Can't Leave It Alone, Can You?

I said I would, so I am. Or I will be. It's taking a while. Four hours, apparently, although it's speeded up some since I took the screenshot.

Square's infamously archaic front end gives the strangest first impression, doesn't it? I mean, I realise it's nothing compared to the PlayOnline version FFXI still uses but still...

Even as I typed that, I wondered if it was even true any more. It has to be fifteen years since I last logged into FFXI. Maybe longer. So I typed "PlayOnline" into Google and I'm pleased to say it looks a little less terrifying, albeit much the same as I remember. 

There's a Free Trial, too. I was curious, so I clicked. This is what I got:

Well, that's encouraging. I'm sure it's all perfectly fine, though...

Not that I want to play FFXI, which I remember as being one of the most ferociously solo-unfriendly mmorpgs imaginable, but I was kind of curious to try it with a controller, now I have one. It was the insane PC controls that put me off last time. Apart from that, I quite liked it. Oh, well, maybe later.

While I'm on the subject, how come you can play the base game and first expansion of FFXIV absolutely free but the ancient and allegedly "in maintenance mode" FFXI still requires a subscription? Is it intended to dissuade people from playing the older game in favor of the newer, in which case, why have a free trial at all? (Yes, I found a link to that page that doesn't kick off a securty alert.)

Arguably odder yet is the exact nature of the "free" version of FFXIV, which as this detailed breakdown explains, is also, technically a "Free Trial" not, as it would first appear, a F2P offer with level limits and restrictions, such as you see in other games like EverQuest, EverQuest II or Star Wars: the Old Republic. 

That's if the information in the article is up to date. It's from 2021 so it may not be. The reason I linked it first, rather than the official web page, is that nothing on Square's site clearly explains that once you convert your "Trial" account, not only do you have to start paying a subscription, which obviously makes sense, but that you can never go back to playing that same account without one. You'll never see your characters again unless you pay up each month, which these days feels almost immoral.

It's why I can play FFXIV on an account I made after the Free Trial was added but can't use the same offer to log in my older characters on my original account. It's also why I will never be able to subscribe to FFXIV for the odd month here and there, as I have done for World of Warcraft and SW:tOR, which does seem an awful lot like that "leaving money on the table" thing companies are supposed to hate. 

I guess Square don't care. After all, they've had a lot more problems of late with too many people wanting to play their flagship title than too few. They really don't need to offer any concessions to bring in the business.

It's no fur off my tail. There's absolutely no chance I'll ever get a character far enough up the level ladder for the restrictions to matter and in any case there are orders of magnitude more content in the free trial than I'll ever see. 

Or want to. Yesterday, Asmiroth at Leo's Life posted a detailed precis of all the things there are to do in the game and it sent a chill through my veins. It doesn't sound so much like a leisure activity as it does a life choice. 

Then again, you could say the same about most mmorpgs. Best taken in small doses, all of them, that's my feeling these days. That's how I intend to take FFXIV, if and when it finally sets itself up, which as I type, should be right around... now!

Let's go see if it works.

Look, Ma! Both Hands!

It's possible, although I don't really think it's likely, that you might remember me saying earlier this week, that I'd bought an XBox-style gamepad. Ostensibly it was because my swerve away from all-mmos-all-the-time to more of a mixed gaming economy had me running into more and more games that support keyboard and mouse grudgingly at best. That was my excuse, anyway, although the real reason was the Prime sale was on and I really wanted to buy something... anything... fun because it sometimes seems like all I ever buy on Amazon are necessities.

The game that prompted my purchase was Ikonei Island, which did indeed turn out to be even more enjoyable when played with a controller. Unfortunately, open beta ended the very next day, so I only got to play once, very briefly, using the superior control system. Grrr. Gnash.

Brevity aside, I enjoyed the experience so much I started looking around for other games to try with the pad. I was under the impression I had quite a few but once I started looking, I couldn't find any. Hardly surprising, really. Most of the games I've bought or played over the last year or two have been some variation of point&click adventure, walking simulator or visual novel, none of which seems especially suited to the controller, although I'm sure there are plenty that use it anyway.

