A Rambling Post About Twitter, New World, Sable, Japanese Breakfast, Posthumanism, Digital Feeds, Steam Sales And Pre-Orders, In Which I Push Declarative Post-Titling To Its Inevitable And Unsustainable Conclusion

This morning I have a few things rattling around inside my head that wouldn't make full posts. Or perhaps I should say ought not to be allowed to make full posts. There's not much doubt I could get a couple of thousand words out of any of them if I set my mind to it but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

If I was on Twitter I could just craft several delicious micro-posts and send them winging into the twittersphere to charm and delight, because that's how Twitter works, isn't it? I am on Twitter, as it happens, but I have never tweeted. Or have I? Let's see... 

Ok, that's quite disturbing. Twitter logs me in automatically even though I haven't knowingly used the service for over ten years. Where is it holding the information that allows it to recognize me without a login or password, I wonder? I never let anything do that, not even stuff I use every day.

I have tweeted five times, all in 2010, all auto-generated from Fallen London, which at that time required Twitter to play. I literally made my Twitter account to play it and that is all I ever used it for. 

I have one follower, a good friend of mine from a long time back. I'm following him too but I have not the least clue how that would have happened. I haven't seen or spoken to him for more than fifteen years. 

Other than that, apart from Failbetter Games, makers of Fallen London, who I had to follow to make the game work, the only other person I'm following is, for some inexplicable reason, Scott Hartsman. Maybe he played Fallen London. He seems like the kind of person who might have done.

It does occasionally occur to me to start using Twitter but I also seem to have set up my Twitter profile using some variant of my real name so if that ever happens it's not going to be on that account. I do appear to be @bhagpuss, though. That would be okay, I guess.

Seem to have strayed from the point a little, don't we? Not sure why I'm including anyone else in that. Share the responsibility, share the blame, eh?

As I was saying, I have a few odds and ends to mention and it's Friday so I thought I might steal Wilhelm's "Friday Bullet Points" idea and run through this and that. Except they're going to bleed into one another a little too much for bullet points, which is a shame, because I like bullet points. And now I've rambled so much I've forgotten what most of them were, anyway. 

It'll come back to me, I'm sure. I'll go and make myself a coffee. Get my thoughts in order. I knew I should have made some notes.

Right, New World! That was one of the things I was going to talk about. I had the email opposite from Amazon this morning.

A few things occurred to me in the light of Belghast's thoughts on the imminent arrival of Amazon Games big new thing/hail mary pass/nine day wonder (delete as applicable), along with the comments of a couple of people in the thread there, an earlier post by Syp about his launch plans and an apparently unrelated post by Tipa at Chasing Dings, which I read this morning.

Firstly, I'm weirdly unexcited by, even detached from this indisputibly major launch, even though there are plenty of reasons I should be super-keen. It's by far the biggest new AAA mmorpg to come along in years. I was in the first alpha, what, three years ago now and loved it. I pre-ordered at the earliest opportunity in 2019. Even though the game has changed almost out of recognition since then, I thoroughly enjoyed the two later betas, last summer and this spring. There's no doubt I want to play New World. I'm just not very excited about it.

I think it's something similar to the Valheim situation and, looking further back, Project Gorgon. I've already expended all the energy on getting excited about these games that I have to spare. They aren't "new" games any more, even though none of them has in fact launched yet. They're games that were "new" six months, three years, five years ago but they're still acting as though they just arrived and it doesn't quite feel real, somehow.

New World is in the better position in that it never had any kind of early access or non-wipe open beta phase. It is a proper launch following a series of proper alphas and betas as we would have understood the process ten or fifteen years ago. And yet it still feels like New World has been around a longish time because that's how we've been trained to feel about these things now.

What I really want, I realized recently, is for New World to have launched, to be running, to have become just another live game, one I can dip in and out of when the fancy takes me. I don't want to invest any special emotional effort or project any particular wishes or hopes onto it. I just want it to be there.

Think we should roll on Sitara? Yeah, maybe not.

I was considering the choice of servers, all 177 of them. It's really not that many to choose from, of course. Clearly I won't be playing on the Australian or South American ones, so that takes it down to 140. I try to avoid playing on EU servers where possible, which knocks out another sixty-four and given a choice of US locations I'd always go East Coast, meaning I really only have to choose from fifty or so names. 

