A Free Ride When You've Already Paid (Or Someone Has, Anyway...)

Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob has a post up about the fallout from Daybreak Games' ongoing legal battle with whoever it is that operates the for-profit EverQuest rogue server, The Hero's Journey. Meanwhile, Shintar over at Priest With A Cause has been keeping us all up to date with her experiences on for-profit World of Warcraft rogue server, Turtle WoW, currently receiving similar legal attention from Blizzard.

 I'm not going to go over all the ins and outs of the events involved or rehash the legal arguments for and against (Except to note that there really are no legal arguments in favor of the continued existence of either server.) The short version is that both servers run unlicensed versions of commercially-available games and take money for doing so and the I.P. owners are taking legal action to stop them. 

You don't have to approve of copyright or I.P. ownership to understand that it exists and the mechanisms to enforce compliance with both also exist. And that the outcome in both cases is a foregone conclusion.

Rather than talk about the legal niceties or even the morality, I'm more interested in the ironies both these cases have made it impossible to ignore. There are a myriad of them but the big three seem to me to be:

• Small, amateur teams out-performing large, professional companies.
• Players believing the New Boss will be different from the Old Boss
• Games coming back to life just as the call to Stop Killing Games gets louder.

Taking those in order, both THJ and TurtleWoW (Which really does not abbreviate well...) offer something not too different from the "Classic +" experience for which so many veterans, particularly of World of Warcraft but also of other MMORPGs, are frequently heard lobbying. 

Both Blizzard and Daybreak have done their best to serve the nostalgic demand for time-slipped servers that aim to return WoW and EQ to something close to their roots. Far from satisfying the urge for a return to the past, however, in both cases what the Classic and TLE servers mostly seem to have done is unleash a desire for a whole new timeline, one in which the games continued to develop, just not the way they did in this one.

Understandably, neither company has, as yet, taken to the idea of running another, divergent MMORPG alongside the one they already have, presumably out of a fear it would split the existing player-base and require a considerable amount of extra expenditure with very little increase in income. Unfortunately for them, this eminently reasonable position is currently being undermined by the highly-visible evidence of much smaller, less well-funded teams seemingly doing exactly that. 

Only without the encumbrance of an actual, much more popular, live game to run at the same time, of course. But no-one playing TurtleWoW or THJ pays much attention to that inconvenient detail, for the very understandable reason that they've already written the Live games off as a betrayal of the True Faith and would almost certainly not shed any tears if they disappeared tomorrow.

It leaves Blizzard and Daybreak looking like the worst combination of bullies, killjoys and incompetents as they try to put the very people who are doing what the players want out of business, while refusing to consider doing anything similar themselves, presumably because it would just be too hard for them. I mean, it's not like they make games for a living or anything...

Which leads me directly on to Irony #2, that being said players imagining that, should the teams behind their rogue servers of choice ever build up a sufficient head of steam to challenge the professional game developer elites, they'd behave any differently. It's quite sweet, really.

There are lots of examples of tiny, dedicated, non-professional teams running retro servers for ancient MMORPGs wholly in the service and with the informed consent of the people who play them. They're wonderful. We all applaud their genuinely selfless efforts. 

And note that they're hobbyists; developers and players alike.

They aren't running commercial businesses so they don't have to make compromises with quality or content to keep their kids in shoes. THJ and TurtleWoW aren't quite the same. They most likely are someone's livelihood already and if they continue to grow they certainly will be before long. 

They may also be labors of love but so, for the most part, are the original, official games they're leeching off. Only, the developers of those games don't have the leeway to make noncommercial decisions just to please the players. The more successful their rogue equivalents become, the less leeway they'll have, too.

Which isn't to say they won't make a better job of balancing the commercial and the aesthetic but they sure as hell won't be able to keep all the players happy all the time, any more than any other live MMORPG ever has. And the longer the Classic + style experiments continue, the further they'll diverge from the One True Path and the more pissed off the players will get.

Finally, and most amusingly, there's the mortality issue. We've been hearing a lot lately about games dying. Or being killed, rather, because apparently they don't just age out and pass away into the Great Gray Nothing all on their own. Someone has to administer the coup de grace.

My question is, if someone's out there killing them, why don't the buggers ever die? 

I mean, they used to, right? Even a hint that an MMORPG I'd played and enjoyed and felt a connection with might be about to close down for good used to make me come out in a cold sweat. Quite literally in the case of a handful that I really liked.

Nowadays, about the best I can summon is a shrug. There's no emotional impact when I hear a game I used to play is about to sail into the ultimate west because I know that, should I ever get the urge to play it again, I can just hop onto an emulator.

The whole post-sunset after-life is so much a part of the process now, Massively OP just ran a post asking readers if the people playing their MMO of choice had a back-up plan in place to spin up an emulator in the event of the real game closing down. It's expected now, apparently, and the wise players are far enough ahead of the curve to guarantee there's barely a bump as players switch tracks when the official servers power down.

It seems like the greatest irony of all, the way the one genre that should be the most vulnerable to executive kill orders, due to being both entirely online and running mostly on someone else's hardware, ends up being the least likely of all to go dark for more than a blink. 

And it doesn't even take a closure for the resurrection to come.

In the case of the two games mentioned at the top of the post, neither of which has yet given the slightest indication that official service is in imminent danger of being withdrawn, there are dozens of unofficial alternatives available already. EQ even has not one but two authorized, non-commercial third-party alternatives in place! You can go play EverQuest on Project 99 or Quarm just as legally as you can play on Daybreak's own servers. 

Blizzard haven't quite countenanced that yet but they've made it pretty plain they aren't interested in closing down every last fan project out there. Just the ones that try to make money. 

I used to like to say that WoW would probably be around longer than I'd be around to play it. At the time I was thinking of the official version, which seemed likely to last for decades and still does. Eventually, though, Blizzard will shut it down. I won't see it happen but you might.

The game itself, though, by which I mean some playable version that's instantly recognizable as World of Warcraft? That's going to be around long after anyone reading this is still here to enjoy it. And so will EverQuest. And many of the others. 

There'll be no final curtain for any of them, although the day may come when they're playing to empty houses. Interest will ebb before opportunity.

Is that a good thing? I'm all for historical preservation and personal choice. If people want to play the same game for fifty years, let them. It's not without repercussions and consequences, though.

