You Know Faepunk Is Already A Thing, Right?

Unlike many people, no doubt, I didn't watch The Game Awards last night. I imagine I was fast asleep. I didn't check the times but this sort of thing generally happens after I've gone to bed.

Let's be honest. Even if it had been held in London at 8pm I wouldn't have stopped playing EverQuest II to watch it. These things tend towards the tedious even when you're invested, something I'm definitely not. Most of the games revealed are likely to be things I wouldn't play even if they turned up free on Amazon Prime or Epic, as some of them almost inevitably will, one day.

There's always a chance, though, isn't there? Something might punch through the wall of indifference. A few years back I got so excited when I saw the promo for We Happy Few I ended up following it all the way through development. I posted about it a couple of times and even added the lead writer's blog to my blog roll, where it sits to this day, although I stopped reading it a while ago.

And then, when the game finally released, I found I'd all but lost interest. That's the problem with long lead times. Developers need to build a following, work on name recognition, generate and sustain some kind of buzz but doing all of that, successfully, for the years it takes to bring a game to market, seems an increasingly large ask. It's no wonder so many rush into some form of Early Access. There are reasons other than fading finances for going short instead of long. 

I'm not sure there any good choices these days. New World was five years in the making. When Amazon kept delaying for one more round of polish a lot of people thought it was uneccessary. Nerves, most likely, following the studio's other failures. And now, just a few months later, most commentators would probably say they went too soon.  

Crowfall is in trouble, to no-one's surprise. Artcraft dithered and drifted and finally had to pull the switch and where are they now? Working on a new project because for sure the last one's failed. Two examples of teams who released before they were ready. One has the resources to pull out of the dive and rebuild to sustained success. The other is Crowfall.

But what's the alternative? Living death in a never-ending Early Access beta that sucks all life out of the game and the ever-diminishing number of players who still, occasionally, log in? That's where many projects end up. It's neither failure nor success but at least it's an existence, until it's not. 

Of course, there's the ever-popular option of never really releasing in any quantifiable form, while still having servers and sales and open days and who knows what-all. Is Star Citizen out yet? I know you can play it. I know people do play it. I have played it. Technically, though, it's still unreleased.

Or Camelot: Unchained? I seem to remember reading reports of battles, so someone's fighting someone... or maybe I just imagined it. Maybe we're all imagining it. Would it really make any difference if we were?

There are certain projects where my interest and enthusiasm stays high - Pantheon would be one - but they're few and far between and getting fewer and farther all the time. I kickstarted Ashes of Creation, twice in fact, one for me and one for Mrs. Bhagpuss, but that was so long ago she no longer even recognizes the name when I mention it and I no longer recall why I thought it was worth paying for in the first place. If it ever does launch it doesn't seem all that likely I'll be interested in playing it, other than for the traditional first impressions pieces I might write. Or it might be brilliant. 

I thought of it at the time as a pre-order but even though I like the concept of paying up front even I don't need to plan my spending years in advance. I've pretty much sworn off kickstarting mmorpgs for that very reason. They take so long to arrive, if they ever even do, it's hard to remember why you cared. 

Not that it's going to be a problem for much longer. Kickstarter's sudden decision to lash their fortunes to the blockchain for reasons described by Gamesindustry.biz as "vague" means I'll be having nothing to do with anyone who tries to get my attention through that particular platform. I might even delte my Kickstarter account, assuming I have one. I should probably check that.

With all that in mind, it was always unlikely I was going to find myself getting worked up over anything that happened in last night's Game Awards. And yet.

That pushes a lot of buttons. There's the Fae for a start. I wouldn't say I have a thing for the Fae but I do feel it's a strand of fantasy that's rarely been well-handled in this gamespace. I'd love to see someone get it right.

The duplicitous, alien amorality of the Fae, siphoned out of celtic legend into so many pop-culture standards, from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files to the Shadowhunters adaptation of Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments, always seems to add a certain, wilding edge. I'd struggle to come up with an example of where it's been well-used in an mmorpg. 

