The Future In Our Hands?

It's 2023 and I'm still playing Noah's Heart. Every day. I know! I'm as surprised as you are.

I sat down half an hour ago to write a post to try and explain why. I was writing it as much for myself as for anyone who might be reading. 

I got eight paragraphs in before I realised I don't really have a clue why I'm doing it. About the best I can come up with is I like the whimsy of it and it's really relaxing to play. Not a lot, is it?

Then, as I was sitting back, trying to come up with something a bit more substantial, I had a mini-epiphany. An epiphanette, if you will. You won't? Can't say I blame you.

Noah's Heart is a multi-platform game but it's fairly obvious that the core design comes from mobile. The placement of the UI elements gives that much away. 

I play the game on PC, where it works well for me, thanks to the free cursor that allows me to click buttons instead of pressing keys. Those buttons, though, would be even better on a handheld screen like a phone, tablet or iPad. 

And that's when it occured to me. Noah's Heart is a mobile game I would actually play on a mobile device. Not just occasionally but regularly. Maybe even every day. If only I owned a device that could run it.

I'm sure this is where we said we were meeting...

I am, theoretically, in favor of mobile gaming, particularly for the kind of games I enjoy on a desktop PC. I announced myself as a relatively early adopter of the form, albeit, once again, more in theory than in practice, back when I first wrote about playing mobile mmorpgs, more than a decade ago in April 2012.

Back then, I was playing a game called Elemental Knights on my iPod Touch. I still have the iPod and it still works. I use it several times most weeks, mainly for listening to music and checking if my lunch-hour is over.

If it's surprising the iPod is still going, it's a hell of a lot more surprising Elemental Knights is too, too. In fact, now that Apple have retired the Touch, I'd have to say the game I once described as "a standard Korean style grinder with anime graphics and a fairly obstreperous cash shop" has had the last laugh over the tech giant.

More surprising yet, at some point when I wasn't looking, Elemental Knights spawned both a PS4 and a Switch version. How come we never read about that on MassivelyOP?

Presumably for the same reason we never hear about anything much from the mobile side of the fence. It seems no-one really cares about mobile mmorpgs or wants to write about them. Or read about them. Although I wouldn't mind. Reading about them, that is. You couldn't pay me to write about them. 

Well, I guess you could. It would all depend on how much. Everyone, as they say, has their price. It'd be a grim job, though, wouldn't it? Or maybe it wouldn't. I mean, I'm writing plenty about Noah's Heart and no-one's paying me a cent.

I'm telling you, that flamingo cage isn't up to code.

Anyway, the point is that there are plenty of them. You only have to look. And I've played quite a few.

Off the top of my head, without going through my post history, I can think of Dragon Nest M, Black Desert Mobile, Celtic Heroes, Heroes of Skyrealm, Villagers and Heroes, AdventureQuest 3D, Mobile Legends, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp...

Of all of them, the only ones I really stuck with for any length of time were Celtic Heroes, Heroes of Skyrealm and Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. None of them was better than a run-of-the-mill PC mmorpg but reason I stuck with them is they weren't available on PC. Well, you could emulate them, I guess, and I did, but that's another kettle of worms.

Even that doesn't tell the whole story, though. It makes it sound as if I don't play mobile games because I prefer to sit at a desk and use a mouse and keyboard so I'd only go mobile if there was no other choice. While there's some truth in that, there's also the fact that I've never owned a really good mobile device capable of playing games effectively.

The best I ever had were two Windows tablets, both of which broke much too soon. And even that is cheating because although I did play mmorpgs on them, mostly I played games made for PC, using some kind of touchscreen AddOn or even with a mouse plugged into the tablet.

Unsurprisingly, that didn't feel as good as playing the games on an actual PC, making the whole thing seem fairly pointless, so when the second device gave up, so did I - on Windows. I went through a series of Android devices, eventually settling on a Kindle Fire just because I was fed up of the damn things breaking down all the time.

Spot the odd one out. (Hint - it's not me.)

 

There's not much wrong with the build quality and reliability of Amazon's device and the price point, at well under £100, is very acceptable. The problem is, it's pretty feeble when it comes to running games. Even with Google Play installed to break free of Amazon's own walled garden, there's precious little I'd want to play that will run on the thing.

All of which leads me back, in circuitous fashion, to my minor epiphany; that if I had a mobile device that could run it, I'd just as soon play Noah's Heart on a tablet. I already play the game, awkwadly, one-handed with the dog on my lap. It would be better for both of us if we were settled comfortably in the armchair next to the fire.

Except that a tablet or phone capable of running Noah's Heart or Genshin Impact or any of the other gorgeous, modern mobile mmo or mmo-adjacent titles would cost me hundreds of pounds. It's a bizarre irony that the games are free but I'd have to spend a fortune to get something to play them on.

Maybe I will invest in some kind of handheld gaming device that's fit for the next five years or so. The Switch looked good for a while but I hear rumors of obsolescence already. The Steam Deck is another obvious possibility or perhaps one of its inevitable copyists. Or I could buy a decent tablet. An iPad, even. After all, that iPod, extravagant a purchase as it felt at the time, turned out to be very good value.

