Counting Crows

 

I'd forgotten Crowfall was due to launch today. MassivelyOP's announcement this morning came as something of a surprise. Bree, author of the post, and a few readers who dropped comments on the brief thread that followed, seemed more impressed a Kickstarter mmorpg had managed to launch at all than by any possibility it could be any good.

"Yes, a crowdfunded MMO with a real launch!" 

"Big grats to the team for getting the game fully released"

"Congrats on them for crossing that finish line"

The MOP piece linked to a reddit thread called "Estimated Population?" in which the OP expressed some concern over how many people would be playing. So far the thread has drawn comments from around thirty people, the majority of whom don't appear to hold very high hopes for the future of the game. 

On a more positive note, there were reports of ten or fifteen thousand viewers on Twitch and a couple of people who'd bought the Buy to Play title took a moment out from their first day frenzy to pop into the thread and offer anecdotal evidence:

"There are at least 100+ players in the starting area on US West"

 "Game was freaking popping at launch..."

I took a look at the official forums. They were very quiet but as we all know forums aren't the hot ticket they once were. There was some mention of Discord being the place where Crows might be found but I wasn't quite interested enough to join yet another Discord channel just to find out if that was true.

After a while it occured to me to check just how many people had backed the game during its Kickstarter campaign way back in 2015. It was 16,936. Someone on the reddit thread claims that in the five years since then the number "who own the game from backing the game" has ballooned to 300,000 but they don't show their workings so I have no idea whether that's true or not.

 

MassivelyOP also published a much longer and more detailed "Launch Impressions" post, authored by Andrew Ross. I was hoping for some hard data but although it's an interesting read it's more of a review of the game itself than any kind of account of how the launch is going.

Early in the piece, Andrew goes off on quite a digression about Istaria, the player-owned mmorpg that started out as Horizons a very, very long time ago. It's an unexpected comparison for Crowfall but I can see what he's getting at. 

I played Horizons in beta and for a short while after launch and I've played Istaria a few times since and written about it here on occasion. Both games have a supposedly deep crafting system with considerable inter-reliance in common. They also both feature several unusual non-human player races. 

It had completely slipped my mind, if indeed I ever knew, that Horizons was originally planned as a PvP title. It was pure PvE by the time I got into beta and as far as I know it's been PvE evers since. The comparison does raise the question, re-iterated by a number of commenters in various threads I've seen, of whether deep crafting systems and a PvP focus really go together or not.

The relative success of games like EVE and Albion Online prove the wolves and the sheep can co-exist but two titles in twenty years isn't all that much of an evidence base. Maybe there are more but those are the two people always seem to quote.

From the thirty levels of tutorial I saw in beta I find it difficult to imagine Crowfall attracting a similar audience. There are a lot of PvE mmorpgs that offer a great deal more to players who aren't interested in PvP and the crafting, while it might be quite involved compared to the genre standard, still didn't seem all that original or exciting to me.  

The options for PvP players are a lot more limited but whether there's enough interest to feed the non-stop conflict the game promises very much remains to be seen. There certainly haven't yet been any of the traditional news stories about launch day queues or servers crashing under load that mmo launches often spit up, although I guess we haven't hit North American prime time yet as I write this so it could still happen.

 

One thing that struck me as I read through the various threads were the number of references to the upcoming open beta for Amazon's New World. Even though I played in both the first closed beta and last year's short open test phase and have the game on pre-order, I'd forgotten it was quite this close to launch.

Most of the people who mention New World suggest that Crowfall has, at most, until that open beta begins to attract and lock down an audience. The sentiment appears to be much stronger in favor of Amazon's game, which feels like it's turned a corner in PR terms over the last year or so. 

Where much of what was being said about the game up until last summer's open testing was cynical and dismissive, what people saw there seems to have changed a lot of minds. The directional shift from open PvP to PvE with optional PvP may have angered a section of the original audience but it seems to have had much the effect Amazon presumably hoped for on the wider marketplace. Amazon have also run a strong publicty campaign in the lead-up to launch, which is something no-one could claim on behalf of Crowfall.