The Secret World looked like it might be going somewhere in that direction but then it stopped going anywhere at all so it doesn't count. Rift used the imagery and the symbolism and did nothing in the least, tiny part interesting with any of it. New World seems to be playing with some of the tropes but to what end is opaque, as yet. All the others that come to mind can't seem to tell the difference between vampires, ghouls, fairies and elves. It's like they're all just there to give us something to kill when we go out murdering. It's not just not enough, it's not anything at all.

Then there's steampunk. We're still waiting for the first, good steampunk mmorpg. Know what the best thing about that trailer is? It doesn't mention steampunk once. Or any other kind of punk. It goes for the less triggering option - Victoriana. That's steampunk without either the steam or the punk. They have my respect just for that.

It is steampunk, though, isn't it? Look at that city at 1:36. That's the Nexus out of City of Steam, that is, the mmorpg that probably came as close to being steampunk as anything we've seen so far. Not that that's saying much. 

I did love City of Steam, though. Still do. Anything that reminds me of it has its thumb on one of those buttons I mentioned.

The voiceover's right out of City of Steam, too. It has that exact same elegaic, fin de siecle, everything just fell apart and we wish it was a week last Sunday feel to it. The whispersoft asmr tone and the RADA elocution don't damage the case it's making, either.

It looks great but of course it does. All trailers make all games look great. Well, most of them. It looks great in the right way, though. The costumes are delicious, the poses are dramatic, the scenery is fantastical. Best of all, the way the lead character holds that lantern high makes me want to go out and buy a litre of lantern oil. I have a lantern like that hanging up in the kitchen.

Anyone can make a game look good in a trailer but this one does have some gameplay footage as well. Pre-alpha footage, which is getting your excuses in first, only I'm not sure they needed to. The bits where players are doing stuff look... okay. I mean, they don't look amazing but they look solid enough. 

The mob designs stand out as not exactly the same as everything we've ever seen before, so that's a good place to start. I'm not sure what those things are they're using for heads but at least it piques my interest. Maybe we'll get to wear some of them as hats.

The setup sounds promising: a transport system collapses, leaving travellers stranded far from home. It's too dangerous to stay but no-one has a clue where to go. It's explore or die or, since it's an mmorpg, more likely it's explore and die, over and over and over again. That's pretty much what I usually do anyway, so it'll be nice to know I'm meant to be doing it, for once.

Is it an mmorpg, though? No-one's claiming that, are they? What they are calling it is a "Shared World" in which "You can play... solo or with friends and other players who you meet across the realms." Let's not split hairs. That makes it as much an mmo as any number of other things we've hung that bell on in the past. In my book, if you can play online, meet, talk to and group with other people there, who you've previously never met, it's an mmo. 

Judging by those gameplay shots with a whacking great shotgun in the center, it's also an FPS. MMOFPS is a thing, right? Maybe it's one of those. Not my favorite combat system but I think I'm over my pickiness about that kind of thing. Certainly it's not enough to put me off when so much else is pulling me in.

Oh, I just realised I haven't actually mentioned what it's called yet. How remiss of me. Just as well I'm only writing a blog post about it, not a press release, eh?

It's called Nightingale. I think that's a very good name. It means something and yet it means nothing all at the same time. Also easy to remember and to pronounce, which always helps.

The developers behind Nightingale are Inflexion Games, a new one on me. They're based in Edmonton, which is in Alberta, Canada and they say their purpose is "to create places". They have one of the more intriguing mission statements I've seen. It's worth a read.

Whether they can make a game that meets their somewhat ambitious standards is something I guess we'll have to wait to find out although not for too long if what they hope for comes true. The FAQ asks "When will Nightingale launch?" and answers "We're working hard to bring you Nightingale in 2022."

That sounds wildly over-optimistic, which puts it in line with just about every other predicted launch window offered by every mmo developer ever. Probably more convincing is the timescale for some form of public testing, whch is also "set to begin in 2022."

You can register on the website to express an interest in taking part when it happens. I have. If I get in and if the NDA allows, I'll be sure to report back on what I find.

