Going To Town In ROSE Online

In a development I'm sure will surprise absolutely nobody, I'm finding ROSE Online to be a lot more enjoyable than I expected. I only started playing the game on a whim, when I happened to read a news report about its unexpected return from mmorpg limbo, thinking to get a single blog post out of the event, if that, but I swiftly found myself drawn in by the simple, uncomplicated gameplay, cute graphics and the general hustle and bustle of what appears to be a very popular and well-attended resurrection.

For the moment, ROSE is the game I find myself keenest to log into each day, closely followed by EverQuest II, where I continue to make good progress in the latest expansion, Renewal of Ro. Third on the list comes Noah's Heart, another game I never expected to stick with but which I've now been playing every day for four-and-a-half months. 

Falling by the wayside for the time being are Lord of the Rings Online, New World and Guild Wars 2, none of which I've given any serious attention for weeks. Of those three, it's LotRO that stands the best chance of an early return, thanks to the recent addition of two new starting zones. As ROSE has reminded me yet again, the aspect of mmorpg gameplay I most enjoy is the early to mid level range, when significant changes to both gameplay and character development come thick and fast.

As I mentioned in passing the other day, just preparing to set out to explore new content in EQII requires a significant investment in time and effort, as you check all your gear and abilities are fit for purpose and take remedial action to correct those that fail the test. It is, in itself, an enjoyable process, but it requires an entirely different degree of concentration, application and administrative attention, something that can become mentally exhausting after a while.

In contrast, the early levels of any mmorpg feel more open, exciting and fresh. There's the intellectual challenge of learning new systems and mechanics, something I find exhillarating and absorbing, but also the relative freedom from the kind of beauraucratic box-ticking that frequently dominates at-cap gameplay. If nothihng else, it's a pure joy to play a character whose inventory is almost empty.

ROSE Online benefits hugely in this respect from being a game from an earlier, simpler era. It feels both mechanically and graphically uncluttered. The game looks and plays clean. I'm aware that behind the straightforward appearance may lurk a much more complicated interior but that's not something I need to worry about just yet.

For now, all I have to do is go where the questgivers send me and do what they ask. If I keep doing that, I get a drip-feed of information on how the game and the world work, plus I get new weapons and armor. It's a really plaeasant, relaxing, involving way to spend a couple of hours. I can see how it caught on.

One of the things I learned yesterday was the name of the world on which ROSE Online is set. It's called Junon, a name that sounds comfortably familiar yet different enough to stand out among the many imaginary entries in my mmorpg address-book.

I was looking at the map yesterday, after I'd been given the introductory quest to the third zone, Canyon City of Zant, eponymous home of the first significantly-sized town I've yet visited, and it occured to me the whole of the world map looked a tad on the small size for a full game. 

I've since learned that ROSE Online takes place on not one but three separate planets, the other two being Luna and Eldeon. There are four other named planets in the ROSE solar system, all of which were intended to be available for play, but as the wiki somewhat enigmatically explains, the others were only available on "Rose Online Brazil, first and only server with all seven planets."

If I go on playing ROSE, something that seems highly likely, at least in the short term, I'll probably find myself digging into the history of the game a little, as often happens in cases like this. I do enjoy investigating the genre's quirkier corners even if I occasionally find myself wishing someone else had already done the research and turned it into a neat summary I could skim through instead. 

The whole concept of mmorpgs offering different content in different territories is something I'd like to learn more about. I've noticed it happening in a number of games I've played, particularly Dragon Nest, which seems to have had half a dozen significantly varying versions over the years, and it often comes up as a point of contention when titles are ported to the Western market, but I can't recall ever seeing any kind of overview or discussion of the underlying principles of the phenomenon.

For now, I'm going with the three world paradigm for ROSE Online. If it turns out there are more, that'll be a bonus. In any case, even given my current enthusiasm for the low-end game, I think it's unlikely I'll make it far enough to complete the Level 70 quest that takes you to Luna, let alone to Eldeon, which doesn't open up until you hit Level 90.

My Hawker is curently Level 19. Progress has been steady, the bulk of experience coming from quests, the handing-in of which can sometimes jump you a whole level or more. The nature of the quests and their rewards makes it plain I'm still in the tutorial phase so how much longer progress will come in such hefty chunks is uncertain. I'll just enjoy it while it lasts.

Meanwhile, I'm appreciating the changes I see all around me as I travel. Yesterday was the first time I'd seen the gameworld at night and it was spectacular enough to prompt me into taking several screenshots of the vibrant night-time sky. I'm something of an afficionado of skyboxes and I have a particular appreciation of looming planets and nebulae, both of which Junon has in abundance.

I also met my first anthropomorphic animal NPC, a vendor and repairer by the name of Rockwell. I think he's a bear but I wouldn't swear to it. At first I thought he was an otter but on closer examination he looks a bit too gormless to be anything so cool. 

One of the things I didn't mention in my First Impressions piece was character creation. Usually it's something I'd give space to but in this case it was so perfunctory I forgot all about it until after I'd finished the post. I was mildly disappointed there were no options to play anything other than a human but it's something I'm resigned to these days. At least if I can't be an animal in game, now I know there are some I can talk to. That's something, at least.

Another in-game staple I ran into for the first time yesterday was the player vendor. Pretty much every mmorpg has some method for players to transfer goods between themselves. Some games have several. There's one basic, fundemental split, though, and that's whether the interface involved is a UI element or a virtual object placed in the gameworld. (Actually, as both EQII and FFXIV would like to tell you, there's a way to bridge that chasm, but I don't want to derail my own post by going into details on how its done.)

ROSE Online appears to stand firmly in the camp that believes in players laying out your their own stalls; literally. Coming into the city of Zant, I ran into several player-vendors on the access ramp, peddling wares that looked interesting enough to make me stop and shop. 

The stalls include a large overhead sign the player can personalise as appropriate. I don't know how or if it's policed but I was impressed by the lack of smut. I saw dozens of the things and they were all reasonably informative, at least after a fashion.

