Do I Not Like This?

I spend quite a lot of time here banging on about how I mostly look for relaxation from my games. I often say I don't want much in the way of challenge. I try to avoid content that could realistically be called "difficult". If I have to do it so I can get to other content beyond the difficulty gate then I will but I'll do it grudgingly and with bad grace.

One thing I've never been known to do willingly and without complaint is to retry the same fight again and again in the hope of learning the mechanics. Perfecting my technique and making incremental progress until eventually I win. Unfortunately, since around the middle of the twenty-aughts, that kind of content gating has been a constant in MMOPRG design so, much though I might dislike it, I've had to do more of it than any rational, reasonable person would consider sane.

It's very odd, then, that over the past two weeks I've spent something close to fifteen or twenty hours repeating the exact same set-piece battle with every sign of enjoyment. I haven't counted my attempts but I've made at least one try most days for about a fortnight. Some days I've tried twice. I think day I tried three times.

Each fight lasted at least half an hour. One particularly gruesome farrago dragged on for more than ninety minutes. Most times I restarted again from the exact point where I began, without making any changes to my team or my build. Occasionally, I made major revisions to talents or gear. 

Sometimes thing went better. Sometimes they went worse. If I was lucky, I learned something. Mostly I didn't.

I did some googling, looking for advice or suggestions. No-one seemed to be having the same problems as me. No-one really seemed to be having any problems at all. The main suggestions were to do pretty much what I'd done the very first time I tried the fight. I'd thought it seemed like the obvious way to handle it and it seemed I was right.

The gist of the scenario is this: 

• There's a bridge. 
• At one end is your team.
• At the other end is a gate with a lever.
• Between your team and the lever are more than a dozen enemies.
• If you don't close the gate by pulling the lever, after a few rounds more enemies begin to come onto the bridge.
• The additional enemy forces arrive, two at a time, every two or three turns.
• They never stop coming so long as the gate remains open.

I mean, it's not hard to figure out, is it? Get the bloody gate shut ASAP. The plan is simple enough. it's the execution that's the problem.

That's how I spent most of my game time these last couple of weeks. Trying to cross that bridge and close that gate. 

At first I couldn't even get to the damn lever without everyone dying. After a while I could get someone there but they'd die before they could pull it. If I managed to get the gate shut it was never before I already had more enemies on the bridge than I could handle. 

Concentrating on getting one person all the way across the bridge with enough health left to pull the lever frequently left most of the rest of the team dead or close to it. Trying to get several people across so as to have redundancy on the pull attempt went even worse. 

After too many failed runs using the obvious tactic I flipped the plan and tried moving forward as a team, clearing the bridge of enemies as we went. That didn't work either.

Although I always felt my errors were the main reason I was failing, a part of the problem was out of my control. Combat in the game involves a significant amount of dice-rolling so luck is always a factor. It also employs a system of Critical Hits and Failures, meaning a particularly bad roll can be catastrophic.

There were things I could do to mitigate some of the impact of a bad set of rolls. There are talents that prevent crits, for a start, and others that negate specific types of damage. All the usual push and pull of RPGs down the years. 

But the thing about random factors is they're random. It's all very well giving one character immunity from critical hits but who's to say they'll be the one to get the bad roll? And you can't make everyone crit-proof. Or fire-proof. Or poison-proof... 

Then there are the really super-annoying design decisions you would never have made in a million years. For example, if you have a Thief, who can go into stealth so no-one can see him, why would you have him come out of stealth automatically, just to take advantage of an Attack of Opportunity? Wouldn't you code it so he stays in stealth unless he's either spotted or chooses to attack?

That one dumb mechanic screwed me over on several runs to the point that I had to stop using the Thief as my sneaker altogether. I had the Elf do it instead. She was lighter on her toes, anyway. 

I also had the Barbarian do his flying leap to get past people. I even had the Ogre throw the Dwarf halfway across the bridge. It's a party trick they do. None of it really worked.

But I kept trying. I didn't even get mad when I failed, again and again. Ok, I didn't get mad much. 

Mostly what I got was interested. It didn't feel so much like I was being forced to repeat the same annoying, over-tuned fight again and again. It felt more like I was putting together a puzzle. Maybe if I put this piece here... or move that one there...

It probably goes without saying at this point that the game I was playing was not an MMORPG. Fights of this kind in MMORPGs are rarely - if ever - fun. Also, most MMORPGs I've played haven't been turn-based, although of course there are a few.

The game in question was one I've mentioned before: The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. I'm only playing it because it came free with Amazon Prime Gaming. There is absolutely no chance I'd have paid money for it.

And it's not even that great an example of its kind. I'd say it's pretty good but it sure as heck isn't Baldur's Gate or even Divinity: Original Sin. It doesn't have that much of a plot and the dialog is cheesy. The whole game doesn't amount to a lot more than a string of set-piece fights strung together with a bunch of lame jokes. 

What all this tells me is that I'm not very good at knowing what I like. Although, I already knew that. I didn't need to have it pointed out to me. Again.

I have a tendency to believe I actually like things when in fact they're just things I think I ought to like. Conversely, I imagine I don't like things when all the evidence suggests I do. It doesn't happen all the time - just often enough that it catches me out, once in a while.

I think it might happen more with games than anything else, too. I expect it's because I know less about games than most other things I like. Or don't like. Whichever.

Now that I've noticed, I'm hoping maybe this time I'll learn something from the experience. That's why I've written it down. In the hope that might make it stick.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and find out what comes after the bridge. I think I've earned it.

It's Magic!

A couple of apparently unrelated posts I read recently, one by Tipa, the other by Redbeard, along with a flurry of first impressions posts on Palia and Baldur's Gate 3, started me thinking about some of the core concepts of the wider RPG genre. Specifically, I found myself pondering the relative merits of games as opposed to virtual worlds, of settings in which magic is taken for granted and of the often unrealistic expectations of the people who choose to spend their time - and sometimes their lives - there.

