You Might Think This Is Funny...

This is still supposed to be an mmorpg blog, although you'd barely know it these days. The traditional kind of content Inventory Full used to feature has dropped right off. Now it's all single-player games, TV shows and music. I guess it's hardly surprising, given I'm barely playing any mmos right now. 

I'm still playing a little EverQuest II every day but that's about it. I think I've logged into Guild Wars 2 maybe twice in the last three or four weeks. If I'm honest, that's been on the cards for a while. For a few years now, just about the only thing keeping me going with GW2 has been its honored position as the only mmorpg Mrs Bhagpuss plays any more. Now she barely plays, I don't either. 

That makes it sound as though either or both of us might be done with the genre and the hobby but I don't believe we are. It's more a combination of getting the puppy, some glorious summer weather and a general lack of anything very exciting going on in the mmorpg scene right now. 

It's some contrast to this time last year, when new mmorpgs seemed to be popping up faster than I could download them and there was excitement everywhere over fresh content, expansions and controversy. No doubt those times will come again, which will at least give me plenty to write about, but they'll have
to come when the weather's less enticing and the dog's old enough to be trusted where we can't see her for extended periods.

That'll just be me, though. As for Mrs Bhagpuss, I think she might be out for the duration, at least until and unless Pantheon ever comes up with an affordable, playable option. I was going to say "ever launches" but let's not get ahead of ourselves. I'll settle for an alpha or beta buy-in package that costs less than a hundred dollars. 

We may be backsliding but the genre itself seems to be in a better place than it has been for years. World of Warcraft is facing the greatest crisis of its lifetime and it's almost certainly no co-incidence its main competitors are prospering. Final Fantasy XIV, Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2 and a few more have done very well, not picking up Blizzard's scraps so much as snatching the food from their table and running off with it.

It's long been postulated that WoW's success wrecked the prospects for the genre, raising commercial expectations to an unsustainable degree, setting restrictive paramaters for what an mmorpg could be and generally sucking all the air out of the room, as a 500lb gorilla will. It's taken a long time but maybe now we're finally beginning to get a picture of what the hobby would have looked like had WoW been the modest success that was the best everyone, even Blizzard, imagined it was capable of back in 2004.

All of this makes for a somewhat abstracted introduction to the next demo on the Next Fest list, the unattractively-named Genfanad. The name's a contraction of Generic Fantasy Adventure, which should be enough to tell you it's meant to be funny but also that it probably isn't.

I don't have a great deal of time for genre parodies of any kind but fantasy parodies are the worst. They tend to be self-indulgent, cliqueish affairs, full of smug in-jokes and obvious puns. Some of the best-known examples that I've tried - the Simon the Sorceror series comes painfully to mind - have done nothing to convince me the whole concept is anything other than A Bad Idea.

On learning that Genfanad was not only a parody mmorpg but also a Kickstarted one, I wished I'd thought twice before including it in the half-dozen I chose for this series of previews. I'd probably still have picked it anyway. It is, after all, an mmorpg and I'd feel I was being derelict in my duty by avoiding it. Also, as I suggested at the start, I could do with all the help I can get in keeping this blog on the mmorpg rails.

It was with very little enthusiasm indeed that I hit Play on Genfanad this morning, for more reasons than my dislike of the premise. Today is the hottest day of the year so far, something I realise would cause snorts of ironic amusement from readers in other parts of the world, should I be foolish enough to quote the thermometer. 

It's hot enough to make it uncomfortable for me to sit at the PC, anyway. My study is in the front of the house, which gets the full glare of the sun from sunrise until early evening and it's the second-hottest room in the house. Fortunately, I've recently revived my old Splashtop installation and refreshed the account on my ancient laptop, meaning I can, theoretically, play any game anywhere in the house.

For reasons not entirely clear, I played Genfanad sitting on a hard chair in the kitchen, laptop resting on a wooden chopping board placed across my thighs to protect me from the inevitable overheating. The dog, suffering considerably more than I from the heat, lay flat out on the wooden floor, a fan pointed straight at her. All the doors were open but there was no breeze.