The one that caught my eye was advertising Backpacks for sale. I'm always in the market for more storage. I wasn't immediately able to work out how to buy them, which turned out to be lucky for me, since I later found out the sneaky seller appeared to have purchased some items from an NPC vendor, just a few yards up the ramp in the city itself, giving them a hefty mark-up. 

It's a common practice and well-established in games that allow reselling of vendor-bought gear. I've done it myself on occasion so I don't hold a grudge. Caveat emptor, as they no doubt don't say on Junon.

Zant itself is a very busy place, positively teeming with activity. I found a helpful NPC willing to explain the facilities although I'm still finding the lack of word-wrap challenging. I often have to swivel the camera so the text is visible against some clear background like the sky.

One other thing that struck me, something I rarely mention when giving early impressions of mmorpgs, is the quality of the combat animations. I know it's something some people take very seriously indeed but I can honestly say I rarely even notice what moves my character is making, mostly because I'm too busy looking at the hot-keys. 

In ROSE, at least at these early levels, there's not an awful lot to do in a fight. It's mostly auto-attack plus a special, giving me plenty of time to admire the clean, precise movements my character makes as she stabs and slashes with the bamboo spear she's still using. 

By now I ought to have swapped to a more Hawker-appropriate weapon, like a katar or a bow but I'm so happy with how my character looks using the spear I haven't yet made the change. That's something I have in mind for next time I log in, which will be later today.

And that's how things stand at the moment. I have the basics down but there's still a huge amount to learn and much more to discover. This is the honeymoon phase. As Parker says to Logan in the final episode of Veronica Mars, employing some of the bleakest ironic foreshadowing I've ever heard, "enjoy it while it lasts".

All Aboard For Funtime

Naithin posted yesterday about some coming games of interest. There was one I hadn't heard of before: Outward.

There's no particular reason I should have heard of Outward. It's not an MMORPG. It's not even an MMO. The Steam page describes it as "an open-world RPG" which can be played "alone or with your friends".

It's supposed to be a sandbox rpg with survival mechanics "featuring deep simulation and immersion". Naithlin says it "...puts you in the shoes of a nobody in an otherwise high-fantasy world. Your victories will be small in scale, but no less meaningful.... Getting a backpack is a milestone to remember." In many ways it's the game I would have wanted fifteen or twenty years ago. Not any more. 

This morning I read what may be Gevlon's final blog post. He says it is. In it he details how he feels gaming has changed over the decade or so since he began blogging. Very much for the worse, in his opinion.

"It’s time for me to accept that my hobby went the way of television: once an intelligent entertainment, now targeted to the lowest common denominator", he says. A somewhat nuanced judgment, particularly given the very widely-held belief that television is currently enjoying its greatest Golden Age of all time.

But of course he means free-to-air, broadcast television, which has indeed descended into a dark place from which it will most likely never return. Ironically, over almost exactly the same timeframe, TV has undergone a role-reversal with online gaming. Television is now a subscription medium; games are free. And easy.

"Players no longer need to be any good to progress. They just have to log in and open their wallets... They don’t have to learn anything to succeed, so learning became “tryhard”. They became the dominant culture in gaming. Being any good became “elitism”. “Gamers are dead” is the new slogan among developers"

Gevlon again. It's an oversimplification but not without substance. Expectations and standards have changed.

Have they changed for the worse, though? I'm not sure. And I don't propose to go round that track again, not right now.

What interests me more is how I've changed over the same period. From the time I first dicovered role-playing games, fairly late, in my early twenties, until perhaps ten years after I started playing EverQuest in 1999, my tastes in the genre were fairly consistent.

For the best part of thirty years I knew what I wanted in an RPG, be it on or offline, tabletop or on screen. I wanted a low level, low fantasy setting, where cantrips and potions represented the only magic most people would ever see and the sight of a goblin or two would send even the town guards running.

I was dead set against anything to do with dragons, gods or demons. I wanted my characters to be ordinary people, scratching a living by poking around in old ruins hoping to find a few tarnished trinkets to sell back in town.

Another thing I wanted was "realism". My characters should need to eat, drink and sleep. They'd need to dress appropriately for the weather and anyone crazy enough to try swimming in chainmail deserved a swift trip to the bottom of the river.

I never entirely got what I wanted, even in tabletop RPGs I GM'd myself. Everything always tends to drift upwards. Characters get more powerful. Players want to fight bigger, scarier things.

In MMORPGs, few of which even attempted to pay lip service to any kind of "realism", the invitable power creep of expansions and updates dragged the median level of play away from the gnoll tribe menacing my home village to battles with the gods, with my character as "the chosen one" or "The Commander".

The strange thing is, over time I got to like it. Or perhaps I stopped caring. I was paying far more attention to whether I was enjoying myself than whether I ought to be. It turns out that being powerful and winning all the time is fun.

And killing bigger monsters with flashier explosions is more exciting than killing small ones with a fizzle.I started out playing gritty, leather-clad woodsmen and women, reliant on hard-won practical skills and the ability to read a scent on the wind or a spoor on the ground. These days, in all games, I cleave towards classes with the most spectacular spells and, especially, the most devestating area attacks.

Instead of slipping unseen through the woods, living off the land, I like to leap into the middle of a crowded camp yelling a battlecry, calling down fire from the sky or spinning in circles like a steel-bladed whirlwind, until everything around me lies dead. Subtle I am not.

It's true that I do, even now, relish a slow start. I like the picking yourself up by your bootstraps aspect of starting out with nothing. But you can only stay low level for so long. And how many times can you scavenge for food with the meter running down before you say "sod this for a game of soldiers" and log off?

Which is why characters, even in games with survival mechanics, always outgrow their needs. Those things that seemed hard starting out become easier, then trivial, then cease to be things at all. If not, people get bored of the endless maintenance-work and drift away.

