Feet On The Ground, Head In The Clouds

These past few weeks, I've been playing various characters at widely differing levels across many of World of Warcraft's continents and expansions and one of the more surprising discoveries I've made has been the sheer, overwhelming scale of the landscape. Not just the number of zones which, while substantial, doesn't come close to matching the many hundreds I'm theoretically familiar with in the two EverQuest games, but the breadth and sprawl of the geography itself.

These are huge zones by the standards of just about any mmorpg I've ever played. I commented last year, as did several other bloggers, on the time it takes to travel on foot from one end of the Barrens to the other but I'd been thinking of that in the way I think of West Karana or Eastern Wastes in EQ, exceptions that put the rest of the zones into context.

Based on recent experience, I'm not sure the Barrens is anything out of the ordinary for Azeroth or its related planets, dimensions and time periods. I have to put it that way. I've taken so many portals of late I'm never really quite sure where I'm supposed to be at any given moment.

Every zone seems to extend for virtual miles in all directions, out, around, up and down. The in-game meter that ticks off the distance to your current destination is calibrated in yards but the experiential effect is orders of magnitude larger. I know what a view of a few hundred yards looks like and it normally doesn't come with a horizon.

You might be thinking this is all a combination of playing lower level characters and Blizzard's decision to limit flying in later expansions but, counter-intuitively, I've found it to be the exact opposite. Yes, it takes quite a while to cross zones on a ground mount but it's not until you take to the skies that the true extent of the distances you've been covering becomes apparent.

The view from above is stunning. I've flown in plenty of games but I'm not sure I've seen anything that so convincingly expresses a sense of scale. The forests, from above, display a dense, impenetrable canopy that, should you be foolish enough to attempt to fly through it, turns out to be every bit as vision-impeding as you'd expect. WoW has some of the more visually convincing forests in the genre even from the ground but in the treetops the impact of such a weight and volume of foliage is overwhelming.

 

As for cityscapes, again I can't remember ever seeing anything quite like it. Cities in mmorpgs have grown over the years from small clusters of buildings, a few streets that would barely make the grade as a county town, to mighty citadels, filled with soaring towers and sweeping bridges. In Azeroth and related environs, though, spectacle frequently gives way to density.

The architecture may not be as spectacular as in other imagined worlds but the urban sprawl makes up for it. From above, Stormwind reveals itself to be a rats' nest of alleys and avenues, squares and parks, a place where it's all too easy to imagine losing your way, finding yourself back where you started, something that happens to me almost every time.

As well as making for some fine photo opportunities, all of this has made me think differently about the concept of flying in mmorpgs. I've long been an advocate of free flight as a travel option in these games, becoming a convert when I got my flying mount in Vanguard. It altered the entire nature of the  game, changing it from something I loved playing into somewhere I loved being.

Being able to fly fundementally changes the sensual envelope. The barrier between game and virtual world dissolves, giving way to something much more fluid and self-propagating. I love flying in every game that allows it. I take full advantage of whatever version of flight I'm offered. Even so, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the argument that letting players fly too freely, too soon, diminishes the impact, effectiveness and immersive grip of the content flying lets them skip.

It's certainly true that being able to take off like a vtol fighter jet, avoiding any and all obstacles in your path, before plummeting down to land on a handkerchief beside your quest target does cut to the chase. Arguably, it renders the very concept of the chase moot. I ought to know. I do it all the time.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. As I found when playing a stealth class in Star Wars: the Old Republic, avoiding fights much of the time can also mean avoiding experience, loot and entertainment. With Classic last year and Retail this, I've written a lot about how much fun I've had. Much of that fun has been rooted in exploring the environments in which my characters find themselves. Skipping over or past it isn't doing myself any favors.

Limiting and restricting access to flight is one way that developers try to make sure players don't do themselves out of a good time in games that purport to maintain some degree of virtual worldliness. Of course, the problem is that there are plenty of players who wouldn't describe the content in question as being much of a good time in the first place.

And sometimes it really isn't. I would very definitely agree with those who object to having to fight their way through scores of annoying and inconsequential enemies just to get to an objective. I can feel my blood pressure rising just thinking about the frustrating, infuriating and ultimately miserable experience of traveling anywhere, for any reason, in Guild Wars 2's dismally difficult and overcrowded Path of Fire expansion zones.

WoW doesn't seem to me to have that problem. Mob density is mostly reasonable and not too many enemies employ crowd control effects. Leash distances are relatively short and few, if any, creatures seem to run faster (or even as fast) as a basic ground mount. If you keep running you'll usually be fine, especially since getting dismounted is a rare event.

