Intertextuality Friday

Super-quick Friday Grab-Bag because I wrote most of a longer post this morning before realizing it was going nowhere and now I don't have time to do much of anything. But I'm working tomorrow and we're going away for a couple of days next week - yes, actually "away", although not so far away we won't be able to drive there in a morning - so there probably won't be any posts for a bit, unless I take my laptop, except some of the keys aren't working and I don't particularly fancy posting some experimental piece that doesn't use the letter "B".

Enough drivel. Let's get on.

When Do I Get To Play WoW?

I said I wouldn't until either Blizzard got better or Microsoft bought them. I see from today's news that the last brick in the wall is about to topple. The CMA has provisionally approved the buyout. "Residual concerns" remain but apparently Microsoft is already "offering remedies" to calm any remaining qualms. I guess there could still be a twist in this never-ending tale but it seems a lot more likely things will now proceed in a stately manner to a resolution that suits everyone. Well, almost everyone. 

I don't know why I care, really. I don't play WoW all that much. I subscribe occasionally for a month or two but mostly I just futz around on the endless free trial. It's not like I've been jonesing for Azeroth ("Jonesing", for younger readers, used to be a slang term for addiction, specifically drug addiction, although later any kind of craving. Oh, who am I kidding? I don't have any younger readers.)

I would quite like to have a go at Cataclysm Classic, if and when it arrives. Most of it would be new content to me and I've heard that if you don't have prior attachments to the originals, some of the do-over zones are pretty good.

Started three consecutive paragraphs with "I" there. My old deputy headmaster would have his red pen out by now.

Words and Music

I was intrigued to read two reports this week about the very different approaches taken by the publishing and music industries to the looming threat to their business models posed by so-called AI. The music industry or at least the UK arm of that global monolith (Can a monolith have arms? I very much doubt it.) released "five fundemental rules" for engagement with our new digital overlords;

At a glance, those seem surprisingly reasonable and pragmatic. I'm very encouraged to see the would-be gatekeepers acknowledge that at least some of the people they're meant to be protecting might actually want to engage with this sort of thing.

Personally, I'd love to start messing around with the tech but I'd also like to feel comfortable putting the results on my YouTube channel and linking to them here and right now I'm definitely not going to be doing that. If they work out some copperplate licensing agreement with Google, though, I'm in there!

Meanwhile, George R R Martin, John Grisham, Jodie Picoult and fourteen more authors have filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infingement. That's not actually news. It happened a couple of months ago. I had heard about it before and tried to pay it no mind but yesterday I saw this at NME and the close-up of George in that hat and waistcoat was just too much to ignore.

The spectacle of vested (Hah!) interests clashing in this way is unattractive enough without framing the whole thing as some kind of battle for the soul of literature, when we all know it's about the money. George R R was a SciFi writer once upon a time, too, which somehow makes it even worse.

FFinger-Lickin' Good

If you want another example of how in the end it's always all about the money, Square Enix have you covered. I first saw this at MMOBomb under the headline "WTF IS Colonel Sanders Doing In Final Fantasy XIV?", which is exactly what I was thinking. 

I ate some KFC chicken once. It was in the early 'eighties, before I gave up eating meat altogether. I wouldn't say the Colonel's secret recipe (I'm guessing it's secret. If not, it should be.) turned me into a vegetarian but it sure didn't help. 

The most disgusting thing I've ever eaten was a brawn sandwich (Aka head cheese, which should tell you all you need to know. I'd link to the recipe but it would literally make you vomit just to read it.) It was handed out free on darts night in the pub where my college pals and I used to hang out in the even earlier 'eighties. That bucket of KFC chicken ran it a close second.

Maybe fried chocobo will taste better.

I So Don't Want It To End

Carole and Tuesday, that is. One more episode to go. Pretty sure I know what the seven minute miracle that saved Mars is now. Just have to watch it happen.

There will be a full review but for now let me say the second season is as good as the first, maybe better. The theme and opening sequence is going to be an all-time favorite. I could watch it over and over and I already have.

I've been looking at Carole and Tuesday merch. There are a number of large wall posters but none of the ones I've seen feature any of the scenes from the Season 2 intro, which seems like madness. Literally every shot is a poster waiting to happen.

Don't take my word for it. See for yourself.

I googled the lyrics to see if I could figure out what the song's about. It doesn't seem to relate to anything in the show unless it's in the final episode and I haven't seen yet. Maybe it's a hat-tip to P.J. Harvey. The show does name-check a lot of 20th century artists so it's not that unlikely.

Whatever, I love it. Been singing it in my head (And out loud.) for days. Carole and Tuesday has a lot to say about AI and music, by the way. I could iterate on that in the light of the aforementioned five fundemental rules but I'll save it for the review.

Last Of The Gang To Die

Crossing the streams, a zeitgeist game I never played spawned an anime I really loved when Edgerunners appeared as a post-launch prequel to Cyberpunk 2077. Without getting too spoilery, the series pretty much ran as a one-and-done, the ending leaving little room for a second season, the final episode being one of the more conclusive and downbeat resolutions I've seen for a while.

It was good to hear that the legacy of the show lives on in the game itself in the form of a lore-appropriate memorial. I've got T-shirts featuring both Rebecca and Lucy on my wishlist. That'll be my tribute although I guess playing the game might be a better one.

There's Something To Being Human After All

When I posted a video by yeule last week I said "We'll be hearing from her again. And again, I'm pretty sure." Oh boy. Ironic foreshadowing. Also misgendering, for which I can only apologise. I did not do my due diligence.

I also knew pretty much nothing about the post-human phenomenon that is yeule. I didn't know they were from Singapore, for a start. I don't know a lot about Singapore other than that my mother thought it was very clean when she went there. I guess when you beat people for dropping chewing gum that'll happen. 

Anyway, it's not the kind of environment you'd expect to foster teen rebellion or then again maybe it's exactly that. Either way, according to Pitchfork's review of their third (!) album, sofstscars, yeule "first started toying around with music production as a young teenager in the early 2010s, after they saw a live video of Grimes on the internet and thought, “This fucking bitch does it all by herself… so I’m gonna try.”"