The developers of Outward are almost evangelistic about the joys of defeat. They make a play of the game's constant autosaving, meaning you have to live with your mistakes. All of them. There are even things called "dynamic defeat scenarios", which makes losing sound like something to be relished.

In the end, though, unless the aim is to attract an audience of masochists, players will have to feel they have "won". This is the hard-won discovery of games developers these past few years against which Gevlon rails.

The way he puts it, "Game companies realized that money comes from bad players too, so they started to nerf their games." Or perhaps, given more options than they'd previously been offered, players discovered they didn't care quite so much about being good at games as they thought they did.

Gevlon sees it as the old guard dying out. Players who cared about skill and effort finally deciding the games were no longer worthy of their time and trouble, moving on to other hobbies. There's certainly some of that.

I suspect, though, that many more players changed along with the games. As the games got easier, less demanding, they found there were compensations for the loss of status that came with being "good". Having things is what matters, not how you got them. And less work means more play.

Without a doubt, I was such a player. My goals changed, my tastes changed, my expectations changed. Here I am, entertain me.

The question is, could I change again? Could I find myself swept up in some new, harsh world of struggle, grubbing in the dirt for the wherewithal to buy myself a pair of worn boots and a belt pouch to carry my few coppers?

Of course I could. And no doubt will. And then the cycle will start over.

The cat's out of the bag, the genie out of the bottle. Uphill both ways in the snow was fine when we didn't have a clue where we were going. Today's players, no longer "gamers", know there are shorter, smoother paths to the sunlit uplands.

Bless Online : First Impressions, Part Two

I played Bless for another, longish session last night. Steam tells me I've put ten hours into the game. My Mascu ranger is level 14. I know just enough about the game to be dangerous. Let's go!

The Tutorial

I am not a big fan of Tutorials. I particularly dislike it when they make you finish an entire instance that has nothing to do with the game itself - especially when it takes up most of your first hour, draining any excitement and interest you ever had and making you wish you'd never bothered. Looking at you, Rift.

Bless kind of has one one of those but it doesn't really count because it's so incredibly short. There's an airship trip. I can't even remember how it starts. Almost immediately it's interrupted by a crisis. A beetle attack. (Beetles? Really??) There's a fight which goes by in a blur and then we're docking and that's it. All over.

It's reminiscent of the original opening to FFXIV (go figure) but on fast-forward. It also reminded me of EQ2 as well as several other MMOs I've played. Originality isn't an issue here, that's for sure.

Making the threat a horde of flying beetles does set the tone for what comes next, inasmuch as it's low key and slightly strange. Once the airship lands the rest of the tutorial melds seamlessly into the game proper. You begin doing the kind of things you're going to go on doing, only with hints, prompts and treats when you do it right. It's well-paced, helpful and unobrtusive. I appreciated it.

Questing and Story

Bless Online is a themepark. No question about that. But it's an odd, off-kilter kind of themepark, not the straight-up, quest hub WoW-clone kind.

There's a Main Quest sequence and a smorgasbord of side-quests. The questgivers have exclamation points over their heads but they're understated and easy to miss. The non-narrative questgivers are scattered all over the place, not gathered in little clumps. There's something of an old-school feel, although thankfully you don't have to hail every NPC just to check if they want something.

I was rather taken with the early questing. It's unusual. The first quest I got had me joining some NPC organization, whereupon they sent me to choose the new uniform for the guild. I went to see a tailor, who showed me several options hanging on mannequins. I had to select the most suitable. The reward was a uniform of my own.

After that I was interviewed by the guild leader and given a mission that sent me to investigate some trouble in the sewage treatment plant. There was some banter about that. I found it amusing. Almost as soon as I got there an animated suit of armor popped out of the waste-water and battle commenced.

From there things escalated to a show-down with a mad scientist who was sticking giant rats into plate armor for some unexplained reason. That led to his lab getting wrecked and somehow it was my fault and I found myself owing damages to the city, which is how I ended up working for the Government.

Or something like that. To be honest, it was all a bit of a blur. It was also entertaining and absorbing, two words that describe all the questing I've done so far.

That was all part of the main questline. I think. There's a very good quest journal with onscreen prompts and a detailed summary but mostly I've just been trucking along, enjoying myself, not worrying too much about the structure.

The plot has some twists I didn't expect and a narrative I'm finding quite interesting. It's linear without being pedestrian and familiar without being enirely predictable. I do tend to enjoy the questing in Eastern MMOs more than that in Western ones, though, so factor that in.

Also, I've read that there's an entirely different main quest and starting area for each race. If that's true it adds a very significant degree of replayability to the low-end game. I'd definitely play through a few more like this one.

Translations, Voice Acting and Polish

I put this in as a separate category because it's been a big part of the backlash. There are long, angry threads on Reddit bemoaning the awfulness of the translation and the bugginess of the game. There are also white knight defences of the work NeoWiz has put in to change all that.

My experience has been mixed. The very early part of the game is well translated. The quest dialog is idiomatic and lucid. The game instructions are coherent and grammatically correct. There are very few spelling errors and little that seems off or odd. I was impressed.

Unfortunately, that level of quality doesn't last. By around level ten or so the quest dialog reverts to the kind of quasi-English all-too familiar from many other hastily localized MMOs. At no point does it become difficult to follow but the characters start sounding less like individuals with personality and more like print-outs from Google Translate. Which is most likely what they are.

That doesn't always apply when it comes to the main quest. There, at least on the sequences that are voiced, things continue to be fully translated by someone with a sound grasp of spoken English.

The voiceovers themselves are all done by people who at least sound as though they're speaking their mother-tongue. Not all of them sound like their day job is acting but some of them are quite convincing. I've heard a lot worse.

As for bugs, I haven't run into any at all. For Early Access Bless seems solid, at least at the levels I'm playing.
 

Mounts and Taming

Another Eastern feature I strongly favor is auto-questing. I love being able to click a button and have my character find her own way to the next NPC or location. It seems to me to add immersion rather than remove it. My character should know her way around better than me. She lives there. I don't.