Daybreak have made the extent to which The Hero's Journey's success damages their bottom line very plain. Blizzard is going after Turtle WoW for much the same reason, although as part of Microsoft now they have almost infinitely deep pockets, meaning the competition can hardly have the same impact. WoW isn't going to close down because TurtleWoW steals a few thousand of its players. EverQuest just might, though, if the shortfall in expected revenue DBG ascribes to THJ's success is accurate.

But even if they both went under, we'd still be able to play, right? We'd just roll up new characters on the emulators and start over. So why worry?

Possibly because all those people playing games that were made twenty or more years ago are sopping up players who could be playing something new, thereby contributing to the much-discussed difficulty every new MMORPG experiences in both attracting and holding an audience. 

And if that's happening already, imagine how much stronger the effect might be if those games weren't just replicating old experiences but were actively engaged in creating new ones. Every action has consequences, not always intended or foreseen.

And maybe that's the greatest irony of all. If the old games won't die, how are new ones going to live?  

Mostly by not looking or playing anything like the old ones, I'd imagine... 

Playing Catch-Up

Since I was so uncomplimentary about the scenery at the start of Dragonflight last time, I thought it only fair I give some praise where it's due. Yesterday I finally got back to playing again (So much for the Winds of Mysterious Fortune - I really dropped the ball on that one...) and after I'd cleared up a couple more quests, the breadcrumb trail took me over the hill and out of the grey-red-black hellscape into a beautiful, lush valley.

Why they wouldn't start with somewhere this lovely I have no idea. Or, wait, yes I do. Someone at Blizzard either has an emotional age of about twelve or thirteen or believes most WoW players do. That'll be it. Also I bet they all listen to some stripe of metal. In the office, likely as not. They all think red and black is cool. 

Okay, red and black is cool. But only in clothes, not in landscapes. Glad we got that cleared up, at least. 

In contrast to what happened the first time I arrived in the Dragon Isles, when I took no screenshots at all, this time I took...  hang on, wait a moment while I count them... eighteen. Could have been a lot more, too.

That was this morning but I got to the new area last night, so why the wait? Ah, well that makes a very nice example of why veterans and developers don't always remember what things are like for a new player. Or a returning player. Or someone who just plain doesn't know what they're doing. You can guess where I fit in.

Here's what happened. I got the quest from the over-enthusiastic but inexperienced dragon cadet outside the Embassy (Nice bit of characterization there.). She'd been deputed by the Majordomo to take me to the camp where there'd been some trouble with some ancestral enemy of the dragons. They'd (Conveniently or inconveniently, depending which way you look at it.) just woken up from... I don't know, hibernation? Stasis? Deep meditation? They hadn't been seen for a long time, anyway, but now they were back.

Before I get to the next part, I have to ask. Why? I mean, why a Majordomo? It's an obscure choice of rank, isn't it? There's an option to have him explain what it means , which I already knew, which was why I wanted to ask him. My not-that-extensive experience of majordomos (Majordomi?)suggest it would be kinda weird to see one commanding an army in the field. More likely to find them organizing the help for a big party in the palace, I'd have thought.

His explanation didn't hold much water but maybe it's different for dragons. Whatever, he was there and he was giving... not so much orders as rather avuncular suggestions it felt like it would be unwise to ignore. So off I went with the cadet, who set off at a jog-trot towards a gap in the hills I hadn't even noticed.

And that was where the problem arose. I was on foot because I generally only mount up in games if I'm planning on going some distance, not if I'm walking (Or running, because it's always running in games, isn't it?) around town. I jogged along behind but the dragon was a lot taller than my vulpera (Isn't everyone? Okay, not gnomes.) and I fell further and further behind.

Waaaiiit! I only have little legs!

The cadet was yammering away to herself the whole way. She never stops monologuing. I was trying to read her speech bubbles although I think she was voice-acted as well. I thought about mounting up but I decided by the time I worked out how to do it she'd be completely out of sight.

Luckily she stopped at the brow of the hill to wax lyrical about something or other and I was able to catch her up. Then, just as I was about to follow her, she shot off and before I could get started she disappeared. I carried on down to the camp but no-one there would talk to me. The quest tracker still told me I needed to be following the cadet to the camp, even though I was already in it and she was nowhere to be seen.

I spent about five minutes looking all around for her. No luck. I figured I was either going to have to drop the quest and start again, if you can do that in WoW, or else go all the way back to the Embassy to see if she'd reset. It was getting late, though, so I decided to leave it til the morning and logged out.

That was last night. This morning I logged back in, hoping maybe the quest would have sorted itself out while I was asleep but it hadn't. I was obviously going to have to go back to where I started but before I did that I thought I'd better mount up so the whole thing didn't just happen all over again. 

And I could not remember how to do it. I must have summoned a mount in WOW scores of times. Hundreds, probably. I was convinced I'd always done it by clicking an icon on a hot bar. And I'm sure that's just what I have done in the past. Only before you can click an icon on a hot bar it has to be on one and as I mentioned last time, all my hot bars were cleansed while I was away.

Now, in retrospect I'm willing to concede that the permanent services hot bar that comes as part of the default UI does include a pretty obvious horseshoe, which should have been a clue. In my defense, it's really small and if you mouse over it it doesn't say anything about a mount. It says something about Collections.

So sue me but I don't think of my mounts first and foremost as something to be collected. I think of them as something to ride. I concede that collecting mounts in WoW is a thing. I've read enough blog posts where people talk about their collection of mounts. It's not, however, one of my things so I didn't make the connection.

What I did do was go through all the keybinds looking for one to summon a ride. There isn't one. Or if there is, it's not included in the in-game information. I also looked through my bags in case there was something in there I was supposed to click but that's not how it works in Azeroth. (How it does work, as in where all those mounts hang out when you're not using them, probably best not to think about.)

In the end I had to google it.  And that's why MMORPGs are so confusing and frustrating for people who aren't intimately familiar with them. Nothing is ever as simple and straightforward as the people who play every day and the people who design the content imagine.

Once I'd found my "Collection" of mounts and pulled one of the icons onto a hot bar, I was ready to carry on. I rode back to the last place I'd seen the cadet (She has a name. I just don't remember what it is. I think it was something like Sarsaparilla.) and there she was. I spoke to her and the whole thing started up again, except this time I was on my Felsteed (Which it occurs to me suddenly I shouldn't have at Level 13, should I?) so instead of struggling to keep up with her, I had to keep stopping so the cadet could catch up to me.