The first two albums are variously described as ambient, glitch and "Asian post-pop".  Also vaporwave, I've seen, which tracks. yeule, who's name as I'm sure someone who isn't me will have realised long ago, comes from the Final Fantasy franchise, leaned heavily into post-humanism for their persona but the third album sways the other way, embracing the soft, messy reality of being human.

I don't know why it's taken me this long to notice them. I'm ashamed of myself, sometimes. I'm busy right now going through their back catalog. Here's one yeule made earlier. It seems relevant, somehow.

And finally...

Speaking of pronouns, on the always-reliable recommendation of Xyzzysqrl, I downloaded the demo for Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain on Steam. I played it, enjoyed it, wishlisted it. I'll wait for a sale to buy it, though. It's cheap but I'm even cheaper.

I wouldn't have mentioned it only it has by far the most impressive choice of pronouns at character creation I've ever seen. I took a screenshot.

I remember a really long time ago, long before the current on-trend gender awareness set in, reading a long list of possible pronouns and what they implied. It must have been a long time ago because I know I was at work and it's been a decade and a half since I had the good fortune to be able to web-surf and educate myself on the company dime.

Given the level of debate over the use of "they", I'd almost allowed myself to believe there were only the three choices left. I mean, I know that's not true. I was watching or reading something recently where someone's preferred pronouns were I/I... hmm, what was that? 

Anyway, even though I was theoretically aware other pronouns were still in play, it's nice to be reminded. I almost feel sorry I'm stuck with boring old he/him although I guess if I was that sorry I wouldn't be. Stuck with it, I mean.

And now, I think it's bedtime, which means the finale of Carole and Tuesday. Conflicted doesn't begin to cover my feelings about that...

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.

The Ghost Of Henry James

There are times when I can see the value of Twitter. Little things pop up all the time, none of them worth a long discussion but all too weird, worrying or just plain funny to leave alone. A quick couple of sentences, a picture, a link would do it. Just what Twitter was made for.

Things like this, for example. I mean, it's not something I'd normally get into. I'm not a big Final Fantasy fan. I've played three titles in the series: VII, XI and XIV. There's no chance I'm going to play the upcoming XVI so why would I mention it at all?

Well, because these days, when Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yakuda makes a pronouncement, it has the potential to unbalance equilibrium across the entire mmorpg gamespace. He's not just the producer of the latest instalment of the long-running franchise, he's also the much-revered savior and showrunner of Final Fantasy XIV, arguably now the pre-eminent mmorpg in the West and certainly one of the most influential. People listen when he speaks and not just fans.

I'm already on record as not being a Yoshi-P cultist. I've always found him to be a difficult figure, my wariness going all the way back to the FFXIV: A Realm Reborn relaunch, when he consistently made statements I found to be uncomfortably paternalistic and patronising. 

I still have issues with a good deal of what he says although I am now willing to ascribe some of that to cultural and language differences, some to issues of my own. I broadly approve of much of what he's actually done with FFXIV. It tends to be more the way he talks about it that sets my teeth on edge.

In this case, though, my reaction was more a dumbfounded "Wha...?" Judge for yourself:

"Yoshida stated that the motion capture and voice acting are all done by Europeans. He went on to say that they purposely did not include any American accents in the game. “However, even though the script is written in English, we made sure not to include any American accents. We decided to do this to prevent Americans from playing the game and getting mad by saying something like, “I was looking forward to playing a game set in fantasy medieval Europe, but why are they speaking American English?” To prevent this, we made sure all dialogue was recorded using British English.” "

Unpack that, if you can. 

Maybe some American of my readers can add a gloss. Do people in the States really find hearing an accent similar to their own in a video game set somewhere other than the USA disappointing or confusing? I would have thought it was so universal an experience as to be entirely unremarkable. And even if it's true, is a British accent somehow more acceptable, even when it's no more appropriate to the setting?

Seriously, there's so much going on here it's hard to get your head around it. At the most basic level, none of the characters in the proposed setting are going to be speaking any kind of recognizeable English to begin with so why are we even giving the accent consideration? 

You might want to argue that, as is routinely the case in movies,various moderrn accents could stand in for contemorary ones but this is "medieval Europe" we're talking about, a place and time where people would have been speaking in dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of languages and dialects, almost all incoprehensible nowadays to anyone other than a scholar of the period. How can it possibly add authenticity, even spurious, fictional authenticity, to have every one of them speaking "British English", whatever that even is?

What's more, it's not even the historical Europe. It's "fantasy Medieval Europe". There will, one imagines, be magic and non-human races at the very least. Even if anyone was worried about linguistic authenticity in the first place, something that seems exceedingly unlikely, those concerns are going to crumble into irrelevance the first time an elf or a goblin opens their mouth.

My strong feeling is that it's a made-up problem to begin with but even if Yoshi-P has demographic research or metrics from previous Final Fantasy games to back up his belief that Americans get mad if they hear their own accents in medieval fantasy games, it's really the assumption that using "British English" is somehow going to fix all this that floors me. 

I'm going to take it that a century of jobbing British actors prostituting their accents in Hollywood, aided and abetted by a seemingly endless stream of artistically dubious but commercially successful television series exploiting the supposed nostalgic charm of a rigid and hierarchical class structure have somehow conspired to imprint a particular set of aural tropes, now conveniently labelled "British English" on the rest of the world.

I can understand, albeit with some embarassment, how such expedient choices have led the world to believe Britain is nothing more than a Victorian\Edwardian theme park, held in perpetual temporal stasis for their entertainment, but how and when did the elongated dipthongs of a public school educated, drama school trained, upper-middle class voice or the dropped consonants and glottal stops that pass for working-class diction come to represent the authentic sound of "medieval Europe?"

All I can say is that I hope Yoshi-P has thought this through. Even if he's right about American sensitivities, something I very much doubt, has he given due consideration to the sensibilities of his European customers? How do they feel about British accents? Do they prefer them to American ones? Are they "looking forward to a game set in medieval Europe" where every cut-scene sounds like an out-take from Downton Abbey?