The auto-pathing in Bless is good, except where it doesn't play nice with things like the paternoster lifts. I found myself running into a corner a few times when the lift platform was up not down. Also I ran off a few high terraces once in a while. Health and safety isn't much of a thing here. Fortunately neither is falling damage. I guess if you can drop a hundred feet then get up and walk away you might as well save money on railings.

Somewhere along the questline they gave me a horse. Quite early on. I think I was maybe level five or six. He's a bit on the skinny side. You can see his ribs. Still, a ride's a ride.

It's definitely faster on horseback but mounts have a stamina pool and it depletes. Slowly, because I didn't notice for a long time, but eventually, on a long cross-country canter, my horse up and vanished.

There's a whole feeding system for mounts. They level up and acquire skills. There are  ground and flying mounts and mounts are a sub-class of Companions, which also includes Pets, which you tame. You can have up to forty Companions. That's about as much as I know but I'm guessing it's a significant part of the game.

So far I have two Companions and I was pointed to both of them by the extended tutorial (still popping up hints and quests at level 14). To go with my under-nourished horse I have a hamster the size of a Pomeranian.

I tamed the hamster using a taming scroll. Actually, four training scrolls. Taming is a mini-game where you have to stop a moving cursor as it passes across a green line. It's not hard but it's not a gimme.

I imagine it gets a lot harder as you go for bigger animals but that's just speculation. I tried to tame a giant rabbit (that's us, hanging out, in the picture above) but I didn't have the right scroll for it. So far I only have the hamster. He doesn't appear to do anything except follow me but he does level up. A cosmetic pet with levels is a new one on me. I may be missing something here.

Leveling

It's easy. And fast. So far.

Killing mobs and gathering materials both give xp to the same leveling pool but the amounts are relatively small. The huge bulk of xp comes from quests. The main quest sequence doesn't give enough xp alone to hit its own gates but so far I've not really needed to supplement my quest xp to keep pace with the requirements. I did hit a couple of markers a tad early but a few side quests fixed that.

I read a couple of leveling guides, not because I was having any issues but because I'd heard that Bless can be very grindy and I wasn't seeing it yet. The guides tend to be written by and for people who want to skip as much content as possible as they race to the endgame. It was much the same in BDO. I don't believe anyone who enjoys questing and exploring is going to find the low levels in any the Eastern MMOs too much of a grind.

If anything, leveling may be a little fast for my tastes. I'm not keen to hit 30, at which point we move into open PvP zones with questing shared by the opposing factions (the exact same model as Allods, come to think of it). I already have an unavoidable xp buff granted by the game and some xp potions from a quest, which are staying in my pack. I don't foresee any difficulties in getting to thirty. After that... we'll see.

As well as quests Bless also has Monster Books. Sadly, these are not twenty-foot tall tomes with giant wheels. They're kill quests for specific creatures, familiar from many other games, most obviously FFXIV (Surprise!).

It's impossible to avoid these because, well, you have to kill stuff. I haven't focused on any yet but it's good to see them ticking away in the background.

Gear and Loot

This is a strange one. Before I'd even received a single piece of gear from a quest I happened to browse the wares of an NPC merchant. She had full sets of armor, with stats, for every class. More surprising yet, it was all cheap enough that I could afford it, just with the coin I'd been looting off regular kills. So I bought a complete outfit.

That significantly upgraded my gear score (which is an actual stat you can see on your paper doll). I was very happy, if a little puzzled. I can't think of many MMOs where you can just buy all the gear you need, for pennies, from an NPC.

It got even odder when, almost immediately afterwards, I received my first piece of gear as a quest reward. It was literally identical to one of the pieces I'd just bought, except it had a diferent name.

This is how armor works, it appears. The system was confirmed when I hit my first Dungeon in the main quest sequence. It's gated both by level (13) and gear score (1665). At 13 was well under the bar but there's an armor vendor right outside the dungeon entrance. I bought a new set of gear from her for peanuts and boom! In I went.

It seems like an odd system but only because it's just the baseline. You can be assured of functional armor but you're going to want a lot better than just functional.

For that you need to upgrade. There's one of those systems that lets you salvage unwanted gear for a resource you can use to improve items you want to use. Armor can also be crafted, as can accessories like Jewellery. I'm just at the tip of that iceberg so I can't say much more about it, except that if it follows the pattern of most imported MMOs it will be a spiral of ever-increasing costs for ever-diminishing returns. That's where the real grind usually lies.

Then there are your all-important weapons. Vendors don't sell those. They come as drops from mobs or from questing. I'm unclear whether they can be crafted. You can also buy them on the auction house. Boss mobs in dungeons always drop either gear or weapons. Other mobs have a much lower chance but can still drop useful stuff.

That is my preferred loot system and always has been. Hunt stuff, use what it drops. Can't improve on perfection. Add a vendor that has you covered for the basics and a way to recycle all the Paladin and Assassin stuff you're never going to give to an alt and you're in a sweet spot. All we really need from there is for some stuff to have unusual and exciting procs and we're home free.



Dungeons

Oh, no. Not yet. I've seen my first one and it didn't go well.

Dungeons in the context of Bless, as in many Eastern MMOs, mainly means solo instances. As mentioned above, they have entry requirements, which you can find here.

I had no difficulty with the regular mobs in the first dungeon, the Underground Prison of Balmont. They dropped some weapons for me, too, albeit not ones I could use.

The fun ended when I tried the first boss. I did get him to 50% but it was clear I'd need a few more levels to finish him and since the gate to the rest of the dungeon doesn't open until he dies I've bookmarked him for another try at Level 15.



Crafting

I have even less to say about this than I do about Dungeons. At level 14 I got the prompt to visit the craft mats vendor. There, I got to pick a Main Profession and a Sub.

