I Can Fly : Riders of Icarus

Before I went on holiday I had a mild disagreement with Jeromai over flying mounts in the comments on his post about Guild Wars 2's Skyscale. The gist is this: I like mounts that operate exactly as though I'm controlling my character directly. I don't like mounts that feel as if I'm controlling my character, while they control another character, one who has independent movement.

Put more simply, I like an extremely gamified version of flying, one with no hint of simulation. I feel the same about all mounts and vehicles in MMORPGs. My feeling is that if I wanted to play a driving game or a flight simulator I'd be playing one, not playing an MMORPG.

That said, I purely love flying mounts. I was very dubious about them before I'd ever tried one. I tended to endorse the idea that free flight would trivialize the worldliness of the setting and lead to shortcuts and exploits that would allow people to avoid conflict.

When I got to fly for the first time, which my ever-unreliable memory tells me would have been in Vanguard, those fears proved to be both true and untrue. Far from trivializing the worlds, flying freely high above them has much the same effect on me as Yann Arthus Bertrand's famous aerial photographs or even the iconic Earthrise.

Seeing the world from above renders it more real, not less. It has the exact opposite effect of trivializing what I see; it adds gravitas. Conversely and paradoxically, my second concern turned out to be both true and no concern at all.

Being able to fly over and thereby avoid conflict in which you would prefer not to engage is liberating. It makes everything about the experience of traveling through a virtual world better. It may harm the game as a game but it enhances and expands the conceit that it's the journey that matters.

With all this in mind, it's perhaps surprising that I haven't paid much attention to those MMORPGs that put flying at the very heart of their worlds. Long, long ago I played Flyff, whose very name is an acronym for "Fly For Fun". I wouldn't know how accurate that acronym is because, as with my run in the later and better-known Aion, another game predicated on flight, I didn't last long enough to get my wings.

I've never felt any desire to try Flyff again. Aion got a fairly recent makeover, which did make me consider returning, but the urge soon passed. But there is one other flight-centric MMORPG I once tried that still lurks in the back of my mind: Riders of Icarus.

I first played Riders of Icarus back in July 2016. I wasn't impressed. I posted about it just once, summing up the experience by comparing it unfavorably to another Eastern import, Dragomon Hunter, concluding "Riders of Icarus is flashier and takes itself more seriously but feels a lot more corporate and bland. Most importantly, though, I actively like my DH character whereas my RoI avatar is a cipher."

Dragomon Hunter lasted a mere seventeen months before closing. Riders of Icarus will be three years old next month. You can play it via Steam, where it has three stars out of five and a 65% favorable rating from over 8000 reviews.

When I posted a list of the MMORPGs I currently have installed on my hard drive(s) a couple of weeks ago, Riders of Icarus was one of them. I annotated the entry with a gnomic observation: "Never underestimate the power of a plush wolf with stars on".

This was a reference to a screenshot at The MMOist. I am highly susceptible to promotions in MMORPGs that appear to have been designed to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of a six-year old. If it has sparkles, stars or rainbows, I want it. If it closely ressembles a cuddly toy, I really want it.

Since very, very few six-year olds must actually play any of the MMORPGs in which these promotions appear, I can only assume my predelictions are more commonplace than might be imagined. Most games, even those with 12 or higher PEGI ratings, seem to work on the general principle that a significant proportion of their audience consists of would-be Disney Princesses.

In this case, the plush wolf seems to have been part of a limited-time login event in February, one which also came with several highly-desirable cats. I'm sorry I missed it. As with all good MMORPGs, however, no sooner does one limited-time event end than another begins.

The current RoI initiative involves Cherry Blossom, always popular in games of Eastern origin (cf Black Desert). There don't seem to be any special mounts or pets although the event vendor is a rabbit in a hat.

I picked up a few cherry blossom petals as I wandered around the impressive capital, Hakanas. I'd flown there on my brilliantly-colored parrot, a seven-day, limited duration mount gifted me for... well, for finding my way to the big city, I think.

In the aforementioned list, Riders of Icarus fell into the "Been meaning to play these again for ages" category. When I wrote that I had a strong feeling it would be sooner rather than later and so it proved.

I patched the game up via Steam yesterday, logged in to find my only character idling in a quest hub not far from the starting area. Within a few moments I was questing mindlessly and enjoying it considerably more than I expected. 

The controls felt familiar. Combat, at low levels at least, seemed extraordinarly straightforward. The scenery was attractive, the wildlife was curious, the experience ticked over. I dinged eight, following the questlines without really following them.


A couple of solo instances flicked past. Some NPC gave me a ride on his griffin. Another lent me a parrot. And then I was flying.

It took me a moment to acclimatize to the controls and then I was home, free in the sky. Hakanas looked impressive enough from the ground but from the air it was laid out beneath me like a fascinating puzzle. I swooped and soared and landed and ran. I took breadcrumb quest after breadcrumb quest until I knew every major square and landmark. I met the King. Somewhere along the way I dinged nine.

Two hours had passed. I hadn't tabbed out once. My mind hadn't wandered. I realised I was thirsty and a little stiff from sitting so long in the same position.

Two years ago I summed the game up like this: "Riders of Icarus is by no means a bad game or a bad MMO but with so many others to choose from I'd struggle to come up with a good reason to play it rather than something with a bit more soul". Nothing I saw or did yesterday changes that fundamental impression, only sometimes "more soul" isn't exactly what I need.

Sometimes I just want to fly.

Anyone Seen My Tortoise?