The closely-spaced launch of the two mmorpgs reminds me a little of the summer of 2012, when Funcom opened the doors to The Secret World just weeks before the arrival of Guild Wars 2. I remember a lot of people back then saying they were giving TSW that window to prove itself before they made the switch. The winner of that contest was plain before the year was out.

There are also, of course, several other mmorpgs due to launch in the same summer window this year. Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis is already here, Swords of Legend Online is due later this month and Bless Unleashed follows in August. None of those is likely to trouble either Crowfall or New World and I suspect Crowfall itself will have no more of an impact on New World than the rest, either.

Unless we hear something entirely unexpected, it looks like this summer's Battle of the Mmorpgs is Amazon's to lose.

Musings On A Wet Monday Morning

A little while ago Azuriel posted some thought-provoking observations on the inherent structural problems facing the MMORPG genre. These boil down to the slipperiness of definitions and the willingness of the audience to be satisfied.

That post, which I found myself mulling over yesterday, after the sad and arguably unnecessary demise of City of Steam, was prompted by another from SynCaine, that infamous pillar of the Axis of Blogging Evil.  The Evil One was bouncing off yet another post, this time from Wilhelm at TAGN, which itself derived from what was probably no more than a routine space-filler for a slow starting year at PCGamer.

So the circle turns. Often lambasted for negativity, SynCaine is more an agent provocateur, a satirist even. Like Keen, who professed rather bizarrely only yesterday that "there’s nothing out right now except for EverQuest that comes even close to satisfying a TRUE MMORPG experience", the register is often closer to disappointment than contempt.

Theirs are the voices of gamers who are not easily satisfied. As Azuriel explains, that makes them a bad fit for MMORPGs in the first place: "I’d wager that most people that stick with the MMO genre long-term generally find one game and settle in. And why wouldn’t you?"

Sometimes you just have to find a new home.

SynCaine, in common with many other long-time bloggers and commenters and countless millions of players who choose not to share their opinions with the world, has drifted away from the genre altogether. Keen, after many, many attempts to find a home elsewhere, has ended up back where he began, or as close as he can get.

It seems most long-time MMO fans don't do that. They settle in. They settle down. They never leave.

The frenzied years of WoW tourism left us with a different impression: MMO players as a vast swarm, filling the virtual skies, whirring and scrabbling as it descends on each new, bright hope, stripping it clean and wheeling away, leaving the bones to bleach and crumble.

It happened. It still happens. Look at Blade and Soul. Game developers even expect and plan for it. People do like a new shiny. But when the swarm moves on do those bones really lie still and forgotten?

Another road to take.

It seems not. Mostly those MMOs pick themselves up and go on. Remember the hype trains of the last half-decade and change? Allods, Aion, Rift, SW:ToR, ESO, just to name a handful. All still with us. MMOs are very hard to kill (although Trion seems always to be working on new ways to test the boundaries of extinction).

Those that drop seem often to have been culled rather than to have met a natural end. Rubies of Eventide sits in someone's wardrobe, a ball taken home. Tabula Rasa and Helgate:London lost their nerve. Star Wars Galaxies didn't fit the portfolio. City of Heroes was making good money, well-populated and popular, just not enough for corporate targets. City of Steam was scuppered by technology and poor decisions.

WildStar may be the next big beast to fall. It probably won't make it, so everyone says. Missed its market, misjudged its targets, mismanaged its way to the cliff's edge. Take your pick. It's not gone yet, though. Nor is Firefall, another of those MMOs you wonder just who plays and which underwent many of the same trials and still does.

I played it for a while. I might again. I never gave Red 5 any money, though, because I am the problem not the solution. I pay money every month to Daybreak Games, whose games I don't play all that often because I'm busy playing every MMO that catches my attention for free. That great long list of installed MMOs I have, growing week by week, earns no-one anything much. I'm not a rational consumer. Don't survey me.

It's no good looking back.

And yet someone must be paying, somewhere. As I was thinking about this yesterday I remembered a few MMOs I played long ago. With sunsets in mind I thought perhaps I ought to revisit a few before the chance was past. Perhaps the chance was already past. That's happened to me before.