After some consideration I realized I had no clue what to choose. Rather than do any out-of-game research I just picked the ones I fancied, which happened to be Handicraft and Cooking. Handicraft makes accessories and cooking, as well as the obvious, makes stamina recovery items for mounts.

The mats lady then sent me to see the workshop guy and I used his workbench to make a bar of silver. It's the standard "have items in your inventory, hit button, watch progress bar" deal. Nothing fancy.

And that's as much as I know. Oh, except for the odd quirk that recipes, as well as being auto-granted by level, are found in "Dwarven Chests" that pop up around the world, both outdoors and in dungeons. By luck I'd already run into one of these under a bridge somewhere. Unfortunately the recipe I got was for Tailors. Still, it's a nice idea.

Conclusion

So far, so good. I'm enjoying myself. What's more, when I'm doing my dailies in GW2 I'm thinking about Bless and hankering to get back to it. I like my character, the world, the questing, the story and the games systems I've seen so far.

On the other hand, I could say the same for a whole raft of MMOS imported from Korea, China and Japan. Black Desert, Blade and Soul, Revelation Online, Twin Saga... I've really enjoyed all of them. They're all just different enough from each other that it feels a little bit fresh every time, yet familiar enough now that it feels comfortable.

I don't think there's much chance I'll ever play any of these games to the level cap, let alone go on after that. At low to mid level though, I find they all pass the time very pleasantly and have a good deal to recommend them.

Bless is in no way going to change anyone's mind about anything. If you didn't like previous Korean MMOs you're not going to like this one. If you did, you might well find Bless a little lackluster. It doesn't even pretend to be original and in Early Access it lacks some polish.

If you're easily amused, like me, though, it's definitely worth giving Bless a go. I'm sure there are a good few more hours in it for me and the odd blog post, too.

What more can you expect for a tenner?

All Roads Lead To Gnome : EverQuest, WoW

If there's one thing I don't need it's a new character in EverQuest. I have no idea how many I've left behind over the years, idling in banks or inn rooms or camped out in the wilds somewhere. For the longest time I tried to keep most of them ticking along, logging them in now and then, adding a level here and there. Now, though, as the years pile up like autumn leaves and my characters and I approach winter together, for many it seems less and less likely we will hunt together again.

Like Telwyn, who alluded to it in two consecutive posts this week, I believe strongly in character permanence. I, too, like to check in once in a while and touch base with my imaginary friends and alter egos. But nearly two decades and a hundred and fifty MMOs makes for an awful lot of characters. Some I'll never see again, far less play.

So why start another? And why a gnome? As Mrs Bhagpuss said, when I told her what I'd done, "Haven't you got enough gnomes?".

Well, no, apparently I don't. And you can't ever have too many gnomes, can you? As for why now, I think there were two proximate causes. First there was something Syp said in an offhand comment at Bio Break. When he described the first dozen levels in WoW as "slow and boring" it triggered a burst of nostalgic desire in me for some good old-fashioned low level gaming.

I couldn't disagree more strongly with that sentiment, finding as I do the very low levels in WoW to be the best part of the game that I've seen. Indeed, the very low levels of most MMORPgs are among the best for some very good and well-known reasons.

The lowest levels represent the game's shop-window, so they tend to be designed to please. They are also usually the content that most closely represents the original vision for the game and as such are more coherent, consistent and convincing than most of what follows. Finally, staring zones have usually been around the longest so they have been repeatedly polished until they positively glow.

In terms of core RPG gameplay the hook never sets so deep and firm as in those first few levels, when every upgrade makes a substantial and noticeable difference to gameplay. Not only does your characters increase in power and capability almost with every item that drops but the way they look changes too.

The low levels are the most playful part of almost any MMO. There's room to experiment, to find out who your character wants to be. The time will come when decisions have to be made, points have to be spent, rotations have to be set. Eventually your "role" will have little to do with roleplay and much to do with learning your dance steps but in those first, few levels you're still free to move to whatever music you hear in your head.

So, that's why I made a new character. I wanted some of that. As for why a gnome, well I blame Isey for prompting me to realize that I really should have saved the title of the previous post for one about gnomes. And once I start thinking about gnomes it's only a short step to making one.

Given where I began, with that quip from Syp, I might have made a gnome in WoW. I'm currently playing WoW a little most days, pottering around on my endless free trial, exploring and evaluating the implications of the new level scaling.

Mostly I've been leveling up my Worgen Druid, spending almost all my time in cat form. It's been fun. The level scaling seems fine. Everything takes three or four casts or hits to kill, which is still ridiculously fast by any standards other than WoW's recent own.

I already have a level one Gnome there, ready to go, but he's a Rogue and I really don't want to play a Rogue. I have no idea why I made him. There were probably reasons.

When it came to it, though, there was no point fooling myself. I wanted to make an EQ gnome, start in Ak Anon and level up in Steamfont for a bit. So I did. Ah, the whirring and ticking of clockwork. There's nothing like it.

I'd actually managed to forget that Steamfont was one of the few Faydwer zones (the only one?) to get a visual makeover many years ago. Which is surprising considering I must have crossed it literally hundreds of times in the past few years, taking my highest level character to Dragonscale Hills and the rest of the zones in 2007's excellent Secrets of Faydwer expansion.

Even so, the new Steamfont has itself now been around so long and I've leveled up so many characters there (all of them gnomes) that it has its own nostalgia. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I can really remember what it looked like before. I might need to log in to P2002 and remind myself.

As in WoW, leveling in EQ is not the uphill slog it once was. Even so, it's hardly a downhill sprint, either. It took me about forty minutes to get to level two. It would have been faster but I had to run back to Ak Anon to zone a mountain lion and I died when I pulled a Krag Chick. They are still the same insane undercon they were in 1999.

When I dinged (that sound still so satisfying) I took the book to Plane of knowledge. I was very happy to see that well outside of U.S. primetime, on one of the less-popular servers, there were still over 70 players in PoK and a couple of hundred vendors trading in The Bazaar. Life in the old game yet.

