Baby, You're Far Too Clean

With all the Blaugust talk and the music stuff it seems quite a while since I wrote anything about gaming. It isn't, of course. Just last week I posted about Neverwinter Online, Guild Wars 2 and DCUO and before that I had something to say about New World, Crowfall and Bless Unleashed. Then there was the World of Warcraft firestorm, about which the less said the better.

In every case, though, I was reacting to something in the news. Mostly structural revamps or launches. Those hooks hang posts. I enjoy writing them but it doesn't quite match up to the organic satisfaction of posting regularly and confidently about a game I'm actively playing.

Remember back in the winter and the early spring, when we were all penning long essays about Valheim? That's the sort of thing I mean. It happens when there's a new game everyone's playing or at least it feels as though everyone's playing. 

It's happening right now. Everyone's jumping on a fresh bandwagon and firing off excited posts about how great it is. It's not Crowfall. No-one's posting about Crowfall. It's not New World, not yet. It might be, come September, but as of now the beta's over and even while it was on, most people seemed happy just to test the waters, pronounce them acceptable, then politely withdraw to wait for the real thing. I know I did.

Oddly, the game of the moment is Final Fantasy XIV. Again. How many bites at the cherry is this thing going to get? For a game that seems to have been around for a very long time, FFXIV somehow manages to come up fresh, over and over.

 

This time it started with the announcement of an Autumn expansion. Interest and attention grew with the arrival of a covy of high-profile WoW streamers seeking a more enticing money-train to ride than the stuttering, sputtering engine of WoW's failing Shadowlands. And finally the trickle turned into a flood, an all-out exodus of refugees streaming out of the Blizzard gates, leaving the 800 pound gorilla bleeding into the dust as the company imploded. 

Here's the thing. I've played FFXIV. Quite a bit. Never got all that far but I quite like it. It's definitely an mmorpg I could play. I could join in the fun now. I wouldn't even have to pay. So much is free there'd be bound to be new games to pull me away long before I got to the end of it.

If I did that, I could post about FFXIV like everyone else. It's a big, feature-filled game with plenty to talk about. And it looks great in screenshots. So, why not?

Yes, well, I've been thinking about that. If I hadn't, I might have slipped into my usual anti-story mode and whinged on yet again about how I don't want my mmorpgs to be centered on pre-written narratives. Or I might have banged on about the paternalistic undertones that creep me out when I read the supposedly supportive and open-handed commentary coming out of Square Enix. I might even have focused fire on the forced grouping required to achieve basic character progression bench-marks.

Really, though, it's none of those, even though they're all actual concerns I have. I'm not making them up. But they're minor problems, by no means unique to FFXIV. I could easily come up with lists of complaints about the way GW2 is set up or how ArenaNet operates. There's plenty wrong with both EverQuest II and Daybreak's custodianship I could get into, if I wanted. Facts are, I tolerate worse elsewhere, willingly.

None of these games, nor the companies that make them, are perfect, not even close. If any of them were, we'd all be playing the same thing. They all have flaws and drawbacks and issues but until and unless the whole thing turns into the kind of meltdown we've seen at WoW these last few weeks, none of it really matters all that much. If we like a game enough we'll play it in spite of its failures.

I just don't like FFXIV enough for that. If I'm brutally honest about why Mrs Bhagpuss and I both stopped playing after our first month all the way back at launch and why I never stick around for long any time I go back it's because FFXIV is a bit... dull. 

No, not dull, exactly. Worthy. that's it. I feel I'm expected to be on my best behavior there, somehow. Have my laces tied and my shirt buttoned. I feel there might be a test, after.

The way it looks matches the way it feels, for me. It's pretty to look at but it's also more than a little bland. The scenery feels stage-managed. The cities are big but the streets and the buildings all look too much the same, too uniform. The countryside is mannered in the way of a country house estate. Eorzea somehow manages to look convincing and artificial at the same time. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there's no there there.

The same over-designed tidiness pervades the whole game or, I should say, the small fraction of the game I've seen. I've never got much past the high 30s. By the time I get that far I feel tired. The sameness wears me out. It's not the famously enervating cross-continental travel. I like long journeys. I spent whole days doing nothing else in Valheim and for less reason. It's just that in FFXIV I never quite feel the journey was worth it and it's rarely fun for itself.

 

Even the interface exhausts me. I was reading Pixel Fairy's post about the FFXIV UI and it made me remember how low-level awkward I always find it when I play.  There's nothing wrong with it, per se. As Adelle says, it's fully customiseable. It ought to be fine. It's not, though.

Enough of that! Believe it or not, I didn't sit down today to write about FFXIV at all, let alone to say bad things about it. I wanted to post about an mmorpg I am playing, not one I'm not. As I thought about it, though, it occured to me to wonder just why I'd made the choice I have and I found myself comparing the two.

The mmorpg I'm playing most right now is Blade and Soul. I only play it for an hour or two each day and sometimes I might spend longer in GW2 or EQII, but it's only in B&S where I'm actively levelling a character and following the intended progression path.

