Look At The Teeth On That Horse! Amazon Prime Gaming Giveaways For October

As promised, here's a little something about Amazon Games' free offer for October - and for a while it looked as though it was going to be a very little something indeed. When I opened the app, there were just three new games: 

• Horace
• Hero's Hour
• Loom

In order to asses just how generous the offers are, I like to benchmark against another platform wherever possible. Horace is £10.99 on Steam right now, making it a decent shout for a freebie. According to the publisher's website, as quoted verbatim by Amazon, "Horace is a story-driven, platform game peppered with nostalgic, popular culture references which will bring a smile to any gamer who enjoys the 8 and 16 bit era." Not me, then. Not only did I not enjoy that era, I barely noticed it. I have no nostalgia to be tapped and I actively dislike the aesthetic. 

I'm also extremely wary of any game that claims to offer "Eccentric British humour", which almost always turns out to be a limp imitation of a style that hasn't aged at all well. I really don't need to sit through another Python/Hitchhikers/Discworld pastiche ever, ever again. Hard pass.

Hero's Hour (£14.99 on Steam.) also has graphics I don't much like the look of. It's "an accessible, yet-deep and content-rich Strategy Roleplaying Game", apparently. It looks like an ugly, pain-in-the-ass waste of time to me. I guess I'm not the target market. Even harder pass.

Loom is the only one of the three I'd heard of. It's this month's guaranteed LucasArts point & click adventure, currently retailing for just £4.79 on Steam, which is quite possibly more than it's worth because it's old. 

Originally released in 1990, the Amazon Games blurb claims it has "Stunning, high-resolution, 3D landscapes", a claim I suspect to have been lifted directly from the original thirty-year old press release. If the screenshots provided are anything to go by, I think we're going to need new dictionary definitions for "stunning", "high resolution" and "3D" and quite possibly for "landscapes", too.

I claimed it anyway. It's a point and click adventure. I might run out of good ones some day.

So much for this month's games. But wait! Of course there are more. Tucked away on the Prime Gaming website (Fka "Twitch") there are three more games new to the platform, although not to anywhere else.

1. Fallout 76: The PITT
2. Total War: Warhammer II
3. Glass Masquerade

These are the games for which you need to link your Prime account to a third party - or more accurately three third parties: Microsoft, Epic and Legacy Games. I'm getting the hang of how this works at last. I already have my Prime account linked to Epic and Legacy so I was able to claim the Warhammer title and Glass Masquerade immediately. 

Total War: Warhammer II is a full-price title on Steam. It'll cost you £39.99 there as I write this. It's the same price on the Epic Store. I guess that counts as a bargain, then. Described as "a strategy game of titanic proportions" and wreathed in compliments from critics and players alike, I have to say it does look impressive, even if it's not really my sort of thing. I do have a fondness for the Warhammer universe, though, so it's not impossible I might give it a try one day. Claimed.

Glass Masquerade is an odd one. It's "an artistic puzzle game inspired by Art Deco & stained glass artisans of the 20th century", which is, I have to admit, not a sales pitch you hear every day. As far as I can tell, it's a kind of digital jigsaw. I'm not entirely opposed to the concept of jigsaws although I can think of better ways of inching closer to death and this is undeniably pretty to look at. At £3.99 on Steam and with an estimated 3-4 hours gameplay, it's a bit of a barrel-scraper but why not? Claimed.

And finally, Fallout 76: The PITT. I was a bit confused by this one. Was it the Fallout game I've been reading about for a couple of years on blogs like Bio Break? The kinda-sorta mmo one? I didn't recall that having a colon and a subtitle.

I had to look it up. It is that game but the newest version including the recent DLC that opens the world out a bit. This Amazon freebie version includes "the full Fallout 76 game" but not " any deluxe, paid or additional content related to Fallout 76". So that's clear.

In order to download and play the thing you have to link your Prime account to a Microsoft account. I've spent the last six years, since I bought this PC, resisting and refusing all of Microsoft's many attempts to co-erce me into signing up. So far I've managed to keep myself clean but it's not been easy.

It is tempting, all the same. I'm no fan of the Fallout series but I am curious to try the mmoish version. It's currently £34.99 on Steam so there's no chance I'm going to pay for it. On the other hand, there's a free week coming up to celebrate the franchise's 25th anniversary so I could just try it then. I'm still thinking about it. I have until the end of the month to decide. In the meantime, claimed, just in case.

That just leaves the in-game freebies, of which there are almost none for games I even vaguely pretend to play. Just three, in fact.

• Black Desert
• Elder Scrolls Online
• Guild Wars 2

The Black Desert freebie is "a box with a class-specific outfit". There's a non-trivial chance I might one day play the game again and new outfits are always welcome. Claimed.

For Elder Scrolls Online you get a couple of mounts, which I confess I thought I'd already claimed. Maybe they've come around again. I know I didn't log in to redeem them last time so if it's a second chance it's very welcome. Maybe I'll even use it this time. Claimed.

And finally, Guild Wars 2. There's only a week left to run on this offer so I must have missed it when it first appeared. It's a "Gift Finisher and Mail Delivery Carrier" and in the blurry illustration it looks very much like the Wintersday one I already have, although that's from a consumable item and I guess this is permanent? Seems a bit of a thin offer all the same but what the heck. Claimed.

There's another GW2 in-game offer "Coming Soon" so I'd better keep my eyes open. I'd hate to miss out on any of these highly desirable items.

And that's that for another month. More games to stack on the "Never gonna play" pile and that's after I've triaged the offer and thrown out the real clunkers! What a wonderful world we do live in, eh?

Tomorrow it's on to another bunch of free handouts - Steam's latest Next Fest. I spent too long looking through the options last night but so far I've only found four I'm willing to spend time with. I'll try and add a couple to the list today to make it a nice, round half-dozen and I'll preview those tomorrow. 

Or I won't. No promises. (I probably will, though. It's not like I'm going to come up with a better idea by then.)

Excuse Me? I think Your Hat Might Be On Fire.