I suppose there's a chance French and German speakers may get their own localized versions but there are more than forty countries in Europe and hardly any of them have English as a first language, British or American. As for we Brits, I suspect most would be fine with a mix that included some regional American accents. It would certainlybe preferable to some of the supposed "celtic fringe" tones all too often assigned to the shorter fantasy races.

It's hard to see this idiosyncratic solution suiting anyone other than, perhaps, Yoshi-P's home audience, who might, for all I know, find British accents more authentic to the period and the setting than American. But won't there be a Japanese-voiced version for the home market, anyway?

All of that and I haven't even touched on the even weirder revelation that all the motion capture work has also been assigned to European actors. Americans apparently can't even get the fantasy medieval European moves right.

And... that was eleven hundred words. I guess Twitter wouldn't have helped after all.

Reasons To Be Fearful. Or Cheerful. Your Choice.

For once, I'm serious when I say I don't have time to come up with a real post but I'm darned if I'm going to let that stop me. What I'm going to do is precis the two posts I would have written today, if I'd had the time. Maybe later I'll get to write them in full and maybe I won't but at least if I ever read this back I'll know what I was thinking of doing.

#1 - Square Enix Loves Money

Yeah, they do. Wilhelm was the first to point to this in his 2022 Predictions post but now everyone's talking about it. Just in case anyone hasn't seen it yet, here's a link to the full and chilling announcement from Yosuke Matsuda, President and Representative Director of SQUARE ENIX HOLDINGS CO., LTD. (His capitalization, not mine.) It reads like the set-up for a dystopian SF novel. Jack Womack would be proud to have thought of it.

I'll just add that I'm becoming less and less certain that the prevailing "It'll never happen" view is sound. Oh, none of the "good" things will happen, you can bet on that. We won't get rich doing our dailies or trip gaily from FFXIV to World of Warcraft to Guild Wars 2 all while playing the same character and waving the same sword, but whether online games or even the worldwide web will still look remotely like they do now in ten years' time, I'm not so sure. And the idea that "governments won't allow it to happen" seems laughably naive. Governments are generally a decade and change behind any technological or cultural shift. They won't be in a position to do much about it until it's too late, by which time we'll be onto the next post-capitalist nightmare. 

 #2 - New Music is the Best Music

I follow a blog by Simon Reynolds, called blissblog (or possibly blissout, as it says in the Blogspot address). I'm always on the verge of unfollowing it because I rarely read it and when I do I even more rarely like any of the music or agree with any of the opinions expressed. 

Yesterday, however, Simon linked to another blog, this time by his son, Kieran Press-Reynolds. Kieran has a list of his top 20 songs of 2022, plus some that nearly made the cut. I started listening to them out of idle curiosity and ended up spending over an hour there, first listening to some of his choices and then following up the YouTube links they generated. 

 

I didn't like everything I heard and I only dipped in to the stuff that caught my eye on a first glance but the quality overall was staggeringly high. I'll be going back to check out the rest of Kieran's faves and to explore the areas, styles and performers I take a shine to in a great deal more depth. No doubt, some of the fruits of that labor will end up here, in due course. You have been warned.

Thanks to Kieran for doing the work and to his father for sending me there. Also, Kieran writes beautifully, which is a bonus.

I said I was going to keep this short and I already haven't, really. Better stop while I still have enough time left to do those dailies. Need to keep in practice for when all our games become virtual sweat shops. I imagine there will be quotas.

Wherever I Make My Bag, That's My Home.

Time for a quick progress report on New World. Just on my own progress, that is, not on how the game itself is coming along. For that you could do a lot worse than check out Belghast's detailed and insightful overview of the problems Amazon have ahead of them if they want to keep anyone once Endwalker arrives.

It's interesting to see how expectations have changed. It's long been the received wisdom that the imminent arrival of a World of Warcraft expansion was likely to spell slow times for every other mmorpg but I'm not sure I can remember many instances of expansions for any other game signalling a similar slump, or not in any mmorpg I was playing at the time, anyway. It usually took the launch of a much-anticipated new triple-A title to pull enough attention to notice, not a mere expansion to one that was out there already. 

It shows how far Final Fantasy XIV has come in this last year. We all know some of the reasons why it's happened but it also marks Square Enix's game out for the second time as something exceptional in the history of the genre. Not only is it one of the very few mmorpgs ever to come back from a truly disastrous launch, not just to survive but to prosper, but it may be the only one since WoW to have experienced consistent growth thereafter, to the point that interest is in the game is still rising at the launch of its fourth expansion.

In fact, when it comes to Western mmorpgs, the only two I can think of that have done anything similar are WoW itself and EverQuest, which was on its seventh expansion and still growing when Blizzard came along to steal its lunch money. 

Sunrise over the gasworks.

What FFXIV is doing is reframing a narrative that hasn't really changed in fifteen years. It's not a game that suits my tastes but I do find its developmental and commercial arc intriguing. It's going to be very interesting to see what the medium and long term effect of both FFXIV's extended commercial success and New World's demonstration that an audience still exists for the right new entrant into the market means for future development within the genre.

In the short term I think we can feel fairly safe in saying there will be a general downturn in interest in everything that isn't Endwalker. New World will slip back into the pack of also-rans as server merges take whatever headlines the game gets. Focus will shift to shoring up the kind of issues Bel was highlighting in his post, in the hope of winning back some ground when the new expansion shine eventually fades from Square's flagship moneymaker.

Which is all very well but what about me? Didn't I say I was only going to report on my own progress? Yes, I did, what there is of it. It isn't all that much. 

Not because I haven't been playing. I have, every day, usually for at least three or four hours. Steam tells me I've racked up nearly 165 hours since launch although these days all of them are via the truly excellent GeForce Now, which has completely altered, for the better, my New World experience.

Ten days ago, when I gave my last update, I was level 46 after 142 hours played. Twenty-three hours more has gained me a whole three levels. I'm now level 49. Over seven hours a level. That is slow.

