Who Needs Words?

Another day, another demo. This time it's Lost in Play, which turns out to be a very well-chosen name. 

I was a little apprehensive about this one. I downloaded it before I read the small print so it wan't until I came to write the first Next Fest post that I realised the game has no dialog. Instead, "Everything is communicated visually in a universal way."

I've played games like that before and it hasn't always been a happy experience. Lost in Play is also "filled with mystery, unique puzzles, and mini-games." I'm fine with the mystery but puzzles and mini-games don't always fill me with delight. I did start to wonder if maybe I'd made a mistake.

The screenshots looked great, though, and I liked the sound of playing "an interactive cartoon... inspired by nostalgic TV shows such as Gravity Falls, Hilda, and Over the Garden Wall". I've actually seen on of those! (Hilda, in case you were wondering.). Anyway, I'd committed to playing the thing when I included it in the post, so I was going to have to buckle up and get to it, whether I wanted to or not.

And I'm very happy I did. Lost in Play is one whole heap of fun. 

It's also one of the longer demos in this run. It took me around fifty minutes to finish, all of which was solid play, no filler. That's a lot better than the average demo.

It begins with a really lovely introduction. You play one of the two main characters, the unnamed sister, as she skips through a sunlit meadow, meeting friendly monsters and solving satisfyingly simple puzzles in what turns out to be a dream sequence. 

The girl wakes up in bed and the game proper begins as it means to go on with a series of very well-crafted logic problems. The first is how to wake a lazy brother, followed not long after by how to wake a lazy dog. Clocks and alarms feature heavily in both.

The puzzles seemed just about perfectly tuned for my tastes, not to say my skills, which tells you something since this is a game aimed squarely at families with children. Probably quite small children. Even so, I did get stumped a couple of times. Luckily there's a welcome hint option on screen that gives just the right kind of nudge to get you over the little logic humps without outright telling you what to do.

About half-way through the demo perspective switches from sister to brother and also from reality to fantasy. Instead of playing with family pets and making monster costumes out of cardboard boxes you find yourself bargaining with frogs, playing chequers with goblins and being chased by real monsters with very big teeth.

There is, as promised, no dialog at all but that doesn't mean no-one speaks. They just don't use actual words although they sound enough like actual words that I kept trying to work out what they were saying. It's very effective. The music's good too and you can even change what's playing on the big boom box in the kitchen, which I thought was a very nice touch.

Visually, Lost in Play is gorgeous. It does indeed look almost exactly like a particular kind of animated TV show, which gives the whole thing an instant familiarity. The animations are excellent and often very funny. 

"Lost in Play" describes the fifty minutes I spent with the demo very well. I would happily have stayed lost a while longer. The demo ends with a montage of scenes from the rest of the game, all of which looked like equally good fun, a very smart way to end a thoroughly enjoyable experience by leaving the player wanting more.

I've wishlisted Lost in Play, which is scheduled to release in the summer. I may not be the target audience but really, who isn't "seeking wholesome delight or just a good time"? Even if you don't fancy the whole game, I'd definitely recommend the demo on its own. It's nearly an hour's free, quality entertainment. I've played whole games shorter than that.

I Just Ride: Riders of Icarus

Just because I haven't mentioned Riders of Icarus for a few days doesn't mean I haven't been playing. Secret Worlds Legends has grabbed a sizeable piece of my extensive available playtime but RoI has been rolling along steadily behind.

Steam tells me I've now played for thirty-four hours, although that's somewhat inflated. So long as you have a Familiar summoned it will level up, even if all your character does is stand in a safe spot, running through their idle animations and squealing. What's more, the game tends not to time out when minimized, which has, on a couple of occasions, led to me not realizing it was still open until it came time to shut the PC off for the night.

Even so, the great majoriity of those hours have been actively played, most of it directed towards questing and leveling, which seems to proceed at a relatively stately pace. My new character dinged seventeen yesterday.

I continue to be quietly impressed by Riders of Icarus. There's nothing particularly special about it other than the collecting and taming mechanic but the familiarity of its basic systems form a substantial part of its charm.

It's quite an old-fashioned game, one that plays very much like an MMORPG released a decade ago, not in 2016. There is a market for this kind of thing. That's what the heavily-publicized Astellia is counting on but why pay $99 for beta access when you could play RoI right now, for free?

I spent some time crafting yesterday. There are six crafting professions, five of which you'd expect to find in almost every MMORPG: Armorsmith, Weaponsmith, Jeweller, Cook and Alchemist. The only unfamiliar tradeskill is Bardercraft, which makes armor for Familiars and consumables that buff your chance to tame them.

Tradeskills seem to level up very similarly to what I remember from Lord of the Rings Online, although with a considerably simplified process. You go to a crafting station and make items. When you've made enough of an item you "Master" it. When you've mastered all the items in a tier you pay your trainer a fee, they open the next tier and off you go again.