In those less than ideal conditions I played Genfanad with attention and enjoyment for a whole hour, the time it took me to work through the lengthy and comprehensive tutorial that forms the first part of the demo. I only stopped because a) I was getting cramp and b) the dog was starting to wake up.

I'd read that Genfanad was at heart a Runescape parody. I have played Runescape but only for a few hours so I'm very much not in a position to comment but of course I'm going to anyway. It didn't remind me of Runescape all that much at all. It reminded me more of several, mostly-forgotten, isometric mmorpgs I played back when getting to play any mmorpg without having to pony up a sub was a chance not to be missed. All of them looked pretty much like this.

Spoiler! (As you'll see when you read on.)

The screenshots tell the story. It's all angled, overhead views of buildings whose roofs disappear when you enter them. Movement is point-and-click, NPC conversation happens in the chat box (and also overhead, in a hard-to-read point size.). Crafting, combat and spell casting involve selecting targets, items and objects then right-clicking to get a menu so you can do something with them.

I'm not sure how early a build this is. The release date for the game on Steam is "2022" so not all that early, you'd think. It plays robustly in the tutorial, although the parodic nature of the project makes it hard to be certain what's genuinely unfinished and what's a joke. 

For example, there's a whole bit about how there's no fishing because it hasn't been Kickstarted yet, which is clearly intended to be amusing but may also be true. I was less sure about the various objects I examined that returned, instead of a description, a data string ending in "TBD", which I took to mean "To Be Done". If that's a joke, it's a very dry one.

What surprised me most about Genfanad wasn't how enjoyable it was to play. I already know how immediately absorbing the very early stages of an mmorpg can be. As the developers put it on the Steam store page, "We know that what you really want is a generic fantasy world, filled with exciting tasks like chopping wood, blacksmithing, and fishing (when we get around to developing it). ", which is so close to the truth as to be embarrassing both to them and us.

Oh, goodie! Achievements!

What I wasn't expecting was that the whole thing would feel so immediately cozy and comfortable. I'm probably more than averagely sensitive to fonts and UI elements, by which I don't so much mean bad ones put me off as good ones pull me in. I found the basic elements of Genfanad, the way it looks, warm and welcoming, very much not always the case in projects of this sort.

It's notable how everything in the UI, from the fixed elements to the windows that pop up are rounded at the edges. They look as though they've been hand-carved from wood by skilled artisans, then sanded off so no toddlers hurt themselves running into the sharp corners. The text is clear and easy to read, the font unfussy yet characterful. Everything presents in warm, earth tones, rich browns, ripe yellows, giving a feeling of fullness that's somehow satisfying and comforting.

It's a game that invites you to settle down and take your time, which is just as well because it took me five minutes to get out of the first, locked, room. I'm still not sure how I managed it. 

The entire cell consists of a bed, a mirror, a door and a window. Nothing else. Examining the door tells you there must be a key somewhere but I was damned if I could find it. I was reduced to googling the answer, which is not something you want to be doing in the first location of a demo and even less so when Google has no more idea than you.

In the end I cracked and started to ask for help in general chat. Before I finished typing the first word a huge window popped up, offering me a range of appearance changes for my character. I was so surprised I closed the window without thinking, whereupon a mesage appeared in chat telling me I'd found a key on top of the mirror.

With that key I was able to open the door and begin the tutorial, during the course of which everything went extremely smoothly. I'm more than willing to belive my key issues were a result of my own incompetence but even so I think it might be worth making whatever it is you're meant to do to get out of that first location just a little more obvious. 

About time someone remembered whittling!

The tutorial mainly covers gathering and crafting and does so in a moderately entertaining way. The mechanics as they're revealed are refreshingly simple and easy to follow and the NPC dialog is a lot less irritating than humorous NPC dialog can too often be in games that purport to ignore the fourth wall. 

In fact, if the Steam page didn't hammer it home so determinedly, I'm not sure I'd have pegged Genfanad as a parody. It seems no more fourth-wall-breaking or meta or even humorous than AdventureQuest 3D or Project: Gorgon, to name a couple of mmorpgs that don't take themselves too seriously. 

I like both of those games and somewhat to my surprise, I think I like this one, too. I'm certainly going to play some more of it, while the demo lasts. I believe at least the first part of the newbie hunting and questing area is included. I'll try and have a look at that and, if it's interesting enough, report back.