Playing these last few sessions, I've found that even with characters whose mounts are able to fly, I don't always choose to unfurl the wings. I like that I have the option but I don't feel I have to use it all the time. Whether I'd be making that choice were I not coming off the back of fifty levels of very enjoyable but enforcedly ground-based fun with my shaman, who can say? 

Flying is so convenient, after all. Can anyone resist the temptation for long?

 

Which, I think, is a good reason for the kind of compromises being made nowadays. Compelling people to cover new ground, literally and metaphorically, before they get to fly past it, ditto, is probably a good decision for the long-term heath of the genre. We could all exert some self-discipline and discretion and choose not to fly but, realistically, would we?

The argument that denying flying is paternalistic has weight but these games are by their very nature coercive to a degree. Many, many opportunities are gated by level, class, gear, faction, reputation and a score more flags and markers. Why pick out flight as being any different?

In the end, as with boosts to the cap and similar content skips, there's an existential question to be asked: why do players pay (or grind) just to be able to avoid the very thing they're supposedly there to enjoy? If the content was sufficiently entertaining, surely no-one would pay extra or jump through hoops for the privelige of being allowed not to play it.

It's an easy question easy to ask but a much harder one to answer. Even the obvious explanation - that levelling and endgame are really two unconnected playstyles that should never have been joined together - doesn't tell me why I like both flying and level boosts so much, myself. Maybe it's that all these things offer their own kind of fun and it's possible to want different things at different times.

For now, it's been refreshing to be reminded that there's plenty to see and enjoy both on foot and from the air. I'll try to do my best to appreciate both viewpoints from now on.

Let's Go Jumpin'

By the time you read this Bristlebane Day will most likely be over so don't go thinking you're getting a rabbit like mine. Not until next year, anyway.

I wasn't planning on getting one either but after my last post on the holiday I thought I should at least visit the vendor and pick up this year's new crafting book, so I could not make anything from it, just like I haven't made anything from any of the others I've bought every year. It's a tradition.

While I was there I took a look at all the things you can buy with Fool's Gold. A few odds and ends caught my eye but the one that really jumped out (boom-tish!) was the rabbit mount. It was three hundred FG, which seemed like a lot Then I checked how much was in my wallet and I already had a hundred or so. Maybe it was doable.

Holiday currencies in EverQuest II are generally easy to get. The various quests tend to offer them as one of the rewards but most holidays (probably all of them although I'm not about to go check) also have some form of repeatable content that gives currency every time.

For Frostfell, my preferred currency grind is the Icy Keep, a dungeon you can easily run solo or, better still, mentor down and do the Heroic version for better rewards. During Tinkerfest the cogs just lie around all over the place waiting to be picked up. Several festivals have associated races, which are always good for coins. Bristlebane brings out patchcraft mobs to kill so that's where I set my focus.

Are they even the same species?

To kill patchcrafts in 2020 you need a max level character or at least someone at the upper end of the level range. Three of the four zones where they spawn are in the current expansion: The Blinding, Aurelian Coast and Wracklands. The fourth, Obulus Frontier, is a little lower, the level cap for the Kunark Ascending expansion being 100. Still not a spot for tiddlers, though.

I'd already been killing the patchcraft zelniaks as I ran into them on my rounds because I once got a nice165 resolve cloak off one and I was hoping there might be more upgrades. (I can now say they also drop a belt and that both belt and cloak come in different versions with stats to suit casters, tanks or melee dps and quite possibly other roles, too). I knew where they spawned so I started keeping an eye out for them.

I doubled my coins to around two hundred in a couple of sessions. Each kill is actually three because the first zelniak spawns another zelniak when it dies and the second spawns a goblin. It's the goblin that drops the coins and he always drops three of them. That would mean one hundred goblins and three hundred kills in total for a rabbit, if you were starting from scratch.

Except that one of the perks of being an All Access member is double currency. I don't generally think much about it but on occasions like this it really comes into its own. I was getting six coins every time. Fifty spawns for a mount seems pretty reasonable.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a frickin' rabbit!

After four months of playing regularly my Berserker has become fairly powerful in solo content. I'm gradually working towards a goal of having all his gear at 165 resolve, at which point I will use the infusers I've been stockpiling to make him more powerful still. I've been exceptionally lucky in getting limited use recipes for adornments and I've started to make them and slot them. It's a work in progress. I anticipate it taking me most of the year, at which point the next expansion will drop and I'll have to start all over again.