You can do all the crafts on the same character and since I happened to have a small pile of silver ore in my bank I started with Jewellery. It didn't take long or cost much to complete the first tier. There's minimal randomization of results when it comes to leveling the skill - you get a point per combine and you need a specific number of  xp points per Mastery.

You can get a Triumphant result, which gives you double the xp and two of the item you're making. I think I had that happen twice. Materials come from gathering in the open world or instances and from mob drops plus a range of items bought from your trainer.  A nice touch is that trainers also sell the basic Tier One gathered mats, which gets you off to a running start. I only had about enough gathered mats to do half of T1 Jewellery but I was able to buy the rest for a nominal cost to finish the Tier.

As with all "make items to level up" crafting systems, you end up with your bags full of things you neither want nor need and which no-one wants to buy. My first response was to sell them all back to the Trainer. I made a loss but it wasn't a big loss. I was happy to take it as the fee for leveling up.

Then, as I was moving on to Cooking, it occured to me that RoI also has a salvage system. You can buy Extractors from NPCs which allow you to deconstruct gear and get Tempering Stones to upgrade your gear. At the moment this is of limited use, since most of my gear isn't upgradeable but the stones stack and will no doubt come in handy eventually. (Where have I heard that before?).

I bought all my rings and amulets back from the vendor I'd sold them to via the Buyback tab. I was interested to see that you have go back to the specific vendor you used, meaning they must all have individual inventories. That's something that varies from game to game. I rarely use the function so I tend to be fuzzy on details, game by game, but as Syp found, when he was dabbling in the World of Warcraft Beta, Buyback is a thing you only miss when you find it's not there.

How useful crafting is long-term remains to be seen. One thing I wish I could make is bags but the developers have cannily limited those to quest rewards and the Cash Shop. Apparently there's a market for high-end potions and the Marks needed for taming Familiars but since all the available info on the web seems to be the best part of three years old I'll believe that when I'm high enough to make them, will will probably be never.

Despite the lack of up-to-date guides and commentary online, the game itself always seems quite busy, even though I'm playing weekday afternoons in the U.K. on a North American server. It's certainly busy enough that I can't solo in peace without people trying to chat to me. That's a particular feature of Eastern imports that rarely gets a mention - people who play them seem to love chatting to complete strangers.

I guess that's another feather in Riders of Icarus's old-school chapeau, although, like many of the supposed wonders of the Golden Age it's probably one I could do without. I prefer wombling about at my own pace in this kind of simple, open-world content. Might be a different matter when it comes to dungeons, I guess.

There's a new event going on but it doesn't seem to be a patch on the last one. It revolves around taming ten horses every day and then Sealing them to hand over to a robot cat from outer space. Since it costs 20 silver to buy the item that seals a single horse, that seems prohibitively expensive for a daily quest. I've only made four gold in total so far!

What's more, the items the cat's selling aren't all that interesting to me and the prices he's charging seem extremely high. I think I'm going to sit this event out and wait to see what the next one brings. I'm sure there'll be another one along any day now.

Meanwhile I'm just going to wander around and enjoy myself. The scenery is often spectacular in an over-sugared, junior-on-psychedelics kind of way but there's some real attention to detail that makes both the art and sound design stand out.

When I eventually found my way onto the battlements of the capital, thanks to a quest, I was particularly taken by the way one of the flowering cherry trees outside overspilled the crenellations onto the walkway. I have seen exactly that effect in very similar circumstances in real life and in video games these things don't just happen by accident, so I'm guessing so had the artist.

When I got my first permanent flying mount (I have two now) I hedge-hopped past a windmill and was stopped in my tracks (not that sparrows leave tracks in flight but you know what I mean) by a hauntingly familiar sound. I have stood next to a windmill of very similar design in La Mancha and that's exactly the noise they make. In game I found it evocative and impressively authentic.

Small pleasures, to be sure, but they add up. I'll be playing this one for a while.

Star Wars: The Old Republic: First Impressions (The Basics)

Since downloading and installing Star Wars: The Old Republic on Thursday I have played for just under eight hours. My first and so far only character, a Scoundrel, is a few pixels shy of Level 22. I've acquired my first Companion and a Stronghold. I know it's very early days but it's never too soon to give an uninformed opinion. This is the Age of the Internet, after all!

Download and Installation

Flawless. Seamless. Painless. Really, this is how it ought to be. As a Free to Play player you don't even have to enter an email address. All you need is a username and password and you're done. The game will prompt you later to add an email address for security reasons (the pop-up appeared for me around Level 17) but you can play until Level 20 without one, which should be plenty of time to decide whether you're going to hang around long enough to care.

You have the option to start playing immediately while the main game downloads behind you. I chose to let the whole thing install first. Once that was done I took a look at

Character Creation

Slick. Intuitive. Simple. First you choose your Faction: Republic or Empire. It's hard to imagine anyone coming to SW:TOR without prior knowledge of the baggage attatched to these generic labels but there's a short description just in case. I thought it was instructive that neither is described in terms of "Good" or "Evil"and both include negative descriptors ("chaotic" for The Republic, "rigid" for The Empire). I chose Republic, mainly because it uses a blue theme and I prefer blue to red.