Although I opted out of playing on Lord of the Rings Online's Legendary servers I've been reading a fair bit about them. One of the issues that keeps coming up is the speed of leveling, when compared to the Live game.

The generally accepted view of leveling in LotRO these days seems to be that it zips past in a bit of a blur. I can't say that's been my experience and UltrViolet concurs, but concerns were expressed that, with just fifty levels to do and four whole months to do them in, much of the content would go untouched. Players would rocket to the cap then find themselves with nothing to do but stand around, playing their lutes and smoking pipeweed, trying to think of other games they might be playing instead.

Naturally concerned for such an outcome, and despite having made it clear this was not to be any kind of "Classic" reconstruction in the Blizzard or even the SOE or Jagex mode, Standing Stone opted to apply the brakes. As you can see from the linked thread, that was a decision greeted with less than universal approval.

No surprise there. The introduction of special ruleset servers to an existing MMORPGs is often a cause of worry for regular players. People who are passably satisfied with the status quo tend to interpret any attempt to cater for those who aren't as a direct threat. 

There are two commonly expressed fears. Firstly, the population will split, thereby weakening the existing game; secondly, changes to rules and systems devised for the new servers will bleed across. One of the main reasons PvE players often give for not having PvP in their game, even when it's siloed off onto separate servers, is that developers will inevitably end up altering skills and mechanics for everyone because it's just too awkward to maintain separate systems indefinitely.

On my way from the Lone Lands to Bree to get a ride to the Shire for the Fall Festival.

I remember seeing that argument on the EverQuest forums, all the way back in the very early 2000s, when EQ not only had multiple PvP servers but each of them had a different ruleset. As PvP slipped out of fashion in Norrath and the seemingly endless series of Progression Servers began to trundle off the assembly line, the same concerns passed to them and when Smed had the temerity to suggest the future for EQ lay in F2P, the roof just about came off (although, as time went on to prove, the wheels stayed firmly on).

There's a whole, long discussion to be had about the benefits, impacts and dangers of adding variant server rulesets. I might get to that another day. For now, let's stick to the topic at hand: leveling speed.

It's a truism of the genre that over time leveling gets faster. Is there any moderately successful MMORPG of a number of years' standing that retains the same pace of leveling it had at launch? Sometimes the acceleration is a direct response to a disgruntled playerbase but mostly it's just a natural, almost an organic, process.

Players like their characters to become more powerful. They also like convenience. They react well to things that support those preferences and badly to things that don't. They also acquire both knowledge and resources over time that mean their alts are more efficient at leveling than their mains used to be.

Fireworks! This must be the place. I hear it's great for fast leveling.

The further the end game recedes, the harder players work to come up with shortcuts to get there. Twinking, power-leveling, buying high-level characters, you name it, players will do it. All of this tends to cause a lot of bad feeling and places considerable demands on Customer Service. Rather than deal with that, developers tend to respond by trying to magic the problem away, making leveling smoother, faster, easier and ultimately irrelevant.

The problem then becomes what to do with all that extra content. For many its a non-issue. They skip to cap and stay there, as uninterested in what lies below them as the average householder is about the mineral rights beneath their home.

Some people do care, though. There's a not-insignificant demographic that plays MMORPGs specifically for the quests and another (probably much larger) that just doesn't feel right if they haven't completed everything in a zone before they move on.

These are the people who complain when leveling speeds up so much that quests start to grey out before they finish them. I have never understood this. 

It has always seemed to me that if what you're interested in is completing the quests then the easier the quests are to complete the more fun you're going to have. Yes, the rewards are going to be useless and you won't get much - or any - xp, but if all you're after is the stories and a sense of completion, so what?

Okay, now to grab a quest and watch that XP fly!

Still, it clearly bothers enough customers that developers find it worth taking the time and trouble to implement options to avoid it. That's not always just to please quest-hounds, either. There can be more pragmatic, less romantic reasons.

EverQuest2, for example, has sliders that allow you to choose what percentage of your xp goes to leveling or to alternate advancement. This used to be very important, because AA abilities are very powerful and AAXP becomes a lot harder to acquire at higher levels. It was, at one time, very much in a player's interest to put a character's leveling on hold while working on acquiring a hundred or so AA levels instead.

Options built into the UI are practical if prosaic but some games take their RPG heritage more seriously. LotRO has an item known as The Stone of the Tortoise, which switches xp gain off completely. It's mentioned in the linked thread above and when Wilhelm observed that he was having to avoid certain activities for fear of outleveling his chosen zones, Lathe popped up in the comments to suggest he might want to use it.

This seems like a sensible recourse. The weight of evidence suggests that most players either don't relish leveling at all or would prefer to scamper through at a brisk trot, if not a full gallop. It seems churlish for developers to insist everyone slows down and smells the slaughtered corpses when the role of Fotherington-Tomas-gone-psycho can be applied at will on a one-to-one basis. 

Despite this apparently benign solution, an obverse trend seems to be gaining traction. Flat or horizontal, the idea that all zones can be created equal has been in vogue for some time. I'm not sure I approve but at least  it's better than another card in the developer's pack, the scorched earth option.

Nearly an hour on a horse, two dozen beers, failed the quest, no xp at all. Stone of the Tortoise? Where's my sodding Stone of the Hare?

World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion is probably the most (in)famous example. Aion is the latest.  Instead of allowing players free choice on how and how fast to level, the developers simply carve out great chunks of content and throw them away. They then add a multiplier to xp gain on the existing content and call it job done.

I was playing Aion a while back. It made such a deep impression on me I can remember literally nothing about it. I'm not about to work myself up into a surrogate frenzy about the disappearance of content I never cared about in the first place.