I also still don't have a house, although I've had all the necessary requirements to buy one in most of the towns I could bear to live in for quite a while. So what have I been doing with all that time?

It keeps me fit, at least.

Mostly getting my Armorsmithing to 100 so I could make one bag to fill the extra bag slot I got at level 40. Yes, it's taken me almost ten levels and probably about thirty-six hours just to make a bag. 

The good news is, tonight I finished it! I spent all evening on the last part, getting the final mats I needed after I dinged 100 Armorsmith. It took me three hours, about half of which was running from one town to another. 

I'd estimate that "running from one town to another" accounts for at least a third of my played time, with "running from one quest marker to another" taking up perhaps another third. It would not be entirely unfair to characterise New World as an orienteering simulator. Most of my time is spent opening and closing a map and running from one marker to another, veering off course every few yards to go and check out something interesting.

I can readily see why this isn't to everyone's taste but it suits me. I spent most of this evening jogging up and down the roads between Brightwood, which has tier four and five crafting stations and Weaver's Fen and Restless Shore, which don't but which are where I have a lot of bulk crafting mats in storage. 

In something of a faux-Catch 22, I couldn't carry all the mats at once because the mats I needed were the ones to make the bag that would expand my carrying capacity sufficently to carry all the mats I needed. So I had to make a few trips. 

I also had to cut a lot of hemp and skin a lot of animals along the way for some different mats I also needed and that inevitably led me into areas where I found other mats I didn't need right now but knew I'd need another day so I had to grab those too, which meant I didn't have room for the ones I was planning on moving from one town to another...

Fingers crossed...

And so on and so on. Every session for the last week or so has been a bit like that. And I have to say I've enjoyed it. I had the Cricket World T20 on the radio a lot of the time and when there wasn't a game on I sometimes had a drama or comedy from Radio 4 Extra in the background. I can think of plenty of worse ways to spend an afternoon. 

It was getting to the point where I really wanted that bag, though, so I was very happy when, about an hour ago, I stood in front of the Outfitting Station in Brightwood and clicked Craft. I was even happier when I saw the result. 

I got probably the best version of the bag I could have made. I'd used the best resources I had available so I 'd done all I could but there's a hefty helping of luck in New World's crafting so you never quite know. Rng rolled me a nice Rare quality result but better yet it rolled me the two best random perks - Extra Pockets and Luck.

A while ago a bag like that would have sold for quite a bit. I wasn't going to sell mine but I was curious what it might go for so I checked the Trading Post. In Brightwood, a bag like that sells for around 2,000 coin. It sounds like a lot, when you consider that I only have 20k after all these weeks, but the rune you need to make this bag costs 1500 coin on its own so there's only about 500 coin profit in it for the crafter.

The days of getting rich making bags are long gone but at least I can make upgrades for the ones I'm using. If I can make a couple more like the one I just made I should be able to get my carrying capacity to more than 1,000, which seems like a lot although I'm sure I'll soon fill it up.

Yay!!

According to this helpful video, the maximum carrying capacity currently possible is 1,665 but I'll worry about that when I'm sixty. Or more likely I won't. The whole "max your gear score" endgame does not appeal.

With the bag in the bag I can get back to working on my Mourningdale standing, something that's slipped down the agenda of late. I'm still determined to buy my first, half-price house there, although as time goes on I'm starting to wonder if I should. 

I'm about to ding fifty and I can already see quest markers popping up in Ebonscale. Maybe that would make a better use of my one discounted ticket. And then there was the huge surprise I got today when I logged in and opened the map.

Every day, when I get into the game the first thing I do is check which faction owns which territory. It makes no practical difference to me but I like to keep up to date. At least, it hasn't made any practical difference for weeks. 

The last time anything material to my gameplay occured was when territory trading gave my faction, Marauders, their second territory, Restless Shore. Since the only other place we owned was the extremely high level and positively repulsive Reekwater, any synergies were entirely notional. I do spend some time in Restless Shore but it makes no difference to me whther we own it or not and I haven't been to Reekwater since the one visit I made weeks ago just to see if it was as bad I imagined. (It was worse.)

Yes, but who'll own it tomorrow?

Today, when I opened my map, I was stunned to see three green splodges instead of the regular two. Overnight we'd taken a third territory and this time it wasn't some outlier no-one else wanted. It was Brightwood.  

Brightwood is a decent territory. It's central and close to the three non-player-owned higher-level areas in the North. It also has a plethora of high-tier crafting stations because it's been well-cared for by the previous owners. Lots of people go there to trade and craft. It's not as popular as Everfall or Windsward but it's no hick town.

I have no idea whether we took it by force or whether there was some kind of deal but the fact that my faction owns Brightwood means I need to rethink my housing plans. I definitely don't plan to make it my personal home but if we're likely to keep it for a while then it wiuld be very useful to have one of my three permitted houses there.

All of which means I have to keep my money in my pocket for now. I have the funds to buy two houses and the standing to live in any of the towns that interest me right now. Except Ebonscale. I'd have to start from scratch there.

If it wasn't for the "50% off first purchase" deal I'd just buy a cheap place in Brightwood but because of that one-time offer I can't in good conscience do that. I almost wish the half-price starter home leg-up had never been put in the game in the first place.

How ungrateful is that? Honestly, there's no pleasing some people. I don't know how the developers put up with us, sometimes. No wonder they make us run everywhere. It's no more than we deserve.

Simon Says "Now Stay Down!" - How To Beat The Amrine Excavation Expedition Without Really Knowing How.

Today, I played New World for six hours. That's the longest I've played in one day since launch. I think the game's beginning to sink its hooks into me. 

It wasn't one unbroken six-hour session. It's been years since I played anything for that long; probably well over a decade. It was two lengthy sessions, though, about two an a half hours in the morning, three and a half after lunch. That's more than I've played any game in one day since Valheim. 

I spent most of those six hours questing. I did do quite a bit of gathering and a little crafting too but I was trying to focus on quests because I'd found myself on the wrong side of not one but two progression roadblocks. I wanted to get past both of them and I'm very pleased to say I did. Eventually.