After Faction comes Class. There are four, split into two sub-classes, so really eight. There's a short description of each but a series of much more detailed drop-downs gives you full disclosure on abilities, expected roles, gear and even storylines. I confess I completely missed this when I made my first character. It could be better signposted. Or I could pay more attention. Either one.

Next comes Race. SW:TOR has a lot of races. There are a dozen to choose from but for F2P players the choice is made a lot easier: you only get three. I chose Cyborg, which is not even a "race" in my book. More of a lifestyle choice. The limited racial options for F2P might rankle more if it wasn't that all playable races are basically "human with a funny head". For a science fiction IP Star Wars has always seemed astoundingly conservative to me. The extreme prevalence of bipedal aliens who look like guests at a "SciFi"-themed fancy dress party is a big part of the reason for that.

Each race gets a "Social Ability" which, apart from looks, appears to be the only practical difference. I didn't even notice this when I made my character. I doubt it's going to matter. Especially since I don't plan on being social. Again, though, it could be better highlighted.

Finally you get to pick a gender. The choice is simple. Male or Female. I do wonder how much longer games are going to be able to get away with that. It seems archaic. You might imagine a Science Fiction IP with galactic reach would be a tad more forward-looking. It is what is, I guess. For now, at least. I chose Female.

Now comes the fun part: sliders. There are nine, covering the basics from Head and Body Type to Scars and Skin Color. They aren't real sliders, though. They just move between presets. There's enough choice to suit me although I doubt it would satisfy the kind of player who downloads pre-launch character creators and spends weeks trying to get the exact look down to the last freckle.

With all that done it's time to choose a name and a server and enter the game proper.

A place for everything and everything in its place.

User Interface

Clean. Clear. Comprehensible. Also enormously flexible. I didn't fiddle with the UI at all because it was already laid out pretty much exactly how I like it. Hotbars bottom center. Quest tracker on the right. Chat on the left. Most of the screen clear. There's an interface editor that allows you to move anything anywhere as well as make any number of other quality of life tweaks.

Couldn't really ask for more, although I don't doubt the default UI is widely derided and I'd be considered a noob for sticking with it instead of some Mod or other. Don't care. I like it.

Controls

Traditional. Comfortable. Classic.  One of the reasons I've been holding off playing TOR is the control system. Not because I thought I wouldn't like it but because I knew I would. These days it's getting harder and harder to find WASD, tab target, hotbar MMORPGs in the style World of Warcraft span out of EverQuest but that's the style I crave. I'd been saving TOR because who knows when, or if, another one like this is going to come along.

I realize this will be seen by some as one of the very reasons TOR didn't do as well as it should have. Many developers have explained in very convincing detail how this kind of control system hugely limits appeal and how badly most gamers struggle to adapt to it. MMORPGs have largely transferred to an action rpg style for sound commercial reasons.

I don't care. I like the old version. I like full control of my mouse pointer at all times. I like to point and click. As I've said many times, I'm perfectly capable of using the other control systems; I just like this one better.

TOR's controls work exactly as you'd expect them to. No surprises. I was as familiar with them in thirty seconds as I am with the controls in games I've played for years. Keys are all fully bindable with a huge range of otions. The defaults are what you'd expect - "M" for Map, "I" for Inventory and so on. No-one's tried to make a name for themselves by reinventing the wheel, for once. The only thing I changed was the screenshot key.

Those "textures"! Those "colors"! Help me!

Graphics

Oh dear. Oh dearie, dearie, dear. For the first dozen levels I thought SW:TOR was probably the ugliest AAA MMORPG I had ever played. I had to go check when it launched because it looked about ten years older than I remembered. It probably didn't help that the planet where the Scoundrel starts looks like a cross between a 1970s out of town shopping mall and a municipal dump but mostly it was the textures. Or so I thought.

I fiddled with the settings a little. I put the Textures to "High", the only option other than "Low", where they'd defaulted, but I couldn't see much difference. I switched off some, then all, off the nameplates. It helped a little. Not a lot.

What happened then is telling. In other MMORPGs I've played, where the graphics were really off-putting, I've usually ended up digging through all the settings, trying everything, then googling for suggestions. In TOR I kind of forgot about it. I started doing some quests and a couple of hours later it was time to log and I'd done nothing about the graphics. Next day I played for another hour and a half or so before I thought about doing something about it.

Now that's more like it!

When I finally did go to the web and search I immediately discovered I'd completely missed a whole macro-level of settings, where you can simply set the overal graphic quality in a six preset range from Low to Ultra. Once again I hadn't seen that, even though I had used the drop downs on either side of it. I really can't blame that on the game. I'm an idiot.

With that arcane knowledge revealed I simply set my graphics to Very High and everything changed almost out of recognition. Even Ord Mantell, the starting planet, began to look vaguely bearable. Coruscant was amazing.