Right now, though, I can mow through two-up-arrow zelniaks in seconds. It made harvesting them for coins very straightforward and quite enjoyable - other than having to wait for them to spawn, that is. I popped a tracking scroll so I could find them and cruised around at low level, swooping down on any I could find.

It took me maybe half an hour to get the final hundred coins I needed. Off to Freeport via that other invaluable membership perk, instant travel, and I had me a bunny. A very big bunny.

It looked fantastic but I was curious to see how practical it might be. Rabbits don't fly, not even in Norrath, so you can't slot a rabbit into the mount appearance slot and use a flying mount for stats. It's a Leaper, the second grade of mount (it goes Ground, Leaper, Glider, Flying), meaning it can jump long distances, but crucially, as I discovered when I tested it, it also negates falling damage and is steerable in the air.

In order to maintain air-speed velocity, a rabbit needs to wiggle its ears 43 times every second.

That makes it a very effective ride in The Blinding, where you can jump off the platform at the zone in and pretty much glide to anywhere else in the zone. If I'd thought about it I'd have bought the mount for one of my characters that doesn't have flying in Blood of Luclin zones yet. But I didn't. C'est la vie.

The other problem is that equipping the bunny makes for an enormous drop in stats. I was astonished just how enormous. My Berserker has a maxed-out mount, Level 20 with all the regular gear slots filled and some of the additional barding slots too. Changing to a Level 1 mount with no gear dropped his key stats by almost twenty per cent.

I'm leveling the bunny up a bit because I have no other mounts I want to level and even at eighty per cent effectiveness he can still do what he needs to do quickly enough.. Mostly, though, I think it's a mount to pull out for special occasions and screenshots.

I feel quite pleased with myself for taking the trouble to get it, all the same. I may play a lot of EQII at the moment but I don't play it the way I used to, when it was my main MMORPG. In those days I made the most of holidays and special events. I'd forgotten how satisfying that can be, especially when you get the thing you've been eyeing up.

Let's hope I remember when the next big event rolls around. There's the very short Beast'r event this weekend and then a holiday drought until mid-June. And who knows what we'll all be doing by then?

Moonflight: EQII

I'm going to close out the year with a bunch of pictures of my Berserker flying around various Blood of Luclin zones on his... flying thing. I'm not entirely sure what it is (or where he got it). On the ground it looks a bit like some kind of cat but it has weird magitech wings that unfurl out of nowhere as soon as it jumps into the air. Makes a change from the usual back-mounted bat flappers.

I'm in two minds about Daybreak's decision to make flying in the new expansion dependent on completing either the Tradeskill or Adventure Signature Line. It could have been frustrating but I didn't find it so. Travelling around on foot seemed perfectly pleasant most of the time. 

Better yet, as soon as I thought to swap out my stats cloak for an old one with Featherfall on it I pretty much felt as though I could fly anyway. The zones all have a significant degree of verticality, which meant I could do what I'm used to doing in Guild Wars 2 - climb up something high and jump off, then glide halfway across the zone.

Other people have reported that the precursors to flying mounts, Gliders and Leapers, work very well too. I was going to try that for myself but most of my characters managed to snag various Holiday and Event mounts that let them fly at low levels so they never bothered to get the lesser kinds.

I'm very glad that the rumor about the tradeskill questline not granting flight turned out to be false. As usual, the crafting timeline is a lot quicker and less trouble than the adventure. My Berserker finished the craft line a few days ago but he's barely half-way through the adventure version.

I'm not as motivated to finish it as I might be, either, because getting flight had the odd effect of making me feel like I'd "finished" on that character. The fact that he'd dinged 120 as a Berserker on the second day of the expansion and now was a Level 120 Weaponsmith as well just compounded the sense of completion.

Where I'm not sure about the need to earn the right to fly is that it has to be done separately for each character. An account-wide unlock might be more appropriate. Like many other MMORPGs these days, though, there seems to be no clear idea what constitutes character progression and what comes as part of owning an account. In principle I prefer things to be character-based so I don't really have much of an argument against the way Daybreak have chosen to go.

The most telling factor is probably that I'm not dreading unlocking flying on the rest of my characters. I certainly don't mind going through the crafting timeline a few more times with my Alchemist, Sage and Carpenter. I can't really see me doing the Adventure line more than once - twice at the outside - so the other two I'm planning on leveling are probably going to have to keep their feet on the ground.

I don't see that as a problem and even if I did I wouldn't mind betting that by the time it becomes an issue the rules will have changed to make things easier. That's what tends to happen in MMORPGs if you're patient.

If only the same was true of life in general.

