It's The Little Things

Guild Wars 2's third expansion, End of Dragons launches in less than three weeks. As the dread day draws ever nearer, ArenaNet's relentless assault intensifies. 

A few days ago we were treated to an hour-long tour of New Kaineng, "Cantha’s heart, a modern metropolis", hosted by Rubi Bayer, formerly Massively's Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2 correspondent, currently either GW2's "Social Media Coordinator" or "Content Marketing Manager" or "Content Marketing Strategist" depending which part of the wiki or her LinkedIn profile you prefer to believe.

I have not watched the video. I suppose I probably should. There's an expansion coming, after all. I don't just play the game, I've been writing about it for nearly a decade now. I ought to care. I ought to be interested.

It's an hour, though. That's a long time. 

Luckily, there's a shorter version. A lot shorter. The day before Rubi took us on the full tour, the official GW2 website posted a promo called "Explore New Kaineng". It's one minute and fifteen seconds long. (1.14 on YouTube - I wonder what they cut?).

I thought I'd be able to manage that, especially when I realised there's a seven second intro and a twenty-one second outro, leaving just forty-seven seconds of actual content. Well, I say "content". For about fifteen seconds all you can see is people fighting in the streets with no context or explanation, so call it about thirty seconds.

I'm not complaining. If I'd wanted more I'd have taken the full tour. Just over half a minute of fast cuts and captions was plenty. I know about as much now as I care to.

There seems to be a concerted effort going on to paint New Kaineng as some kind of cyberpunk city. Some people are calling it "jadepunk", which I thought must be a neologism but which apparently does have some degree of precedent. 

While we're not really on the subject, what is it with "punk" as a suffix, anyway? What's it meant to suggest? I was around for the birth of both punk as a musical movement and cyberpunk as a literary form and I never fully understood the connection even then. 

Now "punk" just gets bolted onto the back of any old noun, verb or adjective to make some kind of snappy portmanteau in which the first word does ninety-eight per cent of the lifting. Does it ever mean anything more than mirror shades, rivets and leather? And why is that "punk", anyway?

Ahem. 

Getting back to the point and accepting that language evolves, first and foremost, through usage, New Kaineng doesn't look much like a "cyberpunk" city to me. It has something of the surface texture familiar from every inflection of South East Asia by way of Blade Runner we've seen in the last forty years but GW2 already has cities far more worthy of the cyber prefix in Rata Sum and Rata Novus. The Asuran cities make New Kaineng look positively funky and down-home.

Again, I'm not saying it doesn't look good. New Kaineng looks as though it'll be an interesting place to explore. It's certainly more interesting than anything we saw in Path of Fire and I'm not saying the art there was anything other than excellent, either. What it looked like was never PoF's problem.

I think what I am saying is that New Kaineng looks okay but not much more than that. Maybe when we're able to walk around those streets in our own virtual forms instead of just looking in from the outside it'll have more impact. Let's hope so.

If I wasn't particularly impressed by my first look at New Kaineng itself, I have to say I was far more taken with the latest promo focusing on the new Mastery track, Jade Tech. If ANet kept this card up their sleeve right until the end because they thought it might not meet expectations, as I've heard said, well let me re-assure them: it exceeded mine.

Heart of Thorns, which introduced the Mastery system, brought gliding into the game and Path of Fire added mounts. Both of those were game changers. Literally. Gameplay changed radically after the introduction of each system, not only in the new areas introduced in the expansions but across every map.

Judged by those standards, the new Mastery does look somewhat trivial: customizeable "Bots" with the ability to enhance a variety of pre-existing systems. They're clearly add-ons rather than innovations. 

They do sound useful, though, and that's probably enough to make working on the new mastery feel worthwhile. They link to the new "Skiff" system to make your flat-bottomed boat skim across the surface faster, something no-one's likely to turn down. 

They have combat-related functionality, increasing your hit points by boosting your vitality and picking you up when you're downed, something rangers' pets have been doing since the game launched back in 2012. There's also some mention of "scavenging", although what they scavenge for isn't explained. There's already a mastery that auto-loots so it can't be that.

The trick that really caught my attention was the ability to create an updraft to lift your glider. I still love gliding in GW2. I use my glider as much as I can, often in places where a mount would be faster, easier and more efficient. There have been many times when I would have loved to be able to summon my own updraft to send my glider soaring over some obstacle.

Of all the End of Dragons features I've seen so far, it's the Jade Tech Mastery Track that interests me the most. Whether it will live up to the (Barely noticeable.) hype remains to be seen. but it's nice to have something in the expansion to look forward to at last.

She Really Shake You Donkey Up

Before Valheim appeared out of nowhere back in February, I'd been spending a fair amount of time in Black Desert Online. I'd updated all my details in preparation for the switch from Kakao to Pearl Abyss and I'd been running around somewhat aimlessly with my Shai, doing a bit of levelling here, a bit of exploring there...

It was fun. I wasn't planning on stopping. And then I stopped.

I kept meaning to get back to whatever it was I thought I was doing there but it never happened. The handover came and went and I still didn't log in. Then, eventually, the viking stranglehold began to lose its grip. And I saw this:

Who could resist the lure of a flying donkey? Well, I could, apparently, at least for a while. The event began on March 31st but it wasn't until today that I finally got around to taking a look at it.

But first I had to patch. Because of course I had to patch. Black Desert's an mmorpg. It couldn't possibly go a couple of months without adding a few gigabytes of data to my overloaded hard drive, could it? 4.27GB to be precise.

Seriously, that's four Valheims. What did they add? I have no clue.

As you can see, the counter didn't work. It sat determinedly at 1% the entire time and then the Patching button flipped to Play and in I went. Gives you confidence in the new owners, doesn't it?