Still a lot. I need to look at that website Bel linked that warns where the streamers are going, then pick somewhere else. I like a low-pop server if I can find one. I quite like the sound of Frislandia but my favorite would be Morrow, which makes me think of the great Gray Morrow.

I was interested to see that Bel had cancelled his Amazon pre-order in favor of buying the game directly through Steam. I wonder if that makes a difference since Amazon are apparently going to email Steam keys as the standard means of access anyway. I guess it depends a) how much you trust Amazon to send things out promptly and b) whether you care how soon you can get online.

As to a) I have had nothing but exemplary service from Amazon for a decade and a half but also as to b) on this particular occasion I'd be fine with getting my key a few hours or even a few days late. I'm not crazy keen to begin  with and even if I was, avoiding the initial feeding frenzy would probably be in my best interests. Letting the hordes move through the first couple of starter areas and then follow along at leisure seems like a good plan.

What I'd really like would be an option to buy a physical box and wait for it to drop through my letter box next week. As I mentioned in a comment to Tipa on the post linked above, I have a DVD case for Guild Wars 2's  Heart of Thorns sitting on a shelf in the bookcase to my right, even though the expansion was only ever available in digital form.

All the case contains is a piece of paper with a code on it. I could have gotten that code added directly to my account by clicking a box online but I chose to pre-order it from Amazon just to get that empty case. I would do that for all the games I'm actively interested in if I had the choice because I like to see the cases displayed in my room so I can handle them occasionally and feel some kind of tactile, physical connection.

As far as I can remember, Heart of Thorns was the last time I was able to do any of that. I was reading the other day how Gen Z buy more vinyl than Millennials. I think the death of physical media may have been overstated. Were not posthuman quite yet. We might have to wait for the singularity before people stop feeling the need to nest.

Conversely, and flipping round to touch Twitter if only tangentially, I do appreciate the speed and range of digital communication. Time was I'd have to wait 'til Thursday to get my fix of music news. These days I get it the same day, possibly the same hour, the journalists do.

 

I recently subscribed to (by which I mean added to Feedly, not payed money for) two additional music sources. I was getting the feeling Pitchfork was missing stuff here and there so I added Stereogum and my teenage mentor, NME.

What I didn't realize was that the 21st century digital NME is hard into gaming, too. I am now getting more gaming news from there than most of my gaming bookmarks. It's very odd but also very welcome, not least because the news items are short, concise and gloriously free of snark. 

Since NME used to be the very fountainhead of snark and also pretension that's a big reminder to me of how the world's changed. I do like me some snark and I live for pretension but it's nice to have the facts plain, no chaser, once in a while. 

Having all three sources in my feed might be a little too much, though. Some days I can't get though them all before a whole stack more have arrived. I mostly just scan the headlines. They tell me all I want to know about most things and give me that heady, fake feeling of not being out of touch with the world. The bits that matter, anyway.

I most likely will keep all of them. Naturally a lot of the news duplicates but you can never be sure which will focus on what. Pitchfork, for example, even though they don't carry a lot of gaming news, was the first to tell me Japanese Breakfast did the full soundtrack to Sable.

I wrote about Sable a while back and I've had it in my Steam wishlist ever since. Today, the same day I got the New World pre-order warning, I also got this (on the right) from Steam.

So there's another game I'm not going to buy. I want to play it but do I want to pay  twenty pounds for the chance? Probably not. Not because I don't think it's worth that much but because I don't need a new game right this moment. Too much going on already. 

Knowing the soundtrack is by someone I'd buy an album by and also knowing what a good game (I loved the demo) makes me considerably more likely to buy it eventually. It's like buying a game and album all in one. Bargain! And an even bigger bargain when it goes on sale.

I guess I am turning into one of those people who waits for things to go on Steam sale before they buy. Is that personal growth or just my standards slipping? Hard to say. 

So far this year, though, five of my wishlisted games have become available and I haven't bought one of them. And yet I'm going through with my pre-order of New World despite my aforementioned apathy.