Take Me To The Movies : Allods

Popular opinion would have it that post-Tolkeinian fantasy dominated the MMO scene from the get-go. Not that the good professor had much to say about it; or anything, really. He was a year dead by the appearance in 1974 of Mazewar, the first entry in Wikipedia's History of Massively Multiple Online Games or, much more significantly, the first published edition of Dungeons and Dragons in the same year.

He was supposedly open to the idea of his legacy living on in other hands. He hoped to create a "body of more or less connected legend" that would "leave scope for other minds and hands" to continue. All the same, given his reported comments on some of the attempts to popularize his work during his lifetime, it seems exceptionally unlikely he'd have approved of any of the later entertainments devised in his name.

On receiving one proposed script for a cinematic version of Lord of the Rings he observed, bitterly, hitching up his most impenetrable prose style for the defense of his canon, "I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about". It's just about conceivable that he might have found something positive to say about Peter Jackson's epic interpretation but it's probably best not even to try to imagine what he'd have made of the coming hordes of adolescents and post-adolescents dice-rolling and mouse-clicking their way through Middle Earth.

The Trollshaws? Nope.

Whether or not he'd have agreed with Syp that "LOTRO is a better interpretation of the books than other attempts" we can only guess but I think it's fair to say that, even if he had, it would have been a judgment on a par with choosing whether the world would be better to die in fire or in ice. At the very least, though, he would presumably have been able to recognize LotRO as something derived, however poorly, from his life's work.

This train of thought rolled through my mind this morning as I was playing Allods. It's one of those happy MMOs that seems to be set in a world all its own. On the face of it, it's yet another fantasy game, but scratch the surface and it quickly becomes clear that Tolkein and his legacy have contributed no more than the slightest sheen; an elf here, an orc there, those recognizable by little more than the names of their races. I have to say that the longer I play MMORPGs, the less Tolkein I find in them, the happier I am.

Ok, that could be anywhere! Give us a clue.

Astrum Nival, the original creators of Allods Online, are based in Russia and it shows. They draw their imagery and inspiration from their own history and legend, not from the trammeled imaginings of an Oxford don. The two factions, Empire and League, play with familiar tropes and images from Russian history, White and Red, but more than that they play with time. The League may feed fantasy but the Empire feels steampunk.

Ah, steampunk. Now we approach the core. When MMOs were climbing out of the cradle and learning to toddle steampunk was on the cusp of adolescence. The first use of the term "steampunk" was recorded in 1987; Richard Garriott coined "massively multiple online roleplaying game" a decade later in 1997. They grew up together.

Tolkein had been dead for almost a quarter of a century by then. His legacy was a dimly-understood, if fondly remembered, melange of willowy New Romantic elves, hirsute Hard Rockin' dwarves and pipeweed-toking Hippie Hobbits. Tolkein was past historic; steampunk past present.

Wait a minute...is that... is that a cinema??

Looking back it would be hard to come up with a fantasy MMORPG, even from the first wave, that isn't riddled with 18th and 19th century technology alongside the magic and mythical beasts. Everquest may have had a prohibition on firearms but Ak`Anon clattered and hissed with steam and engines. By the time WoW arrived, the gnomes had pushed forward in technological time to the 20th century, adding warplanes to their formidable arsenal of robots and machinery.

Call it clockwork or magitech, lift the fantasy cloak and, likely as not, you'll find gears and cogs. As the years roll by and the genre stretches and spreads, even the very terms lose their meaning. We're all science-fantasists now. It happened to the Discworld; why should we escape?

So, I guess I should never have been surprised to come across a questline in Allods based around the dawn of Cinema. And yet I was. Astonished.

Perhaps it was because it all happens in a rough camp out in the autumnal wildlands next to the starting zone of the tribal, primal Priden. Maybe a Picture Palace in the Imperial capital Nezebgrad, with its constructivist architecture and billboard propaganda, would have slipped past almost unnoticed.

Even then, I doubt it. I think it's a first. Oh, a projected image on a screen, that's nothing. GW2, with its merry technological mix-and-match that cheerfully puts ox-carts next to helicopters, has vid-screens fit for a starship. But an actual cinema screen, with a projector? Can't recall seeing one of those before. I think that was always going to stand out.