I'm aware of the heavy irony, given my comments on narrative-driven mmorpgs in general and FFXIV in particular. Almost all of my gameplay in B&S consists of slavishly following the Main Story Quest. I talk to NPCs, all fully voiced. I watch frequent cut scenes, some of them lengthy, all of them, again, fully voiced. I read along with the subtitles, all of which are in good, demotic English.

Every session I go where I'm sent and do what I'm told. There's a lot of running back and forth. There are a lot of dungeons. As I finish each Chapter I get massive amounts of xp and that's what drives my levelling. There's xp for killing things, too, but it's largely incidental. The MSQ is essential if you want to progress, not least because it gives you your gear upgrades.

The whole thing is linear. I have little to no freedom of action within the narrative. There are no meaningful choices. Mostly there are no choices, meaningful or otherwise. If I don't welcome that in FFXIV, why do I tolerate it in Blade and Soul? And not just tolerate. Seek it out.

It's not as if the story's even much good. It's generic and thin. FFXIV's is much deeper, much broader, much more complete, even in the much-maligned original ARR. FFXIV's writing is eminently superior to Blade and Soul's. I still enjoy B&S more.

And I enjoy the gameplay more, too, even though it's button-mashing and most things die very quickly except the world bosses, which I can't kill at all. Even though it's supposed to be an mmorpg and yet I rarely see anyone else because everyone's max-level and no-one's doing any of the lower content. Blade and Soul has none of FFXIV's replayability or reusabilty or culture of continual purpose. Start late, you play alone.

I stopped and thought about why I prefer Blade and Soul. It's comfortable and FFXIV isn't. That's the plain truth of it. I can play for a few minutes or a couple of hours and feel relaxed afterwards. If I play FFXIV, I usually end feeling discontented, sometimes enervated, like my nerves have been stretched. It happens even if all I've done is go from one place to another or taken a few screenshots. 

Part of it, a big part, is that Blade and Soul, at the level I'm at, plays one hundred per cent like a single player game. All those dungeons I mentioned are solo instances. At no point has the main quest asked me to go do anything with another player. I could if I wanted. Most of the instances pop up a window when I enter asking me if I want to look for a group. If I don't want to, though, the game is fine with that.

Another part is that the world of Blade and Soul is more interesting to look at. It's not better. It's objectively worse, I think, unnatural, weird. Everything is too bright, too big, too odd. But it's spectacular and strange and it fires off the right receptors in my brain to make me feel engaged. Immersed? I might not go that far but close. 

 

Eorzea doesn't do that. Eorzea looks too... I want to say real. Maybe I mean complete. It's done. It's finished. There are no ragged edges, no messy corners. Everything makes sense. I don't want things to make sense.

None of which is to say I won't start playing FFXIV again today or tomorrow and leave Blade and Soul in the dust, nor that if I do I won't be here posting about what a great time I'm having and how much fun FFXIV can be. I've done that before and I'll bet I'll do it again. It's a good game. It can be fun. That's not the point.

And I'm not nailed on to Blade and Soul. Not even hardly. I can almost guarantee that next week or the week after that I won't be logging in every day or even at all. I pick up and drop mmorpgs all the time these days. I don't even see it as a failing any more. It's a playstyle. 

Bless Unleashed launches on August 8th and unlike most people I was quite impressed by what I saw in open beta. I plan on playing but I very much doubt I'll be playing for long. 

New World is coming, as we know. I've pre-ordered and I'm keen to get started. That one should last a little longer but once again I have no expectation it's going to be my next big mmorpg. I won't be putting in thousands of hours. Maybe a hundred or two if things go well. If I get half the play out of it I got from Valheim, I'll be happy.

Until those arrive I'm sticking with Blade and Soul. With luck I'll hit fifty before I quit. Levels that is, not hours.

I'm enjoying it a lot more than seems entirely reasonable but I don't have a lot to say about it. When all you do is the MSQ, what is there to say? But that's fine. Some mmorpgs are just for playing, not for writing about. When I find the next one that's worth spending the words, we'll all know about it, that's for sure.

Probably best enjoy the quiet, while it lasts.

(Another) Another World

Tobold has a post up which touches on something that doesn't get mentioned often enough in most discussions of mmorpgs that I've read over the years. He's writing about the founding of Lightforge Games, a new games development studio started by a bunch of people you may or may not have heard of from a bunch of studios you very definitely will - Epic, BioWare, Zenimax, Blizzard. 

As expressed in the PCGamer interview Tobold links to, the pitch is vague in the extreme: "a new cross-platform, social videogame where players have the power to create worlds and tell stories in unprecedented freedom" combining "elements from Minecraft or Roblox with tabletop RPGs to form a new way to play roleplaying games". 

They go on to talk about how they intend to "revolutionize RPGs", which is pretty much the standard new company boilerplate these days. PCGamer sounds unconvinced: ""Revolutionize RPGs" is bold and vague... Roblox is more of a platform for making and playing games than a game in itself. So, are we looking at a creation tool and client for digital tabletop adventures? Or will it be more like a player-driven MMO with custom building? Something in between?"

It's probably wise to be suspicious if not outright cynical about claims of this nature. We've heard them so many times. Everyone plans on getting right all the things they see being done wrong. You'd hope so, too. No-one intends to repeat the maistakes of the past.