This is why companies do pre-orders, you know. Lock in the excitement before it fades then trust to a combination of laziness, lack of attention and an uncomfortable sense of commitment to carry those sales through to the end.

It works, too.

Chinese Whispers

I'm just going to put this down as a marker. I don't imagine anything will come of it but just in case Swords of Legends Online blows up I'd like to be able to say I wasn't asleep at the wheel when it happened. 

Swords of Legends Online, a name which acronyms neatly but misleadingly to SOLO, is the latest on the seemingly-endless production line of mmorpgs from the East. It distinguishes itself from the crowd in a number of ways, not least its imminent launch on Steam. 

The game already has a well-known publisher in the west, Gameforge, on whose platform you can find such familiar titles as Aion, Tera, Runes of Magic and now Wizard 101 but immediate availablity from launch on Steam trumps that. The first closed beta just finished a couple of days ago. You missed it. So did I.

The next beta runs for a week, starting on the first of June. If you want in, unless you can snag a free key you'll have to pay for the privelige. SOLO is going with the popular-in-the-west Buy to Play payment model. $39.99 (£35.99 for me) gets you the game but there are, of course, deluxe packages if you'd like to pay more. If you pre-order via Steam you can download the game right now in readiness for that second closed beta. Your order guarantees a spot.

Oddly, it seems the game used the subscription model in its home territory, which seems like something of a turnaround. The home territory in question is China. This is a very Chinese game. It's part of a well-established Chinese series, there's a highly-successful Chinese TV show and the whole thing takes place in a Chinese mythological setting. There's an article on MassivelyOP that gives chapter and verse on all of that.

MOP wasn't where I first heard about the game, though. I have no idea where or when that happened. I'd had the name in the back of my mind for some reason but I knew absolutely nothing about it. 

It wasn't until I saw a brief mention of the game on the Friendly Necromancer's blog that I started to pay attention. He compared the game to Guild Wars 2 and since that's the only mmorpg Mrs. Bhagpuss plays these days I wondered if it might be something that would interest her. She's also quite interested in and knowledgeable about certain aspects of Chinese mythology so it seemed like it might be worth bringing it to her notice.

I watched the embedded video and it certainly looked like a visually impressive world but then don't they all in the videos? I made a mental note to keep an eye on it and left it that.

Then today I saw that MOP article I linked earlier. It's a bit of a rave. You don't see too many of those on MOP so when one turns up it carries a bit more weight than when, oh, let's say I might rave about something. 

Carlo Lacsina, the writer of the piece, seemed almost apologetic for liking SOLO. There were repeated mentions of how it was a WoW clone of sorts. I took that as a recommendation although I'm not sure that's how it was intended.

Carlo summarised SOLO thus: "in terms of gameplay, it follows the WoW formula: There’s an open world to explore with quests, dungeons to grind, arena PvP, crafting, the holy trinity, and flying mounts. It features a hybrid of the tab target and action combat styles." That ticks a lot of my boxes. As you can see from the trailer above, it also has some very impressive housing options, something that definitely can't be said about WoW. I was intrigued enough to go do some research of my own.

Well, I say "research". I read the Steam page and watched about fifteen or twenty minutes of a promotional livestream that happened to be on at the time. The whole thing lasts over four hours and it's on YouTube now if you have an entire evening stretching out before you and no idea what to do with it. (Pretty much anything other than watching four hours of two guys chatting about an mmorpg you never heard of until today is what I'd recommend but, hey, who am I to tell you how to spend your time?)

 

After that I watched a bunch of YouTube videos. Well, I say "watched". I watched two or three. The rest I skipped through, stopping briefly when I spotted something I wanted to know more about. There are dozens and dozens of SOLO videos on YouTube already. This game is generating some interest, that's undeniable.

All the ones I watched were very encouraging. No-one seemed as taken with the game as Carlo but no-one had anything very bad to say about it, either. Annoyingly, a couple that I really enjoyed I now can't find again and since, as I mentioned a while back, I have the history switched off on my YT account, they're going to have to stay lost. It doesn't really matter- I have plenty more.