Not putting it on the wishlist yet, but I did opt in to the newsletter so I can keep an eye on how it develops. One to watch, if not wish for, then.

East Goes West

If playing Bless last month had any impact on me at all, it was to make me feel nostalgic for other Eastern MMOs I've tried. Over the years I've played quite a few. Most of them I've enjoyed but none of them have I stuck with for more than a couple of months at most.

Let's see how many I can remember off the top of my head...

The first must have been Silk Road Online. Mrs Bhagpuss and I tried the beta and I remember being quite excited that we were seeing something we'd never seen before - an MMORPG made by and for people from a culture significantly different from our own. I wasn't all that struck with it but Mrs Bhagpuss liked it enough to mention it fondly for a few years afterwards, whenever the topic of imported MMOs came up.

I think Ferentus was the first game where I saw player-placed street vendors.

Then there was Ferentus, a beta for a long-forgotten MMO (also known in some territories as Xiones or Herrcot) that never went Live. Ferentus was the opposite of Silk Road in that it was almost indistinguishable from a Western MMO of the time. We both really liked it even though it was very rough and unpolished. Almost unbelievably, it still has an active Reddit ,where ex-players still hope for some kind of emulator, one day.

Runes of Magic, on which Wilhelm occasionally reports, was the first successful Eastern attempt to play the West at its own game. It was also one of the first generic WoW clones and the standard bearer for the Free to Play payment model. Once again, Mrs Bhagpuss and I beta-tested it and found it lacking, although a decade later I find I can remember it in surprising detail.

After that, the flood gates opened and playing imported MMOs became just something I did rather than something worthy of comment. Back then, I used to be in the habit of playing a number of MMOs super-casually, usually for an hour or so at the very end of the evening, right before going to bed.

That was in the days before I had a Tablet. These days I lie in bed watching American sitcoms or searching for ever more obscure bands on YouTube. I'm not convinced that's progress.

I did take some screenshots of NeoSteam but I have no idea what happened to them. I think I saw this thing once, though.

NeoSteam filled the late-night MMO slot for quite a while. I really liked that game. I was a seven foot tall tiger with a giant hammer - what's not to like? Neo-Steam was around for a good few years and had quite a following at one time. There were a lot of levels and zones but I never saw much more than the first few of either. I'd play it now if it was still running.

I also liked Argo, which arrived a few years later. That one came and went and came back and then vanished. Surprising how often that happens. Argo didn't have much to recommend it but it did have that indefinable vibe that made it feel like a place. Hard to describe but I always know it when I feel it.

Before that, there was the one whose name I always get muddled up with another, Western, title. Earth Eternal? No, it's no good, I'll have to google it...

And this is why we fact-check!  No, it wasn't Earth Eternal. Earth Eternal was the all-animal MMO originally produced by an American indie called Sparkplay Media. Mrs Bhagpuss and I betaed that one too and although we both liked it we found it a tad slow and repetitive.

After Earth Eternal failed in the West (twice) it had a run in Japan, where it was known as Ikimonogatari. According to wikipedia, no version ever made it further than Open Beta bit it still picked up a strong following.

I also have no screenshots of my time in Earth Eternal. Nor did I ever play a frog.

As if to prove that nothing on the internet ever goes away, I am astounded and delighted to discover that there is an Earth Eternal emulator! Now known as The Anubian War, it's even had an expansion, Valkal's Shadow, and the game is still up and running. I'm downloading it as I type!

Getting back to the topic at hand, the Eastern MMO I was thinking of was Eden Eternal. A natural mistake, even more so when you consider that in EE I played a mouse. A large mouse, I'll grant you, but a mouse all the same.

Eden Eternal was probably the first Eastern anime-influenced MMO I tried. It's bright and bouncy and not at all serious, which should please Wolfy and Jeromai. It was also, I think, the first time I came across the wonderful auto-quest feature, something I wish all MMOs would adopt.

Eden Eternal is still up and running. It even has a Back to School event on right now, which tells you something about the demographic that plays there. I don't think I'm going to download it again but it's an Aeria game and I have their launcher on my desktop...more on which later.