I'll think about it. In the meantime, I guess I'll just keep playing Noah's Heart on PC. At least there it runs effortlessly on hardware I already own, even if I do have to sit upright instead of slouching in comfort. 

Probably better for my back, anyway.

Keep Taking The Tablets

The list of MMOs that I like to imagine I'm still playing that was included in Saturday's post, stopped at a nice, round dozen. The thirteenth seat at the table could have been taken by a number of other titles but the front runners might easily have been Allods or Villagers and Heroes.

Allods is a game I have never given as much time as I would have liked. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it in beta and enjoyed it a great deal. For a while it was effectively the main MMO we were playing. We each had several characters and we leveled into the mid-thirties, far enough to see some dungeons and take part in the mid-game's open world, non-consensual PvP.

Those characters, of course, were all wiped when the beta ended. We re-rolled for launch but second time around we didn't last long. As I remember, it wasn't the infamous cash-shop shenanigans that put us off, just the usual "I just did all this last month" beta-tester's ennui.

That was Mrs Bhagpuss's last run at Allods but I've been back twice more. The first time was to take a look at the soviet-inspired Empire side of the fence, having always played League before. The second was both to try the new race and its starter area and to test out the viability of playing a full scale MMO on my new 10" Windows tablet.

The concept of playing MMOs on mobile devices has fascinated me for a long time. I first blogged about it back in 2012, when I was playing Pocket Legends and Elemental Knights on my iPod Touch. I'm still using that iPod to listen to music and podcasts and I even occasionally watch YouTube but I stopped gaming on it not long after I wrote that post.

At the time I thought it was the combination of small screen size and not particularly interesting games that made playing an MMO a less-than attractive option for lunch-times and commutes. That explanation didn't hold up very well when I got a tablet capable of playing full-scale MMORPGs like Allods and even WoW.

Of course, MMOs made for the PC aren't generally optimized for touch-screen gaming. WoW plays smoothly on my tablet, which is easily powerful enough to run it, but to play normally I need to attach a mouse and keyboard, by which point I am effectively playing on a netbook.

There are apps that you can install to emulate mobile controls for PC games and I have tried a couple but although they work to a degree the whole process feels awkward. Allods turned out to be the most enjoyable of the MMOs I tried on the tablet because all the innate PC controls that allow for click-to-move or click-to-use seem to respond perfectly as touch-to-move or touch-to-use.

So, I could play Allods comfortably on my tablet, it looked great and I like the game. And yet I only played it a couple of times then forgot all about it. It seems that I don't really want to play MMOS, or any other games, during those short periods of free time I have during the working day, after all. Turns out I'd rather read a book or web-browse.

I only thought about gaming on the go again this weekend for two reasons: the first was when MassivelyOP reported that another MMO I like and wish I'd found time to play more of, Villagers and Heroes, is getting a full port to the Android platform. The other was I dropped my tablet and broke it.

The damage isn't as bad as when I was vigorously cleaning the screen of my first ever tablet and snapped the glass in two. This time it's only the digitizer that's busted. That can be replaced although I probably won't bother. The tablet still has a useful life ahead of it if I simply attach it to a monitor with an HDMI cable. I might set it up like that in the kitchen. There are certainly enough spare monitors lying around this house...

 Following the life/lemons/lemonade principle I used the accident as an opportunity to upgrade. I found something with a much better display, a more powerful cpu and graphics and more memory for almost exactly what the tablet I dropped cost a year ago. That's technology for you.

Best of all, the replacement comes with a dual-boot option, Android and Windows, already installed. That should give me the fullest access to whatever the next couple of years holds for mobile gaming, short of anything that releases as an iPad exclusive.

It will be interesting to see what the new tablet can cope with. Black Desert, for example, could be an ideal mobile MMO with its extensive range of automated options and afk processes. Then there's GW2, which has a highly paternalistic patcher that refuses to run if it finds your system doesn't meet its exacting standards. The old tablet couldn't pass the examination but if the new one can it would be handy to be able to log in at work if just to be able to chat in guild.

Having both Android and Windows on the same tablet gives me carte blanche to play just about anything. Several titles I've looked at over the last year, but which were only available for Android and iOS, might come into play. I'll definitely install V&H when the mobile version becomes available and if Nexon ever release the FFXI mobile port they are supposedly working on for Square, I'll definitely be trying that. (All the cool kids are into FFXI right now, didn't you know?)

In the end, though, I suspect that, no matter how good the choice of MMOs becomes, how powerful and affordable the hardware gets, however smoothly and efficiently everything runs, I'll always end up choosing to use my tablet for something other than gaming. It is possible to have too much of a good thing.

On the other hand, it's also nice to have a choice. It seems like, after a number of false starts and failed promises, the age of the Mobile MMO might be here at last. I'd rather be able to play MMOs on my tablet and not want to than want to and not be able.