Any of these topics could sustain a series of posts but for now I'm just going to fire off a few observations that came to mind as I was reading. If I ever get around to writing about any of this in more depth, at least I'll have some notes I can refer to.

The aspect that interests me the most - and the one I think I've seen given the least attention over the years - is the way almost every RPG, online or off, massively multiple or single player, takes place in a milieu where magic - or science so advanced it may as well be magic - is accepted as the norm. It's so absolutely commonplace in just about every game that we almost never think about the implications.

Redbeard's post makes some astute criticisms of the way NPCs in fantasy games tend to spend all their time gussied up in their Sunday best. I'm not sure it's true to say the farmers are all out there tilling the fields in ball gowns and silk stockings - certainly in some games I've played the farmers are a dowdy lot - but it's definitely the case that around towns and cities you do tend to see an awful lot of very over-dressed citizens supposedly going about their normal, working day.

What his post got me wondering wasn't so much why they'd be doing that as why they wouldn't. These people all live with magic as a part of their daily lives. They may not all be practitioners, although many games are remarkably silent on the degree to which magic is available to the general population, but they certainly see it being practiced in front of them every day.

Most fantasy rpgs include some form of illusion magic, meaning you can't be certain anyone or anything is what it appears to be. Magic-users can transform themselves into just about anything. They can change race, gender, ethnicity, size or species. They can make themselves appear to be inanimate objects or ethereal phenomena. 

You don't always have to be a skilled illusionist to pull off these effects, either. Frequently it's possible to buy potions or magical items that create the illusion on request. Those items are often on open sale in shops in the town squares and side-streets. They're not always even very expensive.

If you posit a society where most people have access to the means of looking just how they fancy, wouldn't most of them choose to look their best? Why would you walk around looking dowdy and down-at-heel, when with a click of the fingers you could look like Lady Gaga on Oscar night?

Even if you choose to believe all those flounces and frills are firmly founded, you know they're still  likely to be something very much other than they appear. Even that much-discussed issue, the disparity between what male and female adventurers wear for protection, recognises a real-world social dilemma, not an in-game credibility gap. 

Don't try and tell me that's not practical adventuring gear!

We all know the armor looks the way it does because the developers expect to market their game to adolescent boys and men with adolescent minds but for the purposes of the world in which the characters operate, the chain-mail bikini makes as much sense as anything. If you can walk the streets with a ten-foot, glowing sword in one hand, leading a saber-tooth tiger on a chain with the other, you can pretty much wear what you damn well please.

All in-game armor provides a level of protection out of all proportion to real-world logic, combined with an equally unrealistic flexibility. Adventurers wear plate armor that somehow fails to drag them to the bottom when they leap into a lake. At most it makes them a little less able to roll and kick like a ninja than their counterparts in leather or cloth - cloth that can turn a blade, if not always as well as steel, then still well enough. 

Every piece of armor is magical. We know that because there are numbers that quantify just how magical it is. Once you give your scrap of cloth a numerical value to indicate how much damage it can take and assign it a slot on a paper-doll representation of the physical form, it's allowed that whatever level of protection it provides applies across the whole of that sector, whether the armor visibly obscures the skin or not. It's magic and there's no arguing with it.

Appropriately dressed for a memorial service?

If that's true for adventurers then why would it not be true for nobles or citizens too? Clothing may not be armor but it provides protection from the elements and from everyday incident. Imagine if nothing you wore ever got torn or soiled and even if it did, that somewhere in every town you'd count on finding a smith of some kind who could magically restore every single item of clothing on your body and in your backpack back to new, for only a few coins. If you knew you could have all damage repaired in a moment for the price of a pub lunch, would you worry about the wear and tear to your best clothes when you went to work or would you strut around like Beau Brummel on a bank holiday while you counted out the carrots?

And since I mentioned backpacks, let me address Tipa's points about "how to get those 200-300 pounds of meat and fur back to your home" after you kill a deer or "why would anyone think they’d be able to single handedly clear out a dungeon full of treasure?" The answer's the same in both cases of course: it all goes in your backpack, along with your horse and quite possibly a couple of goblins and a pagoda or two. 

It's magic. Don't question it. You can't. You don't know how it works. No-one does. Least of all the developers.

Palia fashions are... strange.
Although not as strange as
what's happened to her feet...

Now, Tipa is saying things might be more interesting if the games used real-world physics and that may well be so. Games that make that choice do exist. If you take that route, though, you can't also have almost any of the magic that makes the rest of the game what it is. 

It's not just that once you open the door to things like instant travel, no encumbrance or flying mounts, you're into a brave new world of logistics. It's also that you can't easily separate out the magic you want from the magic you don't without creating just as many cultural infelicities as if you'd left it alone. 

Look at a real-world example: AI. Now the large language models are loose it's proving extremely difficult to contain them. Once a principle is demonstrated, applications follow. The culture is already changing as a result and if draconian restrictions aren't applied and enforced, something which will require a cultural change all of its own, then many things will become possible which used to not to be.

A world in which magic is demonstrably real will necessarily have radically different cultural mores and practices from one where it's not. If we're going to start questioning the internal logic of these societies, we should probably be asking why they look so similar to cultures with which we're familiar, not why they don't look similar enough.

This leads directly in to the more pressing question of whether the games are as entertaining as they could be, although even to get there we first have to get past the hurdle of whether they're meant to be just games or something more. The argument over whether the goal is to create the most enjoyable games or the most convincing virtual worlds has been raging since even before I started playing MMORPGs and that was almost a quarter of a century ago. I certainly don't propose to try and resolve it here.