Blurry when stretched. Then again, aren't we all?

Then came Zentia, probably the best Eastern MMORPG I ever played. Mrs Bhagpuss and I downloaded the beta one Saturday on a whim and neither of us played anything else all weekend. The game had a unique style - cheerful, whimsical, lighthearted - that was exemplified by the giant dragon mount that players could hop on as it passed by, like boarding a bus. You could even do trivia quizzes in the central square of the main town.

The whole gameworld had an upbeat, happy atmosphere that was mood-elevating just to be around but it was also a very solid MMORPG, with traditional questing and combat that felt solid and satisfying. It's a game that deserves to be revived but sadly no-one seems to have bothered.

I think most of those games pre-date this blog, although I did write about Argo back in 2012. I also played, and briefly wrote about the oddly (and inaccurately, given how little time I spent there) named Loong, one of many games tipped by Kaozz of ECTmmo. She finds and plays even more obscure MMOS than I do, although currently she's with the crowd in WoW.

Almost the definition of Generic Eastern Import, Loong appears still to be available from Gamigo under the name of Loong Dragonblood

Since Inventory Full arrived, most of the Eastern imports have been relatively big news. In no particular order (least of all chronological) there's been Blade and Soul, Black Desert Online, Revelation Online, Aion, Riders of somewhere-or-other, that one about Dragons that SOE licensed and of course Final Fantasy XIV, which is a whole different story.

Bless Online is the latest and it's... okay. I wouldn't put it much more strongly than that. As I said at the beginning of the post, Bless's main impact on me has been to remind me of other imported and translated MMOs I like more. Two in particular: Dragon Nest and Twin Saga.

Not that Bless is anything like either of those. It's just that I remembered, while playing Bless and reading about how badly translated it was supposed to be, that there's a particular style of translated quest text that I love. Twin Saga is dripping with it and so is Dragon Nest.

It appears we've crossed out last bridge in Dragomon Hunter.

It's as though they'd found a really articulate, bi-lingual seven-year old, with a vivid imagination, and given them a completely free hand to translate the original quests - without worrying too much about whether the finished version made much (or any) sense. It's almost like naive art.

I tried to find my old installation of Twin Saga yesterday but after booting up several Hard Drives without success I gave up and re-installed it via Steam. As it was downloading I thought to google "Twin Saga", which I probably should have done at the start.

Turns out it's also published by Aeria Games, for whom, as I mentioned above, I have a generic launcher on my desktop. They also published Dragomon Hunter, another quirky import I liked a lot, which has sadly closed. The launcher itself is also dead. You have to download and update directly from the website now - or use Steam.

Following that discovery I was able to find the original installation buried in the Aeria Games folder on my C Drive so now I have the blasted thing twice! I linked my Aeria account to Steam and now I'm up and running with my old character, who turns out to be level 50! Proof that I really did like Twin Saga when I last played.

Best name prefix ever!

Dragon Nest is more problematic. It has a convoluted history of versions and territories. Last time I tried to play I couldn't get it to run. I'm running short of drive space right now so I don't think I'll download it again just yet but I guess I shouldn't wait too long. Grab 'em while they're still alive seems to be the motto for some of the less-celebrated imports.

Anyway, that wasn't the post I sat down to write. I was going to muse over returning to MMOs and how it can vary from impossible to ecstatic. That'll have to wait for another day. This has run far too long and there's double XP in Norrath that won't last forever!

You Got The Look: Villagers and Heroes

Villagers and Heroes is turning out to be one of those off-the-beaten-track MMOs that just clicks with me. In that respect it follows in a great tradition that goes all the way back to The Realm, which I used to play for some light relief between sessions back in Everquest's  Ruins of Kunark era.

Thinking back on other amuse-bouche MMOs that I ended up developing a taste for, there was Ferentus, one of the earlier Eastern imports, which never got out of beta, Endless Ages, Crowns of Power, NeoSteam, Argo and probably quite a few more I've forgotten. The king of them all was the very much-missed Rubies of Eventide, which closed down when one of the owners took umbrage with some of the players, powered down the server and locked the source code in a cupboard. Literally.