Although it was entirely my fault that I missed the options, I find it strange that the game itself defaulted to the lowest settings. Pete, who has just returned to TOR and has his own returner's impressions post up, said "It’s an old enough game that when it detected my graphics card it said “Gosh I have no idea” and set everything to “low”. Which is fair enough if you have a state-of-the-art whizz-bang graphics card but I have a GTX960 that was barely mid-range when I got it several years ago.

While there's an obvious problem if a game tries to do things the player's hardware isn't up to handling, there's an equal risk in downgrading everything to the bare minimum. Especially on a F2P title. You don't really want to give people an opportunity to opt out and really ugly, low-rez graphics as default are that opportunity. The game didn't even default to the correct resolution, which is something many games fail at and which completely mystifies me.

Once I'd got everything settled, the graphics seemed more than acceptable. It's no Guild Wars 2 or Black Desert but it doesn't burn my eyes.

Space. Contrary to popular belief it can be surprisingly noisy.

Sound

Atmospheric. Varied. Immersive. Sound is very well used in TOR. As I write this I have my Scoundrel stealthed in the Justicar quadrant on Coruscant. As well as the incidental music, I can hear the sound of vehicles in transit down the metalic corridors and the static crackle of distant announcements. It feels authentic, by which I mean filmic.

Interacting with computer terminals makes a satisfying bleeping sound. My footsteps slap and echo on the metal walkways. My blaster pew pews like a good blaster should. Even the combat music, when it kicks in urgently, doesn't make me reach for the controls to turn it down.

TOR looks good with the settings properly tweaked but it sounds great straight out of the non-existent box. And sound design is extremely important, or it is to me. It's always puzzled me that anyone can play with the sound off, let alone with other music playing instead. In the days when MMORPGs required you to pay attention to stay alive, I got so many cues from the sound that kept me from being ambushed or surprised. These days that rarely matters but much of my sought-after immersion comes in via my ears, not my eyes.

The Basics: Conclusion

SW:TOR has all the basics down. It's a Triple-A game from a major publisher and you can tell. It's also had over seven years to iron out the wrinkles and stamp on the bugs. Everything works, everything it where is should be and getting started is all made very easy indeed. I haven't had this seamless an introduction into an MMORPG for a while.

Next up: gameplay, questing, leveling, travel, housing. All that good stuff!

Bless Online : First Impressions, Part One

Steam tells me I've played five hours of Bless. That's not long. Perhaps I'd be jaded too, if I'd played for nine hundred hours like the reviewer who called Bless a "generic KMMO with nothing special to offer", or seven hundred and fifty hours, like the "ex-emissary" who warns " DO NOT buy this game or even if its free to play DO NOT download".

Those aren't outliers, though. The huge majority of recent Steam reviews for Bless Online are overwhelmingly negative. The exceptions are from those who, like me, bought it at 67% off in the recent sale. Maybe cheapskates just have lower standards. Or maybe our expectations are more realistic.

There's a key phrase in one of the reviews that probably sums up the feeling that stands behind much of the terrible press Bless is getting: "I was as a lot of other people hungry for another MMO, and I got info that Bless was gonna release in EU and NA.So when it released I bought the game for €150". Surprisingly, this reviewer gives the game a Thumbs Up. Where most people feel their money has been wasted, he felt his was well spent.

If you come to any new MMO in a state of hyped-up, amped-out excitement, fueled by a long wait behind the velvet rope, chances are you're going to be disappointed. Add in a significant financial outlay and a game that, by all accounts, was released long before it was ready and you can expect a backlash.

Let's be clear, because I'm about to say some nice things about my five hours so far: I would not pay 150 Euros for Bless. That would be batshit insane. I very much doubt the current Early Access version even justifies a full price ticket of $39.99. At the price I paid, however, around $13 (actually £9.98) I think I'll definitely get my money's worth.

Preamble over. On to the actual impressions.

Performance

There are plenty of complaints about this in the reviews but I haven't had any issues to speak of. The only real problem has been the loading times, which are terrible. The game seems to want to load in a stream of files - the same files - every time it boots up and that takes about two minutes. Then it goes through another set of routines after you press "Play". I have to allow the best part of four or five minutes before I see the gameworld. That's about twice as long as EQ2, the slowest-loading MMO I play, and EQ2 has the excuse of a decade and a half more content to parse than Bless.

Once I'm in, however, things run pretty smoothly. I don't usually pay attention to my framerate but this time I had FRAPS running so the numbers were there in front of me. I'm getting around 60FPS consistently, which seems fine to me. That's running at the default settings on a 3.3GHz i5 with a GeForce 960 and 8GB Ram under Windows 10.

UI

I like it. It's simple, intuitive, not weird. The default key presses are what you'd expect - "I" opens your inventory, "M" opens your map. There's not much on screen until you put it there, which suits me. I like a minimal look.