Happy New Year!

Flying High: Riders of Icarus

There's an expression journalists use: "Don't bury the lead". Or "lede" if you prefer. Not that the spelling matters. Call it what you want, just don't bury it, that's the point.

It means stick to your main point. Open with the thing you want people to focus on. Don't distract them with secondary issues. Don't give them a chance to lose interest before they find out what it was you wanted to tell them.

I hadn't heard the phrase until Wilhelm used it in a comment recently, when he noticed I was doing it. I often do. Look, here I am, doing it right now. This isn't supposed to be a piece about good journalistic practice, after all.

Burying the lede (I'm swaying that way. The other spelling reminds me too much of "swinging the lead") is something MMORPGs do all the time. When you consider the complexity to come it's forgivable. More than that, it's all but unavoidable. It's tough enough introducing new players to concepts as basic as movement and combat without them throwing up their hands in despair. Imagine what would happen if they found out what the game was really like.

Fine. We'll accept it as a practical necessity, predicated by the form. But what's the excuse for hiding the scenery? Why do so many MMORPGs set out their stall in barren wastelands or cluttered farmlands when a few levels down the line, lie vistas worthy of Dali? Or at the very least, Roger Dean.

Riders of Icarus is good-looking enough in the lower levels but now I've reached the mid-20s it's positively stunning. The zone I'm in right now, Sea of Hakanas, is a glorious seascape, where waves crash against crumbling pillars of moss-covered stone and mist shrouds the cliffs above a desolate shore.

There are ruined battlements and towers, plateaus and parapets, thundering waterfalls and abandoned coliseums. Islands of stone hang in the sky, held in place by massive chains. Everywhere you turn the air is filled with life.

Riders of Icarus is perhaps the most vertical MMORPG I've ever played. Every map has a flight ceiling that limits how high you can go. In early zones flying feels a little like I imagine chickens might, when they somehow get up enough lift to land on the top of the henhouse. By the time you get to Sea of Hakanas it's El Condor Pasa.

I have a fair amount to say about how the game's going. About the gameplay and the storyline and the payment model and  few other things. But rather than bury that lede I'm going to stick to the point and post some pictures.

They really don't do it justice.

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.

Magic Carpet Ride

Things are likely to be slow around here for a while. We're off on our travels again.

I did by a keyboard you can roll up so there's an outside chance I might post while I'm away.

Probably not. We'll see. If not, I'll just have to make up for it when I get back.

Meanwhile, always remember, fantasy will set you free. As Pizzicato 5 never said. That was someone else entirely.

Get Wings. Wear Wings. Fly. : Revelation Online

Revelation Online continues to mystify and amuse in equal measure. Yesterday I set out once again with the intention of stepping off the moving walkway that passes for questing in this strange game. Having failed to discover how to begin crafting or harvesting and with nothing related to housing anywhere in sight I thought I'd just wander around and take in the sights.

In some ways RO could be an explorer's dream - if you equate exploration with tourism, which I confess I often do. As far as I can tell you can click on just about any icon on the main map - a vendor, for example - and the game will autorun you there.

Doesn't matter if you're on the coast and the target is in the high mountains half a continent away. Doesn't matter if there are rivers or seas between you and your goal. It certainly doesn't matter if you've never been there before and have not the slightest idea how to get there.

At first I had to run but now the game responds to my imperious clicking by having my character produce a blast on a whistle to summon her horse. She then mounts up without any help from me and off she rides. If they come to a body of water the horse vanishes and my character swims like a fish.

Quite literally like a fish, in fact, or a mermaid. All movement from the waist, legs going side to side like a tail, no arm movement at all. Unlike, say, GW2, your character can't automatically breathe underwater but it takes a very long time indeed for her breath to run out. I've done several quests requiring diving that would have drowned someone in EQ2  and I've yet to see her breath bar go under 90%.

Airships look a lot more impressive from the ground.

While riding it seems mobs ignore you completely. I've watched as my Spirit Shaper, sitting serenely, sidesaddle, on her Red Horse, canters through herds of aggressive beasts ten or twenty levels higher than her own. They might as well be rabbits.

I had plenty of time to consider all of this at the start of the first session because I'd idly clicked on one of the many (MANY!) hourly, daily and weekly Events that the game thrusts into your hand the moment you log on. Something about eggs. I was hoping it might be like the egg smashing event I used to love doing in City of Steam or the Joker's Funhouse in DCUO.

Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. I wouldn't know because the place it begins turned out to be a hundred miles to the West. I'd been riding for what seemed like hours but was probably about five minutes, which is still a significant amount of time to be auto-riding a horse in a game, when I got distracted by a city.