All of which I found quite entertaining and even more so when I finally got to the camp and picked up my next set of quests. I did a couple and then just went exploring. I took all those screenshots with no interruptions because the whole area seems to be remarkably quiet, not to say idyllic.

There's an abundance of curious and interesting wildlife but almost none of it is aggressive. Whole valleys seem to be entirely devoid of threat or danger of any kind. It looks like it would be an excellent place to build a spa hotel. Or to take a party of Playable Worlds devs so they could get an idea of what makes for a fun environment.

After about twenty minutes, I ended up on the coast. I could see the Horde zeppelin service pulling away in the distance so I trotted down the beach in that general direction and in no time ended up back where I'd started. I have made this observation before but it bears repeating: a lot of MMORPGs, WoW being no exception, are more fun when you stop acting like everybody's gofer and just wander off and do your own thing.

I do find it surprising that, in the midst of my current lack of enthusiasm for games in general, it's WoW I most feel drawn to but that's how it is. I was quite looking forward to playing today and I'm quite looking forward to playing some more. I think the very pointlessness of it all is part of the charm.

Lastly, I just wanted to thank Shintar, who left a comment on the previous post with a link to a reddit thread explaining how to free up some of the hard disk space the WoW patcher leaves stuffed with unnecessary clutter. I'm very bad at checking older posts for late comments so I only saw it today, when I opened that one to get the link.

At first, I thought the tip wasn't going to be of any help. I checked the relevant location as advised but the folders in question were measurable in mere megabytes. I was about to forget it, when I noticed there was a folder called "World of Warcraft" inside my "World of Warcraft" folder. 

That seemed weird so I had a good look at both of them and guess what? It was the whole dam' lot again. I had the entire installation, twice, on the same drive. I mean, I knew in the past I'd had multiple installations on different drives but this was a whole new way to waste space.

I deleted everything from the spare installation except the screenshots and that freed up almost 100GB. Then I logged back into WoW in case it might need to replace a few files but it worked perfectly. How that bonus client got there I have no idea but I'm happy to have the space back.

I'll just have to remember to keep an eye on things to make sure it doesn't come back. I certainly don't trust Blizzard to do its own housekeeping. 

These Fragments...

I have absolutely nothing to write about today because I've been spending every waking minute fiddling around with old cassette tapes and turning the songs I've been hearing inside my head for the last forty or fifty years into ones I can hear outside my head as well. Obviously that's more fun than just about anything but even so I don't want to drop cadence here, so I'd better come up with something.

I was going to do a few hundred words on the Steam Spring Sale and Blizzard's latest press release on how WoW Housing is going to work. Only a couple of problems with that plan, the first of which being I haven't actually looked at the sale yet. The only reason I even know it's on is because I have Pantheon on my wishlist so I got an email telling me it's 20% off right now.

And that is tempting. I'm still curious enough to want to have a poke about and I doubt there'll be any bigger discounts for a while. The whole Early Access thing seems to be working quite well for them. They don't need to give away the farm just yet.

At 20% off the game is £26.80, which isn't nothing but also isn't much of anything, either. I'd pay it. As usual, the main issue for me isn't "Is it worth it?" but "Will I play it?" Realistically, the answer to that is, "Probably not" so I'm holding off for now. The sale has almost a week to go so I don't have to decide right away.

As for the housing in World of Warcraft, the problem there is that I can't really say much about it  because I haven't even watched the video. There is a video, isn't there? Erm... no, not really. I just checked and there are a bunch of video examples in the PR piece but no actual video as such.

What the piece does have is a lot of detail on things like how you can push a chair through a wall and if you put a cup on a table you can pick them both up and move them about together. Too much detail, really. I'm more interested in how you get a house, how much choice there is and whether I'll be able to have one on the Endless Free Trial.

Maybe that's in the press release too. I probably should have read the whole thing before I started this.

Anyway, those were the only two things I had in mind to write about today and clearly I wasn't in much of a position to do either of them justice. Then, right before I was going to do it anyway, Wilhelm put up a Friday Bullet Point post in which he talked about both, so it seemed a bit redundant for me to start going on about them too, especially since, as I said, I haven't even done the reading.

Still, I got eight paragraphs out of it anyway. Can't complain.

Instead, I'm going to rip through this month's Prime Gaming offers. And by "rip" I really mean rip off. I read them at the start of the month and didn't think they were worth mentioning but I lookedagain a few days ago and thought maybe they were, after all. Now I don't have anything better to write about, I'm sure of it!

The full list - and there's a lot - is on the Prime Gaming Blog as usual. I'm just going to mention a few that caught my eye.

Syberia: The World Before - I think this might be the last, remaining Syberia game Prime haven't already given us. I claimed all the others but I only played the first. I found it very heavy going. The series has a strong reputation in the Point & Click genre but it seemed to be right at the ponderous, do everything the hard way for the sake of it end of the spectrum to me. Maybe this one will be a bit more... dare I say fun? I'm taking it, anyway. May as well collect the set.

Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master - I really enjoyed the original game. And the DLC. I'd love another, full campaign. Unfortunately, this is one of those sims where you play the baddie trying to kill the adventurers with your fiendish traps and hordes of minions. I was about to say that thoses aren't really my cup of tea but then it occured to me I've never actually played one. Who knows? I might enjoy it. I'll be taking that one, too and I'll almost certainly play it, although not just yet.

Dog Shelter Simulator - This one jumped out as something I might like to play. Mrs Bhagpuss and I watch our share of dog rescue vodcasts. Then I read the description, which makes it sound more like work than a game. I think that about most simulations but in this case, what with the stress of all those dogs you can't find homes for, it doesn't just sound like work but anxiety-inducing, distressing work at that. Pass.

Endling: Extinction Is Forever - Then again, running an imaginary dog shelter would be a delight compared to this nightmare. "Experience what life would be like in a world ravaged by mankind through the eyes of the last fox on Earth... defend your cubs, three tiny and defenseless fur balls... plan your next movement carefully since it could be the last for you and your pups." It also goes on about how you can get to know their personalities before the inevitable strikes, which reminded me of that old T-shirt that said "Join the Army. Meet interesting people. Then kill them." It's a bit annoying, how bleak it sounds. The graphics are gorgeous. It would make a great cozy adventure game but instead it looks more like a nihilistic horrorshow. Who enjoys this kind of existential torture? The Countryside Alliance, I assume. Fun for people who hate foxes, I guess. My grandmother would have loved it. She really hated foxes.