What I am going to suggest is that the two concepts are considerably less compatible than many people have been trying to suggest for decades now. There's a solid, commercial reason why MMORPGs (And, perhaps to a lesser extent, RPGs.) have become more and more gamelike over the years; it's because that's what players are most likely to accept, to enjoy and pay for.

There absolutely is a market for games where, as Tipa describes, you need a wagon to get the carcass of the creature you've killed back home so you can butcher it. ArcheAge come to mind as a game I've played that incorporates such features. But even in those games, such activities tend to be optional. 

It's also not as easy as all that to set up such systems to be consistent with real-world values, even if you wanted to do it. Star Citizen is perhaps the "shining" example here. In attempting to create a gamespace in which everything really does behave in a way logically consistent with real-world physics, Cloud Imperium Games have... not made a game at all.

We all look completely fine.

If and when they do make a game that conforms to that blueprint, it's odds on that most of the game-playing world, having given it a go, will decide they already have one life to live and can't fit the requirements of another, just as nitpickingly tedious and demanding, inside of it. Every action in a game must be easier, faster and more fun than the real-world activity it mimics. Otherwise, why not just go do the real thing instead?

All of which brings me to unrealistic expectations. These days games are expected to be both rigorously realistic and absolutely convenient. If it takes a long time to get things done it's a grind and if it doesn't there's not enough content. If travel is instant it's an insult but if it's not it's a time-sink. If death means nothing but a brief interruption to gameplay it's trivializing the risk but if there's a corpse to be recovered it's an archaic throwback to the bad old days.

There's so much choice these days, no-one has time to put up with anything that's not perfect. But nothing's ever perfect. Or will be.

Least of all this post, which as I said is just a few jottings on some things that occurred to me while I was reading stuff other people wrote. One day someone might knit all this together and come up with the ideal game but it won't be in my lifetime and probably not in the lifetime of anyone reading this, either.

We're all just going to have to get used to some things in our games not being exactly how we'd like them to be, I guess. Which is probably the closest to reality the games are ever going to come.

Coming Attractions Include Overwork, Crippling Debt, Death And, Of Course, Animals Wearing Pants.

I'm not sure if it's them or me but I never seem to notice when there's some kind of event happening on Steam. For example, I've had the thing open every day this week but it was only this afternoon I spotted another of those demofests going on. Only just in time, too. It's been running for five days already. Two more to go.

They do seem to host a lot of these things. I think there was one last month called Indiefest or something like that. I totally missed that one. This time it's NextFest, "A celebration of upcoming games", which I think is supposed to imply these are games you might actually be able to play in full some time before the heat death of the universe. No mmorpgs, then.

There's an extremely good argument to be made that the last thing I need at the moment would be more games. I just posted about the pile-up of point & click adventures clogging up my hard drive and it goes pretty much without saying that New World is eating every other game's lunch around here right now.

Still, I'm not one to turn down a freebie, as has been made all too plain of late. And these are demos, not whole games. Demos are short. Usually.

So I took a few minutes to scan through Steam's traditional ugly, garish, confusing display. Seriously, who do they have doing design there? It looks like a parody of something a twelve-year old might have put together for a GeoCities page and not a very talented twelve-year old at that.

Then again, I am old. What do I know? Maybe there's some kind of revival going on I don't know about that makes 90s graphics cutting edge again. There usually is.

On the positive side, while it may look repulsive, as a search interface it does work. Mousing over the various thumbnails sets a gameplay clip going, which makes it very easy to spot the handful of titles that might be of interest. 

There really weren't many this time but then I didn't spend as long looking as I have done in the past, mostly because I was trying to stick not only to demos I was almost certain I would actually play but to demos of games I might actually buy. 

My conversion record so far on that is dismal. I put several titles on my wish list after the last couple of rounds of demos but even though some of them have since launched I have yet to buy any. I will, eventually, but I'm waiting for the right moment. The way things are going, it looks like being a long wait.

This time, in the end, I went for just four demos. These are they. Them. Whatever. Up above, with some weird Steam housekeeping thing stuck in the middle. 

They vary hugely in size from almost 3gb to a shade over 100mb. That's like the difference between a pygmy shrew and a giraffe, which is kind of ironic since the protagonist of the smallest of them is a giraffe.

 

Taking them in order of magnitude, first  we have Lord Winklebottom Investigates, "a 1920s murder mystery, point and click adventure featuring a dashing giraffe detective." Oh goody! Another point&click adventure! Just what I needed!

Giraffes are by no means my favorite animals but I do like anthropomorphism and I do like detective stories and I do like the two of them together. And I suppose a giraffe does make a change from the usual cats, dogs and rabbits that tend to get the lead roles in these things.

Whether it's as funny as its creators imagine or, indeed, funny in any way at all, remains to be seen. Experience suggests it's unlikely but we can hope. 

Next up, weighing in at just over 500mb comes Chinatown Detective Agency. Guess what genre that is. Go on. I bet you can't. Give up? 

It's a point & click adventure! Not only that, it's "cybernoir". I hope everyone had their Bhagpuss bingo cards ready. At least this one doesn't have any funny animals. Far from it. Instead, the game "features scenes of moderate violence, blood, the use of tobacco and alcohol, and mild sexual references". Sounds fun.

Reading through the lengthy description, I suspect this one is going to turn out to be more work than play: "Do real-world research and investigation to solve puzzles and uncover leads, and manage your time and money to solve cases from clients both well-intentioned and nefarious." That sounds not in the slightest bit awesome but this sounds worse: "In Chinatown Detective Agency, time is a precious resource. The daily grind of the working Joe is a one-way ticket to fatigue, and tasks have a funny way of taking longer as you tire. Time is money, and the clock is always ticking." You can take realism too far, you know.

 

Third up, based on how how much of my hard drive it's sitting on, comes The Good Life. Not a sim of the 1970s self-sufficiency sitcom featuring the late Richard Briars et al, unfortunately, although I wouldn't be in the least surprised to learn there had already been a video game spin-off of that middle-class classic.