The first thing that greeted me was a screenful of login rewards and other freebies. I'm starting to think I may be past the point of appreciating these. It was less than a couple of years ago that I was praising Riders of Icarus for its incredibly generous login bonuses and I do still very much enjoy a good freebie, but that old saw about it being possible to have too much of a good thing is starting to sound a little less ridiculous to me than it once did.

Other than that, Black Desert isn't the worst mmorpg to come back to after a break and I had only been away for a matter of weeks. All the same, it still took me a good while to get to grips with the UI and the controls again. 

It's as fussy-looking a game as I can remember on the fornt end. Did you know that the default UI has thirty-seven non-combat icons? Well, mine does. Thirty-seven! And doing anything seems to take more keys than feels reasonable. It's a game for octopuses. Octopi. Octopodes. Squid.

Enough of all that. On with the main event. Flying donkeys!

The event I'd come for requires you to play your Shai character and that your Shai character be riding her donkey. The first part was easy enough. She's my main character anyway. The second part turned out to be a little more problematic.

For some reason that I can't even begin to imagine, last time I played I ran her all the way out to Trent. Maybe I needed something out of the bank there? I don't know. Oh, it seems I can imagine it after all... Anyway, it was a fifteen-minute run back to Velia, which was where she'd parked the donkey.

BDO has some big distances to cover but it's a pleasure to do them if you're in the mood. I just set the route on the map, hit "T" for autotravel (once I'd looked up which key it was), switched the UI off and sat back. It's like watching a travel video. Very relaxing.

At the stable I got my donkey back and climbed on. It took me a minute to remember how to get him moving but once we were going at a canter I hit space to see him glide. He sprouted wings and a shower of stars flew out. It was like he was the main event at a six-year old princess's birthday party.

And did he glide? Not he did not!

He juddered along like... well, like a donkey with a pair of papier-mache wings strapped to his back and a box of cheap fireworks exploding in his saddlebags. It was inelegant to say the least.

I ran along the road like that for a while, failing to get airborne. I took a bunch of screenshots, all from behind. It wasn't getting me anywhere, figuratively or literally.

I'd read there was a series of quests to go with the event so I looked that up. It starts at Casta Farm. It wasn't far so I set a route on the map and tried to autopath there, only I would keep trying to make him glide so of course the pathing broke. I nearly ended up in the sea at one point.

I have to say, the screenshots make the whole thing look far more amazing than it was. It looks almost magical here but at the time it felt more like riding a faulty ride-on mower over a field full of rocks.

I got there in the end, somehow. You have to be mounted on a donkey to get the quest or the NPC won't even speak to you. That was a challenge in itself. Donkeys have momentum, inertia and a mind of their own.

The quest is a time trial in which you run from Herar the questgiver to... Herar the questgiver. How he gets from where he is to where you find him I have no idea. I assume he has a teleporter. I wish I did.

On the first run I drowned my donkey in a river. I wasn't expecting to succeed that time. I was pretty pleased with myself just for working out where I had to go. 

Since the whole point of the event was having a flying (okay, gliding) donkey I figured I'd go as the crow flies rather than following the road and just glide over anything in the way. When I came out of a stand of trees and found myself hurtling over a cliff I didn't panic. I hit the space-bar twice to double jump and "E" to glide just like I'd seen in the instructions. 

My donkey and my shai cruised gently over the river, right into the cliffs opposite. They hit about two-thirds of the way up and fell into the water. The donkey went under and vanished. My shai managed to struggle to shore although it was a close call.  

I ran her all the way back to the stables in Velia, paid the stable guy a hundred thousand silver to recover the donkey and set off to try again. The route back had taken me past the point where the quest would have ended and even with the donkey dead in a ditch I'd only missed the timer by a few seconds so I was optimistic for the second attempt.

And rightly so. This time I stuck to the road, crossed the river by bridge and made it with thirty seconds to spare. Which was just as well because it took me nearly that long to manoeuver the donkey into talking distance for the hand-in.

I nearly called it a day right then. I don't like timed quests much and I didn't want to push my luck. In the end I thought I might as well give it a go so I took the second quest and found it wasn't on a timer at all. I  was able to meander over to where Herar had magically transported himself at my own pace.

I found him, looking like a member of an elven Killing Joke tribute band, all mohawk, pointy ears and pantaloons, standing next to a couple of mountain goats on the edge of a high escarpment. Okay, I know what's going on here, I thought to myself. He expects me to ride my donkey off the bloody cliff. Well, more fool him. I've already done that!

So I took the quest and rode my donkey off the cliff. Why the hell not? And to my utter amazement I managed to get the creature to glide, after a fashion, all the way down without either of us dying. 

I would not say it was thrilling or exhillarating or a magical experience of any kind. Okay, alright, a donkey with wings is de facto magical. I guess you have to give them that. 

Compared to gliding in... well... in any other game I have ever played that had gliding in it, though, this was clunky and daft. But then, it is an April Fools event. What did I expect?

It did, however, work. I carried on in a bee line for the marker. There were a couple more small dips. We glided down those. There were several walls and fences. We glided over them. The quest allowed two minutes and we did it with time to spare.

The rewards seemed fair for the effort involved. Food and drink that give ten minute buffs to various kinds of mount experience. I'd have liked a title (Donkey Dropper, maybe) but you can't have everything.

The event runs for another week, finishing on the 14th. It's definitely worth doing if you have a Shai although I don't think I'd go so far as to make one just to do it.

As for flying donkeys as a general mode of transport, I think I'll pass. Just give me an actual glider and we'll call it even.

Punishment Of Luxury: WoW Classic, Guild Wars 2, EverQuest II

WoW Classic is beginning to get its claws into me. The diluted enthusiasm of yesterday is begining to coalesce into something more concentrated. I waited until after lunch to log in today but then I played for four hours without a break and I didn't much want to stop then.