As for my staple diet, mmorpgs, of late, I've rather fallen off that wagon. I think I must have played fewer hours per week these last few months than at any time since the turn of the millennium, although that has more to do with external factors (New dog plus extended run of great spring/summer weather.) than any loss of interest or affection for the genre.

Mmorpgs, being very much a PC genre by historical development, tend not to be optimized for or even playable with gamepads but there are some notable exceptions. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember what they were off the top of my head so I had to do a bit of googling.

Among many others, I came across this list, which looked good, even though I didn't find it all that helpful or indeed trustworthy, what with Tera (Closed down) and Valiance (Not yet up.) along with a few titles that aren't mmos at all, let alone mmorpgs, plus a bunch I'd never heard of (Steambirds Alliance, anyone? KurtzPel?) Still, it was somewhere to start.

I thought I'd make a shortlist of mmorpgs with controller support that I a) already know b) have played and enjoyed and c) still have installed. From the two dozen on the list, that left four - five if you include another from the concluding section, headed "Best MMORPG with Controller Support", in which they bizarrely boil the choice down to four games, two of which they haven't even bothered to include in the main part of the article.

The games I ended up with were

• DC Universe Online
• Dragon Nest
• Final Fantasy XIV
• Lost Ark
• Elder Scrolls Online

I also considered Final Fantasy XI, a game I once tried very hard to enjoy despite it having hands-down the worst mouse/keyboard controls of any game ever. I wasn't going to subscribe just to give the controller a test run, though, and sadly, even after all this time there is no free-to-play option, although it does have a fourteen-day free trial. 

AThere's another consideration. After more than a decade I'm still traumatised from my struggles with Square Enix's infamous PlayOnline registration process. I don't think I want to go through all that again just for an hour or two's play and a blog post. Never say never, though...

ArcheAge might be a possibility in that I liked it quite a bit but it also played really well with keyboard and mouse. Like any other mmorpg, in fact. There doesn't seem a lot of point in re-installing a game that almost certainly won't feel more enjoyable on a gamepad than if I just played it in the regular way. If I want to mess around with something like that, I think Guild Wars 2 has some kind of controller support.

Trove was another theoretical possibility but I never really got on with Trove. I can't say I want to try again. For the purposes of the experiment, five games ought to be plenty, anyway, and it's fair to say that, while I've enjoyed playing all of them, four out of the five do feel like they weren't originally intended to be played on PC. There's a reasonable chance my experience might be improved with a controller.

The exception would be FFXIV, which I always felt played immaculately with traditional PC controls, but I've heard that it's also the best-implemented of all mmorpgs when it comes to gamepad support. Comba did feel a little off, now I come to think of it.... That might well feel a little smoother and more natural with a gamepad. Worth a try, anyway.

DCUO is a game I've always loved despite the control system clearly being designed for consoles. I would have made it my first stop, only I couldn't remember where it was. I haven't played since my hard drives all swapped themselves around and the icon has gone from my desktop. Obviously I could have gone looking for it but all the rest were there, staring at me, so DCUO shuffled off to the back of the line. 

It'd be funny if you could understand it.

 

I began with Dragon Nest. Things did not go well. 

I may have mentioned before just how many versions of Dragon Nest there are. I have played more than half a dozen of them over the years, including the original (Just called Dragon Nest although maybe we should call it Dragon Nest Classic now), Dragon Nest EU, Dragon Nest Oracle, Dragon Nest Origins, Dragon Nest 2019 and Dragon Nest Worlds. 

I have all of those except Classic still installed although Worlds is actually the mobile title and it recently closed down (Wipe away those tears! There's a Dragon Nest Worlds 2 on the way.). The icon on my desktop turned out to be for Dragon Nest 2019, which in turn turned out to be what I'd named the foder for Dragon Nest NA.

DNNA has an excellent opening cut scene with barely comprehensible captions but what the game itself is like I can't tell you because once you get past that it's solidly IP blocked. As the website explains, they only have the USA, Canadian and Oceanic rights. 

The EU servers closed a while back, when whoever it was that had them lost the rights and no-one else wanted to take over. Still, I was fairly sure there was some UK-accessible iteration of Dragon Nest still out there and I was right: Dragon Nest Origins.