Josh Strife Hayes, always entertaining, gets plenty of sarcastic mileage out of the game's claim to be "An MMO unlike any other", mainly in contrast to what he sees as its very traditional feature set. Which, of course, is just what attracted me to it the first place. He also speculates about the potential for SOLO to end up being Pay to Win, something he sees as a specialty of Gameforge. I consider myself to be relativeley immune to P2W so that doesn't bother me much either.

 

 

Sarumonin talks about the leveling system which sounds very much like the kind of thing I like. One of the videos I can't find explains how the speed of levelling has been heavily slowed down for the Western release. Apparently in the Chinese version you can go from character creation to max level in a couple of hours. I'm happy they changed that. 

He also describes the combat system as having both action controls and "standard tab target you can use if you desire". He compares the action combat to "Tera or Blade and Soul" and mentions there's a hybrid version that uses tab and action in tandem.

These days I'm fine with action combat systems although the one time I played Tera, which was many, many years ago, I wasn't at all fine with the way it worked there. Blade and Soul, though, I like. Mrs Bhagpuss, although she's perfectly capable of using most action combat systems (she's tried DCUO and Black Desert Online for example, and got on fine with the fighting), doesn't like not having control of the mouse at all times. Neither do I, come to that.

The problem with the term "tab target" as a description of combat is that it doesn't really get to grips with what I want to know, which is can I click a hot bar with the mouse pointer to use my spells and attacks? Most games never make that clear in the promotional material and since pretty much everyone who ever makes a video uses the keyboard shortcuts to cast it's impossible to tell from watching them.

In the end it doesn't much matter to me personally. If I can click the hotbars with the mouse, perfect. If I have to use the keyboard for that then I'll just go straight to the action combat instead. It would be nice if people would explicitly say "you can click the hotbar with the mouse during combat" though.

The MMO Ronin very nearly says that in his nice, laid-back review of the alpha test from late May but he's still not one hundred percent clear. He's very good on questing, story and dialog. He makes the very lucid point that the story seems to have plenty of moments that would have siginificance for fans of the series but which will be lost on Western players. That's unfortunately inevitable with properties of this nature, I guess, although honestly I've had the same experience playing World of Warcraft while never having played another Blizzard game before.

 

He also mentions that for the alpha most of the spoken dialog was still in Chinese and even some of the text hadn't been translated. You can hear that in Lady Silversong's "First Look" video, for which she leaves the sound on. You can hear how nice some of the music is, too.

And speaking of the music, just take a listen to the Official Western Release Gameplay Trailer. Now that's a tune!

That's probably enough videos for now. As I said, there are a lot of them. And watching them did help me make up my mind. Not make up my mind to buy Swords of Legend Online. Nothing that dramatic. Just make up my mind to add it to my Steam wishlist so I can think about buying it when it comes out.

So I've done that. And that's all I'm going to do about it, for now. 

No need to go crazy.

Lost In The Mail? : New World

A throwaway line in one of MassivelyOP's recent, peculiarly passive-aggressive articles on Amazon's New World started me thinking. (What it is about certain developers that sets MOP's phasers to snark, anyway? It always grates on me but in the case of Amazon it just seems nuts. If there ever was a company you'd expect to get it right it would be Amazon. Why rag on them like some notorious ne'er-do-well pushing a dodgy Kickstarter?)

The line in question "...if you’re one of the five people who haven’t been invited to the new-new testing..." made me wonder whether I might actually have had an invite and missed it. Like just about everyone who cast a curious glance in the game's direction, I was invited to the alpha last year. When the game returned after its lengthy re-design hiatus I was more than half-expecting a prompt re-invitation to the new beta but so far, nothing.

I have any number of email addresses, many of them made specifically to play individual games, others used for alphas or betas of things I don't expect to be revisiting. I do tie some of those accounts into my regular email but by no means all of them. It seemed entirely possible I might have had an invite to the New World beta and never seen it.

Unfortunately, when I went to look for the details I couldn't find any trace. I uninstalled the alpha long ago and I don't appear to have kept a record either of the login and password or even which email I used last time.

Rather than sign in to all my email addresses in search of the original correspondence, which could take me all afternoon, I thought I'd go take a look at the website. I don't think I've visited it since alpha closed down.