After they die many MMOs seem to slip into a ghostly half-life. Of the games listed above, Endless Ages had a couple of attempts at revival and still has people tinkering with the code trying to get something working, NeoSteam has now closed in all territories but appears to have an established "Private Server" scene and Argo was supposed to be returning under new management but now seems to have gone for good. Crowns of Power still has a website where you can download the game and even a "Server Status" page that suggests it's running but the forums tell another story.

I'm on a cart. I SAID I'M ON A CART!

The Realm, of course, just keeps on trucking. Next year will see the 20th anniversary of this venerable genre institution. That's twenty years as a subscription mmo, by the way; a 2D subscription MMO. Who said the sub model was dead?

Villagers and Heroes itself is, as I mentioned in the previous post, on its third iteration although it has continued to operate continuously through the various makeovers. This version really seems to have nailed it for me. It always seemed like a game I ought to enjoy more than I did and now I do.

Yesterday, while I was playing GW2 rather desultorily, as many people seem to be right now, what with the giant iceberg of Tuesday's update looming on the horizon, I found myself thinking, not about the new builds I'd have to be choosing, nor even about jumping ship to play my Necro on Ragefire or do my weeklies in EQ2. No, I was thinking about the plot in V&H and wondering what might happen next. And also about how nice it would be to do a bit of crafting and gathering in those bright, cartoon fields and orchards of that mystical land.

It's not always bright and colorful. Sometimes the world goes all watercolor pastel.

In the end I spent about five hours in V&H yesterday, following the plot, training up my Woodcrafting and my Bug Hunting, backtracking to complete and hand in some of the plethora of quests I seem to have acquired (and inevitably acquiring more in the process). It was a relaxing, involving and thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a Sunday.

I only stopped because I ran into an annoying bug where each NPC I approached would only reply to me with the dialog of the last person I spoke to. I'm hoping that will have fixed itself by  the next time I log in. If not I guess I'll find out how efficient the petition system is.

At low levels there seems to be an enormous amount to do and the pace of leveling is just about exactly as I like it. My new Wizard dinged level 8 last night. It took about eight hours to get there from character creation. Of course, she's also level 10 or more in almost all of the crafting and gathering disciplines, of which there are quite a few. I think she only has Cooking and Fishing left before she completes the introductory "get all these to ten and come back and see me quest" someone gave her right at the beginning.

I believethe level cap is 65 so there would seem to be a lot of mileage just in leveling up. What the end game is I have no idea and nor do I care very much. I'll think about that if I get there, which I don't imagine for a moment I will. A look at the map suggests a large and inviting world to explore, though, and if it's all as interesting and accessible as it has been so far, who knows?

Why do some MMOs feel inviting and fun to play while others can be such a struggle or feel so bland? There must be a whole raft of reasons but the look and feel is crucial. If that isn't right then whatever glories lie hidden beneath the surface are likely to stay there.

I knew an Eamon at university. He was studying architecture and talking to him taught me a lot about the relationship between form and function. If that's him he's really let himself go.

Appearances may be shallow but they have a big effect on whether I want to start playing something - if it looks delicious in screenshots it makes me want to dive in. Aesthetics aren't enough to hold the attention long-term though unless they come with  great sense of design to back them up.

Form follows function as the modernists used to say and the new UI is exemplary in that regard. Everything looks both crisp and modular and explains itself immediately by use. There's no fiddling about wondering what to press or where to click. It looks great and it works first time. Given that we spend so much of our "play" time operating the interface, to have doing so feel like a sensual pleasure in itself goes a long way towards encouraging a preference for one game over another.

Concretizing the sense of discovery.

Villagers and Heroes may not look spectacular but it's crisp and clear and charmingly stylized. When Mrs Bhagpuss peered over my shoulder and saw it for the first time she said "You're in a cartoon" and yes, it does have that look of a quality animation from the mid-late 80s about it. The typography reminds me of Wizard 101, another game whose style strongly enhanced and supported its gameplay. I really like that pseudo-brushstroke font.

The game also has solid sound direction and a really striking musical score. Unlike, say, Syp, I'm not a huge fan of video music in its own right. There are plenty of pieces and melodies that have a strong emotional effect on me but it's usually because of the memories they invoke rather than any intrinsic musicality of their own.