The "About" page on the official website is positively angelic in its positivism. I'm not knocking it. Far better to articulate aspirations and risk being called to book when you fail to justify them than not to have them in the first place. 

No, I'm not going to criticize or even critique Lightforge's intentions, nor speculate on their prospects. At this stage my only interest in the new company is as a catalyst, spurring Tobold into saying out loud something I've been thinking for a while: "The fundamental reason why virtual worlds in MMORPGs never really felt like living, breathing worlds is that most of the inhabitants aren't there most of the time. We live in the real world 24 hours a day, 365 days per year, for up to a hundred years or so. We live in virtual worlds for the few hours per day that we have the time for them, maybe not every day, and a lot of players inhabit a virtual world just for a few months before moving on to the next game."

It ties in with a reply I made to Everwake's comment on my Bless Unleashed first impressions post. I said, quite brutally, "I think we tend to expect far too much of games... Why we think every new mmorpg has to be worth dropping everything else to play for years beats me. It's more than enough for a game to be serviceable and entertaining". 

So often we allocate all the blame to execution when expectation is the real problem. It's not just that everything can't be perfect. Everything can't even be great. Some things have to be mediocre and some things have to be bad or how will we even be able to tell the difference?

It reminds me of that joke Garrison Keillor was so proud of he used it at the start of every episode of The Prairie Home Companion: "Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." And that's what we do all the time. Expect every new game to be above average.

It's bad enough when we're talking about single-player, standalone games with a beginning, a middle and an end but when it comes to mmorpgs the whole thing gets so much worse. Now every new game doesn't just have to be better than all the games that came before it, revolutionary, mould-breaking, innovative and original. 

No, because it's an mmorpg, or even a virtual world, it has to be capable of fulfilling all our gaming needs indefinitely. It has to be that One Game we'll play forever, a world so fascinating, so compelling, so satisfying, we'll have no choice, no desire to be anywhere else, ever again.

The "virtual world" concept, which seems to be coming back into vogue after a long time out of fashion, incorporates in its very name the idea that these are places where we can live. Not visit, not play, not goof around when we're bored until something better turns up: live.

Really? Even if that was possible, is that what we want? Is that what we ought to want?

When these discussions happen someone always brings up Star Trek. The Holodeck, that simulator where they go so the production team or the writers or the stars can get a break from space opera for a week or two, wear normal clothes, or at least different clothes. If mmorpgs were like that, someone always says, then I'd be happy. I'd never want to leave.

Star Trek is an outlier. In almost all the science fiction stories I've read, where there's a device that allows people to send their mind into a virtual, fantasy environment and "live" there indefinitely, that's the pivot of a plot about the dangers it entails. It's never fluffy bunny funtime in there. Or, if it is, it sure as hell isn't outside and that's going to be the moral.

Where is it we get these ideas, that a single mmoprg should be able to fulfill all our entertainment needs for years and years? From experience, some of us. From folk memory, the rest.

We all, or most of us, remember that feeling when we first discovered online fantasy gaming. Or mmorpgs. Or virtual worlds. When it was so overwhelmingly new, different, intense and strange we couldn't think of anything we'd rather be doing. 

Many of us timed it so that we didn't actually have an awful lot else we did have to be doing. School and college allow for an awful lot of free time. We were able to spend long enough in our virtual worlds that they started to feel more real than the mundane lives we returned to for those unhappy moments when the servers briefly went offline.

Do we go on playing those same games, our first mmorpg loves, year in, year out, thirty, forty, fifty hours a week? Thankfully, no. Most of us, anyway. We wind down, we cut back, we move on. 

Not all of us turn our backs on our old homes, delete all our characters, give away our stuff. Many of us keep popping in to see how the old place is getting on. Sometimes we stay for a while. Some of us never entirely leave. But we don't spend all our time there. We don't live there forever. 

And I don't see the people at Lightforge expecting that we should. We're the ones doing that. It's something many of us expect of ourselves and of the developers who design our games. We assess the success of each new mmorpg by how able it is to hold players indefinitely, while at the same time we complain about the methods they employ to make it happen.

What else are they supposed to do, though? Mmorpgs take five years or more to make. They cost millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. If one doesn't catch the attention of the critical, demanding audience, that's it. Game over. Can't just knock out another.

Or can you? Isn't that what we see with the inexhaustible flow of identical games from the East? Bless being replaced by Bless Unleashed just the latest example. The annual announcements of the slates of new mmos. Games that don't intend to be anyone's forever game. Just some fun for now, enjoy it then move on. There'll be another along shortly.

If the games are filled with tricks to make us keep playing, why is that? Because we want to stay and they don't want us to leave. Is it mutual self-interest or co-dependency? 

For a couple of months this year all I wanted to do almost every day was play Valheim. It worried me at the time. I mentioned it once or twice. I knew, though, that Valheim had an endpoint. I got there and my interest dimmed and I stopped. I'm glad about that. 

I also said at the time that playing Valheim was very close to the feeling I remembered of playing EverQuest twenty years ago. It's a great feeling. Of course I want it back. I also want to know it won't last forever.