The first was Destiny Unearthed, a stage in the main story quest and also the point at which New World pulls a Final Fantasy XIV and plays the ever-popular forced grouping card. At least, that's what I suspected was going to happen, although in New World you never quite know what to expect.

Despite having had a lot more issues with queues than I have, Belghast is much further ahead than me. He posted details of his experience recently when, having gathered some friends to help him with a quest that looked like it was going to send him into what he believed would be a higher-level area, flagged for parties of five, it turned out the mobs he actually needed were on the far side of all that and readily soloable.

I had a similar experience a few levels back. I was working on another step in the Azoth Staff sequence. The item I needed was deep in a ruined temple infested with mobs several levels higher than me. The area was flagged as suitable for mid-20s and I was sill in my teens. 

I was very skeptical about being able to fight my way to where the quest marker was telling me I needed to go but it tuned out I was being over-cautious. In the event, all I needed to do was put my head down, barrel past everything at a dead run, click on a glowy object deep inside a crypt, get an instant update and leg it out again with a dozen angry undead lurching after me.

The update I needed today was in much the same place on the map but by the way the quest was worded I felt fairly sure I wouldn't be able to get away with the same ruse twice. It looked like I was going to have to go into an "Expedition", which is what Amazon have decided to call dungeons in their game. 

I'd rather they hadn't done that. Expeditions are something I associate with EverQuest's infamous Gates of Discord expansion. I still have nightmares.

Following the map marker took me to the shimmering blue curtain that delineates the entrance to an instance. It wasn't looking good but even then I thought there was an outside chance it might be something I could solo. I'd gone through a similar curtain around level eight or nine and that one had led to a solo instance. 

I clicked on the zone-in to see if the same thing would happen again. No such luck. 

The Amrine Excavation is an instanced dungeon intended for a minimum of three players of Level 25 or above. You can go in with more people than that, up to five, but not with fewer. The door won't open unless you have a) an Azoth Staff b) a key and c) at least three people.

I had the staff and I had the key. The questline gives you both of those. What I didn't have were the people and I wasn't at all sure I wanted them. There were a couple of people hanging out by the entrance but I had chat switched off so if they were trying to put a group together I wouldn't have known about it.

I wandered away for a bit to have a think about it. I'm by no means unwilling to PUG things like this but if I'm going to go down that road I like to be decently equipped, have a basic idea what my class does in a group and be at or above the recommended level for the content. In this case I had, knew and was none of those things. 

When devs throw you this kind of irritating curveball there are only a couple of ways you can go, assuming you still want to carry on at all: buckle down and join a group, even if you don't feel ready or go away and do other stuff until you do. The other options are quit following the storyline (entirely possible in New World as far as I can see) or quit playing altogether.

Since I neither wanted to quit the game nor to cut myself off from the narrative (It's quite interesting) it was going to have to be one of the first two. And since I had, at that moment, not the slightest clue how people were going about forming groups (there's no automated matchmaking and no dedicated LFG channel) it seemed like as good a time as any to find out.

I switched my chat on and went back to the entrance to see if anyone was trying to put a group together. Someone was. It was about as old school an experience as you could hope for. Or hope never to see again, depending on how you feel about these things.

One player asked in area chat if anyone wanted to do the dungeon. Someone else said yes, they did. Then I said "I'll join if you have room" and after about thirty seconds an invite appeared on my screen.

We had three people, enough to start, but thankfully the leader said "Let's get some more. It's better with five". As the lowest level and the least sure of what I was doing, I felt the more people I could hide behind the better. 

The next part really brought back some memories. We all stood about for ten or fifteen minutes. One guy decided he needed arrows so he ran back to town. Someone else wanted to join but realized he was flagged for PvP. That meant he had to run back to town too, because you can only take the flag off in safe zones and you can't join a PvE group with it on.

I had to afk for a while but I felt pretty safe doing it. Nothing was going to happen any time soon. By the time I got back there was a discussion going on about whether someone's friend would come and join us to make up the full five but before that got very far another player arrived and asked if we were going in, so we took him instead. Then we had to wait for the guy who'd gone to get arrows to finish up whatever he was doing...

We got there in the end. Someone opened the instance and everyone went inside. My PC took forever to load the zone and by the time I got there the rest of them were in the second room, fighting. I caught them up and joined in and my PC decided it really didn't want to have anything to do with all the spell effects and suchlike so I had to open options mid-battle and drop my graphics to Low. 

After that everything played smoothly enough. The game looks good even at low fidelity so I was happy. 

Well, I was until we got to the first boss. My inventory had been close to full when we zoned in. I found myself Encumbered on the very first chest we looted.

I spent the entire run shuffling through my packs, discarding anything I could bear to ditch (Wave bye bye to 400 fibres.) and salvaging everything I looted that I didn't equip on the spot. I still couldn't pick up even half the stuff that dropped.

I'm working on a "Things I like/Things I don't like" list for a future post. The sheer quantity of loot is definitely going in the "Don't Like" column. You very definitely can have too much of a good thing, particularly when you have to lug it all around with you.

The five of us plowed through room after room. If you're interested to know what was there, there's a reasonably exhaustive walkthrough here. I certainly didn't get much chance to take any screenshots. I'd also have to say I didn't see an awful lot of the detailed mechanics until we got to the final Boss, the bathetically-named Simon Gray. 

Before we did the Poltergeist boss, Foreman Nakashima, our healer said "Worst boss next" but if he was any different to any of the others, or even some of the regular mobs, I didn't notice. I did get stunned a couple of times but it didn't seem to matter. 

At this level New World seems fairly forgiving of group make-up. We didn't have a tank at all. We had a a main healer and someone else was putting down some back-up heals when they weren't DPSing. The rest of us were just gung-ho, in there, hacking away. It was only on Simon that it all fell apart.

I had read the strats on him before going in so I knew he was going to call a lot of adds and throw up on us and that the adds would eat his vomit to heal themselves. I had a dog like that, once. 

