Wuthering Waves: First Encore

Time for another brief (!) update on where I am in Wuthering Waves. I know everyone's been on the edge of their seats, wondering whether I've been able to claw my way over the hump and beat that fight I was complaining about a week and a half ago. 

Remember I said I'd have to go away and "figure it all out"? It also seemed like there was a non-trivial chance I might actually have to l2p or git gud if I wanted to carry on with the main storyline, although it also seemed like that wasn't something I especially needed to do if all I wanted was to carry on having fun with the game?

Yeah, well. Overthinking, right? Bane of the age. 

So, I am not going to start explaining how the game works because

a) it's super complicated

b) there's still way more I don't understand than I do

and

c) no-one cares

But I can tell you I bumbled around and clicked on stuff until at least enough came clear that I was able to move forward. It's a method I use a lot.

As far as I see it, everything levels up or upgrades so you need to do some of that or its like you're fighting mid-level mobs in your starting gear. I mean, it isn't exactly that because one of the things I don't much like about Wuthering Waves and gacha games in general (Noah's Heart very much being the exception but I'm saving that for another post.) is that there isn't really any gear to speak of. In the case of WW it's basically weapons and that's it.

But those weapons really matter. You gotta not just get good ones but you have to keep on boosting them. It really makes a difference although not as much of a difference as getting better Resonators, which is another point of contention between the gacha game model and me that I'm not going to get into here. (Won't do that again, I promise. Mention stuff I could talk about and then not talk about it. It's really annoying, isn't it?)

So, anyway, what I mainly did was figure out how to do the "Pulls", where you spend the special currencies for a chance at a new Resonator, plus I used all the mats I'd been stashing (The ones I had no idea what they were for.) to upgrade anything they'd work on, something the game does for you if you let it, although you can do it yourself once you work out what goes where and that's definitely the better option because, left to itself, the game doesn't always make the best choices.

As with all the games like this I've played, you get a ton of free currency to make pulls. I suppose if you're being competitive you might want more and that's how the money gets made but if you're just plugging through the story I doubt it would come to that. Certainly never has for me. 

I only had to spend a fraction of the tokens I already had to get a couple of new Resonators, one of whom, Encore, was my first five-star pull. She looked pretty good. Actually, she looked like a ten year old girl, which there always seems to be at least one of in every game like this, but I'm talking about her stats. 

I stopped pulling Resonators and went to try Encore out, which meant making a new team. This, beyond everything, turned out to be where I'd been going wrong until now.

I have a naive tendency to stick with the character I started with. I think of that one as "me". Or "my character". I mean, it would be in any other game but it's not how gacha games work. 

In Wuthering Waves it's even more confusing because that is your character for the main story, the one that appears in all the cut-scenes, but it doesn't have to be in the fights. And if you picked the one I did at the start then it really shouldn't be because she's... not very good.

The way it works is you can have a bunch of teams set up, each with three Resonators, drawn from your pool of however many it is you've got and you're supposed to swap them in and out whenever, for whatever reason. 

I can't be any clearer than that because I have no clue about the finer points but at least now I know it categorically does not work if you just keep going with the character you started with plus the next two NPCs she happened to meet. That is not a good team. Not even if you upgrade them all as best you can. 

I know because I did try it that way first out of misguided loyalty and although the upgrades meant I was doing twice as well as before in that tough fight, I was still only doing half as well as I needed. I really should have saved the mats.

When I swapped "my" character out for the new one I'd pulled, though, and another for one of the others, suddenly everything changed.

It was categorically not because I became any more skilled. I did not learn to play or get good or any of that. I just button-mashed as I always do but now it felt like I was on EZ-Mode..

Okay, that isn't entirely fair on me. I did read up on some of the mechanics I hadn't bothered to pay the slightest attention to before. I found out that every Resonator has Intro and Outro skills which means as you swap between them in combat they buff the others or do AE damage or all sorts of things as they come onto the battlefield or retire from it. So I started swapping between them a lot more actively. Not exactly randomly but not with any real understanding either.

And it seemed to help a lot. If I was going to play the game seriously, I'd take the trouble to remember what each of those effects did and use them tactically. I guess at some point I still might have to do that but not yet. For now, just making sure they keep happening in any old order seems to make a big enough difference.