I did run into a few issues where I couldn't immediately figure out what the game wanted me to do, as in when it asked me to drag the icon for my mount to a specific place that I couldn't find, but those were primarily shortcomings in the translation rather than anything intrisically wrong with the UI itself.

Talking to NPCs and quest-givers and interacting with objects all work smoothly. You have the choice of hitting "F" for most interactions or clicking an on-screen prompt. I found it all pleasant and straightforward to use. The auction house NPC herself is something of a star turn. I'd love to know her back-story. And I seriously want those gloves...

The only thing thing that's genuinely irritating is the endless stream of huge, intrusive notifications that appear in banners across the top and middle of the screen. There's the typical Eastern MMO insistence on announcing what other people are doing on the market or what amazing gear they've crafted, but worse by far are the Guild territory notifications.

I haven't read this up but as far as I can tell, Bless has a PvP system that relies on guild ownership of territory. Every time you enter a new area that's owned by a guild, which seems to be almost everywhere, a huge banner appears right across the center of the screen telling you whose turf you just invaded. If you're in a city, it can happen over and over again since different guilds can own different districts or possibly even buildings.

There might be a way to turn the notifications off but I haven't found it yet. What with those and the audio warning every time you enter a factional safe-zone the game can be somewhat over-protective at times. It could use an "I'm a grown-up and I'll look after myself, thanks" button.

Graphics and Sound

See yesterday's post. I'm well under the maximum graphical settings but the game looks absolutely beautiful. Most Eastern MMOs do but I think Bless has better art design than Revelation Online and better textures than Blade and Soul. It's very similar, visually, to Black Desert Online, which is a significant compliment, since BDO is one of the best-looking games I've played.

I don't have a lot to say about the sound. It was way too loud on the default setting but then what MMO isn't? There definitely was music but I don't remember what it was like, other than it didn't annoy me. If there was much in the way of ambient chatter or environmental atmospherics I don't recall that either. I could log in to check but it seems more significant to record that nothing I heard comes to mind.

Character and Animations

See last Friday's post. I really like the character design in Bless. It's top-class. The characters and NPCs look great when they're standing still. I like the confident resting pose and the way my little Mascu stares straight at the camera. The detailing on the clothing and armor is attractive and intricate. I noticed, when I equipped a new item, I could see it appear as a pouch on my character's belt.

The running animation on the Mascu is a little awkward. I think it's supposed to be cute and mostly it is but the way her arms stick out makes it look like she has sticks down her sleeves. Perhaps she does.

I can't really comment on the combat animations. Most of the time I'm so focused on trying to hit the right key and not dying I can barely spare time to look at the screen. Which brings us to...

Combat

Hmm. This is a tough one. Bless has one of the daftest combat systems I've seen for a while but I don't entirely hate it.

NeoWiz don't seem to have been able to decide between the traditional tab-target-and-hotbars set-up (WoW style as it's often known) and full action MMO controls like Neverwinter or DCUO. Instead they've gone for some kind of half-baked hybrid that pleases no-one.

Unless you play a Berserker, who for some reason gets the original action gaming version that was removed from all other classes a while back, you have full control of your mouse pointer at all times. You also have several sets of hotbars into which you can drag and drop skills, items and so on. You can then use the hotbars by clicking on them or hitting a key as you prefer.

So far, so sensible. Except you can only add a few basic attacks to your hotbar and those don't do nearly enough damage to ensure a comfortable win against most enemies. For real DPS you have to rely on chaining skills.

Icons for the chains appear on screen as you trigger them but you can't activate those with a mouse-click. You have to hit "R" or "T" or some other key I forget. There's probably some kind of rhythm or rotation to it but I have yet to work it out. Mostly I click the two main attacks with my mouse and hammer on the "R" key.

It's not intuitive or comfortable and I'm sure it's making the fights harder than they need to be. Also the game doesn't seem to auto-target the next enemy when a mob dies so I also have to remember to do it manually by hitting Tab, which is something I don't think I've had to do in a themepark MMO for a decade or more.

My impressions of combat so far are limited to one class - the Ranger. Other classes may play very differently. The ranger might as well be a melee class. The range on the bow is very short and there's no means of stopping the mob closing on you (no pet, snare or root) so every fight consists of you getting a couple of quick shots in as the mob rushes towards you then firing your bow at point-blank range while glugging health potions as the mob tries to rip your head off.

It's very likely there are better ways to play a ranger. It might be possible to kite or circle-strafe although not with my dexterity. There may be skills I'm missing or chains I should be concentrating on that would make the experience less frenzied and frenetic.


The thing is, I haven't looked for solutions to any of these problems because I'm having fun. The fights are crazy and chaotic and I like that. Lots of them are really close but I win most of them. For low-level solo play it's unusually intense. I've died quite a lot but not so much it's been off-putting. More like "Right, I'll have you this time, Sonny Jim!"

Aggro is interesting. Namplates are green, yellow or red. Green denotes an interactable NPC, yellow is a non-aggro animal or mob. Red means it's going to attack you as soon as you get in range. So far, so familiar.