Not this time. Anyone remember Eden Eternal? I doubt it. I mostly remember it because it let me play a giant cartoon mouse. Well, it's still there if I feel like doing that again. It's only five years old though, a mere stripling. What about Regnum? Once also known as Realms Online and now known as Champions of Regnum but still the same game. I had a short and happy frolic there and look, here it is. Next year it will have been running for a decade. It's even on Steam.

Ah yes, Steam. There, perhaps, is a partial explanation for this fountain of youth the genre seems to have found. Only partial, of course. The core reason for the insane longevity of even the most apparently unappealing MMOs is surely, as Azuriel says, that some people never leave. Even so, attrition must wear them all down over time. An infusion of new blood is necessary if the corpse is to keep on shambling.

Even when it seems you're all alone.

I'm new to Steam but I'm fast beginning to see its attractions, both to players and producers alike. My Library, which stood at no games at all for years, then one for twelve months, now has three. Thanks to SynCaine (him again) I downloaded Sunless Sea, which is not an MMO, even by the broadest definition. Its predecessor, Echo Bazaar (later known as Fallen London), which I played for a while and for which I made my Twitter account, something then required, arguably was. Is. It, of course, is also still running.

I played 19 minutes. By the time I got around to playing again my free weekend pass had expired. I'm not sure I'll play Sunless Sea again - it's a bit more of a "game" than interests me and a bit less of a story - but I'm sold on the ease of access.

One of the annoying things about trying new MMOs is all the form filling, the registering, the passwords and so forth. Steam circumvents much of that and if for no other reason I will likely end up using it as a portal for MMOs that use it. Like, perhaps, Knight Online, a game I have never before considered trying, a game that launched in the same year as WoW but which has only arrived on Steam in 2016, a dozen years later.

And your past glories mean nothing.

This isn't going anywhere in particular. I'm just talking out loud, working things through. We'll come back to this, over and again, I'm sure.

There are all these MMOs, you see. Some people start playing them and never stop so the games keep rolling along and as they go they pick up more players as others drop off. Meanwhile game companies look at them, see them there, keeping on going, and think "we'd like some of that" and make more. And people start playing those and some of them keep playing...

There are a lot of people in the world. The internet is endlessly accommodating. There is no clear reason why any of this would stop unless the critical mass of people interested in playing this type of game falls below a viable threshold and who knows what that threshold might be? It's clearly not very large if Istaria and Ryzom can survive and even prosper.

There's always a new dawn just over that hill.

The whole thing clearly isn't going to come to an end just because a lot of people lose interest, get bored or disenchanted and wander off. There are, after all, as noted, a lot of people in the world, more every day, and most of them haven't even had the chance yet to be bored by an MMO. They still have that life-experience ahead of them.

So, yes, some MMOs will go under. As the years wear on more ghosts will walk. Changes in fashion, taste, technology and definition may slow the flow of newcomers from production and consumption both but will the stream be dammed entire? I wouldn't bet on that.

I'm thinking the trick is to attach to the genre and not become overly infatuated with the individual games but that, of course, is impossible. It's always going to hurt when one you love falls. It's comforting to know there are so many but there's always that one, isn't there?  Not to love isn't a response.

The more I consider this the less I understand. It's magic, after all. One morning I'll wake and like fairy gold it will all be gone. Until then, we're rich. Let's enjoy it.

A Shoulder Pet Is For Life, Not Just For Gnomekindle : Istaria

Telwyn at GamingSF asks what it takes to tempt a player to log in over the Christmas holidays. For him, the double xp extravaganza offered by Daybreak Games for EQ2 did the job.

I also managed a little light leveling in Norrath over the weekend, a mentored-down run through Karnor's Castle that took my Warlock to level 94. Even with full vitality, server-granted double xp, a 20% Veteran bonus and a 110% xp potion running, though, leveling in the 90s is slooooooow.

Istaria's extensive map.