If I was playing LotRO regularly, though, I might worry. A little. Players on special ruleset servers are often the strongest enthusiasts for the game and the most vocal advocates for it. Developers also tend to spend more time working on those servers and have more direct interactions with the players there than is usual on a regular ruleset server.

It would be no surprise to see a patch note sometime that mentions a change to Live server XP in some fashion or other. These things happen. If it does, you can bet the Legendary server will get the credit or the blame.

Really, though, these tweaks and changes seem inevitable. I was pondering whether MMORPGs really need to keep adding content but you might just as well ask if they can afford to keep hanging on indefinitely to the content they already have.

Don't ask me. I just play the things.

Summertime Sadness : GW2

I very much agree with UltrViolet, who, when he briefly reviewed the latest Living World episode,  wrote

“See all previous comments regarding Guild Wars 2. There’s no need to write a new post. Nothing has changed. Whatever they spent extra time to work on is not evident to me.” 

Exactly so.

On the other hand, Jeromai, who very much knows what he's talking about when it comes to GW2, takes a different view :

"There’s a lot of what seem like under-the-hood tweaks to improve storytelling: from better NPC AI that form formations, in-instance object changes and scripting and zone phasing that are mostly remarkably used well in the service of telling a story, possibly over-fancy tweaks to the UI to indicate new status conditions..."

I have to confess I missed all of that. ANet did allude to some background changes when they were warning that the latest episode would be late:

"...we had an opportunity to make some adjustments to how we approach developing each episode..."

but in keeping with their usual hyper-cautious attitude to secrecy they gave not the slightest hint of what those changes or adjustments might be.

Well, they probably need to do something. Or maybe they don't. Who can tell? Megaserver technology makes it impossible to assess how well GW2 is doing by any of the usual means. You can't count the servers or make any meaningful judgment on  how busy the maps are. World vs World should be more quantifiable but that game mode is currently in such a deep, prolonged malaise pending the supposed root-and-branch revamp, that it's pointless even trying to take its temperature.

NCsoft’s first quarter 2018 report has GW2 performing tolerably well as part of the overall portfolio. I did initially interpret the table that had ANet's game neck-and-neck with Aion as evidence of a serious slide in profitability but in fact it turns out to be mainly due to a surge in monies coming in from Aion.

"Every other game saw a slight dip...with the exception of Aion which saw a big jump which NCSoft attributed to a “change in monetization scheme”"

All the same, the feeling in-game is one of drift. I find it more than peculiar that ArenaNet, with its 300+ employees (as reported in 2016) appears to struggle to produce four quarterly content updates, each of which provides  - at best - a couple of weeks of fresh entertainment for a very casual player, plus a full expansion only every two to three years.

Many - I would say most - moderately successful MMORPGs do considerably better than that. Even those that don't do a significantly better job at providing bread and circuses to keep the players entertained between major releases. ANet don't even seem to feel they need to work up a full year's calendar of holidays.

Jeromai mentions an upswell of feeling on reddit concerning GW2's lack of a genuine end-game, a problem that's ironically compounded by the game's horizontal sprawl:

"On the GW2 Reddit, there are threads bemoaning the lack of an endgame right alongside threads in which new and returning players profess their utter overwhelm and confusion with what to do next."

It's a problem ANet appear no nearer to solving than they were six years ago, when they trumpeted their mold-breaking manifesto. Over the running time of the game so far many solutions have been trialed and tried. Some have stuck, most have faded. The result is an ill-fitting, ill-seeming mish-mash of old and new.

Raids and fractals sit in their silos alongside the failing, fading original alternative game modes, sPvP and WvW. GW2's goal of becoming a popular platform for professional eSports is long forgotten. The supposed end-game equivalent, realm versus realm competetion in The Mists via what was once known as WorldvsWorldvsWorld languishes in deep decline, played by few,  cared about by fewer. A plan to revitalize WvW's fortunes lies somewhere in the future, maybe next year, maybe never.

Meanwhile the game limps along on crutches of cosmetics and collections. In the absence of anything comparable to vertical or linear progression the developers lean heavily on increasingly time-consuming busywork, leading to increasingly purposeless rewards.

What once seemed an outrageous shopping list for the original Legendary weapons now looks like a trip to the corner store in comparison to the requirements of the new batch. Jeromai considers his options:

"I’ve just come off the really long term goal of making a second set of legendary armor (heavy and light now done, medium to go… at some point far far into the future); am still eyeing Astralaria with temptation but utter trepidation (second gen HoT legendaries are intensive); and settled on the more medium term goal of repeating a easier first gen legendary..."

When we reach a point where players are working on their third set of "end game " armor and further "end game " weapons (all of which offer no practical character improvement other than convenience) just to have something to do, it's clear that we have a game whose appeal is going to be limited.

There are, it's true, a lot of players who like that sort of thing. Collecting all the things because all the things! has long been a recognized behavior. It's my feeling, however, that such an audience is dwarfed by the demographic that likes to see their characters become more powerful, more effective, better. Not just better-looking and easier to dress.

GW2 has become the poster child for that old saw "be careful what you wish for". We wanted an MMORPG with no vertical progression and no end game and this is what we got. I don't believe such a game has to look like that but this one does and I'm the poor sod stuck playing it - although I do at least play it my own way, most of the time.