Saints Row: Remastered -  I quite fancy having a go at this. I've read enough about it over the years. I think it would be good for doing that thing I liked so much in Once Human, namely driving about aimlessly while listening to the radio. Pretty sure that's a thing you can do in Saints Row. Not sure about the rest of it but that alonw makes it worth grabbing.

There were also a couple of Old West/Wild West titles. I'm usually up for anything with that setting so I was briefly excited, until I took a closer look. 

El Hijo - Looks great but turns out to be "a non-violent stealth game". And the protagonist is a child. Doesn't exactly scream "Classic Western", does it?

Colt Canyon - Thematically far more in line with expectations but it's "a 2D pixel art shooter" and the screenshots make it look almost abstract. I might give it a try - it's available for another twelve days - but I honestly can't see myself playing it so I suppose I ought to be sensible and leave it on the shelf.

And that's about it. Thin fare, I know, by which I mean this post, not Prime's March slate, which isn't at all bad. Normal service will be resumed when I've exhausted my pop star fantasies, something that isn't likely to happen for a while yet.

Games, Music, TV, Books... It Must Be The Grab-Bag!

Today, I believe we shall have a grab-bag of various odds and ends. Even though it is Thursday. Because tomorrow I believe we shall have a music post and on the weekend we shall have nothing at all. Because I have to work.

So, let us see what is in the bag. 

Oh, look! Surprise, surprise! Another email from Playable Worlds! It must be a day ending in "y".And what do they have to tell us this time? Something new and unexpected!

Painting The Galaxy Red

It seems Stars Reach has a story. Who knew? Seriously, though. Anyone?

I mean, they have been putting out those really rather quite good short stories on the website while pretty much telling no-one they were doing it but other than that I'm not sure we've heard anything about any lore underpinning the game.

It's an exaggeration to say there's a story. And after all, the game doesn't need one. Raph is very keen to let everyone know Stars Reach is a "true sandbox". Apparently, though, there is some lore behind it all. Well, a paragraph, at least:

"You are one of 8 kinds of humans who have destroyed their homeworlds. Thanks to the TransPlanetary League, a government formed by the eight types of humanity, you have been given a second chance to leave your homeworld behind to head out into the larger galaxy. They’ll hand you a simple blaster, starter tools, and basic training before letting you loose to make a new life among the stars."

There you go. Now you know.  You're basically the scum of the galaxy, one of the surviving members of a bunch of losers who somehow managed to fuck up their own planets so badly they can't live there any more. Now the whole gang of environmental criminals has come together to spread their incompetence and destruction far and wide across the entire galaxy. 

It's not what I'd call an inspiring start. It's dangerously close to "Colonialization: the Space Sim". I was particularly unimpressed to learn that the first and presumably most important item the authorities issue you with is a gun. Get out there, kill anything that gets in your way, take their stuff. Pretty much Colonialism 101, isn't it? 

I'm not sure PW is reading the room here. This sort of stuff isn't going down too well in certain circles just now but it's too popular altogether in others. Which side do you want to be on? 

Less controversially but equally surprisingly, there's a whole lot more in the email about stuff that's not in the pre-alpha. Things like character stats (There are nine of them, apparently.) and quests (There will be some and you'll be able to make your own, too.). There's also a map of the galaxy although it's unclear if it's just an indication of how things will work in general or a specific, accurate map of all the locations that are going to be in the game. 

There's even a flow-chart of what you can do in Stars Reach. Or more accurately will be able to do when it's there. It's mostly not there now, I'm fairly sure...

One thing that did catch my attention was this: 

"A planet is a zone. A part of space is a zone. Zones are connected by wormholes." 

I guess that pretty much puts paid to the idea of spaceships. It's going to be old-school zoning, albeit dressed up as going through "wormholes", I guess. Which is what we're seeing in pre-alpha, minus the wormholes part.

Why Call Her Back From Heaven?

There's going to be a Buffy reboot and Sarah Michelle Gellar is going to be in it!

Really good news. If it ever happens. It's kind of a long way out still but getting closer all the time.

According to Variety, the project is currently "nearing a pilot order" with Hulu, which I think means that someone might be about to green-light a pilot that might get picked up for a series. Sarah Michelle Gellar is also "in final talks" to star in it, so that's not even a certainty, either. 

If it ever happens, it sounds like they have a solid framework, anyway. SMG (Weird acronym...) would appear as a "recurring character" in a mentor role to a new Slayer, which I guess makes her the reboot's Giles. There is the small problem of the way the original series ended, which was with hundreds - maybe thousands - of Slayers appearing across the world but I'm sure that's easily solvable with magic.

The new show, if it comes, will be directed by the Oscar-winning Chloé Zhao. The Zuckerman sisters will write and act as showrunners and Dolly Parton is signed up as Executive Producer, as she was for the original. If they can't get commissioned with a team like that then the money-men really do know nothing.

I'm optimistic but of course, even if it goes ahead, it'll be a looooong wait.

When She's On Her Way To Hell

Sabrina, that is. Sadly, I don't have news of a Chilling Adventures reboot but I am here to recommend Sarah Rees Brennan's trilogy of novelizations of the TV show. I got the set for Christmas, I've just finished the third book and they're all excellent.

Novelizations of TV shows and movies are often so much better than they need to be but these are really outstanding. Not only are they very well-written indeed, they're beautifully designed and packaged as a set. If we had them at work, which of course we don't because we never have the books I want to read, they'd make an excellent display.

The most impressive thing about the trilogy, though, is the way it adds insight into what you see and hear in the show itself. One thing novels handle much better than television or the movies is interior monologue and there's often plenty of that in novelizations but SRB (Much better.) goes well beyond the normal "here's what they were thinking in that scene you remember". 

The three books all employ a different technique and within each there are several more. Only Sabrina ever gives her thoughts in first person but in one of the volumes all the characters' thoughts are represented in idiosyncratic mental registers that sometimes align with but more often diverge from what's shown in the series.

It was so well-done that at first I thought it was being done badly. I felt the author was contradicting both the canonical content of the show and her own, earlier interpretation. As I read on, though, I began to realize she was doing something much more subtle and clever - allowing us to hear not just the private thoughts of the characters but to hear those thoughts from each character's own, unmediated perspective, something often quite different from the way the character wants others to perceive them.