On Yak's Bend apparently all it takes to get people to log on after the presents have been opened is a superstar Commander running riot across the borderlands. WvW, about which I have much to say that I'm still formulating, slipped into a deep, deep malaise for many weeks after the release of Heart of Thorns but slowly, ever so slowly it appears to be reviving.

Last year, when The Bend was under enormous pressure as a very unwelcome addition to Tier 2, Christmas Day saw a miraculous change of fortune. There seems to be some desire to turn this into an annual tradition even though our current, unexpected position as top WvW server NA hardly justifies the effort.


I did spend some time in The Mists over the holidays but I spent a lot more in Magus Falls and just about all of Christmas Sunday was taken up with Wintersday achievements for my third account and an orgy of bank sorting that lasted almost eight hours. I know how to have fun, don't let anyone tell you otherwise!

No, the one thing that tempted me not just to go online over the winter break but also to patch up and log in to an MMO I haven't looked at for a long time was a simple press release. Every year whoever it is that runs Istaria (the game that, as Syp points out, might as well never have changed its name from Horizons) sends me a catch-up email detailing all the things that have happened to the game during the year.

Anyone up for Christmas at the beach?

It always makes me curious enough at least to visit the website, which is looking better-maintained and more attractive than ever, with forums that show a lively and current interest in the game. This time the lure of a Winter holiday event offering "shoulder pets" was incentive enough to get me to hit Play.

Well, I would just have hit Play, had Istaria been one of the many MMORPGs I'd included in The Great Updating a few weeks back. Ironically, even though the icon is right there on my desktop, I skipped it because, to quote myself, Istaria is one of the MMOs "I really can't see myself getting back to any time soon". Twerp.

Logic problem.

The first hurdle was finding my account. Not my account details, which I have safely recorded, but my actual account. Istaria is technically F2P although, based on the large number of subscription-required Dragon players I always see whenever I visit, my suspicion is that most of the playerbase is paying to play.

Last September, apparently, the management re-organized the F2P offer so that you need to log in once a month to keep your free account active. If you have an old, free account it remains valid and your character remains safely mothballed but you need to go to the account page and reactivate it before you can patch and play.

With that sorted out there was the inevitable hefty patch. That took half an hour. Eventually, though, there I was in an all-too-familiar position: staring bemusedly at a screen full of icons that no longer signify. Fortunately, Istaria is a very old-school MMO that uses very familiar controls. It all comes back quite quickly and painlessly, even how to use that weird, floating flying saucer thing that carries your heavy loot.

What turned out to be a lot harder was finding the darned winter festival itself. Of course, if I'd read the press release or the update notes with anything like my full attention I'd have known it was all happening in somewhere called New Koraelia, which would at least have given me a hint on where to go. I found that out about an hour in with the help of Google and the excellent Istaria Wiki.

Hmm. This looks familiar.

In my last two attempts to play Istaria I have never left the starting areas of Spirit Isle and New Trismus. I hadn't quite appreciated just how big the world of Istaria is. When I scrolled the world map all the way out it was pretty impressive. And daunting.

Fortunately, Istaria also has an extensive teleportation system using large, shimmering portals that look very, very similar to Asura Gates. They are at the same time more and less convenient than the Tyrian equivalent, offering menus and prices and multiple options.

It took me some considerable time and concentration to work out which station I needed for the next connection. Before I finally found myself standing at the foot of the long slope up through the snow to New Koraelia's Winter Festival grounds I first visited Kion, the desert home of Istaria's cat people (why is my character not one of those?).

Kion, City of Saris. Or should that be Kion, Kitty of Kats?

I wandered around there for a while, picking up a quest or two and appreciating the newly-added ambient sounds and behaviors of the locals. Cat people are scary when they growl. After a brief visit to a balmy palm-fringed crescent isle just off shore, to which I walked, underwater, there being no swimming in Istaria, eventually I stopped lollygagging and got on with it.

Istaria's winter festival is run by Gnomes (Why isn't my character a gnome? I don't remember but I'm guessing racial choice is limited for F2P accounts). It's called Gnomekindle, which raises disturbing images of gnomes being set on fire, and is a recent innovation according to Hermey Misfit Gnome (actual name) who sent me to visit the Elves to find out what a real Winter Festival might be like.