There was some discussion before we started about tactics. As PUGs go, this one was chill, friendly and chatty. I didn't say much but only because I was fighting the UI. The chat interface is another mark in the Bad column for me. It was a pleasant experience socially, anyway, even they all probably went away thinking I must be the shy, retiring type.

It's always a good sign when no-one leaves after a wipe. We wiped with Simon at about 60% on our first try. There was talk of kiting him and using ranged attacks but since at least two of us had no ranged attacks, me being one of them, that didn't really happen.  

I did learn how to dodge effectively, though. In the two dozen levels up until then I'd never needed to bother. It's a nasty, inelegant, unsatisfying sort of dodge compared to the balletic leaps and rolls I'm used to in Guild Wars 2 but it's effective enough if you get the timing right. 

For all my successful dodging, I still got killed and so did everyone else. We wiped with Simon at about 50% that time. Getting better. And again no-one quit. Or even complained.

Third time's the charm, they say, although in my experience of PUGs like this sometimes it's more like tenth time. Not today, though. On the third try we did indeed manage to kite the Boss around fairly effectively, deal with most of the adds and slowly whittle down his health until finally he exploded.

The game was quick to congratulate us on having finished the instance but luckily I'd read ahead so I knew I wasn't finished just yet. I still had to find the item I'd come in for in the first place, loot it and update my quest. If I'd missed that I'd have had to do the whole thing over again with another pick-up group and it almost certainly would not have gone so well. And don't think I haven't done that before, either... 

As an introduction to dungeoneering in New World I'd have to say it was a decent one. I'm still strongly against mandatory group stages in mainly soloable quest lines but at least I can now complain about it from a position of authority. 

As for the mechanics of the group experience, it felt more like a GW2 dungeon than anything: frenzied, chaotic, messy, freeform. I think much of that might be down to our not having had a proper tank. The classic trinity does seem to be in place but on the flimsy evidence of one run in a low-level dungeon, it looks like there's quite a lot of flexibility.

I was just glad to get it done. I'll bet there are more compulsory group stages to come but for now I can forget about having to look competent. I think I got away with it this time but I don't want to push my luck.

The other significant quest I wanted to get done today was much more straightforward. I'd topped out on reputation for my chosen faction a couple of levels back, when I'd hit the point where you have to do a trial to get promoted to the next rank. The problem was, the NPC who gives the quest didn't believe I could do it. I was Level 23 when I went to talk to her but she wanted to see my Level 25 papers before she'd let me risk my neck.

That's going in the "Don't Like" column, too: all these arbitrary caps and gates. For a supposed sandpark there are a lot of rules and regulations. It seems to me that if I can do the stuff that leads up to a quest I ought to be given the chance to attempt the quest itself. If I get my head handed to me, so what? We fall down, we get back up. That's Aeternum.

When I did get the quest at last, having dinged twenty-five on the hand in for the Azoth staff one, it was something of a doddle. By far the hardest part was getting across the annoying planking onto the ship where the Captain I had to kill was waiting. I fell off three times. Died once because I got stuck in a box. There was swearing.

Killing the captain, when I finally got to him, was no problem. I could easily have done it a level earlier, when I first asked for the assignment. I'd say I told you so but none of the meatheads in the Marauders is going to listen. Maybe I should have joined the Syndicate after all.

With those two roadblocks cleared, tomorrow I can get on with something much more important. I have the money to buy a house. Now I just have to decide which town I want to live in. I have the standing to become a householder in Monarch's Bluff but I think I might prefer the etrnal autumn of Everfall.

I guess that means more questing. It never ends, does it?

Baby, You're Far Too Clean

With all the Blaugust talk and the music stuff it seems quite a while since I wrote anything about gaming. It isn't, of course. Just last week I posted about Neverwinter Online, Guild Wars 2 and DCUO and before that I had something to say about New World, Crowfall and Bless Unleashed. Then there was the World of Warcraft firestorm, about which the less said the better.

In every case, though, I was reacting to something in the news. Mostly structural revamps or launches. Those hooks hang posts. I enjoy writing them but it doesn't quite match up to the organic satisfaction of posting regularly and confidently about a game I'm actively playing.

Remember back in the winter and the early spring, when we were all penning long essays about Valheim? That's the sort of thing I mean. It happens when there's a new game everyone's playing or at least it feels as though everyone's playing. 

It's happening right now. Everyone's jumping on a fresh bandwagon and firing off excited posts about how great it is. It's not Crowfall. No-one's posting about Crowfall. It's not New World, not yet. It might be, come September, but as of now the beta's over and even while it was on, most people seemed happy just to test the waters, pronounce them acceptable, then politely withdraw to wait for the real thing. I know I did.

Oddly, the game of the moment is Final Fantasy XIV. Again. How many bites at the cherry is this thing going to get? For a game that seems to have been around for a very long time, FFXIV somehow manages to come up fresh, over and over.

 

This time it started with the announcement of an Autumn expansion. Interest and attention grew with the arrival of a covy of high-profile WoW streamers seeking a more enticing money-train to ride than the stuttering, sputtering engine of WoW's failing Shadowlands. And finally the trickle turned into a flood, an all-out exodus of refugees streaming out of the Blizzard gates, leaving the 800 pound gorilla bleeding into the dust as the company imploded. 

Here's the thing. I've played FFXIV. Quite a bit. Never got all that far but I quite like it. It's definitely an mmorpg I could play. I could join in the fun now. I wouldn't even have to pay. So much is free there'd be bound to be new games to pull me away long before I got to the end of it.

If I did that, I could post about FFXIV like everyone else. It's a big, feature-filled game with plenty to talk about. And it looks great in screenshots. So, why not?

Yes, well, I've been thinking about that. If I hadn't, I might have slipped into my usual anti-story mode and whinged on yet again about how I don't want my mmorpgs to be centered on pre-written narratives. Or I might have banged on about the paternalistic undertones that creep me out when I read the supposedly supportive and open-handed commentary coming out of Square Enix. I might even have focused fire on the forced grouping required to achieve basic character progression bench-marks.

