Get It Right!

 

In a short addendum to my previous post, here I am again to explain how little I understand about the games I play. It's embarassing at the best of times but to be proved wrong within minutes of hitting Publish is particularly painful.

After I finished my habitual post-publication proofread (three more typos caught) I read this slightly below-averagely snarky article (Snarkticle?) on Massively OP, which purports to explain why Bless Unleashed still has decent Steam concurrency despite no-one on Steam being interested in playing it. 

It's big in China, apparently. Is that like being big in Japan? 

I logged into the game where I'd logged out last night, which happened to be in Navarra, the main city in a region well below my character's current level. I wandered around for a while wondering what to do before I remembered I'd been farming bag pieces from the little chests that appear all over the map.

This is one of Bless Unleashed's more curious featurettes. There are NPCs in various cities and hubs, confusingly labelled Bag Merchants although they neither stock nor sell bags. As far as I can see, there's no way to buy actual bags or craft them. 

Instead, these public-spirited if lingustically-challenged individuals happily take any fragments of bags you may have found on your travels and weave them into... you're thinking bags aren't you? Nope. That would be too logical. Close, though. Inventory slots.

Is that a Fire Rift?

Four bag pieces get you one extra inventory slot and every chest has one bag piece inside. Also some gold and a few artifact shards which are used for something I forget. I'm sure it's important.

When I was levelling up I mistakenly believed these chests were, like gathering or mining nodes, not to be shared. I saw people camping the locations and jumped to the conclusion they were waiting for the chests to spawn so they could grab them before anyone else did. 

Now, I believe I was wrong about all of that. Now, I think the chests are always there, that you can grab yours even after someone else just got there first, and that I could have been expanding my bags the whole while, but I reserve the right to come back later and explain how that's a load of tosh and it works completely differently.

I got on my horse and rode out of the city gates intending to go searching for chests. They're marked clearly on the map but they lurk in bushes and behind rocks so it's a bit of a mini-game all its own. No sooner did I turn the corner, however, than I was confronted by the giant jellyfish you see above.

Something like that will stop you in your tracks. Once I'd taken a few pictures and convinced myself I hadn't logged into Rift by mistake, I cantered down to take a closer look. At first I couldn't see much happening but that turned out to be because too much was.

Looks like there's no-one here, doesn't it? Just wait another fifteen seconds.

 

There were scores of mobs fighting a couple of dozen players. The whole lot took a while to load in but I didn't waste any time. Well, not once I saw a few level 30s, anyway. The mobs were all level 28, putting them within my range to damage and therefore get credit but well beyond my capabilty of killing more than one a time and that carefully.

With plenty of bigger boys and girls doing the heavy lifting I was able to stay well back and smite as many mobs as I could target. I didn't get hit once but when the Raid Leader died I got to loot his corpse (just some gold) and then when the event ended I was allowed to grab a few trinkets from the huge chest that spawned.

I believe what I witnessed was probably one of the "invasions" I hear people talking about a lot in chat. Mostly they're asking how to spawn them and where to find them. I haven't paid much attention to be honest. Alternatively it might have been a Corrupted node, something the game occasionally tells me I can find on my map. 

Who knows? Not me, that's for sure. What I do know is this thing spawned in a low level area and a bunch of mid-levels turned up to farm it. Then, right after that I teleported all the way back to the very first starting area and got killed before I'd even tabbed back into the game (my own fault) because someone was fighting a flame saurin on top of the teleporter.

Don't push! There's something for everyone!

 

Flame saurins are part of the current summer event, Salamander Solstice, about which I was also planning to write, once I was sure I knew how it worked. One thing I do know is that every time you mine one of the glowing nodes that spawn all over the place a highly aggressive, very tough mob called a Flame Saurin spawns and tries to rip your head off.

These are always the exact level of your character, as far as I can tell, regardless of whether you spawned them or not. For some reason, although they seem to be left to wander about harassing all-comers in the areas appropriate to my character's level, back at the start there were half a dozen people  from four to thirty-four happily farming them.

I joined in for a while because that's how things go in Bless Unleashed. It's very similar to either Rift or Guild Wars 2 in that respect. See a fight or an event, all pile on, prizes for everyone.

The upshot of all this is that contrary to what I was saying in my previous post it seems the game has a number of contingency plans in place to keep people interested in all levels of the open world. Whether it's a strategy that will work long-term remains to be seen but it's definitely a positive approach.

Incoming!

As I write this, I've just finished the fifth of the six Palawa Joko Invasions I needed to complete the full set of maps for the Zone Defense achievement in GW2's new Current Events update. That. mind you, is on my third account. I've already done it on accounts one and two and when I finish it on number three I'm going to log in my fourth, the F2P one I haven't used since last September, and do six more.