I was, for a long while, invested in the narrative. It reels and lurches like a drunken sailor in a force ten but I've always found it entertaining and still do. In this, as in so many things, I seem to be out of step with the current audience. In game or out, few seem to care any more. Time was when each new twist and turn in the plot would spawn frenzied speculation in map chat and on the forums. These days all people seem interested in is where to go farm on the new map and how quickly they can get the mount.

I'm not going to say my time with GW2 is drawing to a close. The open-ended payment model means a GW2 player can never really quit, only take a break. I'm playing less, though. Much less. These days I just do my dailies and my Krait on each of three accounts, then I log out and play something else.

That's becoming an established pattern. With the new LS chapter I played a couple of sessions on the story but once I finished I haven't been back to explore the new map. Mrs Bhagpuss hasn't even logged in since the update. WvW is in freefall. Neither of us do much there right now. Maybe the proposed conversion to an Alliance system will change that, maybe not.

I suspect everyone who cares has already left and most won't come back, or rather they will, but they won't stay long. Old names crop up all the time but few hang around. Nothing much has changed over the last four or five years to make anyone who stopped playing feel they made a bad choice.

Then again, it is summer. People have other things to do. Maybe that's all it is. With World of Warcraft gearing up for an expansion launch a lot of MMOs will be retrenching, hunkering down to wait out the storm. Maybe come the autumn things will look different.

Oh, who am I kidding? In Tyria nothing ever looks any different and never will. Not now Scarlet's dead. I miss her. If only this could be true. Just the first bit, obviously.

Enough whining. Maybe I should go look at the new map after all. I might find something interesting. Someone did. Don't click on this if you don't want spoilers. If you've finished the storyline, though, seriously, CLICK ON THIS!

I'm not even kidding.

Making Plans

Spring came in with a bit of a rush around here. Seven posts in the first five days of April! Good going but it seems to have tapped my inspiration dry.

Scratching around for ideas I thought of all those posts I keep reading where people say what they did last month and what they plan to do next month. I've always wondered how they know. I rarely have a clue what I'm going to be doing half an hour from now, much less next week.

It would be useful, though, having a record. Maybe not of what I plan to do but what I'd like to do or even what I am doing instead of what I expected I would be. So in that vein...


What I'm Playing

Guild Wars 2.

Coming up five years this summer. Five years right now, if you count from the beta weekends. Sometimes I think I'm mostly playing because Mrs Bhagpuss plays but the plain fact is I still turn to GW2 first most days, whether Mrs Bhagpuss happens to be playing or not.

Doing my dailies is quite literally part of my daily routine now. I do them for three accounts every. single. day. Without fail. I like to knock a couple of accounts off between breakfast and going to work and then do the third in the evening. I am trying to resist adding the free account to the list. There have to be limits.

WvW is dire these days and yet still ridiculously entertaining more often than not. ArenaNet seem to have literally no idea what to do with the game mode. They fiddled with it 'til it broke. Now they're whistling and looking in the other direction.

Any point or purpose the "competition" ever had is currently in freefall since the combined body-blows of the systematic destruction of Server Identity and the hamfisted manual adjustments to scoring. Nevertheless the day to day, or more particularly hour to hour, engagements remain as compulsively exciting as ever.

Somehow World Bosses are back on my menu. I've been doing Tequatl every day, twice if I can fit it in. I generally manage a Frozen Maw and a Claw of Jormag most evenings. I'm not quite sure how that happened or why, other than it's fun.

Overall, GW2 is just incredibly comfortable and easy to play. Especially after a long day at work it's about as relaxing as a nice, warm bath and frequently about as much excitement as I can manage.

Lord of the Rings Online.

Completely unexpected. Never had the slightest intention of revisiting Middle Earth this spring, let alone leveling up two characters. It's become that game, the one I play at the end of the evening. Mostly I just do tasks, wander about, kill whatever gets in my way, do some exploring.

The zones are enormous. I remembered they were big but not how big. It takes forever to get anywhere, not just because of the distance from one end to the other but also the incredible topological complexity. Everything is layered and there's frequently no quick way from A to B. You have to go up and around and down and through and back again.

I've found lots of new nooks and crannies in zones I thought I knew. Not having quests to lead me by the nose means I go off the beaten track a lot and there's a lot of wilderness out there. I say not having quests - there are some. I can't work out why some are allowed for free, or not always. I do them if I find them but mostly I'm my own boss. It's refreshing.

Final Fantasy XIV

If the return to LotRO was a surprise this is more of a stunning blow. I pretty much thought I'd never play FFXIV again. I've logged in most days and sometimes I've played for a few hours. The free trial has turned FFXIV into something not unlike the game I thought it might be for a week or two back when I bought it.

Not sure if this will last but I imagine I'll dip in and out indefinitely from now on.

EQ2

This was my late night MMO until LotRO rudely pushed it aside. It's still hanging in there. I log in a couple or three times a week.

EQ2 will always be in play, though. I'll always drop in for the holidays. I even did quite a bit this year for Bristlebane Day and that's about my least favorite of the big ticket events. Any major update is going to pull me back in; expansions generally mean four to six weeks of playing full sessions most days. Here for the long run.

Everquest

I did play a little last month. Did a bubble and a half of 92 (or is it 93?) on my Magician. Another MMO I'll play as long as I'm able, although it tends to be in small doses these days.

What I Thought I'd Be Playing

Aion

I was enjoying Aion. It seemed like a solid, oldish school MMO with enough character, polish and content to hold my attention for a fair while. Only other MMOS have more of all of those things and something was always going to come along to distract me. I just didn't expect it to be an old something.

I will probably come back to this one. Maybe.