I'm sitting here now, typing this post and itching to get back in and level up some more. It's quite a long time since I've wanted to play an MMORPG more than I wanted to write about it and wouldn't you know it, sod's law, all of sudden I'm staring down the barrel at three of them.

My delayed start in Classic today was mainly due to a hospital appointment but also because I logged all three accounts into Guild Wars 2 to pick up the seventh birthday present on my oldest character and the Victorious Anniversary Achievement Box on each account.

The box includes a few nice things and a rock you can stand on. I thought it sounded ludicrous but I have to say I quite like it. It is literally a small rock that goes in your Toy slot that you can pull out and stand on, whereupon your character strikes a triumphal pose. I've only seen it on a Charr so far. Looking forward to seeing what an Asura does with it.

"Ahem. May I remind you who is the Princess here?"

There's also a free Black Lion Key in the cash shop. I love these and so does Mrs Bhagpuss, who does map completion not infrequently to get them and has been known to buy them from the Gem Store.When I told her there was a free one she was considerably more excited than she was for WoW Classic (although she has now actually made a character there (Gnome Warlock) and leveled her up to five).

While I love opening the boxes when it isn't costing me anything, I would never buy a Black Lion Key.  A) they are far too expensive and B) what you usually get is total garbage. Total garbage was exactly what I got on the first two accounts, the two I play these days and also the two that have the Heart of Thorns expansion, which you have to have to be able to use gliding.

My third account (chronologically the second but third in terms of usage) only has the core game so of course that was the one that got the big ticket Exclusive item, the Watchwork Wings Package. Naturally it's account-bound and more surprisngly it looks fantastic. I would absolutely use it on either of the accounts that can, y'know, freakin' well glide!

I was, initially, very annoyed but I calmed down a lot when I realised the "Package" part of the description means you get both wings and a backpack. The backpack is also splendid so at least I can use that.

Take a look at what you could have won...

Fun and exciting though all that was, it obviously wouldn't keep me logged in and playing all day. If it wasn't for WoW Classic, though, the other new addition to the game that came with yesterday's update certainly would. Cooking has finally been raised to a skill level of 500 and I would be on my chef right now, grinding away at the stove. So to speak.

Cooking was the first tradeskill I took up in GW2 and it remains one of my favorites. It's been languishing for years but now it's back! Prices of various ingredients are booming and things will be chaotic for a while, which is always fun, but cooking is going to have to go on the back burner until I cool off on Classic.

The other hot ticket right now, were it not for Blizzard parking their elephant on everyone's lawn, would be EverQuest 2, where there's not only the new Panda quest to enjoy but also a new Fabled dungeon. I really enjoyed the last two of those. I spent a good while getting killed in them before I managed to tweak my gear and build sufficiently to start downing names and looting upgrades.

Can't stop! Things to do!

This time the schedule's so crowded I haven't even patched EQII up yet. Maybe tomorrow, as the theme tune to The Littlest Hobo would have it. Could have used that as the post title if I'd been as smart as the dog.

As far as posting about Classic goes, I have so much to say I don't know where to start. The reason you're not reading any of it now is that I know if I get stuck into a post about it I'll be here all night. Only this time I don't want to spend the evening writing about the game - I want to play it.

So I'm going to! Bye!

Skin In The Game : GW2

ArenaNet's revelation that mounts would be the defining feature of Path of Fire, GW2's second expansion was widely seen as a spectacular climbdown, one of an ongoing series of U-turns made by the company since launch. Indeed, I find it hard to recall another MMO I've played where statements of policy are laid down so firmly only to be rescinded so comprehensively.

Some of this fundamental restructuring appears to rest on initial misunderstandings arising out of poorly-expressed principles. Others seem to owe their existence to purely commercial considerations or, in a few disturbing cases, panic.

Mostly, ANet's representatives take considerable care in their public statements to leave themselves at least a sliver of room to wiggle. The company motto might as well be "Never say Never".

For good or ill, mounts are with us now and likely to remain so. As Blizzard discovered when they tried to impose a flight ban in Azeroth, once granted such benefits are difficult to withdraw.

The inclusion of gliders in Heart of Thorns can now be seen as a toe dipped in the water. Gliding came out of the blue. No-one asked for it. No-one expected it. Most players were agnostic about it until it arrived but it turned out to be an immediate hit with almost everybody.

Gliding also opened a fresh revenue stream. In a game in which cosmetics represent a substantial element of both the gameplay and the business model, having a new visual adornment to sell is a big deal.

I forget exactly how long it was before the first purchasable glider skins appeared in the Gem Store but I'm pretty sure that record has been roundly beaten by mount skins. The first set popped up as part of the Halloween celebrations barely three weeks after the expansion's launch.

The sheer number of mounts in fancy dress demonstrated the popularity of that enterprise and with Halloween on the way out ANet wasted no time in building on success, choosing instead to double down on it then double some more.

Yesterday's patch saw Evon Gnashblade adding a slew of skins to the stable. Thirty to be precise. They cost 400 gems per skin or you can buy all 30 for 9,600 gems. That's over a hundred dollars.

With the exception of the Reforged Warhound (pictured at the head of this post and actually a skin for the Jackal mount), which is sold separately at a cool 2000 Gems, you can't buy the precise skin you want. In much the same way that DBG has been selling EQ2 Mercenaries for years, you buy an "Adoption Certificate" that grants you a random skin. Massively, predictably, attempted to equate this with lockboxes but there's a very significant difference that largely invalidates the comparison: you cannot duplicate skins by this method. You are guaranteed a unique skin that you do not already own every time you redeem a certificate.

One of the very, very few skins that actually makes the mount look like a different animal.
Credit to Dulfy for the image - that's her riding it, too.

Dulfy has a preview of all the skins. Most of them are so dull I find it hard to believe I would even know anyone was using one. A few are a lot more obvious, usually because they're on fire or have some kind of aura effect, but the underlying problem from my perspective, other than that I don't like mounts to begin with, is that they are skins.

