sort of. There are Angry Earth bears and wolves that can be logged, at least, and I came across something that could be mined after I killed it but I can't remember what it was. I didn't have enough skill to mine it, I remember that much.

It is absolutely no surprise to me that my two highest skills in New World are currently Tracking and Skinning and Harvesting. Just as I did in Vanguard, I find it all but impossible to pass up the chance to skin a beast or harvest a plant and there are beasts and plants all around. There are also trees and boulders but somehow their utter ubiquity makes it a lot easier to keep on running rather than stopping to aim an axe or a pick at every single one. 

The cumulative effect of all of this is to make me feel very much as I did in the early days of EverQuest and Vanguard. I feel at liberty in a huge, fascinating, mysterious world with no script to follow and no agenda to meet. I find the absence of an overarching, linear narrative positively freeing, exhillarating even. All the same, I seem to be one of a very small minority actually enjoying the storytelling in New World and one of the reasons is that I don't feel I'm being pushed down into my seat by the shoulders and forced to watch someone's home movies.

I think it's very telling that the bloggers I've read who aren't enjoying New World as much as I am, some of whom gave up very quickly, others who carry on somewhat grimly, all seem to be very much more focused than I am on either the potential endgame or the lack of a story. I've addressed the latter but the former could use a gloss.

I don't like endgames in mmorpgs. Over the past decade I believe I've been lulled into a kind of acceptance of the concept, whereas in the decade before I would have vehemently rejected it. I used not just to be disinterested in endgame play as I am now, I actively reviled it. 

My feeling was that mmorpgs neither could nor should have an endgame for the simple reason that they are, by practice and custom if not by definition, never-ending. It was my contention that mmoprgs existed to be explored and experienced and that characters existed to be levelled up and then retired. 

I once counted all my characters in EverQuest, the ones I considered myself to be actively playing, and there were something like thirty or forty of them. I had as many as you were allowed to make on several servers and plenty more scattered around elsewhere. Vanguard only had one server but I had as many characters there as an account allowed.

There are two major differences between those games and New World in regard to making new characters. Firstly, New World only has one race and secondly one character can do anything in the game. In EQ and Vanguard, there were many different races and classes and you needed many  characters to try them all.

That meant, in my opinion, there was no need for an endgame. Even playing the hours I did, putting in about as much time each week as a full-time job, there was never any realistic chance I'd be able to experience what it was like to play all of the available options up to the level cap. Add to that the extreme rate at which new content, including more levels, races and classes, came into the game and the whole idea of getting to some notional end state seemed fatuous.

Over the succeeding twenty years many things have changed but perhaps the most impactful has been the pace. There are still levels and classes and races in most mmorpgs but the time it takes to get to the level cap has reduced by orders of magnitude and the number of characters required to be all the things has collapsed to a handful.

New World fails very badly on the races and classes test. You can be a human and like it or a human and lump it. There are no adventure classes at all, only weapons, and no crafting classes, only skills. What's more, one character can do the lot.

As for levelling, that, too, is comically fast by the standards of classic EverQuest or even Vanguard. The game's been out for a month and my character's already two-thirds of the way to sixty. Level forty-one in fact. 

Even so, the levels are hardly racing by. Leveling in New World is well-paced. It feels solid. Every new level comes with the sense of satisfaction that used to accompany the famous EverQuest Ding! It also seems to be slowing down somewhat. I would guess it will take me another three or four weeks to get to sixty, maybe a couple of months or more from creation to cap. 

When I hit sixty, though, what then? In the old days it would have been off to character creation and another class, another race, another round of level-up. In New World I'm imagining a plateau period of filling out all the weapon trees and all the crafting skills. That should take a while. 

The two things that could keep me playing after that are housing and territorial PvP. Both are activities I very much enjoy in other mmorpgs. Whether there's enough in either or both to hold my attention when the leveling is over and all the skill trees are full I'm not so sure. It's going to depend how much work Amazon put into developing them further, fleshing them out, smothing the rough edges, truning them into genuine endgame activities.

I have to remind myself that whether or not they do so successfully doesn't really matter. Not at all. I do not play for endgames. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself now and that's all that counts. The game doesn't need to hold my attention forever, just for as long as it takes me to do all the things that interest me.

It's dangerous to make predictions but my feeling at the moment is that New World is likely to become the first mmorpg since Guild Wars 2 to join the fairly short list headed "Mmorpgs I always play". 

That's not because it's better than a lot of other games that have come along in the last ten years. I don't think it's better than Black Desert, for example, or Elder Scrolls Online. 

It's because it feels more familiar than anything I've played for a long time. More comfortable. More natural. Even with action combat it feels more like Vanguard than any game has a right to feel. If they'd just add some more races and give us a reason to make more than one character I could easily see myself leveling to sixty a few times over the next couple of years.

As it is, I imagine I'll drop in and out as the mood takes me and as the game changes. It will change, of course. It's an mmorpg and it's barely begun. In time it will scarcely be recognizeable as the game we see now, another reason not to get worked up about what's not working.

But the game I see now is one that works for me and that's mostly because it reminds me of other games that have worked for me in the past. I'm sure it's not working for everyone but I can only hope it's so working for enough to keep the wheels turning.

It's been a fun ride so far. I want to see where it goes next.

Vanguard Gives A Crafting Masterclass - Again.