Revelation Online

Similar to Aion although I thought it had a quirkier style and it certainly better looks. Not a game I need to play in any way whatsoever but one that could always fill an idle moment. I expected to get a few weeks out of it, like I did with ArcheAge, Black Desert and Blade and Soul. Didn't happen. Law of diminishing returns, I guess.

What I Ought To Be Playing

World of Warcraft 

I got Legion for my birthday and that was six months ago. I really ought to use it before the next expansion arrives.

DCUO

This one's not really my fault. I was playing and enjoying it and then Daybreak trailed the complete combat and leveling revamp so I thought I'd pause it and wait for that...and I'm still waiting. Just do it, already!

Project: Gorgon

I kickstarted it but so far I don't believe I've even linked my account or replied to the email or whatever it is that I'm supposed to do. It was meant to go onto Steam Early Access, what, a year ago? Supposedly when that happens I won't be able to log in with my old details but since I haven't logged in for a year anyway that's not going to be a problem. I guess I'll wait until something actually happens and work it out then.


Dragon Nest

I get the feeling this one might not be around much longer so saying "I'll get back to it one day" probably isn't a solid game-plan. It's a really fun game and I was making good progress. It'd be a shame if I finally got round to making time for a session and found it wasn't there any more.

What I Could Be Playing

Rift, Allods, Black Desert, ArchAge, Blade and Soul...

They're all installed and the icons are there on the desktop. Probably about all I'm going to see of them for the foreseeable future but then a month ago I would have said the same about LotRO and FFXIV.



What I'm Going To Be Playing

Secret World Legends

Mostly out of curiosity and because everyone else will be. Unless it turns out to be very substantially easier, faster and more casual-friendly than TSW, though, I struggle to see why I'd play it over the original. Which I'm not playing. At least there's bound to be a blog post or several in it.

What I Wish I Was Playing

The freaking second GW2 expansion!

How much longer, ANet? How much longer? At least start the PR machine rolling so we can speculate. I googled for leaks or guesses about it yesterday and the very few I could find were mostly over a year old. I come from an SOE/DBG background, not Blizzard. I can't cope with these 2-3 year expansion schedules. Bash 'em out! Quantity over quality every time! You can fix it up as we play - it's the MMO way!

That'll do for now and I didn't even mention the mobile and non-mmo stuff. I'll save that for next time I can't think of anything to write about.

Keep On Running : Aion, EQ2, DCUO

Wilhelm is going through something of a slump when it comes to fantasy MMORPGs. It's something that seems to come to most long-time players of these games eventually although in his case it's taken a couple of decades to get there.

That's been the narrative for many of the bloggers and commenters in this corner of the blogosphere for a few years now. It's not really surprising. MMOs are very samey. If we're talking about the kind of 3D virtual worlds that span out of the diku-MUD scene neither the mechanics nor the gameplay differ greatly to begin with and when you skin those over with the traditional goblins, orcs, dragons and wargs then it really can all seem to run together.

I don't think I'd go so far as to call it " a gray, uninteresting mass", though, because, if nothing else, most of these virtual worlds are at least colorful and a few of them aspire to some level of idiosyncracy. Black Desert, for example, may not have held my attention long term but it certainly did hold my gaze.

As I was suggesting last time, though, it's not ideal to have to keep hopping from game to game just to keep the interest levels from flagging. The other part of MMOs that Wilhelm, like many, is finding problematic is staying in touch. These level boosts and bonus xp schemes are all very well but catching up to to where the end game has gone and having the necessary knowledge and equipment to prosper there are two entirely different things.

Playing multiple MMOs is a bit like the specialty act that used to appear on those variety shows that were a staple of television when I was growing up - the "Chinese Juggler". That was someone who spent ten minutes running between half a dozen poles, each with a dinner plate balanced on top, keeping them all spinning.

It does seem to be an awful lot of effort just to get nowhere very much. These days I can manage maybe three MMOs at a time. I tend to have one main MMO, one alt and one that I'm trying out. I played all three of those today - GW2, EQ2 and Aion. Plus another for luck.

In GW2 I just logged in, did my dailies, ran around in WvW for half an hour and then logged out. I spent a lot longer in EQ2, going through every new piece of armor and jewellery on my Berserker to see what slots were empty (most of them) before making adornments to fill them all.

I also found out that if you complete thirty quests in the overland expansion zone it gives an achievement and the achievement awards a Best In Slot offhand item. I checked and I've done twenty-eight so there was some research to find two more.

I could only find one. I did that. I think I'll have to do at least one of the timed key quests to get the final credit I need. I really, really hate timed quests and these are quite tough ones so I put that on the To Do list and left it for now.

As well as the crafting and the questing I did a couple of PQs. Then I spent a while trying to find out which vendor takes the currency you get from those. All in all I spent nearly three hours in Norrath doing the kind of "keeping up with the Joneses" kind of background activity almost all MMOs require if you want to keep your footing on the treadmill.

Speaking of treadmills, I also logged into DCUO for the first time in months to get the freebies from the Flash event. Last day today. Then I went to my base and set them all up in a little Flash-themed corner of the basement. One of them is literally a treadmill! Doesn't work, sadly.

Before I could do that, though, I had to google how to place furniture. These skills just slip away if you don't practice them regularly. The reason I stopped playing DCUO, by the way, has nothing to do with losing interest. I've been waiting for the long-promised complete revamp of how the stats, powers and leveling game work. I believe that it's finally on the Test server now. When it finally goes Live I'll play DCUO again. Probably. If I'm not playing something else.