No, this is... oh go, on, take another guess. I'll give you a clue this time - it's not a point & click adventure. No, it's another anthropomorphic murder mystery! Only this time somehow it's an RPG. I have no clue how that's supposed to work but I'm curious to find out.

The plot sounds intriguing, too: "Journalist Naomi Hayward is drowning in debt and is at the end of her rope. Having accepted a request from The Morning Bell newspaper to “uncover the mystery of a small English town”, Naomi finds herself far from her home in New York, in Rainy Woods. Upon beginning her investigation, Naomi – camera in hand – soon discovers an inexplicable phenomenon in which the townspeople transform into cats and dogs as night falls... Then, as just she’s looking into that particular mystery, a murder occurs.."

So much there to savor, isn't there? Apart from those unfortunate prepositions. And so oddly familiar, somehow...

 

Last and not least if only because it's the biggest of them all, clocking in at 2.8gb comes Endling. I can't really be glib or snarky about this one. It looks absolutely beautiful and has one of the most depressing set-ups I can imagine for a game about a cute fox: "As the last mother fox on Earth, your cubs need all your care to survive in a merciless world that slowly destroys itself. You have to help them, teach them and save them. And you should never forget that extinction is forever."

Geez. As Zippy the Pinhead would say, are we having fun yet?

Honestly, I thought twice and then once more before I downloaded this one. The screenshots and gameplay clips look delightful but even the feature list designed to sell the game feels harrowing. I'm not sure I'm ready to "get involved in emotionally taxing decisions", especially when one mistake could mean the death of a bunch of "tiny furballs" with "unique personalities and fears."

And remember, "Extinction is forever". I hope that doesn't mean there's no save game function but I have a horrible feeling it does.

Those were my choices, anyway. I'll have to live with them. Although only if I ever find the time to play them, I guess.

If and when I do I'll be sure to report back on what I find. If I'm not too traumatized to type, that is.

 

On The Level

There's been a lot of talk about levels of late. Blizzard began it with the suggestion that World of Warcraft has too many. Something ought to be done about it, they said.

Yes, but what? If anyone knew the answer to that, surely they'd have piped up long ago. How long have we had levels, now? I make it... hang on, let me think... oh, yes... forever!

Online gaming was an entirely new concept for me when I stepped onto the precarious platforms of Kelethin back in 1999 but I'd known what a "level" was since the early 1980s. Even then I was late to the party.

I first saw Dungeons and Dragons played at University, where the people playing it confirmed every prejudice about the practice I might have had, had I had any, which I didn't, because I'd barely even heard of it. Nothing about the game or its players convinced me to give it a second glance but circumstances will conspire. A year or two after I graduated I found myself spending almost every Sunday for five years, from midday to midnight, rolling weird-shaped dice and improvising, cast against type and loving it.

We started out playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It was the first edition ruleset, which we just called AD&D, because no-one imagined there'd ever be another. Of all the myriad arcane rules and systems in the many books, by far the most prominent were levels.

Levels ruled all. A lot about your character could change during the course of a regular play session but when the number next to your name on the character sheet incremented, everything changed. Well, so long as you weren't a Fighter.

Levels didn't merely make you more powerful by increasing your stats and giving you more hit points. They gave you entirely new abilities, put new spells in your spellbook, allowed you to do things you could never have done at all before you leveled up.

Perhaps yet more significantly, as your level changed, so did the world and that change was as marked as any real-world shift from childhood to maturity. Claw and fang scraps with kobolds the size of dogs faded into memory as concerns turned to giants, dragons and other-planar powers.

That's the part I didn't like. I loved levelling, sure, but I wasn't keen on where the level curve was taking me. It was all very well gaining new powers and skills but having to use them on demons and demi-gods stretched my personal envelope of disbelief to breaking point.

The rest of the gaming group tended to agree. We got to around Level eight or nine then re-rolled to start a completely fresh campaign from Level one. When we got back to where we'd been, we dropped AD&D altogether and spent the next few years running through various RPG systems, always moving on when our characters threatened to become too godlike.

EverQuest in 1999 felt both familiar and strange. I'd played a few video RPGs in the eighties and nineties, several either based on D&D or using the genre tropes that megafranchise established. EQ had classes and races and stats and spells and magic items. And it had levels.

When I started, about seven or eight months after launch, it had fifty and lots of people had done them all. I came to a game that already knew all about endgame ennui. There was plenty of talk of "bored fifties".

To hear people waxing nostalgic about the golden days of "Classic" EverQuest, you might be fooled into thinking everyone was happy to live in that pre-lapsarian world. They weren't. The atmosphere I recall, both in game and on the forums, was an uncomfortable melange of hyperactive excitement coming from the ever-growing flood of new players like myself and an increasingly uncomfortable and cynical impatience that seemed to be settling over those who'd done their six months.

It must have been plain to the developers back then that something would have to change if the numbers were going to carry on heading in the right direction. The game was opening new servers regularly to meet the growing demand but how many of those players would stick around once they hit fifty?

The solution to the problem was already baked into the structure of the game, of course. More levels. Sony Online Entertainment set out on a course they and their successor, Daybreak Games, has followed unerringly ever since: expand the game, don't change it.

"Expansion", in this context, was a concept entirely new to me. I was familiar with Campaigns and Adventures but the idea that you might "expand" the entire game by adding more of what was already there around the edges seemed astonishing.

From the very start EverQuest expansions included a lifting of the level cap. The first, Ruins of Kunark, added ten, taking the total to sixty. That turned out to be a huge change. RoK was so vast  and those extra ten levels made such a difference to what was possible, it felt like a different game altogether.