Revelation Online is one of those games that seems to think the average NPC is about 75 feet tall. Everything is on a truly gigantic scale. I mean, I've been in some big buildings but you could put a whole cathedral in the atriums of some of these halls and still have room for a train station and couple of grain silos.

It makes the cities somewhat impersonal, I think. Divinity's Reach in GW2 is big, yes, but it's also rich in detail and made up of many small courts and alleys. Here the smallest thoroughfare is an avenue and every square's a parade-ground.

I was lollygagging at the mountains from a high terrace when an airship the size of a small town pulled up alongside me. In seventeen years of MMO gaming I've never knowingly turned down a free voyage on any kind of ship - sea, air or space - so I rode my horse onto the deck and off we went.

Again, the scale was so massive that all sense of "being there" was lost. Unlike the ride in the tiny hot air balloon in 9Lives, for example, which had me tensing my knuckles with vertigo as I craned over the edge for a good view of the rooftops, this had all the thrills of a cross-channel ferry.

On an airship. In case you couldn't tell.

One thing stands out concerning travel in Revelation Online, whether by foot, by horse, by water, by air or via the widespread network of teleport pads: it's free. When GW2 launched and for months afterwards there were grumbling complaints about the few silver it cost to use the waypoint system. In EverQuest, EQ2 and Rift when they were new I vividly recall how I had to scrimp and save to buy even a basic mount.

Getting a good ride has been positively aspirational in most MMOs I've played. In RO they hand them out for doing, well, nothing. Nothing that you notice. I got a choice of horses at the end of one of the never-ending, incomprehensible quest sequences but later I found the same horses for sale on a vendor for a pittance.

Like Aion (and Flyff long, long before that - anyone remember Flyff? Anyone? Bueller?) RO is supposed to be a flying game. There was that part early on that I mentioned in my First Impressions post, where someone lends you his wings so you can see for yourself what you're working towards.

You'd imagine there'd be some kind of ceremony, fireworks perhaps or a fanfare at least, when you acquire a permanent set of wings all your own. Apparently not.

I knew wings came at Level 29. I was level 27 when I jumped back on the quest train (Don't judge me!). I thought I was paying attention but a quarter of an hour later, when I clicked autorun for the millionth time, for once taking a quest step that needed me to travel further than the usual four or five paces, I suddenly found myself enveloped in a cloud of feathers and hurtled skyward.

Checking my details as I barrel-rolled through the ubiquitous cherry-blossomed skies I saw that yes, I had indeed dinged 29 without noticing. I was, in fact, almost 30. The game, recognizing my graduation from hooves to feathers, now auto-equips my wings instead of my mount whenever I want to travel.

I may be being a tad unfair here. It's entirely possible I got the wings as a quest reward and just clicked through in a daze. I long ago lost any feeling of involvement or control or interest in the questline, whose translation is now so fractured as to be almost Dadaist and whose plot I ceased to follow somewhere in the mid-teens.

Even if I wasn't paying attention, though, I think it's safe to say the game does not make all that much of a fuss about this supposedly seminal moment. It's a shame because the wings themselves are very impressive. If this is the basic starter model I can't even imagine what Raid wings might look like.

I flew around  for a while enjoying the sensation. I really love games that let you fly with wings rather than on a flying mount. I notice there's also a whole new skill bar that appears in flight, suggesting a detailed aerial combat system. I imagine there's a skill tree for that but don't get me started on skill trees in this game...

Closed Beta 3 ends in a few days. I am not sure whether I'm glad about that or not. I find Revelation Online extremely difficult to take seriously but it isn't boring. Or sensible. I do think, every time I play, that if I'm going to play something like this I might as well get my semi-established characters out in Blade & Soul or ArcheAge or Black Desert or even Riders of Icarus, all of which I was enjoying well enough until I dropped them cold.

Truth is, I really like trying new MMOs, even when they aren't very "good". I may spend 90% of my time in old favorites but I crave novelty as much as anyone and trying out crazed imports like these (or Digimon Hunter or Twin Saga) is a great way to get that novelty buzz.

I'll be back for Open Beta, assuming that's next. I don't think I'd go so far as to buy the box, if that turns out to be the payment model, but I wouldn't rule it out. Those wings, after all. Those wings...

Flying In Draenor: An Academic Question

For a while now Wilhelm has been trying to bring discussions on issues like the recent Blizzard Flying Controversy back to one fundamental question:

"For me, the great unanswered question in all of this remains how much control over their game should a developer be allowed, whether or not the dev’s view of how their game should be played should trump the player’s view, whether MMO studios be dictating a “right way” to play and should players accept that or not?"