After a visit to the bank, where my new gnome helped herself to a few hundred platinum from the shared vault, thereby bypassing about a year's gameplay from the  good old days, I logged out. Will I ever log her in again?

Who knows? What I do know is that one gnome leads to another. And if you can't find a gnome then a dwarf will do. Or any anthropomorphic animal that walks on its hind legs.

I have all next week off. I wonder how many new characters I could make in how many MMOs?

Starting Over

Telwyn, inspired by Chestnut, posted about starting over in MMOs, saying "I’m an altaholic but usually stick to one server in a given MMO". That made me think about just how much my own habits have changed over the years. Not, I suspect, always for the better, either.

When I started out in EverQuest one of the very first things I had to learn was what a server was and why I should care. Before the game would allow itself to be played it wanted me to pick a name from a very bizarre list.

Almost everything looked as like a scattering of random letters from a Scrabble bag - Xev, Xegony, Bertoxxolous... Maybe not so random, come to think of it. Someone was clearly fond of the letter "X". Maybe they were working on a high score...

There was a smattering of semi-coherent options - The Rathe, The Nameless - but even those seemed alienating. What was a "Rathe" anyway and why couldn't anyone come up with a name for "The Nameless"? In the end I went for one I thought I might be able to remember - Prexus. Another "X" now I come to think about it.

It soon transpired that I might as well just have flipped a coin because I didn't last very long at all on Prexus. I tried Brell Serillis and Test before two new servers, Luclin and Lanys T'Vyl, popped up on the same day as SOE attempted to accommodate EQ's ever-increasing population, something that would be repeated many more times over the next four or five years until the arrival of WoW shattered the paradigm, along with Smed's hopes and dreams of never-ending fortune and fame. Or not.

During that now almost unimaginable period of continual expansion I developed the habit of making new characters on every fresh server as it opened. On their opening days and mostly for a few weeks more I played on The Seventh Hammer, Antonius Bayle, Stromm, Maelin Starpyre, Tholuxe Paells, Mordern Rasp, Morrell Thule, Sullon Zek and probably a few more I've forgotten.

All of which meant that I took "starting over" as the norm for MMOs. How was I to know that it wasn't meant to be that way? Let's not forget that those were also the days when "twinking" was almost as dirty as it sounds, when people genuinely agonized over whether passing a Shiny Brass Shield from an old character to a new one meant they'd lost their moral compass.

When Mrs Bhagpuss and I moved, fairly briefly, to Dark Age of Camelot, an MMO with a tri-partite structure that forbade anyone to play characters of different Realms on the same server, what was the first thing we did? Made characters on three different servers so we could play them all, of course.

As the years rolled by and with them more and more MMOs, the pattern repeated itself over and over again. If a game chose to segment itself by race or alignment or region then I'd do my utmost to make sure I rolled and re-rolled until I'd seen it all. Well, all the starting areas, at least.

For the most part that meant more than just playing through the same levels a few more times with a different backdrop. It meant starting completely from scratch, without hand-me-downs or pre-acquired skills or a bank account groaning with gold.

The one thing that could always be ported was knowledge. Even with the best role-playing intentions it's hardly feasible to unlearn your understanding of how the UI works or where one zone lies in relation to another. Even so, in those days before Free to Play gave us all more worlds to play with than we could ever find time to explore, Starting Over allowed anyone to experience something of that New Game rush at will and at no extra cost.

Trends changed. Convenience took over. Exclusivity began to be seen as an impediment instead of a selling point. While many MMOs continued to pay lip services to RPG tropes like alignment and race it became commercially expedient to separate lore from practice.

Good guys and bad guys joined the same guilds, battled the same enemies, used the same banks. Player characters from races who'd been at war for millennia cheerfully traded magic items with each other while characters owned by the same account used shared facilities that meant they could help each other out even though, since they could never be online at the same time, they could never meet.

By the time we got to Guild Wars 2 the unit of participation had become The Account. Well, mostly. At the beginning there was still an inelegant melange of Character and Account Based play, something that persists to some degree even today in aspects such as Map Completion or Personal Story.

For the most part, though, every character is part of a team, whether they choose to be or not. All the myriad currencies go into a single wallet no matter who earned them and the achievements of one are the achievements of all.

There are no servers, or "Worlds", any more, other than for the competitive game mode of World vs World, which is in terminal decline, most likely to be replaced one day by a less archaic format. As far as PvE is concerned, we're all one big, happy family. Megaserver technology sees to that, as it or something much like it does in most MMOs these days.

Incremental change is insidious. The world alters around us and we barely notice. As I think about it now, though, I would hesitate to say it's all been change for the better.

Like Telwyn, if I step off the treadmill and begin afresh I find myself missing all the benefits that having established, integrated teams of characters brings. It makes it a lot harder to stick at it, when I begin in a new game or even on a new character. That feeling almost everyone must have, when they can't keep from noticing how much time they're spending doing things their other characters, whether in the same game or another, could do so much faster and more easily, it wears at my resolve.

And yet, when I start over, almost every time, I feel light, released, free. Everything that was old is new again. Life is simple on the up. All those dopamine hits the MMO leveling process was designed to provide come raining down just like they used to and it feels good.

That's the way I once played most of the time. Even when I had two level 60s, then two level 65s, when 60 then 65 was the cap, when my friends list bristled with names willing to go dungeoning at the drop of a tell, I spent time playing on other servers, among strangers, unknown and at the bottom of the curve.

I really don't do enough of that any more. Every time I do, mostly in unfamiliar games I'm trying on for size or on special purpose servers in MMOs I know, I find myself drawn in, pulled under, breaking the surface tension of the best-in-slot, meta, fractional upgrade path, sinking into the deep comfort that we call immersion.

You can forget what these games are for, sometimes. You float so long at the top of the tide you misremember all that lies beneath, the vast undertow, the waters that are never still. There's a lot more to MMOs than hitting cap and settling for the end game. I used to know that but I forgot, somehow.