I had a vague memory of having read something about July being some kind of anniversary or special occasion for Amazon Games. There was going to be an extra large giveaway. Was it forty free games? Something like that. Even though it wasn't quite July yet I thought I might take a look anyway, see if anything was happening. 

Oh boy, was it ever! So many new games. So much new free stuff. Where to start?

The only way out is through as they say ("They" being children brought up on Michael Rosen's "We're Going on a Bear Hunt", presumably.) I started at the beginning and worked my way through to the end, looking at the thumbnails, trying to guess from the picture and the title whether it was worth reading the brief description, then clicking through to the websites of the more interesting ones.

I'm increasingly impressed with the way these monthly giveaways are presented. Compared to Steam, which sometimes make me wonder if it was designed by a bunch of teenagers on community service or the Epic Games storefront, which has all the authenticity and character of the Shopping Channel, the Amazon Games front end feels well organized, clear and helpful. I wonder if it's because they're not trying to sell me anything, just give it away?

Whatever the reason, I always look forward to browsing through the offers at the start of the month, whereas I have to force myself to dig through the jumble at Steam and can barely bring myself to log in to Epic at all. Even so, the sheer volume of offers this time around made getting through them all quite a challenge.

As far as I can tell, the splurge is a promotion for Prime Day, which is why it ends when that event does, on the 14th of July. Whether that means a second set of offers will land mid-month I'm not sure. I kind of hope it doesn't. I'm not sure I could cope with another drop so soon.

Or maybe I could. There weren't all that many titles in this batch that piqued my interest. For once the virtual shelves seemed empty of point&click adventures. There wasn't a Monkey Island game to be found. 

I considered several games that looked like they'd have very intriguing narratives but which told their stories by way of mechanics I don't enjoy. That happens in the analog world, too but at least, when you go to the ballet, no one expects you to dance.

I claimed seven of the offers, two of them packs of three. Those came from another platform by the name of Legacy Games. They specialize in casual games of the Match 3 and Hidden Object variety and they've apparently been in that unfashionable but highly popular business for almost a quarter of a century. 

I had to register an account with them to claim the games, whereupon they handed me yet another free game for signing up. It reminds me of the old 1950s pusher trope, where the first hit comes free. Only I never pay. Or wake up in flop house on the Bowery with a kidney missing. Oh wait... different cliche.

The titles I got from Legacy Games were these:

I can't honestly say I know what type of games any of them although the word "Adventure" did crop up somewhere.The one with the picture of a cow was the bonus title. If any of them turn out to be any good I'll probably do a post about it some day. Otherwise, I imagine this is the last you'll ever hear of them.

Of the others, the pick of the bunch was a second installment of the Darkside Detective series so beloved of Syp. I wasn't that struck on the first one myself but it was a decent enough occult comedy adventure. I'm quite happy to go again.

Crow's Eye, HUE and Rain World all look interesting but I suspect the gameplay will defeat me. Sheep and Clouds 2 might be fun for a session or two. Since I've barely even looked at any of the games I claimed last month, it's a bit of a moot point anyway.

Although not, perhaps, as moot as the in-game items I claimed from the Twitch portion of this month's offer. Once more, I found myself taking the trouble to make sure I didn't miss out on cosmetics for games I no longer play and may well never play again. What is wrong with me?

New to the offer this month, or at least I don't recall seeing it there before, is World of Warcraft. Blizzard really must be getting desperate. Despite not having logged in since the scandals began and having no intention of doing so until they're at least convincingly swept under the Microsoft rug, I made the effort and linked my Battlenet and Amazon accounts. 

It was surprisingly painless, although it did involve the usual near-clinical levels of paranoid security. I sometimes suspect we're already living in a cyberpunk noir timeline and we just haven't noticed yet. All I'll get for my diligence, should I ever log in again, is a transmog for a helmet that I'll never use, the Jewel of the Firelord. There are two more dramatically-named hats to come. I suppose I'll have to claim those, too. You can never have too many hats although personally I'd rather none of mine was on fire.

A much more compelling offer and one for a game I have no compunction in going back to is the Windhelm Cliff Ram Mount for Elder Scrolls Online. It comes with some facial tattoos (for your character, not the sheep.) and two Xanmeer Crates, whatever they are. Lockboxes, I assume.

Lost Ark, another game I keep meaning to revisit but somehow never do, trumps ESO's ram with a penguin. A penguin suit, that is. I wish a few mmorpgs I play regularly would acquire Lost Ark's bizarre animal cosplay fetish. I'd love to run around Norrath or Tyria dressed as a giant penguin.

New World has some fairly ordinary armor on offer. It looks a hell of a lot better than the hideous leaisure suit currently being given away to people with so little going on in their lives they're willing to give up four hours of their time watching one of the last remaining Twitch streamers pretending to enjoy the game. It's odd that there are two different giveaways for the same game from the same source at the same time but at least I only wasted a few seconds on mine.

The last freebie I grabbed was a Void Shoulder Sheep for my avatar in Roblox. There's a sentence that would have had almost no semantic value at any time before the turn of the millennium. It doesn't really have a lot now. Also, it's the third thing in this month's offer to involve sheep. Is it some TikTok trend I've missed?

All I have to do now is find time to play at least a few of these games before the next deluge of free gifts arrives. I'd better get on with it.

Broken English : ESO

I knew if I made a list of things to do I'd end up doing at least some of them. Either that or I'd do some other equally "important" stuff instead, so I 'd at least feel I'd accomplished something.

That's the way my mind works. The very act of writing something down imbues it with an almost mystical significance. It's also why I try not to make "to do" lists unless it's lists of things I genuinely do have to do.

Fortunately, with my memory, if I don't literally have the list in front of me I forget what's on it in a matter of hours. Minutes, sometimes. Writing a list in a blog post that I won't look at again after the day it's published is pretty safe. Very different from a piece of paper that sits in front of my monitor and accuses me every time I glance down.