The something else that I am playing at the moment, thanks to suggestions in the comments to an earlier post, is Aion. Aion really does tick all the boxes for the kind of problems Wilhelm's having. There is literally nothing going on there that I haven't seen done before, usually better.

That sounds like a harsh criticism but it isn't, not really. Aion is enjoyable. I'm enjoying it. I played for most of the morning, got to level ten, became a Daeva, chose my class or job or whatever they call it there (Gunslinger), visited the big city (Sanctum, same as Rift), worked out where the bank was and the broker, started a craft (Tailoring)...

Also I ran all over the city taking screenshots, peering out across the clouds, riding on flying platforms and generally gawking like a tourist, which is exactly what I am. And my character, come to think of it, so you can call it roleplaying if you like.

Aion is one of the games that looks better in screenshots than it does when you play it but it doesn't look at all bad in game either. A bit flat in places and everything suffers from gigantism but there are some nice views to be had, here and there.

The music is very familiar. Lots of would-be ethereal chanting and synthesized strings. I think I may have picked the Elven starting area by mistake - if Aion has elves - or different starting areas.

The rest of the sound, however, is awful. Some of the worst I've ever heard. The blooping and bleeping of the UI sounds like something from the 1980s but the yelping and shrieking of the mobs and especially of my own character is the real problem. I'm used to imported MMOs having a lot of very high-pitched squealing but this is much worse than that. I might have to mute the sound effects which is something I never do.

At least the translations are completely competent and professional. Almost everyone has something to say, not always very complimentary either. I rode the lift all the way to the Governor's office, walked up to him as you do and introduced myself. He was not happy to see me. I did laugh.

As promised, Aion is quite old school. Mobs drop gear you want to use. You can farm them for it without even needing a quest. There are named mobs that spawn among them somewhat randomly and they drop stuff too. That was fun.

While I was in the city someone called out to me to tell me I could get a free studio. I thought it was a player at first but it turned out to be an NPC. I didn't realize Aion had housing. Haven't found where to go to get my pied à terre yet but I will!

So there we are. Not bored with MMOs yet. Not bored with fantasy MMOs either. Still doing the same thing and getting the same results and waking up next day ready to do it again.

There's probably a roadblock labelled "diminishing returns" somewhere in my future but I haven't got to it yet. Let's just hope that by the time I do there's a side road I can take to somewhere unexpected.

Bound to be.

Starting Over

Telwyn, inspired by Chestnut, posted about starting over in MMOs, saying "I’m an altaholic but usually stick to one server in a given MMO". That made me think about just how much my own habits have changed over the years. Not, I suspect, always for the better, either.

When I started out in EverQuest one of the very first things I had to learn was what a server was and why I should care. Before the game would allow itself to be played it wanted me to pick a name from a very bizarre list.

Almost everything looked as like a scattering of random letters from a Scrabble bag - Xev, Xegony, Bertoxxolous... Maybe not so random, come to think of it. Someone was clearly fond of the letter "X". Maybe they were working on a high score...

There was a smattering of semi-coherent options - The Rathe, The Nameless - but even those seemed alienating. What was a "Rathe" anyway and why couldn't anyone come up with a name for "The Nameless"? In the end I went for one I thought I might be able to remember - Prexus. Another "X" now I come to think about it.

It soon transpired that I might as well just have flipped a coin because I didn't last very long at all on Prexus. I tried Brell Serillis and Test before two new servers, Luclin and Lanys T'Vyl, popped up on the same day as SOE attempted to accommodate EQ's ever-increasing population, something that would be repeated many more times over the next four or five years until the arrival of WoW shattered the paradigm, along with Smed's hopes and dreams of never-ending fortune and fame. Or not.

During that now almost unimaginable period of continual expansion I developed the habit of making new characters on every fresh server as it opened. On their opening days and mostly for a few weeks more I played on The Seventh Hammer, Antonius Bayle, Stromm, Maelin Starpyre, Tholuxe Paells, Mordern Rasp, Morrell Thule, Sullon Zek and probably a few more I've forgotten.

All of which meant that I took "starting over" as the norm for MMOs. How was I to know that it wasn't meant to be that way? Let's not forget that those were also the days when "twinking" was almost as dirty as it sounds, when people genuinely agonized over whether passing a Shiny Brass Shield from an old character to a new one meant they'd lost their moral compass.

When Mrs Bhagpuss and I moved, fairly briefly, to Dark Age of Camelot, an MMO with a tri-partite structure that forbade anyone to play characters of different Realms on the same server, what was the first thing we did? Made characters on three different servers so we could play them all, of course.

As the years rolled by and with them more and more MMOs, the pattern repeated itself over and over again. If a game chose to segment itself by race or alignment or region then I'd do my utmost to make sure I rolled and re-rolled until I'd seen it all. Well, all the starting areas, at least.

For the most part that meant more than just playing through the same levels a few more times with a different backdrop. It meant starting completely from scratch, without hand-me-downs or pre-acquired skills or a bank account groaning with gold.

The one thing that could always be ported was knowledge. Even with the best role-playing intentions it's hardly feasible to unlearn your understanding of how the UI works or where one zone lies in relation to another. Even so, in those days before Free to Play gave us all more worlds to play with than we could ever find time to explore, Starting Over allowed anyone to experience something of that New Game rush at will and at no extra cost.

Trends changed. Convenience took over. Exclusivity began to be seen as an impediment instead of a selling point. While many MMOs continued to pay lip services to RPG tropes like alignment and race it became commercially expedient to separate lore from practice.