It's never too late to start over. Let's go round again.

I Know When I'm Not Welcome : AQ3D

I haven't played much AdventureQuest 3D since it went into Open Beta. Indeed, I haven't played much AQ3D at all so far, just dabbled. Any impressions I have of the game come from the first three levels, although it should be emphasized that this an MMO where Level 13 apparently counts as "end game".

As I've attempted to explain in previous posts, the cheerful, child-friendly cartoon visuals belie the steep leveling curve and unforgiving difficulty setting of this decidely un-casual MMO. It wasn't until I read this post on Artix Entertainment's website today, however, that I realized just exactly what kind of a truly elitist, hardcore game AQ3D is setting out to be.

In getting on for two decades of playing MMOs I can't recall ever seeing any developer talk down to all but their hardcore players in such an un-nuanced way. I thought Yoshi P from Square Enix was a tough customer but he's a pussycat compared to this.

Indeed, the last time I can recall anything even approaching this level of passive-aggressive disdain directed at the customer would be when Abashi (or was it Absor?) repeatedly referred to players who pushed back against the EQ grind as "bottom-feeders".

The linked post has to be read in full to appreciate just how dismissive the underlying ethos appears to be towards the more casual or, perhaps, just less obsessive player but here are a few choice quotes:

They are jumping in and trying to coast on the coat tails of their stronger team members

 They are taking up a valuable seat on the team that could be filled by someone level and gear appropriate

You might think it's not fair to only allow top level players access to the hard to earn gear. You're wrong.

The higher level players have worked hard, gotten to or near the level cap and played through much of the game's content that is still waiting for you lower level players

This, bear in mind, is in the context of players of a game in Open Beta, who are trying to see and enjoy a limited-duration Halloween event. Granted it's only one part of that event, a dungeon wing "balanced for five level +13 plus members to tackle with some difficulty" but even so the solution is harshly exclusive rather than warmly inclusive.

Where most modern MMOs would use scaling, mentoring, smart loot or one of the many non-divisive methods developed over the past two decades to allow friends to play with friends regardless of the level of their characters or time in the game, Artix Entertainment has found a much simpler method of dealing with those pesky coat-tail grabbers. Level-lock them out.

As I think I said before, if you're one of those bitter vets, yearning for the days when it was uphill to the dungeon both ways in the snow, when low-levels knew their place was watching you strut around the bank in your high-level gear, well, there's no need to wait for Brad McQuaid to bring back the good old days - AQ3D is ready for you right now.

None of which suggests AQ3D is going to be a bad game or even a bad MMO. It just isn't going to be the MMO I thought it might be. And probably not one for me.

Maybe it's time to write this one off. Leave it for the hardcore. The players who have "worked hard" at playing a video game. Perhaps I should just get out of their way and go somewhere I might feel more welcome. I might take another look at Villagers and Heroes for that elusive cross-platform MMO fix.

Passive aggressive? Me? Well, who started it?

The Low Level Life : WoW, EverQuest, EQ2

It didn't take long for MMORPGs to develop a reputation for being all about the "end game". I'll have been neck-deep in the hobby seventeen years come November but the only brief respite I ever had from the bitter knowledge that everything happens at cap came way back at the turn of the 21st Century.

For the first six weeks or so that I played EverQuest I played with the /ooc channel switched off. Back then I had this quaint idea that I was involved in some kind of role-playing experience, living a vicarious life in a virtual world. Conversations about sports or current affairs or even just general chit-chat were immersion-breakers I could do without so I did without them. For a while.

As the weeks drifted on and the initial, overwhelming wonder began to bleed out into a less intense yet more urgent need to know, so the research phase began. I discovered EQAtlas, Allakhazam, Caster's Realm, The Newbie Zone. And I switched the /ooc channel back on.

From my foreshortened perspective down in the twenties much of the conversation was hard to parse but it was impossible any longer to ignore that Norrath, like every other society, had its clades and hierarchies. This was still a couple of months before the release of EverQuest's first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, the expansion Wilhelm likes to refer to as "the best MMO expansion ever and the mood was one of impatient expectation.

My Nightmare

Until RoK arrived in March the cap remained at the launch level of 50. The out of character chat channel revealed to me a whole dissident world; discontented, fractious, self-identifying as "bored". These were the Level Fifties, tired of Lower Guk, done with Nagafen's Lair, already looking past The Plane of Hate toward the jungle coasts of Kunark.

The pecking order was well established. At the apex, the ten percent: proto-raiders, developing DKP and strats. Below them the rest of the Fifties, running the treadmill handful of high-level dungeons over and again, complaining all the while. Then came the Dungeoneers in their Trinities, pushing to the cap as fast as the merciless mechanics allowed.

These three groups appointed themselves the Royalty, Aristocracy and Nobility of Norrath. The Commonality, making up the great bulk of the ever-growing population, toiled away in overland camps and semi-open dungeons from The Commonlands to The Karanas. Many of those commoners would gain enough confidence to become Dungeoneers in time. Others toiled all the way to the top under open skies, making do with the lesser xp, all the while attempting to shrug off the contempt of their peers.

On the fringes mavericks and malcontents soloed, some with arrogance, some with self-loathing. Druids, bards and wizards and most especially necromancers, they camped static spawns, killed guards, kited. Verant/SOE's official position, as expressed by a series of deeply unpopular Community Managers, particularly Abashi and Absor, seemed to suggest soloing was a necessary evil, not something to be encouraged. Bottom-feeders was one of the more polite descriptions.

I'm sorry, that was just a noise.

Regardless of the status of your clique there was an expectation so ingrained it never needed to be articulated: everyone was heading, however slowly, to the top. When the Ogres began launching their terrifying barrel rafts towards The Overthere every player clinging to the rigging knew Kunark meant the future. Only in Kunark could you hope to break the statistical ceiling and soar, or scrabble, to Level 60.