I got that patched up, which didn't take too long. My old login details worked and it was wonderful to reacquaint myself with my highest-level DN character, Dora. I'd forgotten how far I'd gotten with her. She's level 27 (Out of seventy, I think.)

I fiddled about looking for the controller options but when I found them they were horrifically complicated, to the point where I closed the window in terror. I was so shocked I didn't even think to take a screenshot. I'd log in and do it now but I can't because Zenimax won't let me. Explanation follows.

I tried using the controller without the instructions. Some things were intuitive - movement, speaking to NPCs, jumping... Others weren't - scrolling through lists, selecting options, turning around.... I'm going to have to take a proper look at the enormous list of commands before I try and do anything more challenging than walk around town but since I always found DN fairly comfortable to play with the regular PC controls, I can't really summon up the willpower just now.

Proof of Concept

On to the next, which for entirely arbitrary reasons, I decided should be ESO. Big mistake. 

I knew there'd be some updating to do. It's been a while since I last played. I started patching at around midday and the damn thing was still going until about twenty minutes ago. It's nearly half-past six! 

For some reason the patcher kept downloading massive multi-gigabyte files and installing them even though I already had over 70GB of files in the folder. When I eventually checked the size of the finished installation it wasn't much more than 10GB larger even though it seemed like ten times that had to have come down the pipe.

Not only that but for a couple of hours the patching, installing and verifying was so intense it made my entire PC come close to locking up. I couldn't do anything more taxing than look at phones on Amazon and even that was a struggle. 

Eventually I went to lunch, leaving the patcher running, hoping it would fniish while I was gone. I came back an hour and a half later, just in time to see the PC shut down and restart. Whether that was something demanded by the patching process or the poor thing had just given up and rolled over I couldn't tell.

Another couple of hours later and the PLAY button is finally ready to click. I suppose I'd better go give it a try. It's a lot of work for a game I don't even care for al that much but I've started so I guess I'll finish.

Whatever happens when I get in is going to have to wait for another post so I guess this is going to turn into a series whether I want it to or not. I hope the rest of the entries end up a lot more interesting than this one but I have a worrying feeling they won't. There's only so many ways you can say "I tried it but I didn't much like it and now I feel like I've wasted my day".

Long Distance Runaround : Guild Wars

As far as I know, "Maintenance Mode" for MMORPGs is a relatively recent innovation. While any number of MMOs may have slipped into de facto maintenance-through-neglect over the years, the first time I heard of one being officially mothballed was when ANet decided to "automate" the original Guild Wars in 2013, following the successful launch of the sequel, GW2.

Square Enix followed suit, pulling the plug on further development for FFXI a couple of years later. It was a decision driven primarily by the increasing difficulty of keeping the game running on ancient consoles, although, like ANet, Square no doubt also hoped to avoid splitting the audience after the eventual, successful resurrection of FFXIV.

Not a huge difference between this...

That turned out to be a famously ironic decision.  There was no maintenance mode for the PS2 or  XBox 360 players. Their versions simply stopped. For the PC players, however, things carried on almost as normal. Three years after development supposedly ceased, FFXI still receives more updates in "Maintenance" than many MMOs get in their prime.

It's a telling example of how "maintenance" can mean very different things to different developers. SmokyMonkeyS began by abandoning their intent to create a fully-blown MMORPG with Ninelives before going on to give up on the single-player version too. The game went into what they called "temporary suspension" but it remains up and running and it's even received a couple of significant updates since development came to a halt. Funcom's The Secret World, on the other hand, seems to have dropped off the radar entirely since it was replaced by Secret World Legends.

...and this.

ANet have left Guild Wars assiduously alone since they announced the end of active development. Their version of maintenance included the full automation of repeatable events like holidays, aniversaries and special bonus weekends. The idea was that the game would remain up indefinitely for those who still wanted to play but it wouldn't require - or receive - any input or resources to keep it running.

It was something of a surprise, then, to read last week that the game was getting a graphics overhaul. It's certainly true that many MMOs start to show their age in the visuals long before the gameplay dates. As the genre ages some developers have been puzzled, even dismayed, to find a significant number of their customers sticking with old favorites for far longer than expected, which has led a number of of them to attempt to give their fading stars a facelift  - with varying degrees of success.