So does not letting the game auto-select your Echoes, a tip I came across while reading about something else entirely. Echoes are the after-images of mobs you kill. You can collect them and use them like pets to fight or heal or buff. You can have up to five at once and only the first one is active. I'd been using that live one a lot but I hadn't even thought about the others.

It turns out the rest combine to give a bonus effect that I think is called a Sonata although please don't quote me on that. (Also I just now realise combat mechanics all seems to use musical descriptors. I wonder if that's significant...?)

There's an auto-select button to fill all five slots that I'd been using but if it follows any logic I have no clue what it would be. I just let it fill the slots and forgot about it. After I read that was a bad idea I kicked out all my Echoes and hand-picked new sets for all my Resonators, making sure they got all the bonuses they were missing and that seemed to make a big difference too.

I had my new team set up, a team in which the character I'd been thinking of as me didn't even rate a place. I had everyone and their weapons upgraded as far as I could get them. I had all my Echoes in a row. I went out into the world and started picking fights with random mobs to see if I felt any tougher. 

Oh boy, did I!

The improvement was so major I thought I might as well go try the tough fight again right away. I ate some kebabs I'd made and drank some tea to buff up my team's attack power and health and in we went. And we fricken' wiped the floor with them! 

Here's how it went:

Before: Best run - half the mobs killed before the timer ran out.

After: All the mobs killed before the timer hit halfway.

You do the math. I'm an Eng. Lit. grad. I just tell stories.

As I said last time, one of the rewards for winning that fight is everything in the outside world suddenly gains about fifteen levels. (I gained five myself, just from all the XP I'd been storing away while I was stuck at UL 20.) I was wary of what a levelled-up world might mean for my fun but the new team handle the higher stuff about the same as the old team handled the lower, so it all worked out fine.

The other reward is slipping the lock on the next chapter of the MSQ plus a whole bunch of side quests that were waiting for my UL to go up before they'd trigger. Looks like I won't be short of stuff to do for quite a while.

For example, as soon as I dinged, Grandpa Jingzhu got in touch again, wanting Chixia and Rover to help him some more in his amorous pursuit of his elderly neighbor Linghan. We did and it all worked out about as well as could be hoped.

The whole thing also turned out to be a more nuanced, complex story than I was expecting. A very unusual one for a game aimed at teens and twenty-somethings, all about aging and failing faculties and the way life stutters to an end. I do wish the translations were better sometimes. I'm not one hundred per cent sure I got all the implications. I think I did.

Either way, the meaning and the emotional impact of the quests, of which there's often a lot more than you'd expect, always comes through, even if some of the finer details get lost occasionally. And the quests can be packed with stuff so it's easy to miss things.

Case in point: that particular quest has a small sidebar about Chixia's real name and why she doesn't want anyone to use it because it's dorky. Her real name, when you learn it, is Chinese. I have no clue what would be embarassing about it but maybe to a Chinese person it would be obvious. I'm not even sure how you'd translate a joke like that so maybe it's asking too much to expect anyone to try.

Despite all that, the upshot is that the game is great, I'm loving it and now I can carry on with the story, which I was finding kinda interesting. Plus no doubt there'll be a million little stories along the way. 

And the little ones are usually the best. Just like Encore.

Why We Fight

Wuthering Waves continues to entertain me very well and for no cost whatsoever. I am starting to wonder how much longer that can go on. I'm at something of an impasse with the game just now.

It's nothing to do with lack of content. There's no shortage of new, interesting things to do and even if there was, there's a major update with a whole new region due to drop tomorrow. I'm not losing interest, either. I'm more than happy to keep playing. I'm having a fine old time.

The problem lies in progression. I'm stuck.

Wuthering Waves is not dissimilar to Genshin Impact in a number of ways, a design choice that's absolutely fine by me. There's nothing whatsoever wrong in taking inspiration from the best. And, as Palworld's creator Takuro Mizobe said in a recent interview, "To make new things is very hard. In game development, of course, sometimes we have to do it, but, as much as possible, I try to avoid creating new things." 

Sound counsel. In most cases, originality isn't all it's cracked up to be. That's not the issue here. The problem is that, much though I enjoyed Genshin Impact, fairly swiftly the skill level required to progress proved to be higher than my personal ceiling. In plain language, the game got too hard and I quit.