Even without the specifics, though, just knowing I wrote something tends to keep my mind focused. Since I made that list is that I've been extremely productive in several games. I've sorted out banks and upgraded gear and finished questlines. It's been fun and fulfilling and it's fired me up to get even more done.

As far as the projects and plans on the list itself, of course, I have made no progress whatsoever. Except for one tiny thing. I did manage to log into Elder Scrolls Online again.

It's an odd game, isn't it? What does it want to be? I can't tell. Maybe it becomes clearer when you get further in but I doubt it.

Pink moon gonna get you all

I had a little bit of a mini-rant in the comments over at Why I Game and while what I said has much more universal implications, it's no co-incidence I'd been playing ESO not long before. What I was complaining about was "the relentless growth of “story”" in games. Popping on my rose-tinted specs I said "Games didn’t used to need stories. They had situations and that was enough."

I'm not sure it was ever quite as simple as that but I do know that every game didn't used to feel like a classroom excercise, where a series of variously capable students take it in turns to read a story aloud. It's a serious problem for the form, which already has major disadvantages over most other narrative platforms in that it requires regular and frequent interruptions so the player can, well, play.

ESO is an extreme example but all video games do it to some degree. What I'm referring to, specifically, is the way the medium necessitates the portioning out of the narrative in discrete, disconnected chunks. It's particularly evident in games that use a lot of voice acting, which these days is nearly all of them.

What happens is that the player engages with an NPC, who then articulates a sentence or two, then stops. The narrative flow, such as it was, comes to an abrupt and immediate halt while the game waits for the player to reply, assuming a reply is permitted or required. Even if it's not, everything pauses until the player indicates with a mouse-click that they're ready to hear the next line.

That chevron over my pet's head, even with the UI hidden... Drives me crazy!

It's less of a problem with quests that are all text. There, it's not dissimilar to looking up from a book or turning the page. With voice-acted audio, at best it's like pressing pause in the middle of a scene, while watching a movie at home, something most viewers would try to do as infrequently as possible.
Mostly, though, it's like trying to stream over a poor connection. The buffering never stops.

Every conversation is stuttering and fractured, which would be difficult enough if the breaks came at meaningful points, but that would assume the dialog carried enough meaning or interest to sustain such constant interruption. It patently doesn't.

There's so much filler and so many of the breaks feel arbitrary. It drains all significance out of anything that's said. NPCs begin to tell you their fears, their terrors, their intimate nightmares, then they break off and wait for you to let them know it's okay to continue.Take a second or an hour, It's all the same to them.

Time stops in all narrative forms if the reader or viewer ceases to engage, of course, but in no other medium is that paradox so unapolagetically served up as part of the process. It does make me wonder, when I hear people express the strength of the emotions certain games have engendered in them, how they've been able to set aside the mechanics long enough to become engaged.

Pondering a career change? Bounty hunting! Always an option.

The imagination is a marvelous engine, though. It does most of the emotional heavy lifting. It really needs to, often as not. The writing and the performance offer very little help. Elder Scrolls Online is frequently cited as one of the better examples of narrative form in multiplayer gaming. I keep looking for evidence to support that view but I've yet to find any.

The plot certainly doesn't do anything to help ESO stand out from the crowd. I'm willing to accept that nothing very significant or unusual is likely to happen in the opening scenes, which are all I've experienced so far, but even by comparison with the same stages in countless similar MMOPRGs, there seems to be precious little of interest going on here.

That's not to say the narrative doesn't attempt to impart a sense of urgency and immediacy. The starting area I've just completed faces imminent attack by a superior force, necessitating the evacuation of an entire settlement by way of a frenzied flight through some dark tunnels filled with deadly traps. If it was the opening of a movie you'd be on the edge of your seat.

I remember daylight!

Only it's not a movie. It's an MMORPG, so any sense of urgency is entirely notional. Everyone tells you to hurry but if you don't, nothing happens. Even if you take the threat seriously, the game doesn't. The words are urgent but the action is anything but, and there's a shopping list of tasks to complete before you move on.

The voice actors, perhaps understanding the situation better than their characters, generally decline to express much in the way of emotion at all, even when the script suggests they should. Every delivery is much the same; measured, calm, controlled. Occasionally an actor will use just enough nuance to indicate the presence of an emotion without going so far as to employ it.

All of this sits awkwardly with the gameplay itself. I've seldom played any MMORPG where the narrative drove the gameplay so relentlessly and single-mindedly. Last night I wanted to stop a good half-hour before I finally logged out because there is simply never a point at which the narrative reaches a natural break. Every quest leads inexorably into another. It's enervating.

Since, as I already mentioned, nothing proceeds without the player's permission, any sense of urgency is entirely artificial. I could have stopped at any point short of the middle of an actual fight. It would make no difference whatsoever. It's not like the old days, where you'd have to reach a save point before you could answer the doorbell.

At this point the game instructs you to wait for the refugees to get to safety. I do what I'm told.

No, the problem is an aesthetic one. I like to get to the end of a chapter or an episode before I put down my Kindle for the night. I feel the same about gaming. You'd think that it would be easy to abandon something as uninvolving and arbitrary as this mid-scene but ingrained habits die hard.

All of which, perhaps surprisingly, is not to say I'm not enjoying ESO. It's... okay. The world is attractive enough, although the new zone I've reached appears to be drenched in eternal night, something of a shock after the previous one, where midnight felt like mid-afternoon.

The combat, which seems to be universally reviled, is still, at the inglorious heights of level nine, simplistic and not at all unpleasant. I spent a while trying to use the various spells coherently but eventually I realized that simply pounding the left mouse button killed everything about twice as fast as playing "properly" so for now I'm just doing that.

I've died once in four levels and that was because I got stuck on a piece of furniture. It's very likely I'd have died more if it wasn't that the starting zones are extraordinarily busy. Every quest step plays out like a conga line as three or four players arrive in quick succession. Areas that were clearly designed to be approached carefully and with caution are laid wide open as swathes of players hack and slash through anything that moves.