More noticeable here.

That makes sense if the old game is still the one bringing in most of the revenue. Moreover, if a developer is entertaining even the smallest hope, however misguided, of attracting new players, it's true that 2005 graphics don't make for much of a shop window.

Guild Wars doesn't seem to be actively promoted any more, although you can still buy it from the website, so why bother tuning the graphics? Turns out it was one of those "passion projects" we often hear about, most of which turn out to be something else entirely.

Not this time. This one was genuine.  According to Eurogamer, a power surge at ANet's European data center led indirectly to a couple of developers using their off-hours to tweak the old Guild Wars engine to add a whole slew of new options inluding "windowed fullscreen support, a new 8X MSAA anti-aliasing option, 16x Anisotropic filtering support for the existing "use best texture filtering" option".

The new version looks sharper, something that was even more apparent in-game.

They also fiddled with the draw distance and the LODs and added a toggle to maximize both. In my experience, changes to draw distance can be one of the most revelatory changes a developer can make to a game. When SOE pushed EverQuest's draw distance out to the horizon it changed the game overnight. Huge areas that had been shorouded in thick fog for the years I'd been playing suddenly came into view. It was awesome.

The changes to Guild Wars aren't on that scale of magnitude for the simple reason that Guild Wars zones tend to be designed rather cleverly to give an illusion of space while actually being quite constricted. Unlike EQ, where the plains of West Karana stretch into the middle distance, regions like Deldrimor Font or Borlis Pass are full of twists and turns that restrict the line of sight. Even the mountains that form the backdrop are scarcely a jog-trot away.

If the differences between the first two pairs were subtle, here they are unmistakeable.

 Or perhaps I just went to the wrong zones to test the changes. Maybe I should have tried the snowfields of  the Far Shiverpeaks or the savannah of Elona. Instead I went to revisit Yaks Bend, one of my favorite spots in Tyria and also somewhere I can remember very clearly. I figured it might give me a better chance of appreciating the changes.

The difference is quite subtle but noticeable and certainly worthwhile. I think it's fairly easy to spot the Before and After in the screenshots. The new version removes a deal of the "fog" from the zone walls, bringing the mountains into sharper relief. It also reveals details like smoke from the fires and the occasional previously unseen peak. In one shot there's even a mysterious light in the sky that might be either a graphical glitch or an astronomical object.

Not only do the hills and far trees come into focus but smoke can be seen where there was none before.

There's nothing here that's going to pull in new customers but for anyone still playing or returning for a nostalgic visit it should come as a very welcome sign that someone's still paying attention. Stephen Clarke-Willson, one of the developers who did the voluntary work to make these changes happen, along with less-visible but equally welcome fixes for the tools used to report bots and RMT trades, is quoted as saying he'd "like this game to run for many years".

Let's hope he gets his wish.

Ring Out The Old, Ring In... On Second Thoughts, Don't Bother!

Something changed this year. Okay, outside our firmly barred and bolted thick oak fantasy doors, a lot of things changed but the less said about most of that the better.

No, I'm referring to my own decreasing interest and desire for novelty in gaming. While various wise and respected commentators stroke their beards over the paucity of new MMORPGs in production and the supposed moribundity of the genre, I find myself surprisingly sanguine over the admittedly thin, not to say threadbare, coat the New Year's wearing.

In the last few months I have spent almost all of my leisure time playing just two MMORPGs: Guild Wars 2 and EverQuest 2. Not only are those games five and thirteen years old respectively but they are each sequels to older games- games that are both still up and running.

Guild Wars may be in mothball mode but it's still there and people still play it. I played it in preparation for Path of Flames and I ran into a few others while I was there. I even saw tickers scrolling across the screen announcing the results of PvP matches so I guess someone still cares.

EverQuest, a good few years GW's senior, is far from entering maintenance mode. As Wilhelm observed with satisfaction, the old game got yet another expansion this year. Moreover, as he says, "Somebody must be buying the $140 versions of those expansions if they keep offering them."

But then, "maintenance mode" is itself becoming both a viable business model and playstyle. Someone recently wondered whether Funcom has any MMOs that aren't in maintenance mode. It does seem the company fortunes have improved since they stopped even pretending to produce new content and began concentrating on simply polishing up and repackaging the old.