Really, though, it's none of those, even though they're all actual concerns I have. I'm not making them up. But they're minor problems, by no means unique to FFXIV. I could easily come up with lists of complaints about the way GW2 is set up or how ArenaNet operates. There's plenty wrong with both EverQuest II and Daybreak's custodianship I could get into, if I wanted. Facts are, I tolerate worse elsewhere, willingly.

None of these games, nor the companies that make them, are perfect, not even close. If any of them were, we'd all be playing the same thing. They all have flaws and drawbacks and issues but until and unless the whole thing turns into the kind of meltdown we've seen at WoW these last few weeks, none of it really matters all that much. If we like a game enough we'll play it in spite of its failures.

I just don't like FFXIV enough for that. If I'm brutally honest about why Mrs Bhagpuss and I both stopped playing after our first month all the way back at launch and why I never stick around for long any time I go back it's because FFXIV is a bit... dull. 

No, not dull, exactly. Worthy. that's it. I feel I'm expected to be on my best behavior there, somehow. Have my laces tied and my shirt buttoned. I feel there might be a test, after.

The way it looks matches the way it feels, for me. It's pretty to look at but it's also more than a little bland. The scenery feels stage-managed. The cities are big but the streets and the buildings all look too much the same, too uniform. The countryside is mannered in the way of a country house estate. Eorzea somehow manages to look convincing and artificial at the same time. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there's no there there.

The same over-designed tidiness pervades the whole game or, I should say, the small fraction of the game I've seen. I've never got much past the high 30s. By the time I get that far I feel tired. The sameness wears me out. It's not the famously enervating cross-continental travel. I like long journeys. I spent whole days doing nothing else in Valheim and for less reason. It's just that in FFXIV I never quite feel the journey was worth it and it's rarely fun for itself.

 

Even the interface exhausts me. I was reading Pixel Fairy's post about the FFXIV UI and it made me remember how low-level awkward I always find it when I play.  There's nothing wrong with it, per se. As Adelle says, it's fully customiseable. It ought to be fine. It's not, though.

Enough of that! Believe it or not, I didn't sit down today to write about FFXIV at all, let alone to say bad things about it. I wanted to post about an mmorpg I am playing, not one I'm not. As I thought about it, though, it occured to me to wonder just why I'd made the choice I have and I found myself comparing the two.

The mmorpg I'm playing most right now is Blade and Soul. I only play it for an hour or two each day and sometimes I might spend longer in GW2 or EQII, but it's only in B&S where I'm actively levelling a character and following the intended progression path.

I'm aware of the heavy irony, given my comments on narrative-driven mmorpgs in general and FFXIV in particular. Almost all of my gameplay in B&S consists of slavishly following the Main Story Quest. I talk to NPCs, all fully voiced. I watch frequent cut scenes, some of them lengthy, all of them, again, fully voiced. I read along with the subtitles, all of which are in good, demotic English.

Every session I go where I'm sent and do what I'm told. There's a lot of running back and forth. There are a lot of dungeons. As I finish each Chapter I get massive amounts of xp and that's what drives my levelling. There's xp for killing things, too, but it's largely incidental. The MSQ is essential if you want to progress, not least because it gives you your gear upgrades.

The whole thing is linear. I have little to no freedom of action within the narrative. There are no meaningful choices. Mostly there are no choices, meaningful or otherwise. If I don't welcome that in FFXIV, why do I tolerate it in Blade and Soul? And not just tolerate. Seek it out.

It's not as if the story's even much good. It's generic and thin. FFXIV's is much deeper, much broader, much more complete, even in the much-maligned original ARR. FFXIV's writing is eminently superior to Blade and Soul's. I still enjoy B&S more.

And I enjoy the gameplay more, too, even though it's button-mashing and most things die very quickly except the world bosses, which I can't kill at all. Even though it's supposed to be an mmorpg and yet I rarely see anyone else because everyone's max-level and no-one's doing any of the lower content. Blade and Soul has none of FFXIV's replayability or reusabilty or culture of continual purpose. Start late, you play alone.

I stopped and thought about why I prefer Blade and Soul. It's comfortable and FFXIV isn't. That's the plain truth of it. I can play for a few minutes or a couple of hours and feel relaxed afterwards. If I play FFXIV, I usually end feeling discontented, sometimes enervated, like my nerves have been stretched. It happens even if all I've done is go from one place to another or taken a few screenshots. 

Part of it, a big part, is that Blade and Soul, at the level I'm at, plays one hundred per cent like a single player game. All those dungeons I mentioned are solo instances. At no point has the main quest asked me to go do anything with another player. I could if I wanted. Most of the instances pop up a window when I enter asking me if I want to look for a group. If I don't want to, though, the game is fine with that.

Another part is that the world of Blade and Soul is more interesting to look at. It's not better. It's objectively worse, I think, unnatural, weird. Everything is too bright, too big, too odd. But it's spectacular and strange and it fires off the right receptors in my brain to make me feel engaged. Immersed? I might not go that far but close. 

 

Eorzea doesn't do that. Eorzea looks too... I want to say real. Maybe I mean complete. It's done. It's finished. There are no ragged edges, no messy corners. Everything makes sense. I don't want things to make sense.

None of which is to say I won't start playing FFXIV again today or tomorrow and leave Blade and Soul in the dust, nor that if I do I won't be here posting about what a great time I'm having and how much fun FFXIV can be. I've done that before and I'll bet I'll do it again. It's a good game. It can be fun. That's not the point.

And I'm not nailed on to Blade and Soul. Not even hardly. I can almost guarantee that next week or the week after that I won't be logging in every day or even at all. I pick up and drop mmorpgs all the time these days. I don't even see it as a failing any more. It's a playstyle. 

Bless Unleashed launches on August 8th and unlike most people I was quite impressed by what I saw in open beta. I plan on playing but I very much doubt I'll be playing for long. 

New World is coming, as we know. I've pre-ordered and I'm keen to get started. That one should last a little longer but once again I have no expectation it's going to be my next big mmorpg. I won't be putting in thousands of hours. Maybe a hundred or two if things go well. If I get half the play out of it I got from Valheim, I'll be happy.