I wish Lightforge well in their quest to revolutionize the way we play rpgs online. Raph Koster, too, and all the other teams working on projects they hope will literally make our dreams come true. I wish them well but I hope they're not quite as successful as they tell us they're going to be.

I'm not sure we're ready for a true virtual world quite yet.

Head Full Of Steam : City of Steam

I sometimes refer, rather glibly, to "my top five favorite MMOs of all time", which makes it sound as though I keep a list. I don't. I tend to slot things in and out on a whim as the occasion arises, as my mood changes or, as is most often the case, as I remember some game I'd entirely forgotten and succumb to a surge of nostalgic affection.

One such title is City of Steam. I have a lot of history with that unlucky and mostly unloved MMO. There are more than fifty posts tagged for the game here on Inventory Full, starting with my thoughts about the pre-alpha Sneak Peak back in March 2012 and ending with a brief mention in May of this year, when I said  "One of my favorite MMORPGs and definintely one that failed to live up to its full potential".

I also wrote "The original vision for the game was... a real labor of love". What I neglected to mention then, or probably ever, was that the "original vision" was also a published pen and paper roleplaying game.

I vaguely knew it existed. Or once had. The subject came up occasionally on the forums but that provenance was never really pushed as heavily as it might have been. Instead, Nexus seemed to  emerge, fully formed, out of the void, something that was  - and still is - quite common with MMOs.

Nevertheless, it's clear from early promo trailers like Room for Rent that someone knew a backstory we didn't. I felt much the same about WildStar. It's a good way to create interest in an otherwise unfamiliar property.

On a few occasions I've commented that City of Steam was at its very best in its earliest incarnations. It's commonplace to claim that MMOs are better in beta. That's not always objectively true - there are several subjective factors - exclusivity, novelty, camaraderie - that influence opinion - but also it is an indisputable fact that games do often change radically in development.

City of Steam changed many times. The Sneak Peak was perhaps the purest, most distilled version of creator David Lindsay's original vision, while some of the Alphas may have been the most immersive. I called the first Alpha "a disturbingly compulsive experience".

The game changed a lot in beta and in it's various Live iterations, first drifting and then sprinting away from its original conception. The final version, City of Steam: Arcadia, was arguably a better game but it was also as a neon-lit carnival, almost a parody of the dark, brooding, anxiety-inducing retro-future I'd fallen in love with five years before.

City of Steam shuttered in early 2016. There were vague hints that it might not be the end for the concept but Mechanist Games moved on to a new project, Heroes of Skyrealm.

HoS was a mobile game. I've played it. It was quite good, in its way. It almost felt as if it was part of the same world as City of Steam, but much shinier and more upbeat. Yesterday, for arcane reasons I won't go into, I thought of it and went to check the website to see how it was doing.

It's dead. But I didn't know that until this morning.

Heroes of Skyrealm launched in the Spring of 2017 and closed in June 2018, just over a year later. I only learned that five minutes ago as I was fact-checking for this post. The website is still there, frozen in time at the moment before Open Beta began in February last year. The links still go to the Google Play and Apple Store but the game is no longer there. I found the sunset announcement on Facebook.

The reason I didn't discover the sad news of the demise of Heroes of Skyrealm yesterday is that as I was following links back to Mechanist Games to see what they were up to I landed on the "About" page, where I read this:

"City of Steam: Arkadia... is based on The New Epoch, a series of table-top game books written by David Lindsay, co-founder of Mechanist Games" 

So I googled "The New Epoch" and found this. Minutes later I was the happy owner of Watermarked PDFs of both The Character Codex and The Adventure Codex for what is to all intents and purposes the roleplaying game edition of City of Steam.

I've written before about how reassuring and comforting it is to have a solid, physical representation of a virtual world. Novels, gamebooks, comics, even soft toys all help shore up confidence against the inevitable day when the last server goes offline.

Best of all, though, is a full set of roleplaying rules that let you feel that you could re-create the entire gameworld on your kitchen table. If you wanted to. You never will, of course, but you could, and that's what counts.

A PDF isn't quite as good as a printed book but it's a darn sight better than nothing. And these PDFs are stylishly designed and lavishly - gorgeously - illustrated in full color.

I haven't had time to read much in depth as yet. I need to transfer the files onto a device I can hold in my hand before I get stuck in to the detail.

Even so, at a skim, I can already tell just how fascinating a read it's going to be. It's not just the pre-cursor to the game I loved - it is that game. Some of the illustrations in the book are even the very same ones that were used in the early promotional videos.

One of my few gaming regrets is that I never finished the storyline in City of Steam or saw all the zones. I can't change that but now I have another chance to dig deeper into the lore and history that was always evident but ever elusive in the game itself.

And, I guess, one day I might even get to tell some stories of my own.

It's Not Called Ninelives For Nothing

I was browsing my blog roll after work last night when I came across this post from Chestnut at Gamer Girl Confessions. What a nice surprise, particularly since IntPiPoMo is my favorite of all the annual blogging events.

It's always nice to win something although in this case I can hardly claim I made a special effort. I probably post ninety screenshots most months, which is a fairly small fraction of the number I actually take.