City of Eternal Night. Or just some backwater fort in the wolf hours.

I finally hit the infamous mats barrier, my inventory filled with endless body parts and other crafting essentials. It would be annoying but I've chosen to solve the problem by selling everything and doing no harvesting, mining or gathering at all. Perhaps that would be a terrible idea if I planned on staying for the long haul but I'm just a tourist in this town.

The game does have something, I can't deny it. It's enjoyable in the moment. I feel like I want to see more although I'm aware I've been here before. My first character felt much the same at the this level but it didn't last.

When I was him, though, there was no One Tamriel. I'm curious to see if combat becomes arduous and unenjoyable in the mid-teens, as it did with him, or whether making everywhere the same level also makes combat feel like this forever. I hope it does. If I can carry on mashing one button and winning I might get a lot farther this time.

That said, there were four other games on that list. I've managed to get as far as installing AdventureQuest 3D on my Kindle although I've yet to play it that way. DCUO I have lined up for August, when Wonderverse drops. Shintar pointed up some freebies in Neverwinter that I really don't think I ought to ignore. She also mentioned a bike race in SW:toR that sounds like my kind of thing.

I can't see ESO hanging on for long. Still, I think I'll play a little more today.

Pale Lilac Snow: Elder Scrolls Online

Yesterday evening saw my return to Elder Scrolls Online, a little over a year since the last login, when I stuck my head around the door of my free inn room, saw how dark and pokey it was and promptly logged out again.

In all the time I've played the game (can't be more than a few hours in a few years) I've only ever tasted a single race and class, Khajiit Dragonknight, levelled, painfully, slowly, sporadically to level twelve. All I've seen of the game is the starting area for that combo.

Or maybe it is. Hard to remember. ESO hasn't made much of an impact. About all I recall are some caves, a bit of woodland, a rocky island where some orcs live. Oh, and a beach. Maybe I might have seen a strip of desert once, on a boat trip.

To be honest, it's all a bit of a blur. I do know I haven't seen any snow before, though, so the place I found myself in last night has to be new.

With cat-people off the menu, the options that faced me at character creation weren't doing much. There seemed to be a lot of elves, never a happy omen. Some rather ordinary-looking humans. One of those viking/barbarian types.

Nothing really bit. The faux-authentic gear wasn't helping.

I don't know, time was when what I wanted from a high-medieval MMORPG was armor looking like the artist sketched it through dusty glass at a down-at-heel market town museum in some central European backwater but I've been spoiled. These days I'd rather come on like the sugared-up second cousin of a Ruritanian princess, tricked out for a tour with a favorite band of glam-folk troubadours, on the run from that day job in the circus.

I like a bit of color, in other words. Not getting much of that here.

So I chose the lizard. If you can't dress exotic, be exotic, right? And they get frills on their heads. Or punk rock spikes. I went with the spikes.

It looked good in character create but in most MMORPGs no character design survives contact with the game engine. The screenshots tell the old story here. Ninety minutes of play, I really only got a good look at my character once.

That was the oddly blurred shot above. I'm not even sure how it happened. Must have hit some chance combination of keys. It's the only shot where you can - just about - see the character's face. Not that a lizard shows much expression. And the face markings and head-spikes are hidden under the rough cloth cowl.

ESO is one of those games where the graphics look better in screenshots. It's funny how often that happens. Or the other way round. I was only saying the other day how The Hammers End looks better than the screenshots suggest.

It must be something to do with settings. I confess that's something I almost never pay any attention to in any game, although given the ridiculous number of screenshots I take I almost certainly should. I tend to shy away from getting involved too closely with things like that, for my own safety. The last thing I need is discovering something like Black Desert's super-sophisticated in-game photo options. No-one needs a virtual David Bailey.

Anyway, I wasn't really looking at my character. I was looking at the snow. It was pretty good snow and I'm something of an afficionado. Snowficcionado. It's a word, now. I once wrote a piece on Good Snow Art for a comics fanzine. I may have done something similar here, on this blog.

Snow does make everything look better. There's all that blue in the palette. I know humans can recognize more shades of green than any other color but green in games tends towards the bland, except in jungles. Blue has much more resonance.

Blue, white, red. Winter landscapes, there's sometimes a surprising amount of red, bleeding into the blue, leeching pale lavenders and mauves. All these shots drip with it. It makes the cold seem so warm.

Which is probably just as well because, lizard. Cold-blooded, yes? Unless Tamriel evolution is very different, which of course it may be because, magic.

Anyway, I was surprised to find my lizard, whose descriptive background had mentioned something about swampland, waking up in a log cabin somewhere in the frozen north. A quick conversation with the nearest person confirmed no more than I'd expected: shipwreck, washed ashore, unconscious, found by villagers, now pressed into service against imminent threat. Yadda yadda and like that.

Could there be a more generic opening? Well, I guess. I mean, lizard in the snow, that's a twist. Explanation as to why or even how any of it happened, though? Not forthcoming.

Of course, I did opt to skip the tutorial. Maybe it was in there. But the game helpfully told me I'd done it before on another character so I didn't have to go through it again and I took the offer, gladly. No matter it was half a dozen years ago and all forgotten now.  No matter I'd been a tiger, then, in another place. Let's press on.

Out of the cabin I ran around some. It was daytime, for a wonder. In the time I played, night never fell. It did get a bit less bright for a while, one time. It helped a lot, the sun on the snow, the brightness. I'm losing patience with spending half my playtime in thick twilight let alone deep night. It was nice, being able to see, for once.

I grabbed some quests as I happened across them. I didn't seek them out or linger. I don't like either the font or the background. Harsh. Dark. Abrasive. These things affect my enjoyment strongly. I have these issues with print, too. There are novels I just won't read because of the way the text lies on the page.

If it's good, you'd make the effort but the writing in ESO is ponderous. No, that's maybe not the world. Ponderous suggests uncertainty and quest text here is far from uncertain. Too confident, if anything. Portentous, that could be the word I'm groping for. Or pretentious, though usually I like that. No, it's portentous, all right. Portentous and leaden. Lies heavy on the line. A common failing of fantasy, transcribed here faithfully from those endless series that stretch an author's career across decades.