It's a damn good trick if you can pull it off and Brennan very much can. Unfortunately, the trick she apparently couldn't manage was to get the publishers (Scholastic, possibly the last publisher you'd expect to publish a book with a dedication from the author that literally ends with "Hail Satan".) to stump up for more than three books once the series got canned, so the third book ends right in the middle of a tale now most unlikely ever to be told. 

The upshot of all of this is that I really, really want to re-watch the entire series again and also that I'm now extremely likely to read anything else by Sarah Rees Brennan I can get my hands on. She's written some original fantasy but she seems to specialize in novelizations of YA supernatural series. I'm going to have to get hold of her Shadowhunters and WINX adaptations, one of which was published under the name Ava Corrigan for some reason, although she can't have been more uncomfortable being known as the author of a WINX spin-off as I will be if anyone asks me what I'm reading, when I'm reading it in the lunch room at work.

Also, I need to read the comic-book continuation of Chilling Adventures, which was brutally curtailed at the end of Season 4 by the evil Netflix, that ultimate villain no televised hero can ever defeat. The continued adventures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in comic-book form after the series ended were absolutely top-notch so, once again, I'm optimistic.

Home Is The Hunter

Blizzard is finally getting around to adding housing to World of Warcraft and Grimtooth of Not All Hunters is feeling ambivalent about it. So would I be, if I could be bothered feeling anything at all.

It's a mark of how far I've drifted from the anchor that held me to the MMORPG scene for so long that I haven't even felt a momentary urge to revisit Guild Wars 2 to see what the housing there is like. Now I find I don't feel much more inclined to revisit WoW to check out the accommodation there, either.

Of course, at the moment there's nothing to see. Not even a prototype. Some artist's impressions, like the architect's models you see in the showrooms of house-builders, and that's all.

We do have some idea now of what Blizzard intends, though, and I have to say it doesn't look at all bad. MassivelyOP reported yesterday on what they're calling "the design pillars for World of Warcraft's accessible neighborhood housing". It's an encouraging document, including as it does "Boundless Self-Expression" as the first and foremost pillar. I think that means decorating. If so, I'm all for it.

The second pillar, "Deeply Social", interests me not at all but the third, "Long-Lasting Journey" is welcome news. At least, it is as far as it goes, which isn't nearly far enough. 

Despite calling it "an evergreen addition to the game", the timescales to which the press release alludes - "multiple patches and into future expansions" - don't feel as reassuring as they should. Once you add housing, it needs to be there for the lifetime of the game. If not, don't bother.

Grimtooth's take on all this is interesting since it focuses not on the housing players are going to see but on the cost to Blizzard of adding it to the game, particularly in terms of server load. I've rarely seen anyone even mention this side of the housing issue before and I've certainly never thought much about it myself. 

Maybe it explains why Yoshi P. always seems so reluctant to give every Final Fantasy XIV player free access to the housing they want. I always thought that was to create artificial scarcity and thereby instill FOMO but maybe it's more like fear of drowning the rest of the game in housing-induced lag.

Just about every other MMORPG manages to provide housing of one sort or another, though, so I'm sure Blizzard can do it. I don't imagine I'll care enough to re-sub but if there's a shack or a hut going for players on the Endless Free Trial then I'll be happy to grab mine. I'm guessing that won't be until next year but who knows? It is in the Roadmap for 2025, I believe.

And that'll do for now. As always, let's finish with a song, even if we're getting a whole post full of them tomorrow.

Woman Driver - The Pill

There are two bands (At least.) called The Pill. This is the one I like. They remind me of Shampoo, a bit, as well as a certain other band from the same place they come from, the Isle of Wight. You know who I mean.

We might have another from them tomorrow.

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the header image but the process was interesting. I wanted to use a composite shot of Buffy and Sabrina. I could have found a couple of pictures and photo-shoppped them together myself but I'd been at this for a while and I was in a hurry so I googled for one someone else had done. I found a good one but then I started to get uncomfortable about just pinching it so I thought I'd mess around with it and make the provenance a bit less obvious.

I ran it through a couple of filters in Paint.net, trimmed it a bit, removed all the text and finally re-rendered it as an ink sketch. It looked good but still altogether too much like the original, so I had the bright idea of laundering it through AI. I uploaded the image to NightCafe and let Flux Schnell have a run at it with the prompt "Movie poster, technicolor, widescreen, 1950s"

At the default settings, that produced something utterly unrecognizable, as if the AI had completely ignored the uploaded image altogether. I pushed the Noise Weight slider all the way back to zero to make the model stick rigidly to the starting image and that gave me the version above. About all it seems to have done is make Buffy's face a little harder and add a night scene with a car in the deep background, which I rather like.

The interesting part about all this to me is what it does or doesn't do to the ownership of the image and the rights that adhere to it. The picture I started with came from YouTube and was almost certainly constructed from other images from elsewhere on the web, presumably culled directly from the shows' PR materials. The image at the top of this post is an AI-generated interpretation of an algorithmically produced "sketch" based on a modified copy of a screen-grab from YouTube, taken using the Screenshot facility provided by YouTube itself. 

I'm not sure that's any cleaner, morally or legally, than just stealing the image would have been in the first place, although as far as I understand it, as an AI image it now can't be legally claimed by anyone. I'll credit the creator anyway. It's a channel called Doing OK.

Passing The Time On Patch Day

With luck, I might have something to say about the new EverQuest II expansion by Friday, so I think I'm going to do the Grab-Bag today instead. I have a few talking points bookmarked... let's see... ah yes!

Absolutely Not Garrisons Mk. 2

World of Warcraft is getting housing. At last. Although not quite yet. It's coming as a feature in the next expansion, which we already know will be called "Midnight" because Blizzard is doing a trilogy and they announced the names of all three chapters before they released the first. 

That led some people (I may have been one of them.) to assume or at least hope that it meant a switch to something closer to an annual release schedule but the newly-issued roadmap for 2025 puts paid to that theory. I guess that means they have a ten year plan, near as makes no difference. That's double anything Mao ever managed, so bravo, Blizzard!