What's unusual is that in a bandit or orc camp many of the mobs will be flagged yellow or even green. In the outer areas only the scouts will be aggressive and even if they attack nearby yellow-flagged mobs won't assist them.

This means that, with care, you can work your way past the outer defences without a fight to get to the inner areas where your quest target may be hiding. Or just because you're nosy. I got myself into considerable trouble this way.

End of Part One

I have a lot more to say but this is running long already. Next time, I'll get into the tutorial experience, questing, story, leveling, taming, loot and the rest of the good stuff. I'll probably have played a couple more hours too, so who knows what new wonders or horrors may be revealed?

Path Of Fire : First Impressions - Part One

It's been a week now. I must have logged well over 30 hours. I've finished the storyline and explored a good deal of all five overland maps. You'd think it was past time for first impressions but it still feels like very early days indeed.

There will inevitably be spoilers ahead. Although I don't plan on getting too far into specifics it's not possible to give any kind of coherent overview without letting some detail slip. Beware.

Graphics

The first thing to say is that Path of Fire is a stunningly impressive visual feast. In five years the brightest star in ArenaNet's firmament has been its Art Department but this is spectacular even by the standards they've set. As I've observed before, if there's anything to be said against the visuals here it's that they risk becoming too much of a good thing. The sheer magnitude of splendor filling the screen in every direction, all the time, can overwhelm the ability to appreciate it as fully as it deserves.

That said, we have seen a lot of this before. Kormir's astonishing library, for example, is unmistakably reminiscent of the library in the Durmand Priory. The detail and design throughout are mesmerizing but it did occur to me, as I was taking screenshots by the score, that I wasn't seeing much, if anything, to outdo the sights of Divinity's Reach or The Black Citadel. It's stunning but by and large it's nothing new.

Still, such consistency and coherency sustained at such a high level over the life of the game can hardly be considered a criticism. If GW2's artists peaked early at least it left them stranded on the highest of plateaus.

Sound

The sound in GW2 gets a lot less attention than the graphics but the standard once again is high. The ambient background hum of the world going about its business adds a good deal to a sense of immersion. There are some subtle indications of changes in the weather here and there, the sounds of wind and shifting sand and there are animal sounds somewhere in the mix. It's atmospheric enough. It sounds like you're somewhere.

The non-storyline NPC dialog is uniformly strong. What they say is interesting, revealing, thought-provoking or amusing. I'm including this under "Sound" because of the the voice acting, which is of high quality, offering some excellent line readings.

I thought it showed a very distinct improvement over both Heart of Thorns and LS3, where it was often sub-par. It's true that the repetition of certain speeches and routines can be irritating but there's a setting in options to hear audio only once, should you wish to use it. Personally, I like to hear the voices loop.

The music I was less impressed by. Nothing particularly stood out. When I did notice an arrangement it was mostly because it sounded either Arabian Nights cliched or I thought I'd heard it before, elsewhere in the game.

Maps

Huge. Really, really big. Also complex and varied.

There are only five overland maps, which is one more than we got in HoT, but they probably represent more than double or more explorable land than the same number of maps would provide in the base game.

As discussed previously, the terrain and environments offer far more than the endless sand and rocks a desert theme might suggest. I was delighted to find a substantial portion of the Deldrimor Front, a snowclad mountain range included, along with a rich river valley. There are pockets of all kinds of different environment hidden in corners and caves and crags. Something for all seasons.

In terms of explorability I was surprised and satisfied to find that the terrain has not been over-tuned for mounts. Yes, there are specific locations required by the storyline, for particular collections or just for map completion, requiring one or other of the mounts, but 90% or more of the landscape seems to be accessible to nothing more than a glider and an inquiring mind.

There's one way in which I feel the new expansion has been badly misrepresented: verticality. Much was made of the "verticality" of Heart of Thorns and there has been a deal of praise for PoF's supposed flatness. Twaddle!

In HoT, the z-axis was almost always a question of glider mastery: Path of Fire is one giant jumping puzzle from end to end. Flat is the very last word I'd use to describe it. Expect to hop, scramble, climb and glide a lot more than you ever needed to do in the jungle. Especially if you want that Griffon mount.

Gameplay

This is the sticking point, isn't it? There's an axiom in the hobby that gameplay trumps graphics every time. Doesn't matter how pretty it is, if there's no hook people won't stick around just for the view.

You can see the doubts emerging in this comparison between the two expansions as well as in the official feedback thread. The problem is replayability: its possible lack is a function of the perceived return to core values that's been so praised elsewhere.

It is true that Path of Fire feels a lot closer to the original base game than Heart of Thorns ever did. Perhaps the main reason is the way the large, sprawling maps once again feel stuffed to bursting with GW2's signature "Dynamic Events". They pop all the time, everywhere. These are mostly small, local stories told in standalone events and short chains. They're fun but they lack function.