I've always liked Allods. I think it's an underrated MMO, with first-class design and aesthetics, solid gameplay, an engaging and amusing milieu and a facile and friendly UI. There's a heavy reliance on questing; some would say too heavy, but if there are arguably too many quests, at least the quality is consistently high.

Few quests are fully voiced in Allods but they're all fully written, and how. As it does in FFXIV, every quest comes with a lengthy discourse in English that feels just slightly askew. Some people loved that in FFXIV, some hated it. I loved it there and I love it here. I read every word of every quest and relish the odd flavor and fizz as it rolls across my subvocalizing tongue.

For anyone less enamored of off-kilter phrasing and arch characterization there's a benefit to playing Allods that FFXIV lacks: automation. If you're not interested in reading you can click straight through the text then click again on the quest log to autorun your character to the next quest location. Click, click, run. Click, click, done.

That's a feature I would once have sniffed at but now I just can't get enough. The combination of autoquesting and click-to-move makes playing Allods on my Win8.1 tablet a joy and I'm not too proud to use the latter when I'm playing on the desktop either.

Prompt... Prompt!!

Usually I rail against having my mundane tasks automated but this is one that just works. For me, anyway. Especially when much of the quest consists of finding NPCs and listening to them talk. Oh, there were fifteen or so crows to kill and a bunch of ambulatory plants to despatch, and the autorun function makes no compromise with aggressive wildlife so you have to take care, so don't run away with the idea this thing plays itself..

In the end, though, it was all about the strange story of Imperial Cinema versus League stagecraft. The stolen canister of celluloid was retrieved and returned and we all stood spellbound before the magic of the moving image. Which didn't actually, y'know, move, but hey, you can't have everything. Then it was off to assist an elven actress to prepare for performance before joining her on stage for some edge-of-the-seat improv.

One day. I'm not ready today...

I'm guessing that, since Allods is a two faction PvP game and the new Priden race starts unaligned, when she finally leaves the starting zone (which seems huge - she's already Level 11 and there's a lot of map as yet unexplored) there will come one of those decision points where she has to choose between the Empire and The League. That decision may have been made already.

The play was fun but...moving pictures!

Now That's What I Call Steampunk Vol 2 : City of Steam

That title would have worked better if I'd used it when they released the soundtrack, but it was this news item over at Massively today that prompted me to write. To save a mouseclick, Mechanist Games, the studio behind forthcoming steampunk MMO City of Steam is running a contest. If you win, you get:

"an exclusive personalized tour of City of Steam with us, the developer! You’ll get to see and play around the game before anyone else does (major bragging rights)! On top of this you’ll get to talk to us, and bring 2 friends! "

I liked City of Steam a lot when I played the Sneak Peak, enough to post about it here several times. I'm really looking forward to the Alpha, which is tentatively scheduled to start in July.

I'm not entering that contest, though. It sounds like a press tour, which is fine for, y'know, Press. I just want to get into the alpha and help push the game along the tracks to launch. If anyone would like to try, here's the thread you need. So far there are seven entries so the odds aren't bad.

If I understand correctly, everyone who signs up for the City of Steam Newsletter should get an Alpha invite. It's a nice newsletter too. The Mechanist devs seem like real enthusiasts. They like to chat about mechanics and development decisions in some detail, and a lot more informally than bigger MMO houses do. Makes for a more interesting read than the average promo.

I'm not generally one for reading the websites of MMOs that aren't even in beta yet but I do browse this one, on and off. The whole site got a facelift recently and it's rather spiffy. There's a ton of interesting information trickling out about the setting, the races and the world. Already some of the things I felt didn't make much sense in the Sneak Peak are beginning to clarify.

I also notice from the new website that City of Steam has been re-positioned. I am nigh on certain the old FAQ called it either an MMO or an MMORPG. Now its "a massively-multiplayer, steampunk-themed ARPG". I find that somewhat odd considering that one of the things I praised about the incarnation I saw was the slow pace, about the last thing you'd associate with an ARPG.

Whatever it is, I'm looking forward to it. I'll pass on the personalized tour but I'll take an alpha key, please.