This far out (Midnight won't be with us until mid-2026 at the soonest.) we don't know much about how housing will work in WoW although we have been assured development will be ongoing and not one-and-done with the expansion that brings it or even the trilogy it's part of. Wilhelm looked into the possibilities and consequences at some length and thereby sparked a lengthy and discursive discussion in the comments, to which I contributed thoughts and opinions I will not attempt to expand upon here.

Basically, we know nothing yet except that there will be housing of some kind. Syp, as might be expected, is ecstatic. I'll reserve judgment until I see it. At the moment I have no plans to subscribe again, not even for Classic Classic and its fresh start servers but I'd sub a month or two to see how housing pans out. I imagine I'll have to if I want to see anything. I don't suppose us free trial scrubs will get as much as a poxy inn room.

Any Port In A Store? 

I have generally been willing to try any and every new MMORPG as it appears, always providing I didn't have to pay for the privelige and it wasn't too much trouble. It's fun to see new things and it makes for a few easy blog posts. If the game's on Steam, there seems very little reason not to download it and have a look, at least.

With that in mind, when I read that Gran Saga, a game I'd actually heard of, was releasing globally through the platform, my immediate reaction was to go straight to the Store and download it. I got halfway there...

I did look at the game on Steam, where it currently has a Mixed review rating from fewer than a hundred and fifty responses. I read a dozen or so of the reviews and it quickly became obvious that most of the objections were conceptual; people just didn't approve of a mobile game being ported almost verbatim to PC. 

Mobile ports don't bother me in the slightest and other than those complaints, most of the reviews seemed quite positive:

"Good graphics, a lot of side quest and beautiful scenery..."

"Good Story, Graphics, Visuals & VA..."

"Much more to this than what you'll see at surface level in your first 2 hours"

"If you don't mind gacha it's honestly a decent game ..."

And yet I haven't downloaded it. 

Nothing to do with the game. I just experienced an unusual moment of common sense before I hit the "Download" button, as I realised I don't have time to play another MMORPG right now. I also don't have the space for another to sit on my hard drive unplayed, so why not just leave it there on Steam, where I can grab it should either of those factors change.

I may well give it a try sometime. I'll keep it in mind for when I next run out of things to write about, which at the moment seems unlikely. I admit I am curious...

The Door Swings Both Ways

Although nowhere near as curious as I am about this one. I'm guessing the people who don't take to mobile games getting a PC version won't be any happier to see the trend reversed. I've always had the impression that players of Final Fantasy XIV take their game of choice quite seriously so the news that it's getting a mobile version probably isn't going down all that well. 

The comment thread that followed the news on MassivelyOP was predictably dismissive but what's new? Aywren's response was a lot more open-minded but even she's not all that optimistic about the prospect. 

I find myself surprisngly intrigued. I can't really be doing with FFXIV. I've tried it a bunch of times and there are things I like about it but it's always so much slower, stuffier and more ponderous than I remembered.

I spend less and less time there every time I go back and I thought I'd reached the point where I was done with it but the prospect of a mobile port that's much more solo-oriented and - let's not hedge - much less tedious does sound appealing. I would certainly give that a try, although ironically I'd most likely only play it on PC through an emulator like BlueStacks. I doubt I'll ever have a mobile device that could run it.

A lot of objectors seem to be trying to wave the whole thing away by saying it'll just borrow a few keywords from FFXIV and append them to a completely unrelated mobile game that no-one will care about but that's not what Square Enix is saying. In the trailer, Yoshi P (Do people still call him that?) says the mobile game will "faithfully recreate the story, duties, battle content and other aspects of the original game".

I guess we'll see when it arrives. First, though, it has to go through a period of testing, followed by a release in China before it goes global. When we get there, I'll definitely be taking a look, provided I can find some some way of running it. Whether I'll take to it any more than the PC version is another question but it would be funny if I ended up getting further in the mobile port than I ever did in the original game.

Are We There Yet?

I was watching a video on a YouTube channel I follow the other day when I spotted something in the YT recommendations from another channel I sometimes look at. Both channels deal with AI and how it's coming along but the one I follow is more of a "Here's what's new and isn't it cool?", whereas the one I only check out occasionally is all "Here's how you can make some money out of this thing."

That channel is called Comicscape and mostly the way you're supposed to make money is by using AI to make (NSFW) comics. I'm not interested in the making money part (Or the NSFW for that matter, although the examples on the channel itself are always very tame.) but I would like to see what kind of comics an AI could come up with. That's why I ocasionally come back to see what the latest software is capable of, hoping one day it'll have progressed to the point where you can just type in "Make me a comic about a cat that becomes a superhero and saves the world from invading marshmallow monsters" and it'll spew out twenty-two amusing pages all on its own.

We are, as you probably realise, not there yet. Most of the ideas the woman who runs the channel shows seem to require about as much human effort as it would need to draw a comic by hand, assuming you were good at drawing. It's true that she's able to make comics even though she can't draw but it's clearly still a lot of work. Far more than I'd ever be interested in, just to satisfy my idle curiosity.

Anyway, this particular video wasn't about comics, for once. It was all about how to make an illustrated text RPG using AI, which supposedly is something you can do at a website called RPGGO. I thought that sounded intriguing so I went there to try it out.

Suffice it to say I did not make a text RPG, illustrated or otherwise. Once again, the amount of work required felt like more than I wanted to take on just at the moment. I think I'd have given it a go twenty years ago, when I had a lot more patience for this sort of thing, had the software existed then, but these days I'm not really all that bothered about expressing myself through the medium of Go North, Take Axe.

Still, I might come back to it sometime and meanwhile I'm not averse to seeing what other people have done with the technology. I just tried one of the RPGs on the site, Shadows over Eldoria, to test it for the purposes of this post and I've been playing it for the last twenty minutes. 

It's weirdly compelling. Even though I know the plot is being generated on the fly as I type in my responses, I still find myself thinking "Ooh, I wonder what's going to happen next?" The writing is no worse than plenty of human-authored text adventures I've seen, either, particularly the amateur ones, of which I played plenty back in the days of The Quill et al.

I started this section expecting to conclude that we clearly have some way to go yet before AI is ready to provide us with an infinite supply of perfectly serviceable games but actually we might be closer than I thought...

And now, some music and then I must be off. The EQII servers should be up now and I want to go check out the expansion, about which I so far know almost nothing. It's been all Christmas all the time here for so long I'm not sure I have anything much to offer. Oh, I know! How about this?