The music in fantasy MMOs tends to be of a type; sweeping synthesized orchestral pomp, blaring, brassy martial bombast, would-be wistful pastoral warbling and the like. Villagers and Heroes, at least in the few starting zones I've seen, is a little more sonically adventurous. It has, for example, some off-kilter, edgy, piano improvisations that nag uncomfortably in the background. Unsettling, particularly in a starting zone.

I stumble upon The Vinton Village Festival. Prancing Pony eat your heart out.

At one point I even stopped playing to listen, which is a very odd thing to find yourself doing. I'm not sure whether it's a good decision commercially but I certainly prefer it to the usual fantasy elevator music. I guess that jazz feel is all of a piece with the general maturity and sophistication of the aesthetic.

For a game that has a cartoonish look that would appear on the surface to be aimed at a younger audience Villagers and Heroes has an oddly adult feel. The main storyline is mostly the usual fantasy nonsense but there's a strong undertone of sexual jealousy and infidelity running through it. I seem to remember that the original launch of the game as A Mystical Land made reference to fairy tales and there's definitely some of that Germanic fairy tale darkness around the edges.

Let my light banish your darkness!

What with a very busy week at work and the fallout from tomorrow's giant patch bomb Villagers and Heroes probably won't get much play for a while now but it's done enough already to establish a firm position in the hierarchy of "MMOs I Might Play Quite Often", something the previous two versions never really achieved.

I was even looking at the cash shop, which looks very reasonably priced, especially to someone coming from ANet's outrageously expensive Gem Store, and there's a better than even chance I'll spend some money there if I carry on playing. I fancy a house and some sheep and the bags are really cheap. As Maldwiz pointed out to Tobold, we all have the same 24 hours in our days so what we do with them is our choice but the choice is far too hard.

O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay! : Argo

Yes, alright, it's not that frabjous. It's not like SOE changed their minds and decided to give (or even sell) Vanguard back to its creators. What's so special about Pox Nora that it gets preferential treatment anyway? Not that I begrudge Pox Nora fans their luck. There must be some, right? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?.

Longtime readers of this blog probably have no recollection whatsoever of my brief flirtation with the SEA shovelware "steampunk" MMO Argo. It merited one post and it was something of a guilty pleasure, albeit a considerable one. It was the game I made an Allaplaya account for, which felt a little like forging my own long-handled spoon (not that I've ever actually forged a long-handled spoon, or indeed anything else...)

No sooner had I made a throwaway account on a garbage email address and bowed down to worship the devil himself PSS1, Allaplaya's mighty overlords, than they decided to pull the game from their sad collection of no-hopers roster of quality MMOs, leaving me bereft, or at least mildly irritated.

Yes, I've used these pictures before. What do you expect? Game's been down for 18 months.

In a pattern frustratingly familiar from my distressing experience with the even better SEA shovelware "steampunk" MMO, NeoSteam,  Argo continued to run successfully in Korea. Then, in July last year, it was reported that Games-Masters.com, purveyors of SEA shovelware quality MMOs such as Cabal and Ran (no, me either...) had acquired Argo for the European market.

Well, I'd heard that one before. Some company I'd never heard of, can't remember and really don't have the willpower to google, claimed they had bought NeoSteam for an EU release - that never happened. Fool me once and all that jazz.

Except this time it seems there really is a pony! Massively just reported that the European beta for Argo starts tomorrow and I just signed up. I really shouldn't be excited about this but I am all the same. It's like when your cat goes missing and he's gone for six weeks and you're certain he's gone forever and probably dead and then one day there's a knock on the door and you open it and a stranger says "Excuse me but I think this might be your cat" (True story).

So, I might get in beta or I might not and the game might actually come back or it might not but either either way it's another notch on the "MMOs never really die" tally-stick and that's a warm fuzzy if ever there was one, so be happy even if you never heard of Argo, never play it and have no idea what I'm making all this fuss about.  