(Images lifted from City of Steam website. Didn't think it was fair to use more of my old Sneak Peak ones now they've gone and given the graphics a wash&brush-up).

Urs and Worse: Argo

What with all the MMO doom and gloom of the last few weeks, the bankruptcies, closures, lay-offs and cancellations it's worth remembering just how many of the blasted things there are out there. I'm a dipper and a sampler of MMOs, a collector even. In a dozen years I must have tried sixty or seventy. That's not even one in ten just of those released in English.

I do try to keep my end up. I sign on for betas and download trials. I follow the news and watch out for anything coming along that might be interesting. I know about ArchAge and Firefall, Origins of Malu and The Repopulation, Salem and Storybricks. I've written about City of Steam and The Missing Ink. And as I've mentioned, still they slip by.

I am not a pixie! These are mechanical!

I hadn't missed Argo. I just hadn't paid it much attention. Argo is one of the small but growing cadre of supposedly Steampunk MMOs, most of which have very little steam and no discernible punk. Now, I haven't read a lot of Steampunk so maybe I'm missing a key genre convention, but does it always have elves?

Oh alright, not elves. "Elves" is inflammatory, I grant you. Hippies. Tree-huggers. Druids. Nature-boys. There always seems to be a Tech team and a Nature team slugging it out for the future of the inevitably war-ravaged world, spells against guns, tanks versus treants. Wait, I have a video here somewhere that says it best...

Well Argo is all that. Plus the website looks horrible. And it's published by Allaplaya, the gaming wing of PSS1, who as we all know are The Devil. And anyway, I don't have time for yet another badly translated F2P.

So I downloaded Argo. And guess what? It's quite good.

I might go a bit further. It's possibly the most enjoyable non-Western F2P I've dabbled in since Zentia. Ah, Zentia, high-water mark of random acquisitions. I'd play it now if I hadn't broken it. I really must fix that.

More Steam Fair than Steampunk

But for now I'm going with Argo. Yes, it's badly translated. Yes, the low textures look like a child's painting seen through a rain-smeared window when compared to the exquisite detail of The Secret World. Yes, the quests would insult the intelligence of a laboratory rat. Yes, the character models look like day five of "Learn To Draw Anime in Seven Days". Yes, my character's gun is bigger than she is. Yes, all of that.

Looks just like The Somme, doesn't it?

But I'm level 10! And I've played half a dozen sessions and I want to play more. The world may not stand up to the kind of detailed examination that's so richly rewarding in TSW or GW2, but it's an intriguing, idiosyncratic place all the same. For a "post apocalyptical MMORPG" set in "a post-world-war realm" (source) it sure looks bucolic. And that's the techie starting area! God only knows what the hippie commune's like. I'd go check but I'd have to make another account. They make you pick a side and stick to it. There's a war on, in case you didn't know. Or was. Anyway, we don't talk to them.

Aww come on! You wouldn't shoot me!

I've roamed around. The website promises a "vigorous open world", and while I'm not vouching for the vigor it's certainly open. Distances seem large, especially without a mount. Wildlife is insanely plentiful, freakishly cute and disturbingly fast to respawn. It really rubs your nose in the futility of your own existence, virtual and otherwise, when another Urs respawns on top of the one you just killed before you've even had time to pick up his bear-bag. (That's like a man-bag, only for bears. All the smart, six-legged metrosexual bears are carrying them).

There's crafting. And gathering. Very reassuringly traditional. Buy a pick, find a node, stack some ore. Get a recipe, learn it, select and combine. I felt at home right away. And that's the trick, right there. Argo gets that one indefinable thing right. It feels like a place you could live in. Like Zentia does. Like Loong doesn't.

Yes I would. I need the practice.

In that Loong piece I asked myself the question "Will I play it much?". I didn't. With Argo there's a good chance. It's a poor time to be finding new MMOs, what with TSW going live this week, City of Steam alpha and EQ2's Qeynos Revamp in July and the inevitable GW2 pop-ups. All the same, I think I might find time for a little Argo here and there. It would be very nice to get past the newbie areas in one of these imports just for once. Level ten's a good start.

I'll keep you posted. I bet you can't wait.

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.