"Skin" seems to be a concept derived from outside of MMOs entirely (other than EVE, but repainting a spaceship has a very different philosophical import to reskinning an animal). In every MMO I've played before GW2 mounts are individual creatures or devices.

The idea that you could keep the same mount but slap a different look on it just seems weird to me although the extreme commercial benefit it represents over having to make actual new mounts is obvious. And, of course, it is exactly what other MMOs do when they add new mounts that use the old frameworks - they just don't present it so baldly, artificially and unromantically.

It's all part and parcel of the ANet approach that makes resisting the temptation to give them money so very easy for me. I actually like the random element of the Adoption Certificates. I love the idea of not knowing what I'm going to get. 400 Gems is a fair price. I can afford it and I'd pay it - if I was told I was buying a new mount.

For a skin for the mount I already have,though? Nope. Not interested. I managed just fine with the basic glider until I bought the Magic Carpet and the Broom and in both cases it was the fact that the purchase added the function of flight to an item I owned or wanted that attracted me, not the ability to add the look of the item to a function I already owned.

It's a fine difference I know but it matters to me, if not so much to the many, many people excitedly discussing the new skins in Lions Arch map chat last night. One player said it was the best $120 he'd ever spent. Another said that getting the new skins was the most excited he'd been about a present since he got a bike for Christmas when he was eight years old.

However sniffy I might be about them, I think we're going to be seeing a lot more mount skins from now on.

Saddle Up: GW2

Any good intentions I might have had yesterday about sticking to the storyline or following the plot blew away like dust in the desert wind. Before I lit out for the horizon I did manage to stay on rails for the second chapter, which concluded with the entire city council of Amnoon delegating the decision over who to ally with in the looming God-War to a three-foot tall gremlin in a romper suit.

At least on my screen it did. You may cut a more impressive figure. I chose to take my first pass through Path of Fire on my heal-specced druid on the grounds that it takes an army to kill him. That's working as intended but it does have the unfortunate side-effect of adding an entirely unintentional comedy element to the cut scenes as powerful entities threaten or defer to someone who looks like nothing so much as the winner of the "Ugliest Toddler" competition at a down-at-heel holiday camp.

Without heading too far into spoiler territory, I do find the underlying political assumptions of the current storyline to be both disturbing and hard to swallow. Whoever's writing this stuff appears to have a roiling contempt for democratic process or accountability.

Elected officials are corrupt, incompetent, narcissistic or self-serving by default. Due process is trampled gleefully by strong-willed individuals while those elected or appointed to make decisions race to throw difficult choices into the lap of the Player Character, who they sometimes barely know even by reputation.

It's early days but as yet I see little to no evidence of the reported stronger, more believable plot. It's the usual thrown-together farrago. The voice acting has improved, I will say that.

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that I got distracted even sooner than I did in Heart of Thorns. The structure of PoF, inarguably closer to that of the base game than the previous expansion, strongly encourages it.

So far I haven't seen any clear sign of the kind of map-wide meta that ANet have employed as standard in every single map since Dry Top. Instead we appear to be much closer to the original conception of a vast world exploding with "events", some of which overlap, some of which interact, some of which stand alone.

I make this - most likely inaccurate and uninformed - assessment after around fifteen hours of gameplay. It's going to take two or three times that before I feel ready for a solid "First Impressions" piece. Path of Fire is both packed and sprawling. It's going to take some time getting used to.

Without the story as a crutch I came up with something of my own to lean on as I meandered across the maps. Mounts are a key feature - arguably the key feature - of this second expansion and their very existence, something which would go unremarked in almost any other MMO, has been highly controversial.

ANet rarely state outright that they'll "never" do something. The exceptions so far have been more levels and tiers of gear. They certainly didn't say they'd "never" bring mounts to the game but they made it clear they didn't believe mounts were a good fit for Tyria. And now here they are.

They are "proper" mounts in MMO terms. They increase your run speed and you can see yourself sitting on them which are the two defining criteria of the feature as its generally understood.

Very annoyingly, despite loud complaints in the short beta, the mounts also have momentum. This is
intended to add "realism" but what it mainly adds is motion sickness. It doesn't have much of an effect on me but Mrs Bhagpuss, like many players, albeit a minority, couldn't use the first Raptor mount for more than a minute or two before she had to stop playing altogether.

Partly because of that and partly out of general curiosity I decided to get all the mounts and see if any of them were less wobbly than the others. There is some gating on acquiring them but nothing that can't easily be vaulted.

There are four main types - Raptor, Springer, Skimmer and Jackal. You get one in each of the first four maps. You have to find the vendor - who, it turns out, is always a "Heart" NPC. You also need to meet certain mastery requirements before the vendors will sell to you.

For reasons of cussedness and immersion I decided to get all of them without looking anything up out of game. Then, largely because I'd already decided I didn't much like the way mounts handled, I thought I'd do it all without using the mounts themselves.

It turns out that, despite what the NPCs tell you, you can get by perfectly well for the most part without using any kind of mount at all. There are a lot of places where you are clearly meant to use a Springer or a Raptor but where gliding will do just as well and if you have the kind of ferocious regenerative and healing capacity of my druid, you can outheal most of the poison damage riding a Skimmer is supposed to negate.

I had little difficulty getting any of the mounts. I ran blithely across Crystal Oasis into Desert Highlands for the Springer then backtracked to Elon Riverlands for the Skimmer. To find them I just roamed around lifting the fog of war on my map until the Heart icons showed then went to each as it appeared to see if it had the mount. I did also speak to a couple of "Scout" NPCs for directions, which is probably the first time I've done that since a week after launch.