Conspicuous non-consumption! it's the post-capitalist way!

Your Favorite MMOs - Now In Tablet Form! : WoW, Allods, FFXI

One of the oddest items of MMO news this week was the revelation that FFXI is being prepped for mobile. In a way perhaps it shouldn't have come as such a surprise. Of all the established gaming houses Square Enix have probably been the fastest and most assiduous to adapt to the new opportunities mobile platforms afford.

The Final Fantasy series is already available on Android and iOS up to FFV. Square's Dive In streaming service, currently only planned for release in Japan and, as far as I can tell, not yet available even there, is set to extend that through the iconic FFVII and beyond, possibly all the way to current blogosphere darling FFXIV.

Of course you can already play any MMO on a tablet or even a smartphone using the excellent Splashtop app. I bought that one several years ago and can affirm that it works brilliantly. Unfortunately I've almost never used it because if you want to play GW2 on your tablet in your lunch hour at work it requires you leave your desktop PC switched on back at home. I swore off that practice when I got out of the Everquest Bazaar business back in 2006 or so.

Full-fat MMOs that run natively on mobile devices have always been very hard to find. Even now, years into the runaway success of mobile as a platform for gaming and with the mainstreaming of affordable, powerful tablets with screens large enough to display the full, rich detail of virtual worlds to much better effect than we ever enjoyed back in the so-called Golden Age of 14" CRTs, lists of possibles rarely offer anything much more enticing than WoW-clone Order and Chaos or the cheerful cartoons from the Spacetime Games team.

I first wrote about playing MMOs on my iPod Touch almost three years ago. Since then I've kept an eye out for new opportunities. So far I haven't heard many knocks. Lists of current media favorites tend to include a whole raft of entertainments like Ingress, Boom Beach and Clash of Clans that seem to me to be part of a different genre entirely, along with the same handful of titles that filled the same lists last year and the year before that.

So, even though we're talking about a game that's now more than a dozen years old, to hear that Square believe they can bring FFXI to mobile devices is good news indeed. I only dabbled briefly with FFXI. I eventually decided that the famously PC-unfriendly UI and controls were more trouble than they were worth. Also, although even five years ago when I played a lot of work had supposedly been done to make the game more solo-friendly, by around level 20 it was already becoming apparent that work went only so far.

Nevertheless, it was a beautiful world with appealing characters and an interesting story. Optimized for touch screen and gussied up for the casual mobile market I would be very happy to give FFXI another run. It could be a while before that's an option, though, so what could I play when I'm out of the house in the meanwhile?

Well, how about WoW? Or Allods? If the MMOs won't come to the tablet maybe the tablet will just have to come to the games. A month ago I bought a cheap 10" tablet that runs the full version of Windows 8.1. I also got a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. The whole lot cost well under £200 for which what I have is effectively a touchscreen tablet that can double as a netbook.

I've been delighted with its performance as a general-purpose mini-PC and this morning I finally got around to setting it up to play MMOs. Thanks largely to the gorgeous Allods screenshots Kaozz posted, as of yesterday I'm playing Allods again, of which more another day. It's a relatively quick, fast download so I set the tablet to doing that while I also re-downloaded WoW for the desktop yet again (I just bought and installed a third hard drive so space is no longer an issue...for the moment).

I now have Allods installed on the tablet's SD card and WoW copied to a usb drive. I played both of them on the tablet for around half an hour each and the experience was, if not ideal, then certainly very enjoyable. They both look absolutely fantastic - every bit as good as they do on desktop. The colors are rich and the detail is delicious. Quest text is easily large enough to read comfortably. (The screenshots here are from the desktop versions, by the way; I did take some shots on the tablet but I'm too lazy to port them over right now).

Of the two, WoW runs more smoothly but Allods is easier to play, largely because it has that "click to go to quest objective" option so beloved of F2P titles. That really comes into its own on a tablet. On the other hand, to my complete amazement, the WoW UI turns out to be fully touch-enabled. I can cast spells or open bags just by touching the hotbar, something I found out purely by accident.

Clearly there's no way I would play either game on the tablet in preference to the desktop, any more than I would play them on my laptop, which can run both flawlessly; not when I'm at home and could be sitting at my desk instead, anyway. Given that I carry my tablet with me everywhere, though, it does open up a whole new set of possibilities that weren't there before. As windows-based tablets are improving in quality and affordability all the time the future for MMOs on the go is looking a lot brighter.

If nothing else I am looking forward to experimenting, seeing what will and won't run, what feels like fun on the go and what's just too much like hard work. I'm guessing that browser-based MMOs, like Runescape or City of Steam or Eldevin, would work even better than client-based games but who knows? Well I will if I get on and test it out.

As for the bigger beasts, I suspect the poor little tablet would melt if I tried to play ESO or FFXIV. It was getting rather warm just running Allods. I will definitely attempt to get it playing GW2 though. If they'll co-operate I can easily see me popping on for half an hour at work to get a few dailies done. That would be really handy.