I saw more than enough in the test last year to decide New World was a game I wanted to play. I pre-ordered at the first opportunity and since then I've been quite happy to leave it at that. I've barely even glanced at the press releases until Amazon began to ramp up the frequency very recently and I certainly never thought to go look at the official site.

It turns out there's a beta application process which simply uses your Amazon details. It takes about ten seconds. I signed up and got confirmation immediately.

It's oddly phrased. "If a slot becomes available for testing during the Open Beta Test, we'll send you an invitation". It's an unusual use of the word "open", isn't it? Since when has anyone needed an invite to an "open" beta? Maybe they just mean they'll send me something to let me know when it's happening.

The whole process seemed new to me. I couldn't recall having applied before but I had a vague recollection there might have been something in the pre-order information about a beta invite. So I went and checked.

"Pre-order before New World launches to secure Closed Beta access when it is available."

Hmm. Now I was really puzzled. I pre-ordered back in December 2019. The order is still open and I haven't been charged, as you'd expect with a game now not due to launch until August.

I do know what email address anythng related to that order would go to and I did indeed receive the notification of the change of release date back in April. I have not, however, seen anything related to any kind of test, be it alpha, beta, closed or open, since I put in my pre-order just before Christmas.

Just to make things even more confusing, although my order history unequivocally confirms I've ordered just a single copy, if I look at New World on Amazon.co.uk with my account signed in I get an informational note that says "Purchased 2 times".

That looks pretty definite, doesn't it?

That might refer to the original alpha. Or it's possible I ordered it for Mrs. Bhagpuss. I don't think so, because she almost certainly won't play it. The "action" controls put her off both Black Desert and Elder Scrolls Online so I haven't tried suggesting New World yet.

The same informatory note also tells me New World will be played via Steam. I checked there just in case but although the page is set up and waiting there's nothing going on, betawise.

I don't actually want to play the beta in any meaningful sense. I decided a good few years back that putting any serious time into a betas of anything I plan on playing "properly" on release is a mug's game. Alphas and betas are for things you wouldn't otherwise bother with at all or, where there's no NDA, for gathering material for blog posts.

Still, it's always nice to be asked to the party even when you have no intention of going. And if I'm supposed to get a closed beta invite for pre-ordering then I want it, even if I'm not going to use it!

It seems as though I've done about everything I can do. I guess I'll just wait and see what happens next.

I'd bet on nothing. Or, failing that, nothing much. Roll on August 25th.

Better the Beta You Know: GW2, EQ2

I bought Guild Wars 2 this week, a game that doesn't yet exist. Spinks think this demonstrates poor organizational skills on my part. Ravious put his hand in his pocket but he's a little concerned about where we might end up if a precedent is set. Just to give a little perspective, I was chatting with someone at work yesterday who told me that he and his girlfriend are going to see Michael MacIntyre in August. They bought the tickets last August. Paying for things that don't yet exist is not something ArenaNet just invented.

As I've said before, how we pay for MMOs is quite possibly the single least interesting aspect of the entire MMO phenomenon. We're all adults. We can spend our money how we like (although if it genuinely makes a meaningful difference to your household economy whether you spend £50 on a video game this month or in three month's time it's entirely possible you shouldn't be spending it on a video game in the first place, but then, hey, I'm not your dad so knock yourself out!). No, the part of the discussion that spun out of this which interested me was whether or not beta access counts a "benefit" to players.

So, crabs again?

I've done a lot of MMO betas. My first was Anarchy Online, for which they sent me the client in the post, on CDRom. I still have it somewhere. I spent most of a week trying to install it. Never got it to run but that didn't stop me buying the game when it came out, when it still didn't run. Anarchy Online remains the benchmark for the worst MMO launch ever. I think it was three months before they actually charged anyone a subscription because that's how long it took before the game was playable.

From then on I applied for pretty much every MMO beta and got into plenty. A surprising number of my fondest, most lapidary memories of a dozen years spent trekking through virtual worlds come from betas. The thrill of using a jet-pack in Endless Ages (still the best flight experience I've had in an MMO); seeing the Capryni scatter as they scented a prowling Gingo in Ryzom;  riding into Lomshir for the first time in Vanguard.