All three of those maps were a total delight to explore - visually stunning, vast, complex and fascinating. I opened the few waypoints on each then carried to Desolation. Desolation is aptly named. It makes Orr look like an ornamental garden. I would not say it was a joy to explore but it wasn't that hard either. Just wearing on the eyes.

The Jackal mount vendor is on a fragment of a ruined palace floating in the sky because of course he is. The scout nearby tells you quite specifically that you won't be able to reach him without a trained Skimmer or Springer. He's wrong.

There's a tower not too far away that has an external spiral staircase. It's surrounded by poisonous gas and flame traps spew fire at you all the way up the stairs. As if that wasn't enough the force of the jets can knock you off the tower and any wildlife you agro on the way in pursues you all the way to the top.

It took me a while. I got knocked off twice. The first time I was high enough up for the fall to be fatal. I had to use a revive orb for that one - well, I didn't have to but it saved me a ten-minute run back to the tower.

In the end I made it to the top with a veteran abomination and a couple of hangers-on in hot pursuit. They'd finished off the Stone Spirit - something else I haven't used since shortly after launch -  that I'd planted at the bottom of the staircase to act as a speed-bump but it lasted long enough to give me a moment to orient myself before launching myself into the air.

It's a long glide but I made it with a second or two to spare. From the platform below the ruined palace its just a disorienting jog upwards against what seems to be an endless river of sludge to the top. I started off by trying to climb up the guardrail to avoid the flow but it turns out the gas or liquid or whatever it is isn't toxic and doesn't impede your progress so I just waded through it with my head  occasionally disappearing below the surface.

Safe at the summit I spoke to the NPC who trains the jackals. He appears to have been on a recent over-zealous health and safety training course because he point blank refuses to let you try a Jackal without providing evidence you can already handle either a Springer or a Skimmer to its fullest capacity.

There's a Mastery threshold in other words. Since I'd been picking up Mastery points all the way down the maps I did in fact have the necessary points banked. I could have spent them and picked up my Jackal but his attitude annoyed me so I decided to wait a while.

I was satisfied with Proof of Concept. You can indeed get all four of the mounts without having to use any of the mounts. There is a lot of content that does require you to use a mount but as far as I can see it's only in the way you had to use the various "Aspects" in Dry Top.

The Springer is for going up vertical surfaces. The Raptor is for going across gaps. The Skimmer is Poison protection. The Jackal is a key to use teleport gates. They may look like mounts but they are basically the same movement gimmicks we've been using since the Bazaar of the Four Winds.

There is a fifth mount that looks a lot more interesting: the Griffon. This is a "hidden" mount (i.e. unpublicized before launch) that's acquired by means of a collection. I haven't read up on it yet but I have a feeling it might be the only mount I'll end up using regularly, even if all it is really turns out to be is a fancy glider skin.

Especially if that. Gliding is the best form of movement GW2 has. I see nothing so far in this expansion to prove otherwise.

Fly, My Pretties! : GW2

Two years ago, red desert sand replaced white alpine snow as the backdrop for World vs World. There was no explanation for the (deeply unpopular) change, which appeared to have absolutely no connection, either thematic or lore, to the jungle-themed Heart of Thorns expansion of which it was nominally a part.

ArenaNet were very clearly aware of the discontinuity. Someone was either amused or uncomfortable enough about the whole thing to script a couple of conversations in which NPCs question each other about who built all the towers and where they might have gone. Naturally none of those NPCs comes up with any kind of explanation.

The Mists, the realm where the endless struggle over territory between worlds takes place, has always been something of a mystery. According to the wiki, they are "the oldest thing in existence, the proto-reality that exists between the worlds, constituting the fabric of time and space that connects the multiverse together."

The entry goes on to tell us that "The Mists resonate from the worlds around them, forming bits of their own reality - islands of existence that reflect the histories of their worlds." The Mists are a reality but not the reality, which is handy, because it means anything can happen there and no-one has to tell us why. Or how.

Rytlock Brimstone went to The Mists and came back changed. Changed into a new Class, The Revenant, one of HoT's key selling points. Far from explaining how that might have happened, the writers turned not explaining it into both a plot point and a meme - "Later, Cub".

At the time, the vast majority of WvW players were so incensed with the supposed unplayability of the new map that not even the few who acknowledged the game even had any lore cared to speculate on where that hated map might have originated. When anyone did comment on the provenance the general assumption seemed to be that the Desert Borderland was a rejected or surplus PvE map from the expansion that arrived at the same time.

That theory was given considerable credence by the design and structure of the map itself. It seemed to have been created with gliding, a signature feature of Heart of Thorns, very much in mind. The entire map is riven by cliffs and fissured with clefts. Rope bridges cross canyons, steps descend dizzyingly from blue skies to dark shadows. Anyone who has learned to glide in the vine-clogged Maguuma depths yearns to glide in the clear, free air here.

And now we can. In a move many had long requested but few probably believed would ever come, out of the blue Anet have enabled gliding in World vs World. The response from WvW veterans has been predictably curmudgeonly and the addition of gliding is only "a test for gliding in WvW. If we discover with this test that gliding is not appropriate for WvW, we will disable it". Enjoy it while you can.

I foresee unexpected consequences by the barrow-load. Gliding hasn't just been enabled for the Desert Borderland, for which it is eminently suited, but for the old Alpine Borderlands as well. I can immediately think of a whole raft of previously unreachable areas that could open up with just a short flight and if I can think of them you can bet our Commanders are already drawing up lists of spots to place siege where no-one can destroy it and our Mesmers are plotting their new, impregnable hidey-holes.

And that's only thinking of the borderline "fair use" problems that will need to be addressed by changes to code or structures. I'm sure there will be a slew of flat-out exploits for the spies and cheats and hackers to enjoy at our expense as well.