To many players they are quite likely also unfamiliar as a concept. The gameplay model to which they hark back ceased to be the norm in GW2 so long ago that players who must consider themselves veterans by now may never have experienced it at all - especially if they used a boost to hit 80.

With the piecemeal introduction of Dry Top back in July 2014 open world gameplay moved consistently to a mapwide meta-event structure. Players have become habituated to every map having a timed, repeatable, predictable event chain that builds to a climax, provides substantial rewards and then resets. Map metas even have their own real estate in the UI, providing a visible prompt that ensures everyone knows what stage is active and what the objectives are.

Path of Fire maps don't do any of that. There are some large chains that players are calling "metas" but they don't run on an obvious timer and don't flag in the UI unless you happen to be where they are when they start. We're back to calls in map chat like it was 2013.

I quite like the retro approach but it very clearly lacks the organizing principle not just of of HoT but of every map introduced in the last three years. Map metas can be dry but when they work they're compelling content.

Countless players, myself among them, repeated the Verdant Brink, Auric Basin, Tangled Depths and, especially Dragon's Stand meta chains over and over for a full year and more. Not just for profit but because they were a lot of fun. Reliable fun you could find on demand. It's hard to see the equivalent in Path of Fire.

Then there are World Bosses. There was some talk of that feature making a return in PoF but it hasn't really happened. Core Tyria maps almost all serve up a genuine World Boss, who spawns at set times and always draws a crowd. Instead, PoF maps have Bounties, which are player-triggered and unscheduled. Already, at this very early stage, even when a Map Bounty features as a daily, it can be annoyingly hard to find anyone doing them.

Genuine explorers will continue to get entertainment from the new maps indefinitely, I'm sure, but less than half a month into the lifespan of this expansion population seems oddly sparse. It's not because of a lack of players - there's just no particular focus to draw them together and the maps, as observed, are massive. Everyone's busy about their own business.

How long most people will hang around once they have their story done , their achievements ticked, their Griffon collected, their Hero Points earned and their maps completed remains to be seen. If steps aren't taken to prevent it, though, I could easily see these being some of the least-visited maps in the game a few months from now.

Difficulty

I pulled this out of Gameplay to discuss it specifically because I feel it's another aspect of the expansion that's been badly misreported. I've read numerous comments that suggest Path of Fire is a lot easier than Heart of Thorns. This runs directly counter to my experience so far.

I have not found the maps any easier to navigate than HoT's. I would say they are roughly on a par. As I posted I am not a fan of mounts while I'm a huge fan of gliders. That becomes more true the more I use the mounts and the more mount masteries I acquire. If I can avoid using a mount I do so. They are clumsy and awkward where the glider is subtle and elegant.

Movement modes aside, I do not believe that PoF mobs provide any less of a roadblock than the Mordrem. They seem to me to have much the same repertoire of irritating crowd control tricks, which they employ liberally at every opportunity.

Mob density, contrary to comments I have seen, seems to me to be, if anything, worse than HoT. There are mobs everywhere.  Traveling the Path of Fire is like running an endless gauntlet, assaulted at every turn.

I've found it nigh on impossible to do anything at all without two or three unnecessary and unwanted fights. Last night, as just one entirely typical example, it took me literally five solid minutes of fighting to clear dust mites just so I could mine a single node. The aggro range on many of the mobs is huge, they are almost all highly aggressive, they are social and the respawn times are very fast.

As for the idea that they are mostly "normal" mobs - pfah! I can't begin to count the number of Veteran mobs I've had to kill just because they were in the way. Every encounter seems to have at least one veteran - often several. Some areas even have multiple Elites.

It's entirely possible that the difference in perceived difficulty comes from class or build, as we eventually established was the case in HoT. This may be intended as the melee-friendly expansion - certainly a lot of mobs seem to be tuned against ranged attacks.

Mostly, though, I think the reports of reduced difficulty come from people's early experience of the first areas of the first map, Crystal Oasis, which rather lives up to its name. Yes, it's quite relaxing and unstressful around Amnoon. Wait 'til you cross Devestation and push into Palawa Joko's territories before you make any sweeping assumptions about overall difficulty levels, that's all I'm saying.

Aaaaaand... I think that's enough for one post. Going to split this in two and do the story and the class stuff another time. There's a griffon out there somewhere with my name on it and I need to find it!

Bleedthrough : GW2

A couple of weeks ago, while I was hanging around in Krennak's Homestead, an NPC dive in Wayfarer Hills that I like to use as a surrogate home when I'm in the area, I was startled to hear a conversation strike up behind me. The Norn family that live there, none of whom I'd ever paid  much attention before, began to run through some kind of comedy routine.

It was a pretty funny little skit and quite a long one, too. I laughed out loud a couple of times but my amusement was heavily outweighed by my confusion and surprise. I mean, I doubt I'd be exaggerating much if I said I'd spent a dozen hours in that hut over the life of the game. I camp there almost every time after I've done The Frozen maw and I frequently afk there to web browse or write a blog post.