With rather delicious irony commenters have largely ridden over that idea, preferring to bang on about whether they do or don't like to see flying in MMOs and whether or not Blizzard are dealing with the issue in an effective or even-handed manner. The notable exception is Azuriel at In An Age, who picks out the same Wilhelm quote I did to topline his own post.

Once again, though, Azuriel quickly becomes more interested in the underlying reason for the decision/reversal, spinning out a convincing explanation for how it might have happened that still doesn't really answer the question Wilhelm is asking. Which is hardly surprising. It's a question that no-one has really been able to answer in the last half century, though entire careers have been built on the attempt.

When I studied English at Cambridge in the early 1980s there was a war going on although I barely noticed it. I was largely taught by dons of the traditionalist mode, who still harked back to the strictures of Empson and Leavis. We mostly worked under the edicts of New Criticism in which close textual reading was everything.

At least I guess we did. I just read the books, turned in the essays on time and tried not to think about it. No-one really talked about this kind of thing in my clique, probably because most of the people I hung out with were reading Maths or Natural Sciences. My crowd was more interested in going to see Dolly Mixture at The Locomotive in between catching a dozen movies a week at the multiplicity of college Film Socs. and crashing every staircase party we could find. I didn't really take my studies seriously at university - I was mostly there for the social life and the popular culture, something I have never regretted and would still recommend as the best way to spend your college years.

In my final year, however, an event occured that made it impossible to ignore the fact that Something Big was happening. A huge row blew up between the Leavisites, the incumbent establishment of the English Department, and their sworn enemies, an ill-defined loose collective of supposed radicals fronted, largely unwillingly, by Frank Kermode.

It all came to a head over the question of whether Colin McCabe, a flag-waver for the Left and for the kind of structural approach to literary analysis abhorred by the Leavisites, believed by some to be both a drug-dealer and arms-runner, should or should not be promoted to full tenure within the English Department of Cambridge University, generally reckoned at that time to be the best in the world.

I remember going to a protest rally of some kind at the Faculty of English. I can't even remember which side it was for although I would by default have been against whatever I perceived to be the status quo. There were film crews from the main TV networks there and I watched it all play out on TV later that evening, almost certainly the only time Structuralism has featured on the Six O'Clock News.

McCabe wrote a clear and entertaining precis of his side of the affair that was published in The New Statesman a few years back. The Leavisites won their battle, McCabe left, Kermode resigned and I graduated and went back to reading comics and playing video games. I was a decade in recovery before I could read another "serious" novel.

That was probably a lucky break because the decade in question was the 1980s and it was a very good time not to be taking yourself too seriously while at the same time taking things that weren't seen as serious very seriously indeed. All the concepts I'd blithely ignored throughout my university career, if indeed I'd known they even existed, blew up around me.

My post-university social circle talked about Derrida and Foucault with the same intensity and informality they talked about Morrissey and Marr. The New Musical Express, my bible since the early 1970s, ceased to be the agit-prop, situationist playground of refugees from the collapsed underground press and instead became the domain of theory-addled autodidacts like Ian Penman and Paul Morley. After they drove it into the ground, commercially if not intellectually, I jumped ship to Smash Hits. Not even ironically although, of course, in the 1980s it was literally impossible to do anything unironically. Ironically.

Postmodernism was the sea in which we swam and I took to it like a fish to water. Nothing meant what it meant and even if it did no-one knew what that was. Every time I tried to explain my take on what William Gibson was getting at in Count Zero or what the lyrics of Rattlesnakes were trying to say, someone would handwave it all away with a derisive "that's the Intentional Fallacy" .

All these years, right up to researching this piece, I believed "The Intentional Fallacy" , which snorts that it's no business of the author to claim he knows what he's writing about, was some key tenet of Structuralist thinking, probably penned by some inscrutable Frenchman in 1975. Guess what? Turns out it was written in the mid 1940s and it forms one of the key planks of The New Criticism so beloved of the structuralism-loathing Leavisites. It's like the way if you go far enough to the Left you meet yourself coming back on the Right. Or something.

If you go to Literary Festivals, something I strongly advise against, or listen to programs like Radio 4's Bookclub, which I absolutely forbid, you will hear a seemingly endless procession of readers asking authors, sometimes aggressively, more often fawningly, what they "meant" by something they wrote. It always strikes me as about as useful an exercise as asking a cat what's on its mind.