Board Game - Dog Hair Dressers

Now no-one can say I never post anything about board games!

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

I seem to have fallen seriously off the EverQuest II wagon of late. Back in the winter and early spring I was logging in several times a week. Now I'm barely managing to remember to pick up my monthly All Access stipend of 500 DBC. I even found myself wondering this morning if it was really worth renewing my annual All Access subscription when it falls due in a few weeks.

The Summer Jubilee, a sequence of holiday events that ties Tinkerfest, Scorched Skies and Oceansfull into one coherent package, has been running for months but I think I managed one session in Oceansfull and that was about all. And now summer's almost over, it's time for the next big ticket item: Game Update 126, otherwise known as The Immeasurable Menagerie.

It was only when I saw a couple of posts about it on MMO Bomb and MassivelyOP that I realised the update had already gone live. Truth be told, I hadn't thought much about it since it was announced because the GUs are generally focused on at-cap content and for the first time in years I don't have a single max level character.

Another game you might have heard of also added some new content this week. The War Within is the latest expansion for World of Warcraft (Sorry, I'm sounding like an AI now. I'll have to start being more sarcastic.) and from what I'm reading it seems like it's going down pretty well so far. Not that you'd necessarily know it from what Blizzard are saying about their own game.

As many have pointed out, this means the people who paid for the head start got to go hog wild, while everyone coming along behind gets to pay for their exuberance. It also means leveling alts will be slower and almost certainly that newer, less well-geared characters will be at a significant disadvantage.

This feels like a faint echo of what happened in EQII when the most recent expansion, Ballads of Zimarra, dropped late last year. For quite a while, EQII players have become used to expansions that raise the level cap coming with hugely accelerated xp rewards for questing. So huge that it had become the norm for characters to hit the new cap long before reaching the end of the expansion's main questline.

BoZ changed all that. Quest xp reverted back to something not dissimilar to how it was a decade or more ago, only this time there was no alternative leveling strategy. In the good old days, anyone who didn't much fancy trudging through the new content as an under-leveled peon could go back to earlier expansions and solo some dungeons to get much faster xp.

That, apparently, was deemed to be Not Playing The Game The Right Way and a stop was put to it. Annoyingly paternalistic though that was, the effect was at least mitigated by the rapid ramping up of xp in the new expansions, so I for one was happy enough to accept the trade.

Now, however, we are left with the most unsatisfactory of compromises, where xp in new content has been scythed to the ground without any other options being offered as a sop to hurt feelings. Worse, we're being told it's all for our own good, an explanation that always goes down well with the disgruntled masses.

I find it interesting that the enhanced leveling speed in new EQII expansions began and flourished while Holly "Windstalker" Longdale was in overall control and that it's happening again, albeit to a lesser degree, now she's gotten her hands on WoW. Meanwhile, back in Norrath, almost as soon as she was out of the door (Okay, not quite that quickly.) things changed back to how they'd been before she was calling the shots. Probably just a co-incidence, right?

If that comes across a criticism of Holly, it's not. I strongly preferred the fast xp we were getting. I would much rather go through the new content with my extra levels and new spells and abilities than without. 

In fact, given that questing in the latest expansion is now the only way to gain enough xp to get those last five levels, I'd as soon we all started at the new level cap because the whole concept of leveling becomes meaningless when you have no real choice other than to follow a linear storyline to do it. In the old days, when you could do any number of things and see the xp rolling in, leveling could be fun in and of itself. Now it's just a fairly obvious set of weights attached to your boots to make you go slower.

At least, that's the effect it's had on me. It's made me go so much slower that after eight months I've still only managed to do three and a half of the five levels that came with the expansion. It's looking very unlikely that I'll be level 130 when the next expansion arrives in a couple of months and I have pretty much decided not even to try. I'll just use the level boost that comes with the expansion, always assuming there is one.

That's why I wasn't all that excited about the new update. I figured it would probably be too tough for me, although now I come to think of it the last one was OK, so maybe I didn't really think that through. Either way, I wasn't planning on making the effort to log in for the update until I noticed it also included this year's Expansion Prelude.

Now, unless there's been another big change, you can generally assume the pre-expansion events are going to be very easy. No tough bosses, no long, complicated quest chains, nothing to get anyone over-excited, at least not in a bad way. 

For about as long as I can remember these events have either been a carousel of public quests and world boss fights in which the rewards shower down like rain as the strong carry the weak or a short questline with some simple fights, followed by two months of optional grinding for currency to spend on trivia. This year's is the latter.

But it's fun! At least, the questline and the instances are. I did the whole thing this morning. It took me maybe a couple of hours, probably less. I wasn't timing it. 

It all kicks off in Butcherblock for no reason that's ever explained. A new bunch of do-gooders and busybodies called Open Hand are recruiting adventurers to Busy Their Bodies and Do Good and they're doing it in such a ridiculously unconvincing fashion I initially thought it had to be some kind of scam and they were going to turn out to be the baddies.

I don't think that any more. Now I just think someone at Darkpaw, having written one too many of these things, is subtly taking the piss out of the whole concept. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. It's probably me that's danced this dance one time too many.

Whatever, the fighting is very satisfying because as usual, even though the instances scale to your level, everything dies in one hit. I'm aware that isn't everyone's idea of fun, let alone satisfaction (Hi, Blizzard!) but it absolutely is mine. I enjoy questing so much more when any combat is trivial. If the quest dialog is entertaining and the rewards are decent, who needs "good" fights?

There are also some intriguing hints towards the new expansion, although it's quite hard to see how any of what happens could have much to do with it. There are two apparently unrelated storylines, one involving some dark elves giving the Krulkiel bugbears magic they shouldn't have, the other featuring a crazed gnome (Is there any other kind?) who seems to believe Freeport dictator Overlord Lucan d'Lere stole his mysterious invention for unknown but almost certainly nefarious reasons. 

The whole thing left me none the wiser as to where we might be going in the next expansion but it certainly did pique my curiosity, so job well done, I'd say.

For once, I'm not going to make any bold claims about how I'm going to be logging in more and doing this nice, new content over and over. I've made promises like that far too often and I never keep any of them. In this case, it's highly unlikely I'll bother to grind out any of the crafting quests for the currency the vendor takes if only because, having looked through what's for sale, I don't really want any of it.