Oh come on, that's Felwithe. It's even called Feladan ffs!

Well, that set off another bout of portal travel, taking to me to an impressive city filled with what must be High Elves rather than the usual Wood variety. It reminded me of Felwithe. A lot. The elves there were typically flowery and patronizing as they described their ancient traditions in rich and convincing detail. I did wonder why we weren't celebrating with them instead of decorating trees and feeding reindeer with "Mayor and Mrs Clause". Then again, who would you rather spend Christmas with, Gnomes or Elves?

As a level 11 Scout it turned out there wasn't a whole lot I could do to help after I'd returned to Hermey with the elves' encouraging words. Most of the Gnomekindle quests I acquired seemed to require the dismantling of golems or slaughter of winter wolves that could send me back to my bind spot in a matter of seconds.

Never ask an elf a question if you haven't got half an hour to spare.

There was one quest to kill Treants that I could manage, though, because I remembered killing plenty of treants back in New Trismus and supposedly any Treants would do, even the saplings. Back to New Trismus I went, where I competed for a while with a young dragon for the small spawn of walking trees.

The dragon player was clearly trying to communicate with me, presumably with a view to sharing treant-killing duties, but Istaria has an arcane conversation interface that I have yet to fathom and while I was fiddling with the controls trying to get a signal he finished his wood-chopping and vanished, leaving me with the spawn all to myself.

Istaria, the only MMO with proper snowdrifts.

Just as well because the quest requires fifty bits of wood and it's not a guaranteed drop. Probably seventy or so treants will have to die before I get the planks I need. That's a lot of grinding and even then it'll only gets me a couple of Express Checks at most. I need three to buy a snazzy red santa suit from Dolly Day.

Luckily the treants also drop blue ornaments, the currency required by the gnome who sells shoulder pets. I think he wants seventy or so. Treant kills are probably going to run into three figures before I get there if my interest doesn't run out first.

You just decorated the one tree then, Hermey? Ran out of treants did you?

I do like Istaria. It's surprisingly visually pleasing for such an ancient MMO and the old school game systems are comfortable and reassuring. There always seem to be plenty of players flitting about, many of them dragons, which makes the place seem lived in despite the total radio silence caused by the complete lack of anything resembling a default general chat channel.

Were there but time enough it's a world I'd like to explore. Sadly the days are too small for all the fun there is to fill them. I hope to get my shoulder pet, which I think should be a treant, given the provenance (and the creepiness of the other two choices - a maggot or a spider - who wants either of those two inches from their face?) but I'm not promising anything.

If anyone's looking for a well-developed, lovingly-maintained, regularly updated true old-school MMORPG, though, they could do a lot worse than try Istaria.

Normal Service Will Be Resumed When I Get Around To It : GW2, EQ2, Istaria

It's been a quiet week around these parts at least as far as blogging goes and it looks like might stay that way over the weekend. It's not due to any lack of ideas or enthusiasm - just time.

What time I have been able to find has gone straight to playing, which I guess is a good thing. In GW2 there's been one heck of a tussle going on in The Mists all week. T2 has turned into a right old grudge match and it's been hard not to spend every available minute manning the cannons or walking the yaks. Anything less feels like slacking.

Then there's the interminable Wintersday. If only I'd missed a round right at the start but no, I had to get into a perfect run of dailies every day (yes, even Christmas Day) on both accounts. Now I'm stuck on some kind of self-inflicted "I've started so I'll finish" treadmill. So unlike me. Well, I have been ill.

Thank the gods the Charr don't believe in that I never got going on Frostfell this year. As Wilhelm observed, Frostfell is still going, too. What is it with MMO holidays? Why do they always have to limp on and on? Especially the midwinter ones. Oh well, only another few days.

Speaking of EQ2, the other factor mitigating against blogging this weekend is the 150% bonus xp bonanza for subscribers members that just began. It's too tempting to ignore and I really should try and hit 100.

Istaria has cat-people? When did that happen?