From then onwards levels were doled out more sparingly. The next step up had to wait until 2002's Planes of Power, the game's fourth expansion and even then the cap rose by only five levels, to sixty-five, setting a pattern that has persisted ever since, with several expansions passing before another five levels are doled out.

The unnamed, twenty-sixth expansion this autumn will add the ritual five, bringing the grand total to 115. In terms of power, a Level 115 character will be to a Level 50 as a supernova is to a birthday candle. This brings problems.

As many MMORPG developers have discovered, even success can be problematic. By any measure, an online video game that can still maintain a population sufficiently large to justify the production of new, paid-for content twenty years on has to be taken for a success. But a success for whom?

Most long-running MMORPGs rely in very large part on continual growth, creating a sprawling confusion of continents and alt-planes, a palimpsest of contradictory systems and a plethora of arcane mechanics, all of which put up barriers to entry for potential new players. Those barriers can climb to impossible heights and the level cap represents the most insurmountable of all.

A new player may be willing to overlook the aging graphics. They can certainly learn the necessary systems and mechanics. Wikis and fan sites do a good job of cutting through the clutter, opening up the essentials to the light of knowledge.

All of that is manageable. Levels, as originally conceived, are not.

Even back at the turn of the millennium being Level 60 in EverQuest didn't make you seventeen per cent stronger than a Level 50. It added an order of magnitude  - at least. For that to make sense in gameplay terms, the lands those higher characters were exploring had to grow as well.

The mobs needed to be strong enough to put up a fight. The items they dropped needed to be powerful enough to provide a reward. The further the level cap receded, the more irrelevant the rest of the gameworld became.

A level 60 might not have been able to wander Lower Guk alone with impunity but a Level 65 most certainly could. By the time 2006's The Serpent's Spine expansion raised the cap to 75, Mrs Bhagpuss and I were able, gleefully, to duo through the Elemental Planes, leaving nothing standing where once, at cap, we'd cowered in corners with a full group, praying the puller wouldn't bring more than one.

I love that about levels. As a solo or duo player, an ever-increasing cap consistently expands horizons. When a new expansion arrives it's filled with places I can't see and mobs I can't kill. But all I need to do is wait.

In time a new expansion will appear and another and over time my number will float up. I'll pick away at what I can, take my xp where it comes and one day what was impossible will become possible, then easy, then trivial. It's the circle of life.

Or it used to be. Unfortunately, trivializing older content can be problematic in itself.

Veteran players often enjoy re-visiting old challenges and breezing through them without breaking a sweat, especially if there are still rewards there to grab. Some games facilitate that behavior or even make a feature of it, adding achievements and cosmetics that bypass level-based gameplay. It's an approach that works well with instanced dungeons, where over-levelled characters can monty haul at no risk without offending anyone. To the developers chagrin it's a solution that doesn't work at all in the open world.

Allowing high levels to operate freely with low in the same environment causes any number of issues. If there are targets of opportunity the high levels will monopolize them. If there's nothing of interest to the bubble of players sitting at cap in an aging game, that zone will be all but empty. Anything that relies on co-operation better have strong incentives for the capped players or it will fail.

In most older MMORPGs I've played, after a while there's been a call to re-purpose old content. It's not being used, say the players who aren't using it. Let's revamp the lot. Make all the mobs our level, give them the loot we want. So what if a few new players won't get to do what we did? When did you last see a "new" player, anyway?

Game designers are surprisingly resistant to such demands, luckily. There's the economic argument. Revamping content costs. Also someone created all this stuff and chances are they're still there, somewhere, caring about it. And, as Cataclysm showed us, players don't always take kindly to having their memories erased.

In latter years a compromise solution has appeared: level scaling. The world reflects the level of your character. Wherever you travel, in new content or old, the mobs will give you a tussle and the gear they drop will fit. It's a solution ArenaNet incorporated from the outset for Guild Wars 2 and which many other games, from Elder Scrolls Online to WoW itself, have adapted for retrofit.

And yet all those MMORPGs still have levels. GW2 has 80. ESO has 50. WoW has 120. And many games not only have levels but multiple level-like systems, carrying on way past the cap, with the direct intent of mimicing the same mechanics. Indeed, as I think about it, just about every MMORPG I can think of has levels, except for those few that replace them with "Skills", another, very similar discussion of its own.

Only yesterday I started playing Secret Worlds Legends again. SWL is the revamped version of  the excellent but under-performing MMORPG The Secret World, one of the very few games of its genre that chose not to use levels. When Funcom rebadged and remarketed the game in an attempt to appeal to a larger, more mainstream audience, one of the changes they made was to remedy that omission. I did three levels in SWL yesterday evening.

Players complain about levels all the time. Levels cause any number of problems, only a very, very few of which I've mentioned in this lengthy post. Almost every mature game nowadays includes multiple ways to speed up or skip over the painful process of leveling: instant max levels, xp boosts, heirloom items. Scaling content attempts to render levels all but irrelevant. And yet, here they still are.

Blizzard, worried about the ever-growing number next to the name on your character sheet, wants to squish it. But no-one's talking about making it go away completely. Whatever problems levels may bring, it seems not having them is worse.

There's more to say about all this and more will be said. Levels aren't going anywhere and neither are the problems they bring. For now, though, I'm going to pass the conch. I'm sure it'll come back around again soon enough.

Just like my next level cap increase.

All Aboard For Funtime

Naithin posted yesterday about some coming games of interest. There was one I hadn't heard of before: Outward.

There's no particular reason I should have heard of Outward. It's not an MMORPG. It's not even an MMO. The Steam page describes it as "an open-world RPG" which can be played "alone or with your friends".

It's supposed to be a sandbox rpg with survival mechanics "featuring deep simulation and immersion". Naithlin says it "...puts you in the shoes of a nobody in an otherwise high-fantasy world. Your victories will be small in scale, but no less meaningful.... Getting a backpack is a milestone to remember." In many ways it's the game I would have wanted fifteen or twenty years ago. Not any more. 