Having grown up and formed my ideas in the smelting pot of uncertainty I find it a lot more uncomfortable trying to pin down what something is "for" or what it "means" than I do just letting it be what it wants to be, what I want it to be and what it becomes when those two things rub against each other. This is, in part, why I play MMORPGs the way I play them, why I often state that all MMOs are sandboxes and why, as a user, I never feel constrained by the intentions of makers.

In reply to something I said in the comment thread to Wilhelm's post linked at the top of this piece he observed "If they opt to not add flying, who is somebody to then exclaim that such an interpretation of the game is wrong? I mean, by bringing that up you are, by analogy, almost claiming domain to edit somebody else’s work."

Well, yes, I am. I do lay claim to that domain. It's a domain that all readers have over all books, all viewers over all films and all players over all games. I edit the work in my mind and it becomes my work. Every reading of every novel is a new work of art.

Although, of course, all of this is breaking down under technology, or perhaps it is. Playing an online game is like reading a book with the author still writing it. It's as if the words on the page could change while you slept so the character who died last night is alive again in the morning and the city she lived in has become a village. The malleability of form must surely soon outpace the ability of critics to parse it, if that didn't happen long ago.

Gaming may be at the forefront of the wave but it's a wave beneath which all certainty in narrative art will soon be drowned. This isn't a very helpful response to Wilhelm's question but it's the one I have. It's just too big a question for anything plainer.

Oh, when it comes to MMOs, the pragmatic answer might be that these are commercial projects, in which the only real point of conflict is what makes the most money now versus what might make more money for a longer time and the only "right way" to play might be the one that keeps the money rolling in, but that's an argument that derails when it runs up against the abutment of art. An Economics or Business Studies grad writing in response to Wilhelm's question might make it fly but I can't.

I can only respond as who I am - ex-punk, post-postmodernist, English grad, vacillating moral relativist. Until tomorrow, when I might be someone else, with a different answer.

Fifth Time's The Charm : Everquest

After a turbulent first couple of days, worthy of any full MMO launch, it seemed that Daybreak Games finally have all their orc pawns in a row. Ragefire, the new Voting/Timelocked Progression server (catchy...) is up, stable and devoid of Level 50s, although scuttlebutt has it there was a six-boxer already pushing Level 35 last night. As of this morning they even have a system up and running for handling log in queues and kicking AFKers.

With a couple of hours to go before bed, after finishing up my dailies in GW2, I thought I'd give it a try and see if I could make a character. It was still mid-afternoon on the US West Coast so maybe there was a chance I'd get in. And get in I did. At first I got the expected Server Full message but going with the launch-time vibe I kept on clicking and to my considerable surprise it took just a couple of minutes until there I was at Character Select.

In the last round of Progression, on the Fippy Darkpaw server, I went with a gnome necromancer. In the end, this time, I chose to do the same. I did toy briefly with the idea of going Magician but, while my highest level EQ character is a Mage and the class is arguably the most powerful solo specialist at the top end, I've always found the low level gameplay a little disjointed and frustrating. I also rather fancied being a Dwarf for a change but one look at the Classic options for Dwarves (Cleric, Warrior, Rogue, Paladin) quickly put a stop to that plan.

So, Necromancer it is. That makes my fifth in sixteen years. All gnomes. It's a class I have played and enjoyed a lot and yet with which I've never really made much headway. Over the years I've played alongside some extremely skilled and versatile Necromancers, not least Mrs Bhagpuss, who used to main one for a while, insofar as either of us ever "main" anything. A well-played necro can pretty much fill in for every role in the game. They, not Bards, are the real all-rounders of Norrath.

The trouble is, knowing how good they can be is quite intimidating, especially since a lot of them...aren't. You really don't want to be That Necro. There's a lot to take in if you want to give full service to a group as a Necromancer and I can't see myself putting in the hours. It's never to late learn, as Jeromai rightly observes, but I fear it would end up being a project almost on the scale of his latest venture and I don't think I'm ready to commit to that.

Apart from my Heroic Level 90, who has never adventured further than Plane of Knowledge, the highest I've ever taken a necro is somewhere in the 40s. It's extremely unlikely that this latest addition to Bertoxxulous's Dark Army will get even that far. Indeed, odds are very good that he'll get no further than his Progression server predecessor, who topped out around Level 12.

At least I think he did. I can't check because, even now, if you want to play on the old prog server, Fippy Darkpaw, (which I'm guessing almost no-one does any more) you still have to have a paid-up All Access account. Which, of course, I do - only not the right one.