And yet, Kunark did not arrive as a neatly packaged new ten levels to bolt on to your existing game. Kunark came as a continent. A whole New World. It brought a new playable race, the Iksar, with their great city Cabilis and their four (count 'em - four!) starting zones.

My initial Kunark experience, once I'd recovered from the loss of half a level and an unrecoverable corpse for my mid-20s druid, who retired to The Karanas to rethink her options, consisted of leveling an Iksar Shadowknight from Level One. When Scars of Velious, the second expansion, followed just nine months later (believe it!) there was no longer a logjam at the top.

Phat Lewts!

Kunark was vast. Velious arrived long before most people were done with it. New hierarchies had barely had time to establish themselves before the paradigm changed again. Some would say it was a Golden Age. From there the train rolled on through a total of twenty-two expansions and counting but only twice more did an expansion amount to a complete reboot.

Shadows of Luclin, the much-maligned but loved by me third expansion added not just a new continent but an entire new world. Cats on the moon and another new start, this time one that took. My Iksar SK is still somewhere in the high teens or low twenties but for a long time my Vah'Shir Beastlord was my highest EQ character, topping out at 84 before the Heroic Boost saw my Magician hurdle her and push on into the nineties.

SOE's last shot at starting over came five years later with The Serpent's Spine, an expansion that had its moments but proved to be the death-note for growing the base. For the following decade everything has been about keeping the established order onside, about adding more storeys to the teetering top of the skyscraper.

And that, by and large, has become the model for every MMO, for the genre. The base game establishes the setting and the world, sets the criteria for success. Most every subsequent expansion, update or DLC adds content at the cap.

Even Guild Wars 2, the supposedly level-neutral poster child for horizontal progression, has settled into a penthouse life. When Living Story 3 debuts later today you will be required to have a Level 80 to follow the plot. Of course, ANet have removed any need for you to go through the tedious process of leveling one. To play through LS3 you also must have the Heart of Thorns expansion and that comes with a Level 80 character boost ready to pop.

I bet they have better weather at the cap.

 Legion, when it appears at the end of next month, adds another ten levels to Azeroth. Ten levels appears to be the industry standard for building on top these days although some games scrape by with five. Once again, with the box comes the option to skip the tedious chore of getting there. One hundred levels of content you don't need any more.

Except that it turns out some of us do. I do. Playing EQ2 and WoW through again as I am right now I find it is, after all, this low-level and mid-level path that I want to follow. It seems I can indeed go home again and, what's more, find a welcome equal to any I've had before.

Playing through the low levels in MMORPGs is fun. Not for everyone, that's apparent, but for me. I enjoy high level content. I enjoy new content. I like novelty and I enjoy a sense of achievement. In the end, though, I have to accept the evidence: by choice I return, over and over, to begin again at the bottom.

There really is nothing to match the satisfaction, the involvement, yes, the immersion. Stepping out in rags with a rusty sword or a knobbled stick, making your way in a hard, harsh world, being useful, helpful and always, of course, violent. Learning a craft, finding a path, seeing your rags turn to riches or at least to leathers.

Sure Kyle, only some of us have other plans...

Taming pets, earning mounts, flourishing your first cloak. Seeing your reputation rise. Watching the world open up around you. Making space to stash the treasures you find. Paying the rent on your first home and laying down the pelt of that great bear you slew, in front of a roaring fire you made all on your own.

At the cap the explosions are louder, the colors brighter, the numbers bigger but somehow the magic dries out. Not always, not inevitably, but often. Sometimes it can all go a bit Nigel Tufnel.

I miss the days when we had it all. When expansions meant both much more to do for the ennui-ridden capped and a new start for the dilettantes at the bottom. When the expectation was that new players would want to jump in at the beginning, would grab a fresh opportunity with all claws. I miss the days when developers were able to look out on occasion, not always in.

Yes, I miss those days and it would be so fine to have them back but the world doesn't turn the other way, not even for Superman. Wishing doesn't make it true but luckily, for me, it doesn't need to. Recent events prove to my satisfaction that all the old magic is still there, just waiting on a click of  the character create button.

If MMO developers are determined to keep adding to the top I'll just keep diving to the bottom. It's funny but I find I can breathe much better down there.

Playing It Down

Psychochild has a post up that I found an interesting read. 

Scruffy, poster-child for low-level gameplay

My introduction to RPGs was AD&D 2nd Edition and I came to it relatively late, already a year or two out of university. A lot of my attitudes to MMOs derive from the three or four years in the mid 1980s when I played tabletop RPGs every Sunday afternoon. I think that's where I first developed a strong disinterest, even dislike, of high-level gameplay.
 
There were about five to eight of us at any given session, all in our early-mid 20s and I can clearly remember the increasing dissatisfaction of the group as the levels of our characters rose. Somewhere around level seven most of us were beginning to struggle to empathize with their increasingly baroque lives. I know I was, anyway. I retired my half-elf ranger at level 8 and rerolled a dwarf cleric, who didn't make it even that far. From then on our group played a series of  different RPGs, never getting much above low level and I think we were all a lot more comfortable with that.

Kill it? I'm getting a crick in the neck just looking at it!

The problem for me at least, was that I found the plots we were involved with and the opponents we were facing increasingly hard to care about. Help a village deal with bandit attacks on outlying farms? Fine! Investigate some ruins seen from the highway? Why not? Hire on to protect a merchant caravan? Good honest work. Travel to another plane to fight demons or demi-gods? Give me a break!

Newt or dragon? You decide.

Ever since then I've very strongly preferred low-level gameplay. In my first few months of Everquest I decided I would never kill a dragon, putting that down as a line in the sand between my characters and silliness. I managed to keep that rule for many years, although I broke it eventually. 


The attritional drip drip drip of high-level content in all MMOs got to me in the end. I've seen my share of gods and demons and defeated quite a few. Call it immersion fatigue. Still, though, I spend much more of my time clearing bandit camps and skinning animals. I imagine it'll always be that way. I hope so, anyway.