This morning I read what may be Gevlon's final blog post. He says it is. In it he details how he feels gaming has changed over the decade or so since he began blogging. Very much for the worse, in his opinion.

"It’s time for me to accept that my hobby went the way of television: once an intelligent entertainment, now targeted to the lowest common denominator", he says. A somewhat nuanced judgment, particularly given the very widely-held belief that television is currently enjoying its greatest Golden Age of all time.

But of course he means free-to-air, broadcast television, which has indeed descended into a dark place from which it will most likely never return. Ironically, over almost exactly the same timeframe, TV has undergone a role-reversal with online gaming. Television is now a subscription medium; games are free. And easy.

"Players no longer need to be any good to progress. They just have to log in and open their wallets... They don’t have to learn anything to succeed, so learning became “tryhard”. They became the dominant culture in gaming. Being any good became “elitism”. “Gamers are dead” is the new slogan among developers"

Gevlon again. It's an oversimplification but not without substance. Expectations and standards have changed.

Have they changed for the worse, though? I'm not sure. And I don't propose to go round that track again, not right now.

What interests me more is how I've changed over the same period. From the time I first dicovered role-playing games, fairly late, in my early twenties, until perhaps ten years after I started playing EverQuest in 1999, my tastes in the genre were fairly consistent.

For the best part of thirty years I knew what I wanted in an RPG, be it on or offline, tabletop or on screen. I wanted a low level, low fantasy setting, where cantrips and potions represented the only magic most people would ever see and the sight of a goblin or two would send even the town guards running.

I was dead set against anything to do with dragons, gods or demons. I wanted my characters to be ordinary people, scratching a living by poking around in old ruins hoping to find a few tarnished trinkets to sell back in town.

Another thing I wanted was "realism". My characters should need to eat, drink and sleep. They'd need to dress appropriately for the weather and anyone crazy enough to try swimming in chainmail deserved a swift trip to the bottom of the river.

I never entirely got what I wanted, even in tabletop RPGs I GM'd myself. Everything always tends to drift upwards. Characters get more powerful. Players want to fight bigger, scarier things.

In MMORPGs, few of which even attempted to pay lip service to any kind of "realism", the invitable power creep of expansions and updates dragged the median level of play away from the gnoll tribe menacing my home village to battles with the gods, with my character as "the chosen one" or "The Commander".

The strange thing is, over time I got to like it. Or perhaps I stopped caring. I was paying far more attention to whether I was enjoying myself than whether I ought to be. It turns out that being powerful and winning all the time is fun.

And killing bigger monsters with flashier explosions is more exciting than killing small ones with a fizzle.I started out playing gritty, leather-clad woodsmen and women, reliant on hard-won practical skills and the ability to read a scent on the wind or a spoor on the ground. These days, in all games, I cleave towards classes with the most spectacular spells and, especially, the most devestating area attacks.

Instead of slipping unseen through the woods, living off the land, I like to leap into the middle of a crowded camp yelling a battlecry, calling down fire from the sky or spinning in circles like a steel-bladed whirlwind, until everything around me lies dead. Subtle I am not.

It's true that I do, even now, relish a slow start. I like the picking yourself up by your bootstraps aspect of starting out with nothing. But you can only stay low level for so long. And how many times can you scavenge for food with the meter running down before you say "sod this for a game of soldiers" and log off?

Which is why characters, even in games with survival mechanics, always outgrow their needs. Those things that seemed hard starting out become easier, then trivial, then cease to be things at all. If not, people get bored of the endless maintenance-work and drift away.

The developers of Outward are almost evangelistic about the joys of defeat. They make a play of the game's constant autosaving, meaning you have to live with your mistakes. All of them. There are even things called "dynamic defeat scenarios", which makes losing sound like something to be relished.

In the end, though, unless the aim is to attract an audience of masochists, players will have to feel they have "won". This is the hard-won discovery of games developers these past few years against which Gevlon rails.

The way he puts it, "Game companies realized that money comes from bad players too, so they started to nerf their games." Or perhaps, given more options than they'd previously been offered, players discovered they didn't care quite so much about being good at games as they thought they did.

Gevlon sees it as the old guard dying out. Players who cared about skill and effort finally deciding the games were no longer worthy of their time and trouble, moving on to other hobbies. There's certainly some of that.

I suspect, though, that many more players changed along with the games. As the games got easier, less demanding, they found there were compensations for the loss of status that came with being "good". Having things is what matters, not how you got them. And less work means more play.

Without a doubt, I was such a player. My goals changed, my tastes changed, my expectations changed. Here I am, entertain me.

The question is, could I change again? Could I find myself swept up in some new, harsh world of struggle, grubbing in the dirt for the wherewithal to buy myself a pair of worn boots and a belt pouch to carry my few coppers?

Of course I could. And no doubt will. And then the cycle will start over.

The cat's out of the bag, the genie out of the bottle. Uphill both ways in the snow was fine when we didn't have a clue where we were going. Today's players, no longer "gamers", know there are shorter, smoother paths to the sunlit uplands.

Money Is The Anthem

BioWare's Anthem is The Big New Thing. There seems to be absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind about that.

I foresee finding myself in a very familiar position: reading thousands of words about a video game I have no interest whatsoever in playing. I predict there will be a torrent of posts, varying from the gushing to the gutted. Some will skate across the surface on a wave of feels; others will dive into the depths, dragging up a deadweight of extraordinary detail.

After a couple of weeks the torrent will turn to a stream then a trickle. In six weeks only a couple of die-hards will be left, working the pump-handle for those last few drops. Everyone else will either have moved on to the Next Big New Thing, if there is one, or back to an Old Favorite. Either that or they'll be posting about how bored they are and why doesn't anyone make any good games any more?