For some reason I derailed myself a while back by maxing Weaponsmith and I've barely logged in since. I think somehow it flipped some kind of "I've finished" switch in the same way filling my free player Labor Points bar did in ArcheAge (which I also would like to get back to playing, some time).

There's nothing remotely rational about such reactions. They aren't choices or decisions. They just occur. It's disturbing how frequently an apparently innocuous, often quite positive event in an MMO, particularly the completion of a personal goal, leads to my interest in playing that game dissipating. I bet that's something developers don't allow for in their retention plans - or maybe they do and I just set unexpectedly achievable goals. 

I hardly help the situation by diversifying yet further into more MMOs but I'm doing that too, of course. The time that I could and otherwise probably would have spent playing EQ2 this month has mostly gone to Istaria. Yes, that old thing.

The reason that came about was serendipitous. Or is that fortuitous? Co-incidental? Whatever, I didn't plan on doing it, that's for sure. I bought Horizons on release and although I never played it to any meaningful degree it looks as though I must have used my regular email address to sign up (something I absolutely never do - or haven't for a decade and more. Shows how long ago it must have been) because since the game, renamed Istaria, came under its current management some years back, I get a kind of Annual Report every December that outlines what has been added to the game during the year.

The bells! The bells!

It's always impressive. This year it was impressive enough that I was goaded into downloading it for, what, the fourth time? Every other attempt at playing Istaria lasted just a session or two but this time round I seem to be making some progress. Level 9 in my main combat skill at least! I may just stick at it a while. It would be nice to see something past the first zone.

So, just a set of excuses for why I haven't written much lately. Next week Mordremoth returns in the latest Living Story hiccup and towards the end of January there's the heavily-trailed Future of GW2 reveal at Pax South. That should generate plenty of commentary, complaint and speculation even if I am futzing around in a couple of decade-old has-beens and never-weres instead.

Plus there's an Istaria report to put together. I think I need to get a little further for that, though. Meanwhile, those damned handbells won't ring themselves...

The Cat In The Hat Strikes Back : GW2, Istaria

I had a few ideas of things I might write about this morning. There was the unexpected email from Istaria, the game that used to be called Horizons, David Allen's much-hyped MMO from 2003, which failed horribly at launch but refused to die. Not only is it still up and running but apparently it's thriving. "We've grown by leaps and bounds this year...Last year was the best ever for us here at Virtrium", they say, which is great news, not only for Virtrium's employees and Istaria's players but for all friends of the form.

We hear a lot of bad news about MMOs closing down, development studios downsizing and projects stalling. Massively dutifully reports each brief press release as one F2P bucket-shop MMO after another takes down the sign and closes the door. When a game who's name we might actually recognize,Vanguard, say, or City of Heroes, some MMO we might have a dim memory of once having played or having thought about playing, when such an MMO sets a sunset date, the blogosphere incandesces with outrage, schadenfreude and despair.

Such news strengthens the fears of those who feel the genre is in terminal decline, its best days long in the past, its present uncertain, its future bleak. The stream of closure stories encourages the narrative, growing in credence, that the whole industry took a bad wrong turn sometime back in the first decade of the 21st Century, when developers decided the best way to sell their games was to give them away.

I was going to say something about that, about how any narrative only tells the tale the teller wants to tell and that's half the story at best; about how the old school games we yearn for never really went away and whether we need Brad McQuaid's jam tomorrow when there's jam right here on the table today. And since Istaria is the only MMO that let's you play as a dragon I was going to work in a link to Syl. So that was one idea  might have gone with...

Then there was the comment thread that span up out of the day before yesterday's post. That raised some ideas worth pursuing and since my own replies were getting as long as blog posts anyway, why not give them room to stretch out even more? We seemed to be paring something down, examining the nuances of hardcore versus casual as something closer to a philosophy than a playstyle, considering elitism versus accessibility as a moral choice and there's much more to say in that discussion.

Then it occurred to me that here we all are, rehearsing the same arguments that must have been heard in salons and drawing rooms two centuries ago. The form changes, video games stand in for poems, but the substance remains the same. It's Romanticism versus Realism all over again, Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, the Sublime vs. the Rational.