Don't look at me like that. I don't have the key!

One of the great things about IntPiPoMo is that it gives me an excuse to run a few of the shots that I otherwise might not find a good reason to post. Not that I should need an excuse, I guess. Kaozz , who really should enter IntPiPoMo next time, makes a habit of all-picture posts and MassivelyOP has a weekly screenshot feature called One Shots.

Somehow, though, even if I start out meaning to post nothing but pictures I always end up writing a whole bunch of words. Case in point.

Re the recent discussion in the comments here: NineLives has fully functioning underwater environments.

I'm going to use this opportunity as a peg to hang a few pictures I took last week in a game that I've mentioned a few times in the past but which can be a tad hard to justify including on this supposedly MMOcentric blog. It's not an MMO and it's no longer in active development.

It is, however, one of the most aesthetically satisfying, visually subtle and deliciously appealing virtual worlds I have ever encountered and it deserves far more attention than it is ever likely to get. The game in question is Ninelives.

As far as I can tell, if you can see it, you can get to it. I saw that house and I got to it. Died a few times doing it, too.

Why the Smokymonkeys team decided to shelve this wonderful project is puzzling. I think they may just be obsessional perfectionists for whom nothing is ever quite good enough. For whatever reason, they announced the suspension of development over a year ago. As the website states, in terms idiosyncratically translated from the original Japanese, "Currently this game is suspended and has no plan to resuming."

It's still up and running though and occasionally some small update or improvement drifts in. Every so often I check just to see if it's still alive and last week I saw it twitch:

 "We decided to publish remain areas that under development. There are no creatures, no items, and no quests. It's like a walking simulator. There are only terrains and great music. Nothing to get valuable items or so on them. Even we believe it has some impression or some value for some people. It will not intrupt your normal game play. You need to fill some conditions to open the games to reach new areas."

Well, it certainly had some impression or some value for me! The game required a new download and installation, which took just a couple of minutes, then there I was, back in the gorgeous, unnamed world of Ninelives again.

Here I am, half way up the winding path, already into the cloud layer.

According to the update notes the pre-requisite for access to the new zones comes in the form of a quest to "get two climber's medals from the quests at Imera Climbing Cluba in Continental Highlands".  Easier said than done in a game that has so few players, no official support and struggles to populate even a basic wiki.

All of which is part of the appeal. As I was roaming around Continental Highlands, a map I thought I'd opened but actually had barely started exploring, I found myself thinking that I was quite glad Ninelives never followed its original dream to become an MMORPG.

And here's the house, accessed by a very scary almost invisible magic platform.

A significant part of the appeal is the loneliness. It's one of the most bittersweet, elegiac environments I've found in decades of gaming. It's more of an art installation than a game. It definitely wouldn't have the same bleak grandeur if it was filled with other players darting hither and yon, slaughtering the wildlife and complaining in chat about being bored.

I'm very keen to make my way into the new explorable areas because I think that having "no creatures, no items, and no quests" may even enhance the experience. The quests are nothing special and the awkward translations sometimes take you out of the moment rather than drawing you in. Progression is slow and there's a fairly steep curve, which makes exploring beyond the areas you're meant to be leveling in a dangerous affair.

It's so cosy inside! Who else would live here but an elven wizard. Look, he has the ears and the staff and everything!
And, naturally, he's got a quest.

All things taken in to consideration, it may well be that Ninelives will be best appreciated as a walking simulator with great music. But first I have to find the Imera Climbing Club. Easier read than done.

I opened all of the West side of Continental Highlands on the map in a thoroughly enjoyable session the other night. I died a few times doing it and every death costs me gold to respawn. I'm not sure what happens if I run out of money.

I didn't kill them! They were dead when I got here - honest!

I found a load of fascinating and beautiful locations and acquired a bookful of quests I'm not powerful enough to complete but I never found the Climbing Club. I hope it's somewhere in the still-fogged East. If not then I'm stumped.

In any case, I probably should go back to the start of the zone and level up a bit. I don't suppose those climbers are going to hand out their medals for nothing. I'll probably have to kill something at some point, even if it's only to get to the right area.

This is some kind of "research facility". Hence the white leather lab coat and the face mask. Not sinister at all...especially with that motivational poster...

It would be such a shame if NineLives just faded away out of some misguided sense of perfectionism amongst its creators. As someone pointed out on the forum, when  it was suggested the game should go to Steam, "even incomplete as it is, it's much better than most of the games there!" . Which may be true although I haven't exactly played enough Steam games to judge.

For now, though, it's freely available and as I've said before I recommend trying it while you still can. It's not going to set anyone's pulse racing with its gameplay but the visuals, the music and the ambience are superb.

Last time I wrote about Nine Lives I think the only person who mentioned trying it was Syp and he didn't like it much. He would have liked it even less if he'd made it to the Highlands and met this Elf Child.

When I get my medals and climb the wall I'll be back with another report. I'll be sure and take plenty of pictures.

Light In The Darkness : LotRO

There's a post I want to write about what makes people go on playing MMORPGs long after they've finished the supposed "content". I started thinking about it after I read Armathyx's Hiatus From GW2 announcement, in which he wonders what there can be about any MMO that would keep someone logging in for "7 hours per day, every single day of the year without exception" for over four years.