Good guys and bad guys joined the same guilds, battled the same enemies, used the same banks. Player characters from races who'd been at war for millennia cheerfully traded magic items with each other while characters owned by the same account used shared facilities that meant they could help each other out even though, since they could never be online at the same time, they could never meet.

By the time we got to Guild Wars 2 the unit of participation had become The Account. Well, mostly. At the beginning there was still an inelegant melange of Character and Account Based play, something that persists to some degree even today in aspects such as Map Completion or Personal Story.

For the most part, though, every character is part of a team, whether they choose to be or not. All the myriad currencies go into a single wallet no matter who earned them and the achievements of one are the achievements of all.

There are no servers, or "Worlds", any more, other than for the competitive game mode of World vs World, which is in terminal decline, most likely to be replaced one day by a less archaic format. As far as PvE is concerned, we're all one big, happy family. Megaserver technology sees to that, as it or something much like it does in most MMOs these days.

Incremental change is insidious. The world alters around us and we barely notice. As I think about it now, though, I would hesitate to say it's all been change for the better.

Like Telwyn, if I step off the treadmill and begin afresh I find myself missing all the benefits that having established, integrated teams of characters brings. It makes it a lot harder to stick at it, when I begin in a new game or even on a new character. That feeling almost everyone must have, when they can't keep from noticing how much time they're spending doing things their other characters, whether in the same game or another, could do so much faster and more easily, it wears at my resolve.

And yet, when I start over, almost every time, I feel light, released, free. Everything that was old is new again. Life is simple on the up. All those dopamine hits the MMO leveling process was designed to provide come raining down just like they used to and it feels good.

That's the way I once played most of the time. Even when I had two level 60s, then two level 65s, when 60 then 65 was the cap, when my friends list bristled with names willing to go dungeoning at the drop of a tell, I spent time playing on other servers, among strangers, unknown and at the bottom of the curve.

I really don't do enough of that any more. Every time I do, mostly in unfamiliar games I'm trying on for size or on special purpose servers in MMOs I know, I find myself drawn in, pulled under, breaking the surface tension of the best-in-slot, meta, fractional upgrade path, sinking into the deep comfort that we call immersion.

You can forget what these games are for, sometimes. You float so long at the top of the tide you misremember all that lies beneath, the vast undertow, the waters that are never still. There's a lot more to MMOs than hitting cap and settling for the end game. I used to know that but I forgot, somehow.

It's never too late to start over. Let's go round again.

A Toe In The Water : Aion

Today I downloaded Aion. I wasn't planning to. It's probably fair to say it wasn't on my agenda for this year let alone this week. But there were several comments on yesterday's post from people whose opinions I respect suggesting it might be the sort of thing I'd enjoy and what with the GW2 update being a day late thanks to snow in Seattle, I thought I might as well give it a try.

Well, I say I downloaded it. I downloaded some of it. I thought it looked suspiciously light at just over 5GB. That turned out to be the feint for a 40GB sucker punch.

The download comes in nine stages. Once you get those first five gigs you can log in and play while the rest fills in behind you. In theory.

At a steady 3mb/s the first part didn't take long but unfortunately it added a three second skill lag to GW2, playing hob with Mrs Bhagpuss's defense of the home borderland, so I had to wait for a convenient break in the action.

In the meantime I visited the website, which is slick and confidence-inspiring. There's plenty of detailed information including a level-by-level guide on where to go and what to do from creation to cap. I flicked through the race choices (two, both human) and the classes (the usual four plus two slightly more interesting variations) and read a bit about the general gameplay.

He's behind you!

I'm not entirely sure why I was so uninterested in Aion back when it was new. The meaningless, bland name didn't help (I say "meaningless" although Wikipedia takes another view entirely). Neither did the lack of interesting playable races. It always looked uninspiring in the screenshots I saw, with a particularly insipid color palette and a fussy aesthetic. Then there was the compulsory PvP at level 25, too. That was off-putting back then.

Looking through the information and pictures in the website guides, though, not much seems to match that faded impression. It looks and sounds like most any other mainstream MMO of its era. Even the "compulsory" PvP seems to be more of an option than I remembered and anyway I've played so many MMOs since then that supposedly make you PvP in the course of leveling (Allods, ArcheAge, Black Desert...) that it's a non-issue by now.

Once the necessary files were installed I hit Play and the launcher crashed. I tried again and it worked that time. Character creation was impressive. Lots of sliders, yes, but all the ones I tried did actually change something I could see without a magnifying glass. There were plenty of presets too for those who don't want to micro-manage their eyelashes. You can also make a character so short it might as well be a gnome or so bulky it could be an ogre if you really want to. I didn't want to - yet.

Start as you mean to go on, I always say.

I managed to get a character the look of which I really liked. In close up, that is. In third person from behind, as I'll see her for most of whatever time I play, she looks as anonymous as every other F2P human female but at least she should look good posing in front of a sunset.

What she sounds like I can't say because although there were a range of voice choices and a button to test them, all that emerged was an electronic beep. I picked one at random. I hope she doesn't yell too much.Or cackle. Can't abide a cackler.

The game recommended a server for me. In fact it recommended all the servers that were available. I went with the one that was highlighted, which turned out to be the "Fast Track" server. It seems Aion has a server that runs double xp all the time. That's a novel solution to helping new players catch up to the pack.

It's also one of those games with "channels" as well as "servers" meaning you can hot-swap from Fast Track to Standard. I found that out because I was trying to escape the insane rubber-band lag that made the game almost completely unplayable.

I might have overdone one or two of the sliders just a tad...