Still, I'm really looking forward to Tuesday, 8th August, the day my glider will unfurl in The Mists for the first time ever. My Elementalist will be riding her Magic Carpet into battle and with luck I might finally stop dying when I misjudge the drop as I jump off the cliff in a mad dash from Citadel to save North West Tower.

All of which is very well, but once again it begs the lore question. Why have our gliders started to work when they never did before? Why is it that they only work around structures we control? Who's behind all this?

Well, did you know that according to legend the only current access to The Mists comes courtesy of none other than... Balthazar? I didn't. According to the wiki "...the only known fixed means of entering the Mists is within Lion's Arch, which is said to contain a portal with a bluish hue made by Balthazar which fluctuates between different places of the Mists".

Balthazar, the very same rogue god - the God of War, let's not forget - currently filling the Main Villain slot in both the Living Story and the Path of Flame expansion. How intriguing that both gliding and Legendary Armor, another key feature of Heart of Thorns, should come to The Mists just as the God who gave us access to them strides to the fore.

And think about this: if it hadn't been for the intense player pushback that forced Anet into a U-turn, right now all the borderlands (save Eternal Battlegrounds) would feature a desert map that looks for all the world as though it fell, not from the Heart of Maguuma, but straight out of the forthcoming expansion.

It never made any kind of sense for the Desert Borderland map to have been a rejected design from the jungle-themed Heart of Thorns development cycle but it fits right in with everything we've seen from The Crystal Desert, where we're going in September. There's one screen shot that looks almost identical to Air Keep and Fire Keep could be Balthazar's Summer Palace.

Is it too much to imagine all this was planned out before the last expansion? That at least some of what looks from the outside to be fractured, reactive, pragmatic might in fact be considered, patient, imaginative? That somewhere in ANet Towers there remains at least a vestige of the rumored ten-year plan?

Pretty to think so.

Give A Dog A Bad Name... : GW2, EverQuest

Here's a controversial proposition: Heart of Thorns was a good expansion.

I know, I know...it stalled GW2's commercial progress dead in its tracks, almost killed World vs World for good and ended up having to be nerfed into the ground to appease the pitchfork-and-torch-waving crowd.

For an encore, six months later Colin Johanson, the guy responsible for HoT's design and direction and the game's prime mover, fell on his Legendary Greatsword and left the company. From that point on GW2 has been in recovery and repair mode, trying to fix the damage wrought by the first, botched xpack.

Or so the narrative goes. Factually that's not an inaccurate summary. Only problem is, it misrepresents almost the entirety of my experience in the jungle itself.

From the day I first stepped into the sweltering heat of the Maguuma heartland I was having fun. Yes, it was a tad over-tuned to begin with but not unusually so. Almost all MMO expansions come in hard and soften up later.

Benchmarked against the harshest expansion I've ever slogged through, EverQuest's notorious Gates of Discord, HoT isn't just a walk in the park; it's a sun-lounger on the beach with an ice-cold beer in your  hand and a chillout mix on your iPod.

Okay, unfair comparison. GoD was not just hellishly hard; it was actually broken. The developers knew that but released it anyway. John Smedley later called it SOE's "worst mistake in five years." and despite many unwitting attempts to unseat it since, GoD still  wears the crown.

Giant Bomb has an excellent overview of the expansion itself, with a coda that partially explains just why EQ players who were there recall the game's seventh expansion with a sense of horror:

"... the seventh expansion ... was largely unfinished with many encounters either not working properly or simply unbeatable. It was later revealed that the development team built much of the expansion's content with the idea in mind that the level cap would increase to 70, but that did not happen."

Well, that would make a difference, wouldn't it? What's more:

"GoD brought about an entire overhaul of EverQuest's graphics engine, issues with the world's geometry were affected throughout the world of Norrath, both new zones and old.

This is why Daybreak's new Undercover Classic server, Agnarr, stops at the sixth expansion, right before the gates to disaster open. A shame, really, because once they'd fixed it, and with its companion, eighth expansion Omens of War in place (the one that actually had the level cap increase) it turned out to be a pretty good era as Norrathian adventures go.

Too late. Too late. Reputation once lost is hard to recover, ironically.

The main reason I'm thinking about this right now is that I finally applied my half-price HoT code to one of my two base-game-only accounts. I figured with the second expansion almost certain to arrive before the end of the year, dragging free HoT access for all behind it like a White Elephant no-one's going to be allowed to refuse, I might as well get the benefit while there was still some paid value left.

I wasn't particularly relishing it. Not because I don't like Heart of Thorns; I always liked it. Check pretty much any of my many posts on the topic. The tone is bemused but happy. I never expected to like it but it turned out I did.

In the year and a half the expansion's been with us I've only completed the main story-line once. It's okay. About as good as any other ANet story. Faint praise, I know.

What I have done, though, is explore the entire jungle to a degree I have still never managed with Core Tyria to this day. I have Heart of Maguuma map completion in multiple zones on multiple characters and I loved doing it.

I've done the lengthy Ascended Weapon "collections" ("quests", translated from Anet Newspeak) on every class and I really loved doing those. I've filled out almost all the Masteries and the few I haven't I've only left because I don't feel I'll ever need them. Most of those, again, I thoroughly enjoyed doing.

There's more. On top of all that designated content I've spent hundreds of hours over the last couple of years just gliding the updrafts in Verdant Brink for sheer joy. I've spent happy winter evenings doing the ninety-minute Dragon Stand event, not because I needed anything from it but because it's bloody good fun.

Even so, I was a little apprehensive about returning to the Heart of Maguuma on a fresh account.

The thing about modern MMO design is that all your characters bar the first are twinked by design.
Once I'd run one character through the entire storyline and opened all the maps, every character on the account could take advantage of the enhanced travel and survival options. Not only did I know where everything was, I knew all the shortcuts and had all the passes and permissions. It got easier and easier each time - and as I said I dispute the widespread belief that it was ever very difficult in the first place!