Case in  point. I'm pretty sure I was meant to know who he was. Maybe if I'd raided in the first PoP...

Square Enix restarted FFXIV after it failed and that seems to have worked well for them. But then, as a company, they seem to have only the vaguest understanding of the concept of "stopping": FFXIV's predecessor, FFXI, is famously more active in supposed maintenance than many triple-A MMOs were at the peak of their success.

It goes on. Until NCSoft discovered the mountain of money that is Mobile gaming, its biggest earner was the near-two-decade old Lineage. That corner was finally turned not by Lineage's successor, the inevitable Lineage2, itself still bringing in the dollars, but by yet another Lineage, or rather two of them - LineageM and Lineage Revolution.

If it's not sequels or revamps it's versions. Blizzard's biggest reveal of the year wasn't the next WoW expansion. It was the news that they'd thrown in the towel and started work on bringing back Vanilla. They were probably swayed not only by the continuing interest in illegal time-travel via the Emu scene but also by Jagex's joyous capering under the the money-hose that is Old School Runescape.

Two decades and counting since the beginning of the MMORPG revolution and the huge majority of all the MMORPGs ever made are still running. It's news when one closes because it's so unusual.

When Brad McQuaid, John Smedley et al cooked up EQ they were hoping it might last three years. Modern developers think bigger. And longer. GW2 was designed with a ten-year lifecycle in mind and ArenaNet have said they have no plans to make any other new games. That will change, eventually, but when it does, what do you think the new game might be called?

I have actually finished the PoP Signature questline, I just haven't had the time to post about it. It was a lot better than the Path of Fire Story, that's for sure.

Indeed, once you have a successful MMO up and running, the need to come up with new ideas becomes significantly less pressing. Production of The Elder Scrolls series has effectively gone on hiatus with the success of TESO, for example.

CCP, the one major development team that really relishes the maverick tag, marked the exception to the rule with their advertisement for people to work on "a new and highly ambitious MMO" but then they've said that before, haven't they. And did it happen? Did it heck as like!

Mostly, for developers and players alike, the launch (or Early Access or Open Beta or Give Us Some Money And We'll Describe It For You) of an MMORPG is the beginning of a brave new world of updates, expansions and occasional graphical overhauls. The ship keeps on sailing, the scenery passes by, we dock at the occasional port, the band keeps on playing and we all keep on dancing.

And I like it. It suits me. I'm happy here in the happy house.

Oh, it's partly the season, I'll admit. The season and the weather. Short days, dark nights, rain, snow, warm socks and a comfy jumper. A night in with a mug of hot something and the familiar sights and sounds of 2012  - or 2007 or 2004 even 1999 - all bigger, brighter and less trouble than I remember.

Come the spring I may be yearning again for something fresh and new. As the leaves green and the sun brightens I could be back here, pounding out a thousand words wondering where all the new worlds have gone. I'll deal with that when it happens.

For now I'm quite content. Let this year roll over into next. I'll stay where I am, which is pretty much the same place I was last year. And the year before that.

Happy New MMORPG Year and let's have another one just like it. Please and thank you.

Keep Taking The Tablets

The list of MMOs that I like to imagine I'm still playing that was included in Saturday's post, stopped at a nice, round dozen. The thirteenth seat at the table could have been taken by a number of other titles but the front runners might easily have been Allods or Villagers and Heroes.

Allods is a game I have never given as much time as I would have liked. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it in beta and enjoyed it a great deal. For a while it was effectively the main MMO we were playing. We each had several characters and we leveled into the mid-thirties, far enough to see some dungeons and take part in the mid-game's open world, non-consensual PvP.

Those characters, of course, were all wiped when the beta ended. We re-rolled for launch but second time around we didn't last long. As I remember, it wasn't the infamous cash-shop shenanigans that put us off, just the usual "I just did all this last month" beta-tester's ennui.

That was Mrs Bhagpuss's last run at Allods but I've been back twice more. The first time was to take a look at the soviet-inspired Empire side of the fence, having always played League before. The second was both to try the new race and its starter area and to test out the viability of playing a full scale MMO on my new 10" Windows tablet.