Whether that was my connection or, as I suspect, a side-effect of the other 35GB choking my pipe in the background, I'm not sure. I guess I'll find out when I have the whole lot downloaded. I gave up around 20GBs. I'll get the rest when we're both asleep or out of the house.

I did manage to bounce as far as the nearest village. Oddly there seemed to be no quests at all where my Technist (Engineer or Gunner to you) spawned. Or indeed any NPCs. Just some odd creatures that, naturally, I killed to see what they would drop. Gold was all.

Visually the game had that same, overstretched, flat look I associate with almost all Eastern imports. It reminded me a lot of Argo, an MMO I liked quite a bit. Starting areas in most MMOs are very plain so as not to frighten the nervous so I'm not going to read too much into what I've seen so far.

Daeva already has some connotations that probably weren't intended
without adding "Teenage" to the front of it.

In the village I managed to find two quests. Neither of them was anything like I expected. I thought someone would want some rodents killed or a wasp nest cleared from an outhouse but no. The very first person I spoke to wanted me to buy her some flowers from the in-game store. Usually they wait until at least the fifth quest before pulling that one.

The other guy wanted something I didn't quite follow and I didn't take a screenshot and now I can't remember what it was, just that it confused me. Both quests were reasonably well-written in idiomatic English, though, so that's a positive. Quite funny, too, one of them.

And that's as far as I got. When I'm going to get the time to explore further I have no idea. The GW2 update finally dropped about five paragraphs into this post so I stopped and did that for about four hours before I came back to finish up here. I'd guess that will occupy the rest of the week at least.

Still, Aion looks interesting enough to investigate further, provided the lag lets up. We'll see.

Last Stop, Everybody Off!

A couple of news items turned up in my reader yesterday and started me thinking. Rift decided to flag some servers for "large scale trial programs" and asked everyone on them if they wouldn't kindly mind leaving and Gods and Heroes went F2P. 

I've done quite a few betas over the years and I'd become used to having one or two icons on my desktop that offered me something for nothing but my time and goodwill. When it came to playing a game full-time and having ownership of my characters, though, I knew I'd have to put my virtual hand in my virtual pocket and come up with a credit card number. That had an obvious downside: I only have so much money so I could only justify subscribing to one or two MMOs at a time. Which was also the upside: the subscription fee acted as a kind of quality control.

Back when I began playing MMOs trying a new one meant buying a box and paying every month if you wanted to stick with it. That wasn't so much of a problem because there weren't that many MMOs to try and every new one that came along was something of an event in itself. It was worth shelling out just to say you'd been there when it happened.

Shadefallen - last Defiant out please turn off the lights

A few years on there were a lot more MMOs and few people would have wanted to stump up cash just to try them all. How lucky we were that free trials turned up, then! What a co-incidence! Free trials meant a week or two of low-level play to give you a taste of a game in the hope you'd buy the box and sub if you got hooked. That was better in some ways, because you knew going in you'd probably be done with the game before the trial ended and you wouldn't have wasted a penny. Still, there was the nagging worry that the new game might sink its claws in and you'd be stuck paying after all, which acted as some sort of a brake.

Millrush - lalala! We can't hear you!

Now there are hundreds of MMOs and most of them don't ask for any money at all. There's all kinds, too. Fantasy, Science Fiction, Super Heroes, Funny Animals, Crime. It's like being at the comic store all over again. And quite a lot of them are good. Good enough that once upon a time they thought they'd be able to sell you a box and charge you a monthly fee.  Only that didn't work out so well, or maybe it didn't work out as badly as all that but even so the other guys who'd dropped the fee were doing even better... Whatever, everyone went whaling.

Faeblight - There goes the neighborhood...

All of which brings me back to Rift and Gods and Heroes. Scott Hartsman nailed his colors to the subscription mast a long time back. In fact he pretty much scrambled up after them and nailed himself up there as well. I sense a retrenchment in recent months, however. It's going to be awfully painful if he has to pull out those nails and climb back down, but he's leaving clear wiggle-room with his "Right now, absolutely no plans whatsoever" reply to Eurogamer back in November when they asked if Rift had any contingency plans to move away from subs.

 Rift's done well with its subscription model, though. Can't argue that. If one day it does flip over and go Free to Play (and I'd bet it will although probably later rather than sooner) Trion can expect a massive surge of interest and publicity and a tsunami of returning exes. It's a solid gold game and it will be around for a long time. How it raises funds is the least interesting thing about it.

So? I can buy those and put them on a rat!

Gods and Heroes on the other hand never really got off the ground. I was in the beta and I could never even get the client to run. Sentiment was strongly against the game even being ready to launch when it did, let alone charging both a box fee and a subscription. When I saw the Massively article yesterday my first thought was "Is that thing still going?" Now it's free to play, will I try it? Well, there's a nominal fee for the client, so not yet. But even if that last barrier wasn't standing in my way, then no I probably wouldn't.

STO : You can walk about! Outdoors even!

Because I just don't have the time! This is the thing about all these great MMOs moving away from the old pay to play deal. Now I have all these extra games I could be playing but no-one gave me any more hours in the day. On my list of AAA F2P MMOs that I haven't yet even tried out yet there's Age of Conan, City of Heroes and Lineage2, with Star Trek Online due in a few days and Aion next month. Any one of those would justify a full month of concentrated play just to decide if it was worth carrying on.

Here's the thing. I'm paying to play Rift right now and I'm still not logging in. Forget Free-to-Play, I'll be happy if more games just go Free-to-Forget-to-Play !