This weekend both Mrs Bhagpuss and I barely missed an invasion. Every hour, on the half-hour, there we were, waiting in the crowd in Metrica Province or Wayfarer Foothills or Caledon Forest as predicted by the Phasic Distortion Reader, a handy device which we both now have on all three accounts.

The Reader costs two gold to make and involves a fair bit of running around plus a full day's wait if you aren't an Engineer, an Asura or a Charr in  the Iron Legion. All it does is tell you in game what you can see on Dulfy any time you care to look. It's fluff in other words.

And yet we dig it out of our bags at the top of the hour and announce its findings to each other in Guild chat and thank each other for the information. We used it to encourage our one other regular guild member, who only plays on Sundays, to come and join the fun, which he did, although he probably had no idea what was going on.

In between invasions there were times when I did little more than clear my bags and hang around waiting for the next one. It's not as though I even want the rewards. The Achi gives three kegs of Karma, which totals 22,500. I have nearly 15 million karma on my main account. Even my third account has nearly seven and a half million.

The dropped loot is quite nice but it's the same loot you can get 24/7 in Path of Fire maps. Only I would never go there to get it. I don't go to Path of Fire maps any more. Well, for the vista daily or the plant-picking daily, occasionally, if there's nothing better. Otherwise, never.

PoF is all but dead to me already, as I predicted it would be. I saw the story once and hope never to see it again. I got the mounts and didn't like them, although I am gradually getting used to using the Griffin for general travel.

I haven't even finished a single one of the Ascended collects even though I want the weapons. Occasionally I think about it, then I imagine going through those tedious maps again and I decide to leave it for when I'm in the mood, which so far I never have been.

Whether the PoF maps are, in general, well-used these days I have no idea because I'm not there even to gather anecdotal evidence. I know the ludicrously overgenerous meta in the first LS4 map was being heavily exploited, just as Auric Basin was before the nerf , but that has everything to do with a broken game mechanic and nothing to do with whether anyone is actually enjoying the content. I did it once and haven't been back.

All I can say is that the Joko invasions, which look like they must have taken a very small team a very short time to create, are drawing big crowds and those crowds seem very happy. I know I am.

What the invasions remind me of more than anything is Rift in its early days, when it was good. As I think about it, a very great deal of the MMO content I've enjoyed most - certainly the content I've found the most addictive or compelling - in the last seven years or so has followed a very consistent and rather simple pattern: a bunch of mobs descend out of a portal and try to kill us and take our stuff and we band together to try to stop them.

As well as rifts, Rift had invasions. I liked those even more because they came at me instead of waiting for me to come at them. WoW had the Legion invasions which kind of did both. I really enjoyed those. I played more WoW while they were on than at any time since my six month stint years ago. I even subbed for a couple of months just to do them.

GW2 had the Karka invasion and then the wonderful Scarlet Invasions plus a few more along the way. Even World vs World, the part that appeals to me, follows the format. The enemy zerg arrives unexpectedly and starts sieging our keep, the call goes out and we rush to defend.

It seems to me that this could - should - be the PvE answer to PUBG. Content that's easy and quick to make but also infinitely replayable. Because it's PvE and it's in an MMORPG it probably has to have loot attached. Loot or achievements or titles. Preferably all three.

It's also best, I think, if there's something at stake. Something practical. In WvW you don't want to lose your structures, particularly if they've been upgraded and have banks and waypoints. In Rift beta and possibly for a month or two after launch if you failed to stop an invasion the baddies would kill your questgivers and take over your quest hubs for a while. I liked that but it got removed so presumably most people didn't.

Still, I don't think it should be beyond the wit of professional game developers to hit a balance between incentive and annoyance that falls on the side of motivation rather than frustration. The payoff would be a game that people wanted to keep playing because it was fun to keep playing - as seems to be the case with PUBG and its clones.

Gevlon posted today about the terrible fit "story" makes for an MMORPG and while I don't often agree with the goblin on much I do think he has a point here. Lore, for sure. MMORPGs thrive on lore. It gives context, creates a world. Story, though? Story gets in the way. It can work if it plods along behind or off to one side but put it at the front and get it to pull and the whole cart veers sideways. Sometimes it tips over.

No-one really knows what Joko is playing at with these invasions. There's no story to them and no-one cares. The action tells its own story. Invasions are exciting and dynamic but above all they are inclusive. They require no explanation beyond "Stop them!" and no organization beyond "Get here, now!". They're drop in and drop out if you want them to be or stay all day if you have the time and the inclination. They have a rhythm and a pace that allows for time to breathe between battles and yet they feel relentless, inexorable.

In beta, Rift looked like it might be the first MMORPG built around invasions. For a while, even after the post-launch nerfs, it was. If I had a wish for a new MMORPG it would be just that - all Invasions, all the time. I think someone could make a lot of money doing that right.

Failing that I'll take a Rift Classic server, please. I really miss those Sunday afternoons in Stillmoor.