Although... let's be fair. The few quests I did last night weren't all that bad. Better, or at least, less wearing to read than those I remembered from the other starting area. More perfunctory, less long-winded. Mostly "go find this guy" and, when I found him, "go do this thing".

At one point I almost felt a sense of urgency. A ship sighted, an invasion anticipated. Danger blowing in on the wind. You wouldn't know it from the voice acting, of course, still as first table-reading as ever. I have a theory about this. It applies to video game voice acting in general, not just to ESO. I don't know enough about the process to begin pontificating. Yet.

I didn't do a lot of questing, anyway. Mostly I ran around in the snow, taking snapshots, killing stuff. I ran into a bandit camp early on. Expected to die, being only level two or three. Tried to con the bandits, couldn't figure out how, so I blasted one to see what would happen. What happened was I killed him.

So I killed some more. Quite a few. Got a hat, put it on. Burned some supplies, freed a captive. Bandit Camp 101. I dinged. It occurred to me this must be the famous equalization. One zone for all.. Makes you wonder why levels at all except I guess without them there'd be none of that drip drip drip, progress. I suppose now I can go anywhere, kill anyone, like in that old joke, the one about the army. 

My lizard's a sorceror. I thought maybe it would be easier than melee, given the awful, awful controls. It wasn't, actually. If anything it was harder. More keys to press, can't just spam LMB/RMB. But I lived, bandits died. Can't complain.

And it was fun, kind of. As much fun as the horrible controls let it be. I started thinking maybe I should get a controller and use that. Could hardly be worse. I was already thinking about it. I even looked at some on Amazon the other day.  

After the bandits I went to some kind of temple, swarming with skeletons. Again, I lived, they died Or undied. Whatever the verb is. I do like fighting bandits and undead at low levels. Simple pleasures. If these count as low levels, that is.

The game was kind of busy. Really busy, actually. There were players everywhere. It seems ESO etiquette dictates you just pile on when you see someone fighting. People were always "helping" me to kill stuff. I got the loot so that worked out. I didn't reciprocate, though.

I found all my runes, opened the crypt door, looking for the necromancer. If I followed the plot I think I was supposed to kill him but I never even saw him. There was a line. I didn't bother waiting, just spoke to a ghost. He seemed to think I'd done whatever it was I'd come there to do. Fine, then.

I grabbed a bit of paper that said something or other and left. Gave it to the guy who'd sent me. He was waiting right oustside, which saved me a run. He asked me to go back to the village, tell someone what had happened, not that I really knew what that was. I did it anyway and the guy said something bad was going to happen so it would probably be best if we all ran away. More of the supposed realism? Maybe, but it's going to be tough adventuring if all the quests go "check out if something bad's happening and if it is come tell me so we can all run away".

I said I'd tell a few other people and we'd be off but actually all I did was move five feet away and log out. I'm sure he won't mind waiting although on form so far it could be another year or two.

Or maybe not. It was kind of fun. I think ESO may well be another of the growing list of MMORPGs (FFXIV, LotRO) I enjoy the more, the less I quest. Now if I could just figure out a way to make the combat not actively annoying...

Room At The Inn : Elder Scrolls Online

When I re-organized my HDD, one of my vague plans was to take another look at both Black Desert and Elder Scrolls Online. They each have settings that I find visually appealing and to some extent I enjoyed the relatively brief times I spent exploring their worlds.

Of the two, I liked BDO a lot more. The lore may be considerably less developed and the mechanics significantly more gamelike but it always felt much more like a "real" place to me. The various NPCs seemed, somehow, to be "there" in a way they don't in ESO.

It was very easy to imagine life going on in without me in Calpheon or Valencia, whereas in Glenumbra or Betnikh I felt more as if I was walking around a historical re-enactment. It was as though the NPCs were all actors, who'd heave a sigh of relief when I logged out because it meant  they could slip back into their everyday clothes and go home.

The overriding reason I enjoyed BDO more, though, was the mechanics. Both games use a form of mouse-locked, reticule-aimed action combat but in Black Desert that results in a wild, freewheeling romp whereas in ESO it's a jarring, discordant lurch.

Now, this is the kind of place I was thinking of...

Black Desert also benefitted strongly from having excellent personal housing. Property there is plentiful, inexpensive and appealing. The way you can open the windows of your home to look out and see other players passing by, even though your house is instanced, seems more magical than the actual magic in the game.

As I posted, when I'd patched up BDO and recovered my login details, the first thing I did was go back to my house in the hills. I was surprised to find I immediately remembered the way and delighted that everything there was exactly as I'd left it. When I think about persistence in MMORPGs I suppose this is the kind of thing I have in mind.

I'm not quite in Syp's class in believing that all MMOs should have personal housing but I do believe it acts as a very powerful incentive to retention. For that reason alone I find it strange that any developer would resist having it in their game, the way both Blizzard and ArenaNet seem determined to do.

When I briefly played ESO it didn't have housing but it wasn't long before ZeniMax added it to their increasingly impressive offer. I'd read a few things about it that made it sound a bit insipid but I wanted to take a look for myself. Once I'd got the game running and my account working - no short process - I logged in and went to look for somewehere to live.

Sounds interesting.

Okay, that's not strictly accurate. What I really did was log sraight out again and go searching for Add Ons.

I'm the kind of player that generally doesn't bother with third-party programmes for MMOs. I prefer to use the default UI, wherever possible. In ESO it's not. If you stuck with the defaults you'd never know where you were going, what you  were doing or how you were meant to do it. You most likely wouldn't even know what it was that you'd done after you'd done it.

Even with Add Ons giving me a mini-map, an on-screen quest journal, visible hot bars and an inventory with visual iconography I still didn't really know what I was doing. I managed almost two levels and an entire solo dungeon using only auto-attack because I had no idea where any of my weapon skills were or, indeed, if I was meant to have any.