 

This is by way of being a placeholder post about crafting in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the game I would contend had the best overall systems and mechanics of any I've played in the mmorpg genre when it came to supporting crafting as a genuine, full and complete playstyle the equal of adventuring (And when I say "crafting" I mean just that. I don't mean manufacturing. That's a different activity altogether.)

The post is a placeholder because, having just worked my way through the crafting tutorial, I realize just how much I've forgotten and how much there was to remember. Vanguard crafting is deep and complex, considerably more so than the runner-up in my personal poll, EverQuest II.

I'm very familiar with EQII tradeskills, which had a glorious flourishing after several years under the guiding hand of Domino but even those don't reach the standards set by Brad McQuaid's team at launch. SOE/Daybreak outpaced Sigil in the way they adapted narrative storyline techniques from adventuring and refomatted them to work for crafters but in doing so they turned crafters into non-combat adventurers. In Vanguard every questline teaches you to be a better crafter and that's that. No saving the world with your needle and thread.

This is the very basic start-of-the-tutorial version. It already has four stages, one split into two parts, four different reagents, tools, action points and a choice of crafting station. It gets a lot more complicated than that...

 

In Vanguard, tradeskill progression is about two things: learning and perfecting practical skills so as to make better items and travelling the world to find and meet master crafters willing to share their secrets. The former is something the player needs to do in much the same way a player of an adventuring character needs to perfect their rotations and develop muscle memory. The latter expands and increases the range of options available to the character, allowing them to make more things.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I can write a post about the subtlety and sophistication of crafting in Telon I need to refresh my memory on the way it all worked. How am I going to do that with the game long gone and all my crafters with it?

Sound simple? No, not really. And it's not even as simple as it sounds!

I'm glad you asked! And I'm even gladder some thoughtful ex-player chose to stop by the comments on a two-year old post to let everyone know that "As of now crafting and harvesting up through tier 1 has been implemented and is working well."

Working well where? On the wonderful Vanguard emulator, of course. I knew harvesting was in but last time I checked crafting wasn't. And now it is!

I logged in this evening to take a look. I ended up running through the tutorial in the Crafter's Forum in Khal. It took me the best part of an hour and it really was just the basics. It reminded me how much time and energy I put into learning to craft the first time around, how challenging it was and ultimately how satisfying.

As I recall, crafting in Vanguard was reasonably simple at the start but became increasingly more difficult in the low to low-mid levels. I seem to remember the high teens being particularly "challenging". Or maybe it was the high twenties. Whichever it was, a lot of people faded at that stage. Certainly I remember hearing a lot of complaints and I had some tough times of my own. 

Complications? Recurring nightmares, more like!

If you stuck at it, though, things slowly improved and I seem to remember that by the mid to upper-mid levels I was finding crafting comfortable and reasonably reliable. I could make good stuff for myself and I made good money selling things I made at the auction house. 

If I remember correctly, by the time my Outfitter hit level 47, he could make everything he could get recipes for, to the best quality, with almost no failures. That was why I never finished off the last three levels to hit the fifty cap. There didn't seem to be any point.

All of that is feeling a bit vague now. Some foggy recollection of a time long gone. Rather than eulogize about how great I think the crafting was based on memories a decade old, it might be better if I levelled up again. Not only should that give me some incontrovertible facts to work with (and some screenshots) but it might jog loose some definite, detailed memories.

That certainly seemed to be happening as I worked through the simple tutorial recipes today. I was getting flashbacks to the bags and bags of powders and crystals, the flasks and pouches, tools and trinkets, all the manifold means and measures I needed to make the best jerkins and claws. (Did Outfitters make martial weapons? I think they did. They're just gloves with spikes in, after all.)

If I'd known there was going to be a test I'd have taken notes. Also, the guy with the blur over his head is the player who guild-invited me. I've anonymized him out of courtesy but I'm pretty sure he'd be happy to add anyone who wants to play to his guild.

 

The implementation seems solid. The Vanguard emu is still supposedly in "early pre-alpha" but there's a lot there now and a lot that works. There were great chunks of flavor text missing, replaced by placeholders asking anyone who remembered what the NPCs used to say to get in touch but the stuff that matters, the mechanics, the rewards, the progression - all those seemed to be working perfectly.

I'm going to keep this short because I do hope, some time, one day, to give a more thoughtful, informed overview of the gem of the genre that was - IS! - crafting in Vanguard. Before that happens (if it ever does) I recommend, as I always do, anyone curious to know what this game was like install the emulator and take a look for themselves. There's already more to do there than some games that are taking money.

"Go find them" is the least of it. Survive the journey, persuade them to talk to you, prove you're worthy, basically live the life of a trade guild journeyman of the fifteenth century. Then go to another continent and start over from scratch.

 

You'd probably need to be the sort of mmorpg player who thrives on going it alone. It's hardly a seething mass of players. There are people playing, though (Five, not counting me, when I logged in today!) and they're very friendly and helpful. I got a guild invite this afternoon from someone  standing next to me at the crafting tables. 

Even as a single player game, though, Vanguard still shines, and crafting was always something best done alone. In fact, it may have been the only thing in Telon best done alone, now I come to think of it; group harvesting got you the best mats and civic diplomacy the best buffs.

I wonder if there was group crafting too and I've just forgotten?