The game's not even out yet and already the dam is breached. There are leaks springing up all over the place. I've already heard plenty about the Demo Weekend and its issues. Isey and Gevlon had a sparky little interchange about that.

The post that prompted me to join in, however, was Alli Rense's compelling anti-Anthem rant at The Parent Trope, unequivocally entitled Anthem? No Thank You. Alli isn't just uninterested in playing the game, like me; she sees it as an active threat to the future of the kind of games she enjoys. Very specifically she imagines that if Anthem is successful it will lead to future BioWare games following the Anthem model and abandoning the narrative RPG format on which they built their brand.

She's probably right, too, although she doesn't speculate on what might become of BioWare if Anthem isn't successful. Hard to imagine that would have a positive outcome for the company or its future projects - if any.

I don't have any emotional attachment to BioWare, either past or present. They made one game I really liked - Baldur's Gate - and one I quite liked - Baldur's Gate 2. That was twenty years ago. Since then they've made nothing I care about at all.

I did try the first Dragon Age and found that, while it had a powerful impact at first, it very rapidly became tedious, repetitive and obvious. I played DA intensely for about a week and then one day I couldn't stand the thought of ever playing it again.

It was a useful learning experience. The most important thing I learned was that I really, really hate the "Companion" mechanic, where the player character is expected to schmooze, romance or otherwise jolly along various NPCs, either by buttering them up with flattery or giving them gifts.

Who ever thought this was a good idea? And how old were they? Six? Will you be my best friend if I give you my Action Figure?  No, cos I can't be your friend any more, cos you like Jimmy and Jimmy's bad! Geez. Give me a break.

That experience beyond anything else is why I have yet to even download Star Wars: the Old Republic. The mere thought of having to deal with managing the imaginary emotions of a bunch of virtual pre-schoolers in battle-armor gives me the heebie-jeebies.

The other lesson I learned from Dragon Age is that I really can't take any more Generic Fantasy Plots (or Generic Science Fiction Plots for that matter). I can stomach them as background in MMORPGs, where all narrative is set dressing for the main performance - building my character - and I can get on board when  narrative provides atmosphere for enjoyable mechanics, as in the two Baldur's Gate games or Pillars of Eternity, but the last time I encountered a plot in a video game that I found as immersive or compelling as a good novel or movie...well, if it ever happens, I'll let you know.

When Alli says "I think video games are the best way we have to tell a story. Better than TV, film, and even books. Because they’re the most immersive, they have the biggest impact." I imagine she speaks for quite a few people who might be reading this. Even I would say that the medium has the potential to compete on equal terms with established narrative forms.

It's potential that's gone largely unfulfilled for decades, though, primarily because of the mechanics involved. I have a big issue with all video game mechanics when it comes to storytelling. Video games are clunky. They persistently pull you out of the moment to fight things or solve puzzles or click through dialog trees. It's the equivalent of trying to watch a movie with someone sitting next to you going "Who's that guy? Wasn't he in that movie we saw last week? Are you sure you switched the lights off when we parked? Can you hold my Coke, I want to get a mint out my pocket...no, wait, your pocket. You had the mints, didn't you?"

The ones that do it the least and which probably make the best stab at telling an uninterrupted narrative come from the sub-genre often somewhat derisively labelled "Walking Simulators" but what those mostly seem to me to be doing is trying to edge as close as possible to being movies. One of the main criticisms often levelled at them is that they aren't really video games at all.

We do all make some sweeping assumptions at times, about what a video game can or can't be - or should or shouldn't be. At one point, in a piece that has enough comment hooks to hang a dozen blog posts on, Alli asks "Aren’t video games supposed to be an introverted hobby?".

Are they? I don't know. They certainly have had that image at times, particularly in the eyes of worried parents or politicians in search of a headline. I did think the image of video games as the exclusive province of the socially maladjusted was behind us but it does recur disturbingly regularly, even now.

Getting back to Anthem itself, while I don't feel as disturbed by the prospect of its success as Alli, I do see it as not so much a straw in the wind but a bloody great haystack in a hurricane barrelling towards the traditional MMORPG. Belghast said something very revealing in his recent post on returning to FFXIV: "I am trying to get back into playing an MMORPG again…  but it just feels weird considering how much of the Destiny style MMO Lite I have been playing of late."

Pete S in reply to Belghast clarified that feeling with some solid reasoning: "I’m really struggling to engage for that same “been playing quasi-MMOs too much” reason. I just feel like the time-invest:reward ratio is off now."

Pacing in MMORPGs is something many of us have been talking about and around for years. People have argued that leveling is too fast, too slow, too uneven; gear ladders have been both too long and too short. The genre suffered years of post-WoW speeding up that then slewed into a "Slow MMO" car-crash that threatened to bring the entire crowdfunding process into disrepute.

While all that was going on deep in The Niche, the hinterlands were filling up with somewhat successful hybrids like Destiny and The Division and bona-fide hits and mega-hits like PUBG and Fortnite. If the last five years have told us anything, it's that there's a huge market for Massive Online Games - provided you don't add those fatal three missing letters.

So I can see why Alli is worried. The current trend in large-scale online games, supported by sales, would seem to have little to do with either narrative storytelling or traditional rpg character-building. What's more, I would contend that, with Destiny, Warframe and now Anthem all choosing to house the player character in form-fitting, personality-occluding body armor, the current version of "character building" has closer affinities to driving games than to any imagined ancestry in Dungeons and Dragons.

Beyond any other reason, that was why I lost interest so fast in Warframe and it's very high on the list of things that put me off trying Anthem: I don't mind my character owning and driving a vehicle but I draw the line at them being one. But no-one cares what I think because not every game has to be for me.