Going back to yesterday's post on Survival games and how they key into progression mechanics that have always worked well for me, it shouldn't have been the surprise it was to find out that Heart of Thorns without all the shortcuts is even more fun than I remembered. Having to get around with only the most basic gliding skill, the one that only keeps you aloft so long as your endurance bar lasts and that's not long at all, turns out to be exciting, satisfying and entertaining.

Not being able to just bounce on a mushroom to get up a cliff, having instead to work out the paths, dodge roll past the Pocket Raptors and glug Elixir B like cooldowns were going out of fashion - is that frustrating? The hell it is! It's thrilling.

Naturally, in the tradition of every MMO ever, your goal in having fun is to acquire the means to avoid having to have the fun you're having ever again. As my Mastery points accrue and my xp bar fills (soooo slooooowly - must use boosts...) soon I'll be bouncing and leaning with the best of them.

That's fine. There's new kinds of fun to be had with each new skill. I'm already planning my path to becoming a Scrapper. I'll need all the tricks. After that my fourth ranger (or is she my fifth?) can get Druid.

One thing that concerned me a year or more ago was whether anyone would still be "doing" Heart of Thorns as the expansion aged. Back then it seemed unlikely.

The expected exodus may still happen one day, as the next expansion or the one after that arrives, but for now the maps are hopping - and not just with Itzel. Anet have done a sound job of tying desirable rewards to the content in both HoT and all the LS3 maps that followed.

Map chat is busy with people organizing Hero Point runs or calling out events. Better still, the improved LFG system successfully fills maps with like-minded players set on achieving specific goals. HoT's not the hysterical, overheated chaos it was for a few months after launch but it's a very long way indeed from being dead.

Tomorrow sees the latest WvW revamp. That's going to take up most of my game-time this week, I'd imagine. Then we're going on holiday for a while so I won't be playing at all.

My latest run through the jungle will have to go on hold but it's off to an excellent start. If this was Anet's "bad expansion" I can't wait to see how the next one turns out.

Up Above The Roofs And Houses : GW2

I was on Reddit last night reading the leaked/faked (delete as applicable) upcoming patch notes that supposedly reveal details of ANet's plans for server merges and other "fixes" for World vs World's many problems, when quite by chance I came across a thread entitled "Thank you ANet, for polishing Black Citadel. It's beautiful."

Putting aside my mental image of a team of ANet developers in community service fatigues hanging from the girders of The black Citadel on bucket-chairs wielding mops and dusters, I read on to learn that, as a direct result of the addition of gliding to Core Tyria, someone had taken the time and trouble to "polish up, rework the newly accessible areas a bit" and sort out "invisible walls, low res props without collision, etc that needed fixing".

The Black Citadel has always been my favorite Tyrian city. I've sung its praises before, more than once. Over the years I've poked my whiskers into its many back alleys and wild places. But I've never seen it from the air.

This evening I spent an hour exploring the old place. Honestly, I couldn't with any certainty say what parts were or weren't newly accessible. The place always was a maze. For example, I'd have said the whole perimeter of the Great Imperial Smelter would have been unreachable without a glider but as I made my way back on foot from the far side I found myself next to a vendor and next to him was a ramp going up, so maybe you always could take that tour.

It's also not impossible that you might have been able to jump down onto the jury-rigged, flat, riveted rooftop of the Gladium Canton, although I rather doubt it. In places the collision is still touch and go - I fell through what looked like a sheet of solid boiler plate steel while I was gawping at the sunset.

I purely love rooftops. There's a famous romance to the world above the houses that's been celebrated in many a book and film from Mary Poppins to Rooftoppers. As a teenager I used to take every chance I could get to climb out of a window or up a wall and sit on a roof ridge or a parapet.

I'm getting a tad past that now but my characters aren't. The roof over Gladium is a joy, although it's also an architectural disaster. I really hope no Asura "geniuses" ever happen to see it, but for atmospherics and mood it can't be beat.

There were two places I managed to reach that I'm certain weren't on the tourist trail before gliding came to Tyria. To the South of the Gladium Canton there's a sector from which the map's fog never clears because no-one was ever meant to go there.

It was scenery. Now it's a picnic spot. There's not much there except trees and grass but it makes a great staging post to swoop down on that tricky vista.

Most satisfying of all, though, was the flight I took from the ledge of the Asura Gate to Lion's Arch all the way across to the ruins of the Great Northern Wall. Those fragments of archway have taunted me for years, granite ghosts of a past that won't fade. Landing on their ledges and sitting in their shade made an old Charr feel the war was finally over.

So, yes, thank you Justin of ANet, for going above and beyond the call of duty and adding yet another paragraph to the palimpsest of The Black Citadel, the greatest city in Tyria. May her steel always shine and her roadways never rust.

Onwards And Upwards : GW2

In much the way a new year finds players making a flurry of resolutions, predictions and goals, so this is the time of year when road maps to the future begin to roll out of MMO developers offices. This week ArenaNet published some general notes towards both their Profession Balance Goals and their wider plans..

The former is easily dismissed. Every MMO I've ever played has trudged joylessly around Escher's eternal spiral of "balance" The more classes there are the wearier the trudge becomes. Developers and elite players find themselves locked in a desperate dance of nerfs and builds, each seeking to obviate the excesses of the other.

Patch notes increasingly resemble medieval disquisitions on the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. Most players tune out entirely, while those who try to decipher the hieroglyphs find their eyes glazing over around the third bullet point.

Whatever the actual changes, once the emergency patches and server restarts required to fix the most egregious errors are done, we all settle back and wait for the grognards to codify the new meta, which we then religiously adopt (with amendments because we all know better). A few weeks later the developers shake the bag and pull out new tiles and the whole miserable process begins over again.