Eventually I got that sorted out, which made killing things about two orders of magnitude faster and easier, at which point, naturally, I decided to stop the slaughter to go look for a house. I'd picked up a quest somewhere that wanted me to go to Daggerfall and speak to someone about an Inn room. I was already in Daggerfall so that seemed like the place to start.

You're really not selling it, Felande.

Whoever wrote the quest dialog for "Room to Spare" must have had their tongue stuck in their cheek so hard it probably left a permanent mark.  The whole thing's so arch you could run a railway over it.

The conceit is that having an adventurer staying at the Inn confers such status it's worth letting the room out for free. The landlady, Felande Demarie, somehow manages to smirk and wink her way through the entire catalog of things you, the player character, can and can't do in your room, including setting up crafting stations, displaying your trophies, housing your assistants and even stabling your mounts, without ever quite breaking the fourth wall.

It sounded like an awful lot to be going on in any Inn room but, when she finally let me see the room she was offering, I began to doubt her sanity. It was, without any question whatsoever, the smallest in-game accomodation I have ever seen. If it was any smaller you'd have to call it a cell. It's so tiny it makes the original single-room accomodation in 2004's EverQuest II look like a penthouse suite!

It also comes with no furnishings at all. None. Nada. Unless you count a single, guttering candle on the floor, which I do not. I stood there, gawping at my new home in dumbfounded amazement. I couldn't even get enough distance to take a screenshot that showed more than one corner at a time. Felande had made a point of telling me the room was too small to permit dueling. She's not kidding! You couldn't swing a rat in there, let alone a greatsword.

Monastic, I believe the term is.

All the same, it's dry and indoors, which puts it two places above anywhere my Khajit Dragonknight has spent the night so far. If he could just lay his hands on a bed...

You would think a bed would come as standard in an Inn room. I mean, I've stayed in all kinds of places, from five-star hotels to the box rooms of private houses, but never have I paid money to stay anywhere that didn't come with some kind of bed. Not in MMOland. There you get neither bed nor breakfast unless you bring your own.

So off I went to do some research on furniture. It seems you can buy the basics - the very basics - from NPC vendors, one of whom plies her trade out of the very same Rosy Lion Inn where I'm now living. You can also quest for a few things and you can either take up carpentry and make furniture or buy it from those who did.

It's motivating. I like furnishing rooms. I certainly like it a lot more than I like following ESO's so far unengaging main storyline or enrolling in the seemingly endless series of dour, downbeat, depressing side-quests and regional narratives that pepper the otherwise charming cities, towns, villages and farmland.

Triple-A Housing

ESO has received some considerable praise for its quest writing. I quickly worked out why back when I was playing before: the people who praise it like it because it's just like the stuff you find in all those endless, by-the-yard, multi-volume fantasy epics. I think of the authors who churn them out as the literary equivalent of the kind of prog rock band that makes a living playing in the middle of the afternoon on the second stage on Sundays at festivals all over Europe, when everyone's either too stoned, too exhausted or too hungover to pay attention.

I remembered that from last time but I hadn't really remembered just how stultifyingly bland the voice acting is. It's not that it's bad, per se. It's not like the astonishingly crass and inept voicework that EQ2 foisted on us a decade and a half ago, when that game promoted itself as the "first fully-voiced MMORPG". It's just flat, inert, lifeless and dull.

It's so bleached of human feeling, in fact, that I found myself wondering whether whoever was directing the recording sessions actively forbade the voice actors to express an emotion. Any emotion. Given that these are clearly professionals, who understand the lines, it's very hard to imagine them throttling back so consistently unless their paycheck depended on it.

After a few minutes I started skipping the spoken dialog. I can read the text in about a quarter of the time it takes the audio to play through so questing began to ressemble listening to FM radio while driving through a series of tunnels. Next time I think I'll switch the dialog off altogether, assuming there's an option for that.

There will be a next time, though. ESO's is a huge world and it seems one very well worth exploring. What's more, I have a home base now, and a prospectus of other places I could hang my hat. If I had a hat. Or a hat stand.

Things are looking up. One of these days, maybe I'll even get myself a bed.

Same Old Song : Astellia

As Mailvatar noted in the comments to the previous post, I do have a lot of MMOs on my desktop right now. Can you ever have enough MMORPGs, though? That's the question. There's always room for one more, isn't there?

A couple of days ago, MassivelyOP reported on a new one to me. I probably should have remembered it - they first featured it back in 2016 - but I didn't. It's yet another Eastern import, coming to us in here the West, this time, from South Korea. It's called Astellia, which is a perfectly functional, -if rather bland - name for what looks to be a standard Eastern take on Western fantasy.

It also just happens to be the name chosen by "a leading provider of network and subscriber intelligence", whose website currently leads the Google search race. If the new MMORPG succeeds in emulating the success of another fairly recent import, Black Desert Online, those rankings could easily change.

On the topic of BDO, while we're talking about it, I patched the game up the other day. I already had a full installation from a few months after the Western launch but to bring it up to date I had to download another 36GB. BDO has had a lot of "expansions" since I've been away. It is, by most reports, thriving.

When I was finally able to log in I found my characters all still where I left them. I'd forgotten I had three. Multiple characters in a particular game is usually a sign that I'm enjoying myself. I did indeed find Black Desert quite compelling for a while.

There's a non-trivial chance I'd find it so again but unfortunately my current installation appears to have a bug that's close to game-breaking: my keyboard doesn't work. When I got into the game I couldn't move or do anything. I stood there by the side of the road and watched horses and carriages pound past me. A giant airship cruised by overhead. I don't remember those being in the game when I last played.

That thing's going to frighten the sheep.

Some fiddling about via the Escape menu eventually got my WASD keys working but that was about it. I can run about and talk to NPCs but not much else. I remembered the way to my cliffside cottage, another indication that I'd been fairly invested in the game at one time. I made my way there and found it exactly as I'd left it.