I might take a look at the new update after all, though. I imagine that will require some proper fighting in which I have to pay attention so I'll need to be in the mood but it could happen.

And if anyone from Darkpaw reads this, they'll probably be pleased to hear that I have decided to renew my annual All Access sub after all. I was always going to get the expansion and, thinking about it, it hardly seems worth interrupting the process for such a short payment holiday. 

Add to that, as today has proved yet again, whenever I remember to log in, I always have a good time and there really doesn't seem to be any reason not go on as always have. If nothing else, I have to find out what Lucan is up to this time!

Why I'm Not Playing WoW Right Now (Like I Thought I Would Be)

For all my enthusiasm over World of Warcraft's Pandaria Remix, I haven't gone ahead and re-upped my sub. I keep thinking about it but then I remember I'm paying for EverQuest II and not playing that either. It's not like I begrudge the money but there does come a point when you have to ask yourself if spending more is really the smart thing to do.

I'm not going to rehash all the familiar arguments for and against various payment models, nor even remark once again on the ever-growing realization that, as consumers, we're screwed if we pay, screwed if we don't. If anyone needs a final confirmation that no-one owns anything any more, even when they've paid for it and taken it home in a box, look no further than Spotify's short-lived entry into the hardware market, the Must Have Been Named By A Teletubby Car Thing. 

I am not a Spotify user. The service they provide doesn't fit well with the way I listen to music so I've never even considered subscribing. Until fairly recently, I didn't have much of an opinion about the company either way. I don't tend to waste a lot of time pondering the worth of services I don't use or plan on using. 

All the same, it's hard to avoid hearing plenty about the Swedish company. I read a lot of music news and the name comes up over and over again. Of late, that reporting has skewed hard towards the negative.

 Q1 revenue this year was up 20%, immediately following a cull of 17% of its workforce in December. That sort of thing always goes down well with shareholders. Everyone else? Not so much.

Since making money is the primary purpose of business, there are always plan to increase the yield.  In Spotify's case, there was talk of a "Supremium" level of service, intended to raise subscription rates even further, but apparently that was torpedoed by consumer resistance. It seems there is a temperature at which the frogs start to jump out of the pot after all.

Until yesterday, by far the most controversial of Spotify's recent business moves was the decision to stop paying royalties on any track listed on the platform if it receives fewer than a thousand plays per year. This has been widely reported as an attack on independent music-makers although, as Spotify points out, seemingly without either irony or self-awareness, a thousand streams earns you less than $3.

Bad though that looks, yesterday's news that the company is about to brick its own, dedicated, in-car device, the Car Thing, beats it hands-down for self-inflicted bad PR. It's almost up there with Apple's disastrous piano-crushing commercial.

At least Apple's PR department had the sense to walk that one back once they saw the reaction it got. There's been no indication of Spotify enjoying even that degraded sense of self-preservation. 

Not only will the devices they sold, apparently for $50-$100 dollars a time, cease to work entirely just before the end of this year, there will be no refunds and no alternatives. Spotify helpfully suggests you recycle yours because of course they care about stuff like that...

You might argue that, for a piece of consumer electronics that was only available for around five months a couple of years ago, that's not a wholly untenable position. Nothing last forever, after all, The U.S. Federal Trade Commission might not agree. They seem to think that if you sell someone a thing it ought to last more than five minutes. Luddites!

Inevitably, a class action suit has already been raised. Whether or not that gains legal traction, brand damage has already been done. Not that Spotify probably cares. This is clearly one more tone-deaf marketing decision from a company that doesn't seem to hold much concern for what its customers or anyone else thinks about it. 

Lest there be any lingering, residual doubt in anyone's mind about just how far removed Spotify corporate is from anywhere that could even remotely be described as "in touch with popular opinion", let me just quote the stated reason they've given as to why they very briefly entered, then just as quickly exited, the arena of automotive audio products in the first place:

“The goal of our ‘Car Thing’ exploration in the US was to learn more about how people listen in the car.”

So it was all for science. An experiment, carried out using other people's money. And, presumably, their data, although I imagine all rights to that are waived in the EULA when you sign up for a Spotify account.

Not that any of us own anything any more. Certainly we don't own our games. Not if they require an internet connection to play and not even if they don't, according to Valve. You may be able to play Nightingale offline now but don't let that give you any funny ideas about who owns the game you paid for. I'll give you a clue: it's not you.

It can't be, can it? If it was, you'd be able to bequeath your Steam games to your heirs. Yeah, that's not happening. As the NME helpfully points out, there are ways around the problem, such as taping your password to your PC before you gasp your last. That way your games can be handed down the generations like the family heirlooms they will literally have become. As the article blithely puts it, "Steam can’t prove a bunch of 135-year-olds aren’t still playing games."

I suppose one thing you can say about the good old MMORPG subscription model is that at least it's clear. We grizzled vets may have shelves of cardboard boxes and stacks of shiny discs to prove we went to the store around the turn of the millennium to buy EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot or Final Fantasy XI but we all knew those were nothing more than souvenirs. We owned the boxes but we never owned the games. Those we just rented at $14.99 a month.

The Free to Play revolution muddied the waters but even with the entry fee removed, no-one was fooled into thinking we owned anything more than we ever had. If the company chooses to shut the servers down the result is the same whether you were paying to play on them or not. 

All of that has something to do with why I haven't ponied up for a WoW sub, even though I was quite enjoying myself on my return but other factors are having considerably more impact on that decision. It's true I'm in a bit of a lull with MMORPGs just now but that's not going to last. I'm somewhat wary of subbing to WoW and then almost immediately finding I have other, more pressing gaming concerns to occupy my time.

The new EverQuest II Origins server opens next month, most likely just after Steam's Next Fest, and now Tencent have revealed the official launch date for Tarisland to be June 21st. As I mentioned yesterday, Once Human could go live as early as August and this morning I got an email from the people behind Genshin Impact, telling me their new title, an "Urban Fantasy ARPG" by the name of  Zenless Zone Zero is set to relaease globally on 4 July.

That's pretty much got the whole summer covered and all of those I can either play for free or via a subscription I've already paid. Sure, I'd like to play WoW but would I want to play it more than all of those? It seems unlikely.

In the end, it probably doesn't matter all that much whether the games I play really belong to me, whether I'm just renting them or whether I'm getting them for free. What counts is whether I'm going to play them or not. And it looks like I'm not going to be playing WoW after all.