It's something I've thought about many times. The problem is that I have rather too much to say about it. Blogging may be considered "long form" for social media these days but I find it increasingly constricting. Most of my posts already run too long and yet many of them barely qualify as introductions to want I want to say.

Sometimes I think I'd be happier working in the five to ten thousand word scale of a dissertation but that would create more problems than it solved. For one thing, there is no real forum or format for writing of that length that I'm aware of and for another I'm not a full time student any more. If I were to write at that kind of length I would have no time to play the MMOs I'd be writing about.

So instead I am, yet again, going to try and do the thing I say I'm going to try every year: write shorter, more focused pieces. Keep to the point. The two posts this weekend were an attempt to do just that.

In that vein, rather than include these screenshots as evidence in an extended analysis of what can make logging into an MMORPG feel more like going to a place than playing a game, I offer them simply as a demonstration of that same principle.

I have been playing more LotRO than I expected. Only an hour or two each day but I want to play more. I took my level 40 Guardian (I always have to think about the class names in LotRO. None of them come naturally to mind) to Forochel, the final zone from the original game and the only one I never explored.

There I took all the tasks on the board and spent a couple of hours on consecutive days killing orange and red cons and handing in the furs, skins and other body parts. At first I was very, very wary. I expected the orange cons to kill my dwarf in short order but they did not. Even though I had no real idea what any of his attacks did and even though he was dressed in gear from five years ago he was able to cull the forest wildlife with fair success.

From that examination I moved on with even greater trepidation to red cons and found they, too, died. As long as I stuck to animals and didn't get adds it was manageable.

It was, however, hard work. For reasons I don't understand LotRO is the only MMO I have ever played which gives me RSI-like symptoms. Actually, I should say, the Guardian does that. My Lorekeeper is fine.

Playing the Guardian, though, I could feel the strain an hour in. I would have had to stop even had I not discovered that the task system is time gated. Also it was dark for the entire time I spent in Forochel.

At first that was wonderful. The recreation of the Northern Lights is truly spectacular. I spent a good while doing nothing more than marveling at the sky and taking screenshots.

After a while, though, the darkness becomes oppressive. Night in Standing Stone's Middle Earth is shockingly dark by modern MMO standards. It's immersive, that's for sure, but you can have too much immersion.

When the snow began to fall I was out in the woods. Visibility dropped to something very close to nothing. With aggressive creatures above my level all around, now invisible in  the darkness, I began to feel much of the old fear from nighttime in early Norrath.

LotRO may not have corpse runs or item loss but I have an adversity to dying just because I can't see my hand in front of my face. I got on my new fast pony and relocated to the previous zone and waited for sunrise.

At this point I would normally move on to what happened next and how it relates to a thesis I am working on about the way Free to Play restrictions enhance and encourage that sense of immersion that once seemed so easy to find in the genre but now often feels so elusive.

That, though, would extend this post beyond what needs to be its natural length. I'll get to that another time. Maybe.

First Monthly Report : Black Desert

This weekend I got my loyalty reward for spending thirty days in Black Desert. You'd think that would be long enough to have made up my mind whether I'm enjoying myself. If this was a subscription MMO it would have to be, because right now the first monthly payment would be due.

Of course, a month's play often isn't enough to decide the future of an MMORPG. When Mrs Bhagpuss and I played Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn at launch, by complete chance the first subscription payment fell due just as we went away for a week's holiday. As we left we were undecided whether to sub but that enforced hiatus brought clarity.

By the time we returned neither of us was interested in picking up where we left off in FFXIV. We both preferred to return to GW2, which we did and where we remain, by and large, almost three years on.

Beats riding an oversized chicken, that's for sure.

FFXIV wasn't the game for either of us and I can give chapter and verse on why, but I won't, because this isn't a post about FFXIV's shortcomings. Summing up how I feel about Black Desert after a month is going to be a lot harder.

For one thing haven't had the benefit of a full week away from both Black Desert and gaming in general to let my thoughts and feelings settle. For another, I'm not sure I can truly claim I've been "playing" Black Desert for a month anyway.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm playing Black Desert at all. I wonder if you can play Black Desert. Is it even a game? The month I spent playing FFXIV was a full month of hands-on gaming. I probably logged 25-35 hours a week and all of that was active play.

In Black Desert I have an achievement for 100 hours played but it should say 100 hours logged in. I have, without doubt, spent more hours "playing" Black Desert from the system tray while I actually played GW2 or wrote this blog than I've spent in direct, personal control of my character.

With the addition of looping now you need spend even less time playing!

Even when I am actively playing BDO I'm mostly not doing very much. My involvement as a player is required only intermittently. I spend a lot of time just watching. I may be at the keyboard but I'm not using it.

A good deal of the "gameplay" consists of taking a quest, hitting "T" and auto-pathing there. If it's a normal quest that could take anything from a few seconds to a few minutes. If it's a  trade quest, where my character trudges along carrying a heavy pack, it might take the best part of half an hour.