So, forget about that. The broader picture outlined in Colin Johanson's pretentiously titled (yes, I know, I can talk...) State of the Game Update is much more interesting, especially the part where he says

2016 will also be a turning point in the type of development we do for Guild Wars 2

Spin it how you will, this is an admission of defeat. Go back and read the mission statements on cadence and Living Story. Or just read this quote from Colin back in 2013:

Our goal is to make Guild Wars 2 the most frequently updated and best supported game experience you can find, and to that end, every two weeks there will be a release with brand new playable content and a mix of supporting features and updates across the entire game.

How did that work out for you then? Probably about as well as this:

Expansions are definitely something that we’ll potentially look at in the future," he explained. "We don’t have a timetable on it. We’re open to it, but I think our major focus as a studio is making the living world concept as strong as possibly can for the players that we’ve got.

All of which is why any road map that talks about content or changes further ahead than, say, a couple of months needs to be taken with an economy sized bag of salt.

We should at least be able to rely on the frontlisted changes coming in the first of the new Quarterly Updates. It's happening in two weeks, after all. Quarterly also sounds like a much more manageable cadence, doesn't it? Maybe it's one they'll be able to handle this time.

The big ticket announcement for Winter 2016 is Gliding In Central Tyria. We're calling it "Central Tyria" now, then? Not Core Tyria? Not Pact Tyria? Oh, wait, that's not the "big" part of the announcement, is it?

This is quite a surprise. When other MMOs have introduced free flight to older zones it's generally required a deal of background work and preparation. While many GW2 players probably hoped, even expected, this day would come, I imagine most thought they'd have a longer wait than a mere three months on from the launch of the first glider over Magus Falls.

Of course, gliding isn't flight. Gliders can only go downwards, unless there's a handy updraft nearby. Merely by declining to add those mysterious swirls of rising air developers can presumably avoid much of the heavy work required to reshape old zones for flight.

As someone pointed out in a conversation on Dulfy (or was it Reddit?) after Rubi Bayer's initial teaser, most jumping puzzles go up. To preserve the notional integrity of JPs and vistas all that's really needed is an updraft exclusion zone in the immediate area.

Somewhat to my surprise I really, really enjoy gliding in Heart of Thorns. I've spent more time than I like to admit simply gliding around Verdant Brink for the sheer, exhilarating fun of it, trying to see how high I can get. Much like flying in Vanguard, gliding in GW2 doesn't need much of a purpose beyond wheeeeeeeeee!

That's a plus, then. And if they add it to WvW as well, where the new maps seem to have been made specifically with gliding in mind, we could have a whole new game. Imagine dropping shells on keeps or zergs the way we bomb Mordremoth in the final battle for Dragon's Stand.

Next on Colin's tick list is a revamp of The Shatterer. For those not in the know, The Shatterer is the lieutenant of Elder Dragon Kralkatorrik. Shat's main claim to fame, apart from being the instigator of a thousand scatological puns, is his deep and abiding inability to turn his head to the right.

Every three hours or so a huge gang of players gathers on a small hillock just to the lee of his right shoulder. As he stands helplessly, roaring and rearing and breathing his crystalline breath directly ahead, the zerg indulges in fatuous, excrement-based banter as they batter away at his exposed flank. Then he dies and we take his stuff.

Presumably the plan is to re-tool the "fight" into something at least on a par with Jormag, which has two phases, takes about fifteen to twenty minutes, and at a bare minimum requires players to move about occasionally. More likely it will get an upgrade to match Tequaatl, for which a modicum of both organization and attention are required.

While it's been handy to have Shat as a punching bag all these years, even I wouldn't claim the event has ever been fun. I used to enjoy the original Tequaatl battle and even now I'd have it back in preference to the current version but I won't be sorry to see The Shatterer get a makeover.

Colin's batting two for two. Keep it up. What's next? Ah, Fractal of the Mist updates. Pass.

Okay, I do have one thing to say about that, but it comes from much later in the notes, towards the end, when Colin's moved away from the Winter Update to cover plans going through the year. At this point he confirms there will be some new fractals.

Given that fractals were first introduced, what, three years ago, and we've had the same nine ever since, you'd have to say it's about time. Oh, wait, there was that one we voted for at Kiel's election, wasn't there? Did that ever happen? I lost interest when Evon was robbed of his rightful victory.

Hmm. Looking at Colin's post I can see that if I carry on picking over it section by section this is going to overrun. By a lot. Let's skip all the WvW stuff, save to say that almost everyone I've seen or heard comment on it, who actually plays WvW regularly, thinks the upcoming changes are positive. That's a first!

The real changes for WvW, the ones that will effectively relaunch the entire game mode in a format barely recognizable, are still out there in the long grass somewhere. Until then everyone's just marking time.

What else is there? Oh yes, event credit for Healers and Support Builds. This is something that should have been an integral part of the game from launch. How is it even still a thing three and a half years on? File under "Better Late Than Never" and let's hope it actually works.

The remaining odds and ends - tweaks to squads, a new "Mist Champion" for the new sPvP map, some new key binding options - deserve a line or two in a patch note, not a paragraph each in a PR post. There is one intriguing little squib, though: The Eldvin Monastery Brew of the Month Club.

Apparently "Once a month, when visiting a major city, club members will receive a package in the mail containing that month’s finely crafted brew. After collecting all twelve brews, club members will receive a title, a brewer’s backpack skin, and a guild decoration in recognition of their devotion to the craft." So that's a Monthly Log In Reward, then, is it? See you in January 2017 with my backpack and a hangover!

All in all it's encouraging. A lot of it I'll believe when I see it, like Living Story 3 and the WvW re-envisioning but at least, on paper, it looks good. It's very nice to see the first acknowledgment that there will indeed be a second expansion, too, even if it is thrown away in a couple of passing remarks. I wonder where we'll go next?

Until then, let's enjoy the holidays. Next up: Lunar New Year. Dragonball!