Anthem will be a success. Possibly not as big a success as it needs to be but there or thereabouts. The trend of narrative-light, combat-heavy, fast-paced MMOs set in open worlds or open maps, using or at least including Battle Royale and Survival mechanics is going to be with us for a good while yet.

Will that trend prejudice the production of other types of video game? Of course it will. That's what bandwagons do - roll over everything else. Will there be anything left for the rest of us? Of course there will. Whether we'll want it when we get it, though, that's another story...

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.

Ourselves The Elves

Psychochild has a post up about the perennial topic (I won't say "problem") of Roleplaying in MMORPGs. Over the years, RP has become a niche within a niche but if you drift back far enough in time it was once baseline behavior for the genre.

In 1999-2003, when I was playing EverQuest (on and off) pick-up groups were the norm. I met countless players, some of whom became online friends, some of whom I never saw again. In virtually every group someone, often several people would roleplay. Or rather, they would do something that we all thought of as "roleplaying" back then but which these days comes much closer to what I referred to in my recent "Conversation Starters" post as "character play".

Not if Scarlet sees you first, you won't.

The difference between what I'm calling character play (I'm not sure if its a term anyone else uses) and the practice generally known as roleplay nowadays is mostly - but not entirely - one of degree. Modern-day roleplay tends to be very serious business indeed. As Brian says in his piece, the current understanding is that "RP is basically shared storytelling". People get as deeply involved as actors do in their craft and we all know just how seriously actors take acting.

In-game racial abuse - weirdly okay.

Then there's the emotional commitment. "RP sometimes makes us feel vulnerable because it can expose emotions we often keep to ourselves." says Brian. There's a reason why many non-roleplayers go beyond finding roleplaying not to their taste to feeling actively threatened by it. The reason is fear of intimacy.

This is not the case with character play and it was rarely the case with what many players called "roleplay" in the early days of MMOs. While there absolutely were cadres of serious roleplayers back then, including whole RP guilds and cross-guild RP organizations who treated the virtual worlds of EQ or UO as backdrops for their collectively-constructed dramas, they were not the mainstream. Not even close.

Mainstream roleplaying in the dawn of MMORPGs was tawkin liek dis if you woz a troll or usin' a vera bad Scotch accent fer yer dwarrven clerrric. It was standing aloof and making sarcastic comments if you were playing a dark elf or handing out muffins to everyone in the party if you were a hobbit halfling.

In the lengthy downtime between pulls and set-ups, conversation ranged from what gear you were wearing to the latest sports news. There was no hard boundary between ooc and in-character chat. People dipped in and out of both all the time.

What's more, many people would stay in character while discussing out of character subjects. In EverQuest at that time people playing Trolls and Ogres would often not break character at all. You could be recovering from a bad pull at Back Door in the Sarnak Fort in Lake of Ill Omen and the Troll SK might say "gunna be afk a minnit. Dam cat skratchin at de door agen".

There were players I knew quite well at that time who I literally never heard speaking normal English. I was never that consistent myself when I played EQ but when I moved to Vanguard my Raki Disciple developed a particular speech pattern almost immediately and never deviated from it until the game closed down.

Names changed to protect the infantile.

Vanguard was, I think, the first MMO that Mrs Bhagpuss and I played mainly as a duo. We'd duoed
many times in other games but we'd also soloed a lot, been in the same and in separate guilds, had shared and separate circles of friends - the whole range. In Vanguard we started together and never really got to know many other people.

That was probably how we came to develop the kind of character play between ourselves that we've carried on in some form ever since. It consists largely of playing our characters as though they were various stripes of siblings or childhood friends (or more often frenemies).

It's actually worse when you can see what they're talking about.

There's a lot of jibing and taunting, frequently based around shared experiences and knowledge of each others (imagined, in game) habits and personality quirks. We tend to play small races as though they are the age their height makes them appear, while taller characters tend to be po-faced, long-suffering adults.

Size matters.

Over time a huge range of in-jokes accrue, some of which get carried over from one character to another or even one game to another. Not infrequently we stay in these character roles even when we are talking in game about something outside the gameworld.

I don't much like formal roleplay. I've tried it and I've watched a good deal. Mostly it seems to be artificial, forced and awkward. I find the conventions of using emotes spelled out in text with some signifier in front excruciatingly arch. The predeliction many roleplayers have for talking about their characters in the third person or the passive voice is about as unimmersive as it's possible to get.

I've also had a number of unfortunate experiences with aggressive RPers demanding compliance with their self-imposed standards in open-world areas and in non-roleplaying groups. I was once pursued for much of a Sunday morning by a Hobbit in LotRO who insisted it was my obligation to help him level for RP reasons which he articulated with increasing vigor and anger when I told him I had other plans.

Part of his argument was that, since I had rolled a character on a designated RP server, my characters were required to behave at all times in a certain manner, one which, in this instance, seemed to have far less to do with RP and a lot more to do with him not being able to find a group. My response was to quit LotRO altogether and go back to EQ2, where people generally let you use the bank without badgering you to take them adventuring.

Even the adults in the room...

All of this puts me in a somewhat ambiguous position. I have major reservations about roleplay in MMORPGs and my experiences with the more serious end of the hobby over the years have mostly tended to reinforce rather than remove those reservations. On the other hand I absolutely love character play and really regret the extent to which it has slipped into obscurity.

I'd love to hear Asuran player-characters talking like brash, self-agrandizing little "geniuses" or Charr gruffly cursing and calling each other out over their supposed legionary affiliations. My game experience would be considerably enhanced if players remembered which of their characters were Priory or Order of Whispers and dropped a few comments accordingly now and again.

It's all about getting the voice right...

It's not that it never happens any more. I see it occasionally. It stands out as the exception, though, where once it was so familiar I wouldn't have noticed.

You don't know what you've got til it's gone as Joni Mitchell used to say. Then again, she was obviously a High Elf, so no-one would have paid her the slightest attention anyway...