The auto-pathing in Black Desert is exemplary. The best I've seen. There's an annoying exception, where the game assumes you want to go to the source of whatever the quest requires, an area with imps or ash trees for example, instead of to the NPC you need for the hand-in, but other than that, as far as questing goes, you can pretty much just hit "T" and go make yourself a coffee.

If you set your own markers, which you can do freely, occasionally you might come back to find your character stuck on a wall. That might make me feel needed for a brief moment, when I tab back in and notice, unstick my character, make sure she's pointed in the right direction, then tab back out again.

Simple crafting, somewhat ironically, requires more attention than "proper" crafting.

An awful lot of my gameplay in Black Desert happens better without me. The AI fishes more slowly than I do but it never misses a cast, never fails to land a fish and sorts the old boots from the valuable catches far more efficiently than I would. My workers don't need direct supervision. So long as I pop in once in a while and buy them a few beers they get along just fine.

There are a few things that do need my personal attention, combat being the most obvious example. Ah, combat... What is there to say about low-mid level PvE combat in Black Desert? It's very fast, very easy and very loud and that about covers it.

There's a whole, hugely complex, system of combos and key-presses that you're meant to learn, none of which you need. Frequently you don't need to select or pull mobs because after the mid-teens, whenever you arrive in an area filled with hostiles everything in a fifty meter radius will rush at you like steel ball bearings to an electro-magnet.

The depth and complexity of PvE combat is exemplified by the many daily quests that start "Kill 50" or "Kill 100". It's a matter of taking the quest, hitting "T", auto-pathing to the middle of the swamp or the field or the camp, waiting a second or two until the imps or fogans or rebels notice, then AEing and chugging health potions until the required number have immolated themselves on your pyre.

I have a Gathering outfit that stops mobs like him bothering me but I don't have enough inventory slots to carry it with me. So I just kill them.

In fact, the only problem in combat is picking up the loot, which is frequent and potentially valuable or useful enough to make it uncomfortable to ignore. That's why they sell pets that loot for you. I don't have one and I will not be paying real money for one so I do my own looting, which does at least mean I take a few hits while my back is turned; that adds a semblance of danger once in a while.

Speaking of loot, inventory space in Black Desert is a major issue. In fact, if there was one reason I might stop playing it's that. Bearing in mind that I love inventory management, that I will literally spend whole days organizing my inventory in EQ, EQ2 or GW2, for me to say that inventory management is a tedious, fun-sucking bore should be a dire warning to anyone who already finds the whole concept of sorting icons into bags tedious.

It isn't particularly a question of shortage of space although the basic allotment is measly and the potential for expanding it without spending $1.50 per slot in the cash shop is limited (here's a list). If you add up all the free storage options inluding the inventory on each character you make, all the warehouses in different towns, the warehouse expansions from owning buildings and the inventory slots on boats and mounts and wagons, then in total it probably doesn't fall far short of most MMOs.

It gets very dark at night but only for a short while.
The sun rises at about 2 am. No wonder no-one goes to sleep.

It's just staggeringly, mind-bogglingly inconvenient, awkward, fiddly and annoying. It's an approach that exemplifies my major problem with Black Desert as a game: resource management. When it comes down to it, that's what BDO is - a resource management game. And I was done with those by about 1983.

These days I do not want to spend hours and hours juggling resources as a way to entertain myself. It's not entertaining. I enjoy sorting things, putting them in order, filing them away; that's inventory management. This is something else. This is never, ever having enough space and never, ever having what you need available when you need it. This is frickin' infuriating!

It's not even as though there's any level of realism to all of this. Like the tableaux of the previous post, having separate bank space in different towns is a snapshot of a reality, not reality itself. The Marketplace isn't bound by time or space like the Warehouse and its overland transport system. Put something on there and everyone can see it. Buy something from there it appears in your pack instantly.

This is the only example of an NPC with a life of his own that I've seen but i hear tell there are a few more.

This sense of dual values, "realism" and convenience, is prevalent throughout the game and the world. Take the handful of NPCs who put out a sign to say they're not at work right now. Any sense of "realism" that seeks to create is destroyed instantly when you turn around to see the hundreds of other NPCs who stand in the same spot 24/7 to offer whatever service or local color they've been placed there to provide.

Anyone could nit-pick any MMORPG to death like this, though. The genre has always suffered under a terrible compromise between the creative, artistic vision behind the games and the unavoidable requirement to compete for custom in a crowded entertainment market. No-one has hit a perfect balance yet so why expect Pearl Abyss to be the first?

A better question might be, if there's all this and a lot more wrong with the game, why am I certainly going to go on playing it? Well, apart from the very significant factor of BDO not requiring a subscription, meaning I don't have to make any hard choices over whether or not to keep dabbling, it has two huge factors in its favor:

1. Black Desert, as a world, is delightful to explore. 
2. Black Desert, as a game, is relaxing to play. 

If I had the Energy and the Inventory I'd literally gather all day. It's like visual valium.

That's it, pretty much. Other than the space issue, which does verge on being a deal-breaker, most of the other "negatives" I can think of, including all of those listed above, can equally spin positive.