The concept of playing MMOs on mobile devices has fascinated me for a long time. I first blogged about it back in 2012, when I was playing Pocket Legends and Elemental Knights on my iPod Touch. I'm still using that iPod to listen to music and podcasts and I even occasionally watch YouTube but I stopped gaming on it not long after I wrote that post.

At the time I thought it was the combination of small screen size and not particularly interesting games that made playing an MMO a less-than attractive option for lunch-times and commutes. That explanation didn't hold up very well when I got a tablet capable of playing full-scale MMORPGs like Allods and even WoW.

Of course, MMOs made for the PC aren't generally optimized for touch-screen gaming. WoW plays smoothly on my tablet, which is easily powerful enough to run it, but to play normally I need to attach a mouse and keyboard, by which point I am effectively playing on a netbook.

There are apps that you can install to emulate mobile controls for PC games and I have tried a couple but although they work to a degree the whole process feels awkward. Allods turned out to be the most enjoyable of the MMOs I tried on the tablet because all the innate PC controls that allow for click-to-move or click-to-use seem to respond perfectly as touch-to-move or touch-to-use.

So, I could play Allods comfortably on my tablet, it looked great and I like the game. And yet I only played it a couple of times then forgot all about it. It seems that I don't really want to play MMOS, or any other games, during those short periods of free time I have during the working day, after all. Turns out I'd rather read a book or web-browse.

I only thought about gaming on the go again this weekend for two reasons: the first was when MassivelyOP reported that another MMO I like and wish I'd found time to play more of, Villagers and Heroes, is getting a full port to the Android platform. The other was I dropped my tablet and broke it.

The damage isn't as bad as when I was vigorously cleaning the screen of my first ever tablet and snapped the glass in two. This time it's only the digitizer that's busted. That can be replaced although I probably won't bother. The tablet still has a useful life ahead of it if I simply attach it to a monitor with an HDMI cable. I might set it up like that in the kitchen. There are certainly enough spare monitors lying around this house...

 Following the life/lemons/lemonade principle I used the accident as an opportunity to upgrade. I found something with a much better display, a more powerful cpu and graphics and more memory for almost exactly what the tablet I dropped cost a year ago. That's technology for you.

Best of all, the replacement comes with a dual-boot option, Android and Windows, already installed. That should give me the fullest access to whatever the next couple of years holds for mobile gaming, short of anything that releases as an iPad exclusive.

It will be interesting to see what the new tablet can cope with. Black Desert, for example, could be an ideal mobile MMO with its extensive range of automated options and afk processes. Then there's GW2, which has a highly paternalistic patcher that refuses to run if it finds your system doesn't meet its exacting standards. The old tablet couldn't pass the examination but if the new one can it would be handy to be able to log in at work if just to be able to chat in guild.

Having both Android and Windows on the same tablet gives me carte blanche to play just about anything. Several titles I've looked at over the last year, but which were only available for Android and iOS, might come into play. I'll definitely install V&H when the mobile version becomes available and if Nexon ever release the FFXI mobile port they are supposedly working on for Square, I'll definitely be trying that. (All the cool kids are into FFXI right now, didn't you know?)

In the end, though, I suspect that, no matter how good the choice of MMOs becomes, how powerful and affordable the hardware gets, however smoothly and efficiently everything runs, I'll always end up choosing to use my tablet for something other than gaming. It is possible to have too much of a good thing.

On the other hand, it's also nice to have a choice. It seems like, after a number of false starts and failed promises, the age of the Mobile MMO might be here at last. I'd rather be able to play MMOs on my tablet and not want to than want to and not be able.

Conspicuous non-consumption! it's the post-capitalist way!

Your Favorite MMOs - Now In Tablet Form! : WoW, Allods, FFXI

One of the oddest items of MMO news this week was the revelation that FFXI is being prepped for mobile. In a way perhaps it shouldn't have come as such a surprise. Of all the established gaming houses Square Enix have probably been the fastest and most assiduous to adapt to the new opportunities mobile platforms afford.

The Final Fantasy series is already available on Android and iOS up to FFV. Square's Dive In streaming service, currently only planned for release in Japan and, as far as I can tell, not yet available even there, is set to extend that through the iconic FFVII and beyond, possibly all the way to current blogosphere darling FFXIV.