I think my days of trying to change anyone's mind on any of this are behind me. There aren't enough oak-panelled pubs, worn leather benches and strong, continental lagers in the world to see this one through to a result that anyone's ever going to accept. As I said in the thread "If you don't intuitively feel the difference I don't think it can be explained" and as Jeromai replied "We can agree to disagree". Which, the older I get, seems less and less like the kind of compromise I once would have condemned and more and more like the right, respectful, human choice. 

Still, I could have whipped something up around that and I was thinking it over when I switched my computer, my randomized desktop background came up with this and all my plans went straight out the window:

That's an unedited screenshot from one of GW2's beta weekends, graphic glitches and all, and it says everything to me about what was lost. Forget all the stuff about horizontal or vertical progression, zerging, Living Story, one-time or repeatable events. None of that matters. 

I was a tiger in a trenchcoat and a trilby hat!

I'm sorry to have to shout but it needs to be said, loud and clear. I. Was. A. Tiger. In. A. Trenchcoat. And. A. Trilby. Hat! And yet, unbelievable though it is, it gets better than that! Wait, let me just turn around...

 I was a tiger, in a trenchcoat and a trilby hat, wearing a backpack!

A proper backpack. That you can see. That you can see and which looks like an actual backpack. I could go on (and on) about how betas are better because everything is fresh and new and everyone's excited and open-minded and optimistic and how there's something new to discover over every hill and all of that would be true but it wouldn't tell you the real secret of why betas are almost always better than the Live game when it arrives. 

It's because no-one's asked the art department to come up with yet another set of skins for some holiday or achievement or raid so no-one's wearing anything that looks like they called Liberace in to design it because Carmen Miranda was worried she'd look under-dressed playing Joan of Arc. That's why! No-one's wearing an entire, working dwarven forge for a shoulderpad. No-one has armor that's on fire or has their paws in gloves made of lava, dripping hot gobs of molten metal onto the floor. No-one has Dr. Octopus arms or metal-jointed spider legs sticking out of their back. And most especially not one single person anywhere in the entire game has a bow that fires unicorns!

 
During one GW2 beta weekend I spent a whole Sunday farming leather from skelks near the Irondock Shipyard in Plains of Ashford  to make my own leather armor and when I was done my charr ranger looked fantastic. I was so happy. What I didn't know then was that was the best he was ever going to look.

As if that wasn't enough, here's another Charr I made in beta. I can't remember the class but she's wearing Light armor and as far as I can remember she never even left Black Citadel so those are almost certainly the clothes she started in. 

 She doesn't just look great, although she does look great; she looks better than any Charr I've seen since launch. It's true that Charr probably have the worst clothes and armor in the game but in beta we were blissfully unaware of what lay in store for us. I only played Charr in beta so I can't say if all the other races also looked better back then. I bet they did, though.

Now it may well be that all of these clothes are still in the game (except for the Charr trilby hat - not that I'm bitter...) and what's more, if they are, then anyone can easily transmogrify a hideous high-level abomination back into something tasteful, but that's not the point. The point is that GW2 has a progression mechanic partly built on the acquisition of gear that varies primarily by appearance, not by power and, like almost all MMOs, that gear appears to have been put together by a motorcycle gang working from bad photocopies of designs sent to them by Kiss's stage costumier, a sensibility that doesn't sit at all comfortably, I might add, with an ever-growing mini-pet collection clearly under the direct control of a five year old girl in the grips of a fever dream.

Or, if you prefer, none of it's much to my taste. And if you don't want to see your character wearing any of the things to which you are intended to aspire, and if you can achieve the stats you need easily and early with easily attainable items, then there really isn't much of a progression mechanic at all. 

And yet, as I mentioned at the end of my previous rant, GW2 remains one of the MMOs I enjoy the most, coming in somewhere around fifth if I was to make a list of my all-time favorites. I play it all the time and plan on doing so for a long time to come. Which, I guess, proves that an MMO doesn't really need a progression mechanic at all. Or something.

Now excuse me. I'm off to transmogrify my exotics. And see if that backpack is still in game.