In The City : City of Steam

I don't believe we've yet seen a really satisfying Steampunk MMO. Fond as I am (was) of NeoSteam, an eight-foot-tall tiger flattening balloon rabbits with a beer-barrel impaled on the end of a scaffolding pole does not scream 19th Century techno-noir to me. I've not revisited Gatheryn since beta so for all I know it may have changed out of all recognition but I remember it mostly as a Victorian-themed fairground portal for some uninspired mini-games. Echo Bazaar is wonderful, of course, but it's more Surrealist than Steampunk and more card-game than MMO.

Half the supposed high-fantasy MMOs that I've played have Steampunk elements. Airships drift, glide or rumble across the skies in WoW, EQ2 and Warhammer. The Empire in Allods is is almost post-steampunk, pushing into the mid 20th Century with its totalitarian politics and constructivist architecture. The Defiants in Rift look to have taken their entire aesthetic from the James Whale Frankenstein . How well technology of this order sits with high fantasy is debatable, although by now it's apparent that once you let gnomes into your fantasy world there really isn't any point trying to hold the line against clockworks.

Until yesterday I'd never heard of City of Steam. Massively posted a news item about a pre-beta "Sneak Peak" that looked interesting but supposedly you had to have registered on the CoS website before the 28th of February when the event began. Massively right on the case there, then. A bit of digging around turned up a website that still had a few keys left from some cross-pollinating offer and with one bound and several registration forms I was in. (Looks like they might still have a few left, although a lot more have gone since I nabbed mine last night).

The Sneak Peak lasts for two weeks so there's a week left. The question is, is it any good? Well, yes it it is, rather and since there's no NDA here's what I've found so far.

City of Steam is in great shape for pre-beta. I've put several hours in and I haven't run into a  single bug, unless Clockroaches count. There's plenty of content in place, all running smooth as gnomish machine-oil. Not that there are any gnomes. Or dwarves. No, wait, hang on there are dwarves but they're clockwork. I think. I spoke to one and he chided me for forgetting about his marvelous clockwork city, tragically now overrun by undead. Nice twist.

The writing is very good.  Mechanist Games, the studio behind the game, may be Chinese but the opening credits name one David Lindsay as both Creator and Producer and the English throughout is impeccable. The text and dialog isn't just grammatically correct either. It's idiomatically comfortable, literate and witty and there's a wealth of interesting detail which I found endearingly old-school. Every item has a mouseover tooltip that reads like an entry from a tabletop rpg rulebook from the 1990s.

The UI is first rate. Elegant, clear and responsive. Can't fault it. I found it intuitive, familiar without being generic and a pleasure to use. The game runs in a browser but looks like it's running from a client. Masses of detail, very gritty feel. There doesn't seem to be a first-person view option but the camera is well-behaved. Movement is click-to-move, which is fine by me. Maybe they'll add WASD at a later stage.

"None" includes Your Reporter

Visually City of Steam is gorgeous. I couldn't get it to run full-screen, which is a shame because I would love to be able to get an even better look at the dirty buildings, moss-covered cobbled streets and juddering steam-powered vehicles. Airships and even flying steam-locomotives cross the skies above the sprawling city in which you begin. It really is a city, too. Seen from above in the opening cinematic it reveals itself as port city that has spread back into the surrounding hills like a stain. Reminded me a bit of Bilbao.

Thus far I've spent most of my time taking screenshots and exploring. At the end of various streets or bridges an option sometimes popped up inviting me into some suburb where the City Guard's writ no longer runs, or down into the inevitable substrate of sewer and crypt. Instanced dungeons, in a word. Two words. For a pre-beta there seemed to be quite a few  already,  stretching at least into the high 20s.

Click here...

... Go there.

One feature I really liked was the signposts. You can click on the destination and your character will make his own way there. I've played plenty of MMOs that have this autoroute feature activated from the quest journal or the map but for some reason having it on a large sign in the gameworld itself seems much more immersive.


Ah, there's that word. Immersion. Some MMOs attain it effortlessly, some couldn't find it in the dictionary. I suspect City of Steam has it and if it does it's down to something I can't show in a screenshot. Sound. The sound direction is about the best I've heard in an MMO. The music is sweeping, elegaic, bittersweet but it's not the music that builds the pervasive atmosphere, it's the ambient sound. Train whistles hoot mournfully, sinister functionaries make mysterious announcements over a distorted tannoy system, dogs bark somewhere in the maze of streets that stretches into the distance all around. It's like being somewhere.