Of course you can already play any MMO on a tablet or even a smartphone using the excellent Splashtop app. I bought that one several years ago and can affirm that it works brilliantly. Unfortunately I've almost never used it because if you want to play GW2 on your tablet in your lunch hour at work it requires you leave your desktop PC switched on back at home. I swore off that practice when I got out of the Everquest Bazaar business back in 2006 or so.

Full-fat MMOs that run natively on mobile devices have always been very hard to find. Even now, years into the runaway success of mobile as a platform for gaming and with the mainstreaming of affordable, powerful tablets with screens large enough to display the full, rich detail of virtual worlds to much better effect than we ever enjoyed back in the so-called Golden Age of 14" CRTs, lists of possibles rarely offer anything much more enticing than WoW-clone Order and Chaos or the cheerful cartoons from the Spacetime Games team.

I first wrote about playing MMOs on my iPod Touch almost three years ago. Since then I've kept an eye out for new opportunities. So far I haven't heard many knocks. Lists of current media favorites tend to include a whole raft of entertainments like Ingress, Boom Beach and Clash of Clans that seem to me to be part of a different genre entirely, along with the same handful of titles that filled the same lists last year and the year before that.

So, even though we're talking about a game that's now more than a dozen years old, to hear that Square believe they can bring FFXI to mobile devices is good news indeed. I only dabbled briefly with FFXI. I eventually decided that the famously PC-unfriendly UI and controls were more trouble than they were worth. Also, although even five years ago when I played a lot of work had supposedly been done to make the game more solo-friendly, by around level 20 it was already becoming apparent that work went only so far.

Nevertheless, it was a beautiful world with appealing characters and an interesting story. Optimized for touch screen and gussied up for the casual mobile market I would be very happy to give FFXI another run. It could be a while before that's an option, though, so what could I play when I'm out of the house in the meanwhile?

Well, how about WoW? Or Allods? If the MMOs won't come to the tablet maybe the tablet will just have to come to the games. A month ago I bought a cheap 10" tablet that runs the full version of Windows 8.1. I also got a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. The whole lot cost well under £200 for which what I have is effectively a touchscreen tablet that can double as a netbook.

I've been delighted with its performance as a general-purpose mini-PC and this morning I finally got around to setting it up to play MMOs. Thanks largely to the gorgeous Allods screenshots Kaozz posted, as of yesterday I'm playing Allods again, of which more another day. It's a relatively quick, fast download so I set the tablet to doing that while I also re-downloaded WoW for the desktop yet again (I just bought and installed a third hard drive so space is no longer an issue...for the moment).

I now have Allods installed on the tablet's SD card and WoW copied to a usb drive. I played both of them on the tablet for around half an hour each and the experience was, if not ideal, then certainly very enjoyable. They both look absolutely fantastic - every bit as good as they do on desktop. The colors are rich and the detail is delicious. Quest text is easily large enough to read comfortably. (The screenshots here are from the desktop versions, by the way; I did take some shots on the tablet but I'm too lazy to port them over right now).

Of the two, WoW runs more smoothly but Allods is easier to play, largely because it has that "click to go to quest objective" option so beloved of F2P titles. That really comes into its own on a tablet. On the other hand, to my complete amazement, the WoW UI turns out to be fully touch-enabled. I can cast spells or open bags just by touching the hotbar, something I found out purely by accident.

Clearly there's no way I would play either game on the tablet in preference to the desktop, any more than I would play them on my laptop, which can run both flawlessly; not when I'm at home and could be sitting at my desk instead, anyway. Given that I carry my tablet with me everywhere, though, it does open up a whole new set of possibilities that weren't there before. As windows-based tablets are improving in quality and affordability all the time the future for MMOs on the go is looking a lot brighter.

If nothing else I am looking forward to experimenting, seeing what will and won't run, what feels like fun on the go and what's just too much like hard work. I'm guessing that browser-based MMOs, like Runescape or City of Steam or Eldevin, would work even better than client-based games but who knows? Well I will if I get on and test it out.