• I like the auto-pathing. 
• I like being able to tab out and read blogs while I travel. 
• I like being able to play other MMOs while I "play" Black Desert in the background. 
• I like the mindless, simplistic combat - or I woud if I had enough space for all the loot.
• I like the attempt to add some realism here and there, even if it doesn't always convince.
• I like the housing, even if it can often seem limited, small and dark.
• I like the gathering, mining, tanning, even though they are incredibly slow and fiddly.
• I like the Amity mini-game, even if it isn't a patch on Vanguard's Diplomacy.

And of course, beyond anything I like the look and feel of the world and the sense that there's always something new and unexpected to find.

Sing Ho! for the open road!

So, with no more money required to go on playing, I'll be carrying on with Black Desert for a while yet. It's not going to be my main MMO. I may lose interest, wander off and forget about it for a while. With the buy-to-play door always open, though, if I do I know I can always drift back.

Let's see where I am in another month.

Hold That Pose : Black Desert

It probably won't come as much of a surprise to anyone reading this to hear that in the first month of playing Black Desert I've taken almost seven hundred and fifty screenshots. The problem with BDO isn't finding something to snap - it's knowing when to stop.

Much has been said about the beauty and quality of the game's graphics but it's the strength of the world-making that cannot be overstated. Rarely, probably never, have I traveled the roads and footpaths of an imaginary world that so meticulously, painstakingly replicates an authentic managed environment.

I've mentioned before how every village, town and city uses street plans that are logical, workable and convincing. No compromise whatsoever appears to have been made for player convenience. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the designers used the layout of real-world towns as templates.

The road networks are similarly naturalistic all the way down to the dirt tracks leading to isolated farmsteads and mountain hermitages. The countryside looks and feels wild at the borders and tenanted where civilization encroaches.

There's much more than good geography to why Black Desert feels so immersive to explore, though. The level of detail throughout the built environment is exemplary. The set design and placement of props would do a BBC historical drama proud.

What takes the whole thing to another level is the extensive use of tableaux vivants. Everywhere you go small dramas play out around you. Not a roadside camp or farmstead goes without its own staged set piece and once you enter a city the feeling of being surrounded by stories is overwhelming.

It's a fascinating approach to world-making. I'm not convinced it has the edge over GW2's enormously complex, nested scripted NPC narratives, where entire storylines with thousands of lines of dialog, all voiced, unfurl across whole maps, but it has a deep charm all the same.

In Metrica Province, to take my favorite Tyrian example, it is entirely possible to spend a whole afternoon trailing NPCs and eavesdropping on their quotidian lives. Just by watching and listening that way you feel it might be possible to come to a rich, nuanced understanding of life among the Asura.

Wandering through the bustling streets of Altinova or Heidel the impression is more one of walking through a gallery. Screenshots taken at random look, almost literally, like paintings in the style of the great Renaissance masters. Where GW2 is a watercolor dreamscape, Black Desert is naturalism done in oils.

It's those tableaux that hold the eye, though. The eye and the mind and the imagination. Black Desert's designers have dared to be lavish, not just in the size of the cast or the scale of the production but in the detailing.

When dressing sets with NPCs, almost all MMOs re-use animations primarily intended for other purposes; emotes, combat, idling. I can't be certain but it seems to me that the Pearl Abyss team has gone to the trouble of creating specific animations for certain tableaux just to make them more convincing.

Take, for example, the soldier pictured above fixing something - a mirror? a shield? a sign? - to a wall in Altinova. That animation seems bespoke. Or his colleague, painting a symbol on a wall a few doors away. That action has to be handcrafted just for that scene, doesn't it?

That symbol, too. Found in many places in the
area, it has a significance I don't understand. Wherever it appears it looms, darkly. The sight of that soldier, marking the clay while a hulking guard and a lackey look on, is chilling.

Whatever it means it can't be anything good. The tableau of cowering refugees - or are they citizens? - surrounded and menaced by more armed and armored soldiers just a few doors up the hill make it plain this is a city in turmoil.

And yet, meanwhile, business must go on. Black Desert's is a world of trade and commerce as well as violence and magic. As you watch the heated bargaining between a gesticulating Shai and cold-eyed goblin dealer in art and artifacts you have to wonder about the provenance of the goods. Were those gilded frames looted by the militia or are they the family heirlooms of some wealthy Altinovan, liquidating his assets before he flees to Heidel or Calpheon?

It's entirely possible to stand for hours looking at this world and wondering. For all I've supposedly "played" Black Desert for a month now, what I've mostly done is watch. In some ways the "game" part just gets in the way.

The players certainly do, with their hundreds of wagons parked on top of each other, their lines of horses lined up like so many black cabs on the rank, their garish dyes and Las Vegas showgirl glitz. So, too, the odd clusters of milling wildlife placed down conveniently at the edge of town, just waiting to be killed. Without the need to provide a game there'd be none of that.

Black Desert makes a good case for the old-school vision of the Virtual World but, once again, a huge question mark hangs over the compatibility of virtual world-building with the making and playing of video games. Perhaps VR will finally drive a wedge between the two. If I could "walk" through Altinova in three dimensions and 360 degrees I'm not sure I'd need anything more by way of  "gameplay".

Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure I do, even now.