And the bugs. My god, the bugs. Pushing through a gap in geometry to break into someone's house in Endless Ages and not being able to get out again (that was a re-roll). Falling for fatal damage every time I even passed close to a griffin tower in EQ2.  The plain unplayable lag in Rubies of Eventide, Horizons, EQ2, Vanguard... well, every beta ever at some point, come to think of it.

Waiting for the end of the world

This is where I should make a confession. I really like bugs in MMOs. I see them as content. I've probably had almost as much fun out of bugs over the years as gameplay, which is partly why EQ2 Test was my home server for more than five years. I like finding bugs and I like reporting them. I've had everything up to and including all my characters vanishing from bugs and while I get as annoyed as anyone would when I can't do what I was planning, dealing with a funny, odd or flat-out game-breaking bug sometimes turns out to be a lot more involving and thought-provoking than whatever I had in mind. It's true dynamic content.

 A huge part of the interest in playing MMOs for me has always come from trying to understand how they work. It's one reason I don't like tutorials much. I like to observe, gather data and test hypotheses while playing. I like it best of all if I'm never quite sure, even after extensive research, what the hell is going on. Bugs open up the cover so you can see the gears whirr and betas pull back the curtain so you can see backstage. More than that, you can chat to the stage manager, the make-up artist and the props team. A good beta will offer multiple channels of communication with the developers, from ad hoc in game chats through organized content testing to lengthy forum discussions. It's not one-way traffic, either. In a good beta you have a real chance to influence the detail, even the direction of the game you eventually hope to play. I've seen countless changes made in good betas as a result of player feedback (and countless more ignored but, hey...)

Wonder if woodworkers get a scratching-post recipe?

That's a good beta. A bad beta is one where nothing you say, nothing anyone says, seems to be getting through to anyone that cares. Where feedback is ignored, issues glossed over or there's always a "miracle patch" just round the corner. I'd name names but the NDAs for betas like that never end. (The only genuine miracle patch I ever saw was in the final week or thereabouts of EQ2 beta when, after a month of game-breaking, unplayable rubber-banding lag and innumerable fiddle-faddling changes to changes to changes that had just about everyone playing believing the launch should be delayed at least another three months, we logged in one day to a lag-free, reasonably smooth, certainly fit-for-launch MMO. They said they had one last patch that would fix most of the major problems and they really did. Of course it didn't address any of the gaping holes in the underlying design - Scott Hartsman had to come in and start on that six months later, but you can't have everything. At least it ran! )

Mandatory letterbox format preserved for disbelieving future generations

Then there's the opportunity to say "I was there", although that can be a very bittersweet experience. Some MMOs I've beta tested have been more to my taste at some point before launch than they ever managed afterwards. It can be a little galling to remember that the game you're playing not only could have been better but was. I'd rather know, though, than not know.

And finally there's the end. The day it all stops. Sometimes the server just closes and re-opens as "Open Beta" the next day and it's all a bit of an anticlimax, but often there's a big party, or an apocalypse. My favorite beta memory ever comes from EQ2. Everyone gathered at the Claymore in Antonica for a party before the world came down but right at the very end, just before the countdown started, I decided to go into the great dark in my own Inn room, just me and my cat. I just made it back in time to sit on my bed and then the world ended. You just can't buy that.

Boom, out go the lights.

Oh, wait, now you can! That's where we came in. Will GW2 beta weekends have any of the benefits I'm gushing over? You wouldn't think so. They will be totally nonexclusive, open to all for the payment of a fee. They'll be isolated weekends, not a continuum. It's unlikely that a community will have a chance to develop (a beta community can be a very different beast from a Live one). Above all, people will have paid to be there and will have entitlement issues off the scale compared to those normally seen in betas (not that those aren't often ridiculous in themselves).

These weekends will probably be much more like the marketing-led Open Betas MMOs throw out like chum to bring in the fish they hope to land at launch. But maybe not. Rift's beta weekends were proper betas, even at the end when they were letting everyone in. Every single Rift beta weekend was arguably more entertaining than any weekend post-launch. Any way up, I'm happy to have the opportunity, even if I did have to pay for it. It's money I would have spent in any event and it will buy fun I otherwise wouldn't have had.

I'd have preferred to have gotten into the closed beta, all the same.