Five years back I made a fresh account to play on the then-new Freeport F2P server in EQ2, which is how I ended up playing my best-geared, most rounded, highest level character, by far, on a free to play Silver account instead of the one I was actually paying for. Last year, finally, I decided to fix that. I cancelled payment on my longstanding All Access account, which in turn booted my best-geared, most rounded, highest level character in Everquest, the aforementioned Magician, who happened also to be on that longstanding account (which itself is registered in Mrs Bhagpuss's name because we swapped accounts almost a decade and a half ago for reasons which would totally have made sense back then, I'm sure...) onto a F2P account...

And so it goes... After sixteen years of chopping and changing, from illegal account sharing, borrowing and taking over each other's discarded characters, to server merges and payment model rationalizations and being sold off like chattels - twice - our SOE/Daybreak accounts are a hideous tangled mess, almost as much so as that paragraph above. It's something that is not going to get any better. Ever. So I just live with it.

Anyway, remind me; why am I playing on Ragefire, again? It can't be to get a nostalgia fix. I never stopped playing EQ. It's still a current experience for me and you can't be nostalgic about something you never stopped doing, can you? And don't I have a whole raft of characters I'm - verrrrry slowwwly  - working on, any of whom would be a better investment of the limited time I can find to spend in the elder game than a fifth necro?

And besides, the version of Norrath currently showing on Ragefire would surely make for a very poor nostalgia trip for anyone, wouldn't it? There's so much that just isn't even the tiniest bit like it was in The Good Old Golden Olden Days.

There are no real corpse runs because you keep all your gear on death. You can't even lose a level any more. Your pets zone with you and don't explode with a cry of anguish and despair when you thoughtlessly turn yourself invisible. Your spells scribe instantly. Come to that, the entire research system is different. When you arrive at a new city on a different continent there's no need to spam /ooc and /shout, increasingly desperately, "Looking for Bind at Gate", terrified that at any second someone could pull a train over your hiding place and send you back to your bind spot two hours travel away. Nowadays, in our Brave New Classic World, you just stroll up to the Soulbinder NPC and presto, safe.

There are a thousand ways the current version of "Classic" is nothing of the kind. I haven't played on the now officially sanctioned Project 1999 but I'm pretty sure that if you want anything that even begins to approximate the genuine Everquest experience that's where you have to go - and I bet even there it's a damn sight easier than it was in the one and only original 1999.

Thing is this: you can't turn back the MMORPG clock. Wish you could but you can't. Unlike static, offline games that genuinely never change, online games are living constructs. Their very essence is change. How can you hope to re-create the Classic Everquest experience when the game was patching in changes almost from the day it launched?

Have you ever read the patch notes for EQ from the first few years? Allakhazam has the full record archived for posterity. It's fascinating reading. The game changed, substantively, month by month, sometimes almost week by week and it never stopped changing. The EQ we were playing right before Kunark was already a very far cry indeed from the EQ that had launched just a year earlier and yet somehow we're supposed to lump it all together and call it "Classic".

Over in WoW, the game that snatched Everquest's ball, ran away with it and never gave it back, Blizzard will have no truck with Classic servers and programmed nostalgia. So they say. Yet they still seem to believe they can turn back time. To the dismay of many and the delight of, I would guess, very few, this week Blizzard announced that all flights over Draenor and any future New Lands have been cancelled - for good.

I say "Blizzard". All the recent controversial news from the world's biggest MMO seems to have come from interviews with Lead Designer Ion Hazzikostas. One assumes he has the backing of Management when he claims "Having looked at how flying has played out in the old world in the last couple of expansions, we realized that while we were doing it out of this ingrained habit after we introduced flying in The Burning Crusade, it actually detracted from gameplay in a whole lot of ways". Yes. It was almost certainly the detraction from gameplay caused by flying that cost the game three million accounts in the last quarter. Except, wait, didn't that happen just after the expansion that didn't have flying? I must be missing something...

Well, you can make a player a walker but you can't make him think it's for his own good. Grounding the mounts won't be taken as a joyful return to a golden age of exploration and mystery, just a bloody nuisance. As Pike's perfectly chosen quote from Leonardo da Vinci puts it "Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return."

Meanwhile I'll be out there today with the rest of the would-be time-travelers, trotting across the Steamfont Mountains with my bony pet, hunting down decaying skeletons for bone chips and kobold runts for cloth pants. It took me an hour to hit Level 2 last night so some things haven't changed.

Oh, and as to why I'm playing on Ragefire? I've remembered. Forget the ruleset - it's got that New Server Smell. Can't ever get enough of that.