By this point I was quite keen to carry on playing so I did some research on the bug and tried a number of suggested fixes. None of them worked. If all else fails I can try a full re-install but I can't say I'm looking forward to it so chances are I'll let BDO lie fallow for a while longer.

Anyway, right now I'm patching up Elder Scrolls Online, so I don't have the bandwidth. The ESO patcher doesn't tell me the full size of the download but I'm guessing it's huge because I've been at it for several hours and there's no sign of it stopping. Maybe it'll be ready for the weekend.

I did succeed in getting Dragon Nest installed and patched. It seems to have changed hands yet again. I've lost count of how many different owners and publishers it's had. None of my several previous login IDs worked so I made a new account with the oddly-named Cherry Credits and started over from scratch, yet again. I think that's the fourth time - no, the fifth if I count the mobile version.

Cherry Credits appears to be some kind of Singaporean portal for any number of games. Why I now have to go via Singapore to play a game called Dragon Nest EU beats me but Dragon Nest is worth any amount of hoop-jumping. I think it's probably fair to say it's one of my favorite MMORPGs of all time, now. Maybe one day I'll actually manage to get far enough to find out what's going on in the demented storyline.

Dora Dora Dorah!

With all that re-installing and re-investing going on I probably don't need to be looking to new games to satisfy my craving for "novelty" but I am anyway. What caught my attention about Astellia was the producers' insistence that it's going to be "a Classical MMORPG striving to return the genre to its roots". 

Doubling down on that bold claim, in an interview with MOP, Astellia's Western publisher, Barunson (no, me neither...) goes on to predict that "Astellia is positioned to appeal to players who have enjoyed EverQuest, Guild Wars 2, and other content based MMORPGs". 

The game uses the modern version of the Holy Trinity (Tank, Healer, DPS) and has an old-school PvE/PvP split, with solo and group dungeons, instanced battlegrounds and large-scale, three faction realm versus realm PvPvE. That's quite a list of things I like, if only they're done the way I like them to be done.

What's been somewhat harder to establish is how the controls work. Combat is tab-target but I have yet to ascertain for certain whether it's also hotbar-enabled in what we've learned to call "WoW Style". It doesn't necessarily follow but from this video it certainly looks as though there's a free mouse pointer in play. 

So far, so good, from my perspective, at least. Also, the world looks visually attractive and the characters and animations seem smooth enough. I did a bit more digging and found some comments from people who have played the Korean version. For example: 

"I played a healer (it has defined roles) but found it really mediocre - its not horrible, but its also not anything groundbreaking or amazing. The questing is boring, its hub based - the game just feels like something that belongs in 2005."

"The questing was really bad - kill stuff, pick plants - and always have to run back to the quest guy - no remote turn in - just a bunch of time wasted. The first mount comes in early - I think at level 7 or 8, but even with the mount I felt like I was moving really.... slow... back from one NPC to another to do these mindless quests. The game does have sort of an old-school feel to it but it's nowhere near as good as old school MMORPGs." 

Which is... kind of what I wanted to hear. Not the part about it being not as good as the games it professes to model itself on, obviously, but that it does, in fact, ressemble them to a significant degree.

Something I found significantly more intriguing was this interview. It seems to have been Google-translated, which makes it for a highly, if unintentionally, amusing read but there are also some quite surprising revelations concerning the thoughts and intentions behind the game.

"Q. The composition of the content looks like a game that requires patience, which should last a long time. I wonder how you look at the age group playing this game.

Chung Hyun-tae, CEO: It aims to make sure that a game is convinced, and it is aimed internally and at the 30th and 40th user groups. Of course, it is said that the age group is the same for all ages."

Borrowed from the official website

What this means (it's clarified later in the interview) is that the demographic targeted by the Korean developers is players in their thirties and forties but younger players might enjoy it anyway. The character visuals do play a little younger than the setting suggests but targeting an older audience makes quite a lot of sense when you consider the retro gameplay.

Chung Hyun-tae goes on to say "I want to point out that if you were targeting users of 3:40, you are not focusing heavily on a niche market", by which I interpret him to mean that there are a lot of MMORPG players in that age bracket. And I think that's right. You just don't often hear MMORPG designers admit that their core audience is aging.

Al this and I haven't even mentioned the title's USP, which is the eponymous "Astell Companion System", which consists of  "Dozens of Astels to acquire, level, and build effective support teams that can combo directly with your character based on classes and skills". It's a collectible card game inside an MMORPG, essentially. I remain to be convinced how well that will work but it'll be something different to play around with and learn, which is always fun.

All things considered, I'm not expecting much of Astellia. It's going to be a very odd duck, something of a hybrid throwback, combining WoW-clone era gameplay and design with relatively recent Eastern visuals. It's also likely to have a Buy-to-Play business model. They promise no "Pay to Win" and a relatively inocuous cash shop but we'll see.

I'll probably buy it. I'm not so sure about the "play" part.

What Shall We Play Next?

It's shaping up to be a very busy Spring and early Summer in MMOland. No, strike that - a busy year. Leaving aside the plethora of Kickstarters and indies we have The Elder Scrolls Online debuting in just over two weeks time on April 4th, followed by WildStar two months later on the third of June.  

EQN Landmark hasn't announced an official launch date but it goes into closed beta next Wednesday. One would imagine that open beta, which will to all intents and purposes be the launch, should come no more than two or three months after that.

No-one seems to have made a firm booking for midsummer yet but there are  couple of heavyweights eyeing the sand and flapping their towels meaningfully. There's UbiSoft's The Crew, originally scheduled for the Spring  but put back until "Summer 2014" with no exact date, while Funcom's Lego Minifigures Online is flagged "coming Summer 2014".

As the nights start to draw in Bungie have early Autumn covered with a September 9th launch pegged for their is-it-or-isn't-it MMOlike Destiny. Blizzard haven't nailed down an exact date (and Warlords of Draenor is "only" an expansion not a brand-new MMO) but they're taking pre-orders for "Fall 2014".