Until those arrive I'm sticking with Blade and Soul. With luck I'll hit fifty before I quit. Levels that is, not hours.

I'm enjoying it a lot more than seems entirely reasonable but I don't have a lot to say about it. When all you do is the MSQ, what is there to say? But that's fine. Some mmorpgs are just for playing, not for writing about. When I find the next one that's worth spending the words, we'll all know about it, that's for sure.

Probably best enjoy the quiet, while it lasts.

And So The Story Goes

Following on from yesterday's post, where I took a thousand words to explain how I wished I could keep to the point once in a while, today I thought I might try a five-finger excercise on that very theme. There's a topic going around, kicked off by Aywren but generally following in the slipstream of Final Fantasy XIV's growing success, concerning the necessity or even advisablity of hanging mmorpg gameplay on the hook of a strong, linear narrative.

Naithan sums up the situation perfectly in the title of his post on the problem (if problem is what it is): "FFXIV May as Well Not Be an MMO". Couldn't have put it better.

Of course, FFXIV isn't just an mmorpg, it's an instalment in a long-running series of JRPGs. It's a hybrid.

And it's not the first. A decade ago (what, has it been that long already?) all the attention was on an upcoming mmorpg set in the Star Wars universe, Star Wars: the Old Republic. Produced by BioWare, a developer famous for story-driven, single-player and co-op RPGs, what we were being promised was a collation of two forms: the massively-multiple theme park mmo experience of World of Warcraft underpinned by the nuanced storytelling associated with games like Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect.

Much was made of the "Fourth Pillar", the term BioWare liked to use for Story. Anyone remember what the other three pillars were? I didn't. I had to go look it up and it wasn't easy to find.

"Traditionally, massively multiplayer online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars - combat, exploration and character progression", said "BioWare boss Ray Muzyka" in an interview with Eurogamer back in 2008. (Yes, it really was that long ago). His contention seemed to be that until then mmorpgs hadn't bothered telling stories, but that was okay because now BioWare were around to make things right. 

I suspect that plenty of writers who'd been making a living putting words in the mouths of NPCs for the previous ten years might have looked at that interview a little askance. I'm pretty sure Blizzard and SOE thought they'd been telling stories set in their imagined worlds and I'm damn sure Turbine did in the one they'd leased from the Tolkein estate. That was kind of the point, wasn't it?

BioWare were widely seen to be riding in to battle against an enemy that didn't exist but time has proved them right about one thing: story has become that fourth pillar, at least in the minds of some players and developers. 

In the early years of the genre, narrative and story were gameplay elements but they weren't the focus of the experience. I played the EverQuest titles for years without ever having more than a vague idea what the overarching story was. But I always knew there was one.

Because those games attempted to replicate the experience of being in and of a world not as the "one, true hero", just someone who saw things happening around them and joined in as best they could, story was everywhere. Not just the personal stories of the players themselves, as touted by the advocates of the sandbox, but crafted stories, written by writers and given to NPC actors to tell.

The quests told stories, the incidental, ambient dialog told stories, the books and the statues and the ruins told stories. The worlds told stories and they were as real as stories ever are, which is as real as real gets. And you never heard them all.  

You heard fragments, sections, pieces. You heard rumors and legends and myths. You puzzled and figured and discussed and out of all of that came stories with frayed edges and loose ends, tales to tell over camps and at guild meets, stories to argue and maybe even duel over.

Then along came the serious writers, the adults in the room, ready to tidy up the toys and put them neatly back in their boxes. A story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It has to have a hero and a moral. It has to follow the rules.

Why did it happen? I have a theory. The games, the genre itself, began with explorers. Explorers are the ones who go out and make the maps. Explorers, though, don't stay behind to hammer in the signposts or manage the map concession in the town square.

There's always been a tension, a competition, between the four archetypes, the Explorer, the Socialiser, the Killer and the Achiever. The people who tell you where to go are the achievers and the importance of story in mmorpgs grows alongside their ascendency. Almost by definition, the one archetype that has to come out on top is the Achiever.

And so it was. Achievers gained their ascendency, in the games and in the studios, years ago. Almost all the mmorpgs we play now are box-tickers, first and last. Everything must be codified, accounted for and scored, including exploration, socialising and killing. All those boxes have to be ticked.

And that's just what the current incarnation of Story in mmorpgs does. It ticks boxes. The new, big, important stories are unified and linear. They may contain many digressions and sub-plots but like those in a novel they all serve the central narrative. You start at page one and you read to the end. Every page turned, evey cut scene watched, is a box ticked. 

Stories, of course, are infinitely more than box-ticking excercises. In a good story, the characters become friends, their actions, memories. Stories become us. We're made of stories.

There's nothing wrong with a good story, of course there's not. There's everything right with one. I love a good story. I'm not saying I want the stories in morpgs to be not good. That would be crazy. I'm not saying I don't want mmorpgs to have stories in them. That would be crazier still.

But there's a place for these particular kinds of finished, complete, linear stories. From everything I've seen so far I'm not convinced that mmorpgs can, let alone should, be that place. 

Mmorpgs are places where stories happen, of course they are. That's the whole point of an mmorpg: it's a place where anything can happen. It's a world, or it can be. Stories belong in mmorpgs as they belong everywhere. But stories can't be mmorpgs. Mmorpgs can't be stories.

To bind the mmorpg form to the yoke of narrative is to set hard restraints on its limitless capacity to change. A linear narrative is a corridor passing countless doors that will never be opened, a train on a track that arrows straight to the horizon. It's a wasted opportunity.

We already have so many ways to tell those kinds of stories. Mmorpgs offer a chance to tell the old stories in new ways, maybe even to tell new stories in ways that have never been seen before. For a while that seemed like it might happen but the signs and portents aren't good. Mmorpgs are being assimilated in the old narrative tradition, when they should be in the vanguard of something new, something non-linear, fragmented, chaotic, alive. 

It maybe already be too late. The damage may already have been done. Story sells, or so it seems. And, of course, it's the winners who get tell the stories.

Their stories, not ours.