As for the bigger beasts, I suspect the poor little tablet would melt if I tried to play ESO or FFXIV. It was getting rather warm just running Allods. I will definitely attempt to get it playing GW2 though. If they'll co-operate I can easily see me popping on for half an hour at work to get a few dailies done. That would be really handy.

The Mouse In The Room : FFXIV

For those sufficiently committed or profligate to have paid in advance, Guild Wars 2 Headstart begins on the 25th of August. The cagier pre-orderers roll in two days later on the 27th and the doors fly open for all-comers on the 28th. Presumably that'll be people who had to work all weekend and obsessive box-collectors with a pathological distrust of postmen. Exactly one month later the March of the Pandas begins.

Anyone interested-enough in MMOs to be reading this knows all that already, but as I can affirm from personal experience, there are people playing major Western MMOs day in, day out who have never heard of GW2 and who neither know nor care whether World of Warcraft is adding pandas, pangolins or pachyderms this autumn. If even great cultural events such as these fail to strike a gong that 's heard across the land, imagine the size of the gong-bonger Naoki Yoshida has to swing to get anyone to pay attention to his re-launch of Final Fantasy XIV.

Yes, FFXIV is re-launching. Remember how it went the first time? After a lengthy closed beta in which all but the most blinkered loyalists pointed out, repeatedly, that launching such a quarter-finished shambles would be a disaster, FFXIV launched unchanged in September 2010. Disastrously.


There followed a prolonged period where the game was available to play for free since it was clear no-one would pay for it. Mr. Yoshida was drafted in to put the game through the many months of development the previous management had somehow forgotten and eventually the shaky ship was righted sufficiently that the ticket office could be opened and subscriptions sold.

Oh yes, let's not forget. FFXIV, like FFXI, is a subscription-based MMO. In all the lengthy debates on the relative merits of payment models, few remember to cite the example of these two games. FFXI has been running for more than ten years not just under a subscription model but under a relatively expensive and awkward one at that. FFXIV, once it was finally passed fit, went for a similar option. The former has prospered, it seems. The latter?

Good question. What with Funcom's gloom over their 72/100 Metacritic score, you'd imagine FFXIV, whose current Metacritic rating stands at 49/100 even after all the repair-work, would be lucky to have any servers running at all. It has eighteen! (And FFXI has 16 in case you were wondering, which is damned impressive for a decade-old MMO).

If that's what a disastrous MMO looks like I imagine there are a few "successful" ones around that wouldn't mind a little disaster coming their way. Square Enix, the most enigmatic of all MMO Houses, must think they can do better, though because very soon (no official date yet, supposed to be going into beta in the autumn, might go live this year or early 2013...) FFXIV will get a reboot.

What changes? Don't ask me. I haven't really been paying attention. Has anyone? I know that Eorzea becomes worldier, which is good. I believe all zones are getting a graphical revamp to emphasize individuality, which they sorely need. The original FFXIV looked magnificent in screenshots and, like FFXI, the outdoorsy "feel" in game was unparalleled but the landscape was tessellated from a disturbingly small set of tiles, something that became obvious very quickly when you set out to travel more than a few hundred yards in any direction.

Not that you could travel a few hundred yards in any direction because you can't jump in Eorzea. A six-inch drop means a half-mile detour to find some flat ground you can cross. They've been debating adding the ability to jump since beta and for all I know it might already be in. It's definitely been promised for the relaunch if not before.

The UI, which was diabolical beyond imagining, has already been rendered tolerable but 2.0 should feature a "normal" Western PC MMO front end, with hot-keys and moveable, resizeable windows. (Almost unbelievably FFXI is getting something similar). Then there have already been many tweaks to things like the insane Guild Leve quest system and the really certifiably, insane market system. Presumably more will come in the new version of the game.

That's about as much as I know because as I said I really haven't been following it as closely as I might have, but the gist is that the second coming of FFXIV will see it refitted in a format that Western PC MMO gamers will find comfortable and familiar. And still no-one's interested, or so you'd think from the complete lack of commentary.

I like FFXIV. No, I wanted to like it but the UI, the marketplace, the generic landscape, the attritional combat, the bugginess...  I'll try again when version 2.0 comes around. Kudos to Square for sticking at it, sucking it up and carrying on. I just hope 2.0 turns out to be something close to the game I wanted it to be two years ago.