Finally, at least in this shortlist of MMOs I'm vaguely paying attention to, Trion promise that by the end of 2014 we'll get our hands on the year-before-last's Next Big Thing - ArcheAge. And that's just takes us up to Christmas. Let's not even think about Star Citizen and EQNext waiting in the wings.

So, with all this multiplicity of choice and glistening newness to slaver over, which MMO have I found myself most excited by these last few days? Everquest, of course. A fifteen-year old MMO that doesn't even have a new expansion out right now. Turns out all they needed to do was dangle the carrot of a free high-level character (not even max level you notice) and there I am, pushing my head back through the harness and taking up the strain.

Most of yesterday was spent getting to grips with my newly-85 Magician. Getting the hang of the spells (Not difficult. Mostly "Burn it! Blast it! Burn them! Burn them some more!") and the AAs (going to need a free afternoon and a manual for those). Re-learning old skills (Pulling. Crowd-control. Handling adds. Finding my corpse).

To get back into the swing of things first we went somewhere familiar. I say we: three of us - Magician, Mercenary and Pet. Dragonscale Hills didn't require the Merc but she came in handy when I stopped to read the map after a long run and the half-dozen clockwork beetles that had been chasing us caught up. Paying attention to your surroundings as you travel - there's another rusty skill I need to buff...

...something I hadn't managed to do by the time we moved up a notch to Loping Plains.  The four zombies I tagged while taking an ill-advised short-cut to the bottom of the long ramp down gave us a good work-out but standing on the grizzly bear conveyor belt outside Bloodmoon Keep proved to be too much. Talk about Bears! Bears! Bears!

That's another skill to be re-learned, right there - choose your ground for a fight carefully, don't just stand somewhere random and start killing. That kind of slack behavior might cut it in Tyria or Azeroth but this is Norrath.

So, the pet died valiantly while the other two bravely ran away and the mage gated and back we all were (well, two of us and a new Kabobn) in the Guild Lobby, ready to go again. Boy, was the Guild Lobby busy, too. And Plane of Knowledge. And Hills of Shade, where we went to try and finish Franklin Teek's Hot Zone task. Everquest is heaving right now.

At last we all felt confident and practiced enough to try somewhere our own level, so off we toddled to try Feerrott: The Dream. Over the past few years SOE have saved themselves a lot of trouble and kept a lot of long-time players reasonably happy by re-skinning existing zones as new, high-level content. They leave the old zones as they were and add timeslipped or dreamtouched versions alongside. It works really well and presumably saves a ton of design time. Oh look - isn't that Blizzard over there, taking notes?

I haven't been keeping up with Everquest lore (when did I ever) so I don't know whose Dream we're in but Kaozz mentioned a quest just for Heroic 85s there so off we went. It was fun. It was profitable. It was quite hard. We all died. Twice.

The first time I just paid the 500 plat to the NPC gouger  Disciple in the Guild Lobby, gave the stone to the Priest, had her summon my corpse and let the Merc rez. The second time I was too mean to pay again plus I was confident I could get back to my body safely, not least because I'd spotted that Magicians get an AA for permanent unbreakable invisibility these days (okay, I hadn't spotted it so much as SOE had kindly slotted it onto the "Would like us to hold your hand for a bit?" hot bar they thoughtfully provide along with your free levels. I think they know what you're going to be using it for, too).

Well, I couldn't find my corpse. Being a tiny gnome dressed entirely in green in an all-green swamp that maunders in perpetual twilight might have had something to do with it. That and forgetting you should always take a /loc when you die. I went and bought a Chipped Bone Rod in Plane of Knowledge but three charges of Find Corpse weren't sufficient to triangulate, at least not once I'd finished running from the Lizardman shaman who'd though to buff himself with See Invisible.

I've always enjoyed a good corpse run but after about an hour the novelty was beginning to wear off. Luckily I had a bright idea. For the only other Heroic 85 I'd managed to make (just one of our several Silver accounts turned out to be valid, for reasons still unclear) I'd chosen Necromancer, a class I've always wanted to have at high level but somehow never did.

Necros have always been able to track corpses and summon them and in this modern Norrath they no longer even need to go to the right zone or buy a coffin. Logged him in, grouped them up, summoned the corpse, Merc rezzed and the money-grubbing Priest and her creepy little disciple got nothing! Soooo satisfying.

Back we went to The Dream. I considered towing the Necro but in the end I couldn't be doing with all the zoning and re-applying /follow so we left him standing in the Guild Lobby in case he was needed. He wasn't. Lessons had at last been learned. With more thoughtful pulling, standing and traveling the Mage and her little crew finished off the quest and received the flag for the Journeyman 5 Mercenary that I'll probably be too penny-pinching to pay for but at least we have the option now.

The quest itself was pretty good. Simple to follow, sharply and amusingly written with good  characterization in the expected tradition of Norrathian stereotypes (devious magic users, dimwitted-but-loveable ogres, tightfisted dwarves with dodgy Scot-ish accents...). The tasks required snapped along nicely, travel between points required your attention not your time, the final fight was big, loud and scary - and we won. What more could you ask for an afternoon's entertainment?

So, it seems I'm back in Norrath, at least for part of the time. I never really leave, I just take extended holidays. It even turns out that the guild my mage joined way back in the dim, forgotten past (about 2007 I'd guess) is still up and running all these years later and although there's no-one left I recognize they seem a very friendly bunch. God forbid I might even end up doing some group content...

Either way, I'm guessing that I won't be spending Spring or Summer in Tamriel or Nexus. It'll be anything up to three flavors of Norrath. And Tyria, too. The Living Story may be on hiatus but there's The Tourney to come at the end of March and that crazy Feature Patch in April (of which more here in due course as more is revealed. I just can't wait to find out what "Friendly Play" is and why it takes three separate announcements to explain it...). GW2 is a mere snapper compared to Everquest or even EQ2 but it's coming along, coming along.

One thing's for sure. We're none of us going to have an excuse for being bored this year. If there's really nothing to take your fancy among that lot it might just be time to start thinking about a new hobby altogether.