Since I have the sound of the game set to continue playing while I'm tabbed out, I can absolutely guarantee that, had the Norn Family piped up, I'd have heard them. I never had until then.

Since then I've heard them exchange the same banter so often I could almost recite it by heart. It starts up every time I enter the lodge and replays often if I stay there. It's gone from amusing to annoying to "I really have to find somewhere else to afk".

It would seem very strange for ANet to have paid writers and voice actors to add this kind of flavor to
such old content so my best guess was that it had long been bugged until something in some patch nudged it working. That explanation didn't entirely convince me but it was the best I could manage.

Anyway, I soon stopped wondering about it as the dialog became part of the soundscape of the game. Then today I happened to be in Plains of Ashford when something happened that surprised me even more.

I'd logged in my Free to Play account to take the screenshots for my Elite Spec Beta post (because reasons) and since I had it logged in I thought I'd check whether F2P accounts are allowed to claim the free promo item currently in the Black Lion Store (yes, they are).

After that I thought I'd just do the Dailies and one of them was Plains of Ashford Events. My F2P ranger is a Charr and I used to love doing my dailies in Ashford so much I once wrote a guide on the subject (albeit the long-lost and much-missed "Kill Variety" kind), so that was too tempting to ignore.

First I went to the cave under the waterfall to spawn the Rampaging Skale. As I was standing there waiting, I thought I faintly heard a sound I'd almost forgotten: Drottot Lashtail demanding devourer eggs.

Drottot is a Charr given the unenviable task of teaching cubs how to catch and raise devourers for the Legions. His charges are sassy, the work is tedious and as far as I knew he'd given up trying about three years ago. Not his choice: he was retired as part of the New Player Experience patch that, among other things, strove to do away with many non-standard events that supposedly sent delicate new players into a tail-spin.

This particular event required you to activate some small devices that look and sound like old-fashioned gramophones in order to distract female devourers so you could break into their nests and steal their eggs. It was fiddly enough that a three-year old child might have taken five or ten seconds to grasp the mechanics so it had to go.

Well, it's back! I did it this morning. It was joyous. So good, in fact, that I did it twice. With other people. Still busy in Ashford on daily day I'm happy to confirm.

Of course, now I'm beginning to doubt my own memory. I can't find any sign that I, or anyone else, ever wrote about the event going away, much less anyone commenting on it coming back. If it wasn't for that absolutely, definitely, for certain sure new to me after five years, dialog in Wayfarer Foothills I'd think I was losing it (whatever "it" is and always assuming I ever had it in the first place).

Oh, and there's this, which does prove things get changed under the hood now and again without ANet coming out and making a big fuss about it.  I note that was also a belated acknowledgement of mistakes made in the New Player Experience.

Co-incidence? I think not.

Ashes in the Wind : Rift

 No, much though I enjoy a bit of Joan, that's really not what I meant!

Flares are back!

So, the Ashes of History event started, finally. On the face of it, it looks remarkably like the last one. And the one before that, come to think of it. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Find something that works, you may as well run with it, I say.

I'd been doing Night of the Dead stuff in EQ2 for most of the evening so it was late when I logged into Rift. Only took me a few seconds to find out where the event began. Look!  Over there! A bunch of strangers standing around the same quarter of Meridian's yard where the last lot decamped a couple of weeks back. In the exact same spots I do believe. I think they may even have rented the same tents.

Sun comes up, out go the lights. Or not.

The first quest sent me looking for a Travel Stone. It wasn't hard to find. In fact it was straight out of Meridian's main gate and up a path to the right. If that wasn't plain enough, someone had thoughtfully planted a row of torches. You couldn't miss it, frankly. Nor the huge, blue crystal at the end of it.

Mrs Bhagpuss had gone to sleep so I was playing with headphones on for once. I'd also had most of a bottle of Chilean Merlot by then so it's just possible I may have been in a particularly receptive frame of mind. Whatever, when I clicked on the crystal suddenly I was pulled sharply, unexpectedly into the world before me. By the song of a long-dead dwarven bard.  

Erm, that didn't come out of your spider by any chance?

Sound gets a raw deal in MMOs.Many people turn it off altogether or turn it down and play music instead. I often have the radio on while I play and pay more attention to that than the sounds of the world I'm supposed to be inhabiting. I don't usually play with headphones on, but whenever I do I remember just how important a part sound can play in creating that elusive, desired sense of immersion. This, however, went far beyond that.

Imagine Sound Clip Here

The voice was unearthly. Softly sibilant, airy and distant, it wasn't even the  tone that chilled. It was the phrasing. Phrasing is the key to song as timing is to comedy. Get the phrasing right and everything follows. Whoever voiced this had the phrasing perfectly wrong. No human would emphasize those syllables, take those pauses. It was a voice from another world, another time. Magical. Appropriately, for once.

I was impressed. And I went on being impressed with the following quest, which also used sound excellently and atmospherically. It all bodes very well for the rest of the event. Just because you re-use the frame doesn't mean you have to paint the same picture.