And with that I think it's time to take a break. More on City of Steam to come. Probably. So many MMOs, so little time. I think this one deserves attention.

Taking The Loong View

What a lot of MMOs there are. I downloaded yet another one yesterday. Kaozz's fault. She mentioned that she was playing something called Loong Online. "Smooth as butter and polished", she said. I'd never heard of it, which was provocation enough without the praise on top.

I googled and found it on the Gamigo portal where I had a choice: sign up for Loong alone or make a Gamigo account to play any of their games. They host a lot of MMOs including a few I'd heard of. Fiesta, which certainly gets a lot of advertising, none of which has ever made me consider trying it, King of Kings, which I did once play for about half an hour and Black Prophecy, which crops up on Massively now and again largely to my complete lack of interest. They have several more and others in development. They even have a Golf MMO, and they're welcome to it. Obviously no real point starting a Gamigo account, then.

Quit hogging the camera, cat!

Having made my Gamigo account, when I came to add Loong to my list of games I planned to play on it I noticed a familiar name: Otherland. Otherland is the MMO based on Tad Williams' sprawling, disturbing cyberpunk/fantasy noir. It's an MMO I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, looking forward to giving it a run whenever it appears. Haven't heard much about it for a while, although there was a video recently. I had no idea Gamigo were involved but now I'm signed up. Pre-ordered, I suppose you could say, if you can pre-order a game you don't have to order in the first place. Ah, sweet serendipity.

Gamigo is a German F2P gaming network.  Seems to be the week for those, what with the PSS1 thing and all. There's an awful lot of MMO activity in Germany, now I come to think of it. Bigpoint are another. They host Drakensang and Nadirim, both of which I've tried, and Battlestar Galactica, which I haven't, it being a shooter. Germany is a big, rich country and one where MMOs seem to be very firmly established. Once you factor out the "sold like chattels" part of the PSS1/Sony deal the whole thing begins to look a little less disturbing. If they can get the IP block sorted out and restore freedom of choice, who knows? Maybe something good could come out of the wreckage.

Slot in top of head is not for litter

Leaving that aside for now, pending the supposed SoE/Allaplaya statements due later today, what is Loong like? Well, I only played for an hour or so but it was a good hour. It certainly looks fine. The world is lush and detailed, the views are stunning, the creatures are quirky and that's just in the starting areas.The interface is a bit too gritty for my taste and I can't say I'm keen on the fonts but the functionality is all there. Compared to, say, Eden Eternal, a game I like a lot, Loong appears to be several notches higher in quality. Gameplay, at the starter level, is identical.

Will I play it much? Ah, that's the question, isn't it? There are just so many MMOs. It's all very well downloading them and trying them out, but how often do I get much further than the starting area? Is looking great and playing smoothly enough? Well, no it's not. Even really top-notch gameplay doesn't set the hook deep enough. Zentia, for example, is a first-class game in just about every respect. Gameplay there is as good as any MMO I've played. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were on it all weekend when we first found it and we played sporadically for a fair while after that, but in the end we drifted away.

I told you once. Shoo!.

I think, for me at least, it comes down mostly to character. In Loong I can be a good-looking young man or a good-looking young woman and that seems to be about it. It's not like being a giant tiger in NeoSteam, is it? Or even a mouse in Eden Eternal. I just don't find playing good-looking young people very involving. If I can't be an animal, at least let me be a dwarf or a gnome, something with a big, bushy beard. Zentia let me play a fat old man, which may be why I lasted a few weeks there rather than a few hours.

Do my feet even touch the ground?

It's not just how the characters look, either. It's also how they move. My Loong character travels in sudden, fluid leaps and bounds, so slick and fast that he's sometimes on the far side of where I want him to be before I can make him stop. Rift has a very dull selection of races but movement there is stolid, steady, firm. I can feel every footfall and that really does matter. The more solid the character feels, the better I am able to associate.

I'll plug on with Loong for a bit. On and off. Here and there. Now and again. The world very much looks worth exploring. I'll be surprised if I become more than an occasional visitor, but that's fine. There are so many MMOs after all.