I would prefer not to quit Wuthering Waves. I'm enjoying it too much. Considerably more than I ever enjoyed Genshin Impact, in fact, and probably more than I enjoyed Noah's Heart, although I have another post in mind to write about that.

The world is beautiful, charming and fascinating to explore. I like the characters. The quests are varied and often amusing. There are plenty of puzzles, games and non-combat activities, most of which I find fun. Even the main story has managed to hold my interest, despite being basically the same one I've heard in a dozen games I've played over the last ten years.

Even the combat is okay. I do like to kick a little ass in-between all the cat rescues, portrait sittings, improv and match-making. Unfortunately, when it comes to the set-piece, instanced boss fights that gate-keep both story and levels, I'm not having such a great time as all that.

It's mostly my fault. Wuthering Waves is an action rpg and by most accounts I've read, a fairly simple one. Combat relies on timing and observation. You need to read visual cues to know when to dodge so as to minimize the damage you take. You need to build chains and swap team members to maximize the damage you deal. That's about it.

All very straightforward and certainly within my capabilities to learn and execute successfully, given  sufficient practice. The question isn't whether I can do it; it's whether I want to. And thinking about it carefully, I find I don't.

Over the last couple of years two, distinct, apparently contradictory trends in gaming have emerged: coziness and difficulty. The success of the Elden Ring series has revitalized the once-common idea that games should be hard and players should learn to play them. Conversely, titles like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley have popularized the concept of chilling out in a peaceful environment as a legitimate way to play video games. 

My problem, as I've only recently come to realize, is that what I'm looking for is a combination of both. I want a cozy world with friendly characters and homely activities, but I don't want to faff around farming or romancing. I want to punch monsters in the snoot. 

Except I want that to be cozy, too, and as easy as everything else. Cozy combat. What's so hard to understand about that?

In quite a lot of games I've played there have been ways to manage those kinds of expectations. Some games actually come with difficulty settings. Failing that, you can out-level the fights and come back when they've been reduced to a difficulty you find manageable. You can improve your gear without fighting (Crafting it, buying it...) until you're able to stroll through the fights with little trouble. You can call on friends (Or willing strangers.) to come help.

None of those worked for me in Genshin Impact and I'm pretty sure they won't work in Wuthering Waves either. It's a single-player game for a start, at least at the level I'm at, although I believe it does open up to co-op play later on, Bringing in more people isn't an option, even if I knew anyone who played or I was willing to start making new in-game friends, something I've shown no inclination to do for well over a decade.

It is possible to upgrade gear to a some extent but not enough to make a big difference as far as I can tell. As far as out-leveling the fight I'm having trouble with goes, it just so happens to be same fight that unlocks the next twenty levels, so that's a bit of a Catch 22...

Still, there must be some way to deal with it. After I failed the fight (To be fair, I've only tried once, so for all I know I might have just had some bad rolls. I could win quite easily on a second attempt. That's what happened when I fought Scar, which I think may have been a tougher battle.) I did some research to see if there was a way around it. 

Most of the advice focused on how to play better. I knew immediately I didn't want to play better to beat it. I didn't want to have to deal with it at all. I didn't want to change myself so I could beat the game. I wanted the game to change so I didn't need to.

I realize this is neither a realistic nor a reasonable expectation, although it might well be what drives the economic engine that makes Wuthering Waves a commercial proposition. It is a Gacha game, after all, even though I haven't been playing it as one up to now. 

I think what you're supposed to do, when you get stuck like this, is to spend money in the cash shop in the hope of getting better Resonators. Then, when you get some, you spend more money buying the materials you need to upgrade them.

Do all of that and then, presumably, your team gets stronger and the fights get easier. Except that in my experience it doesn't work that way. I had some very strong characters in Genshin Impact and I remember them doing me not much good at all because, in the end, player skill was still the most important factor and you can't buy that in the cash shop, more's the pity.

Even if I was willing to spend money on Resonators in Wuthering Waves, and even if I thought it would do me any good, there is one more, rather unusual problem: I haven't figured out how to buy them. 

In both Genshin Impact and Noah's Heart, the games constantly pushed you towards ways to obtain new characters. They were both big boosters of the first hit comes free principle. Not so in Wuthering Waves, where the developers seem to want to keep the whole process as much of a secret as possible.

I've been playing Wuthering Waves for close on a month now and I have a grand total of five Resonators, four of which I had by the end of my second session. One is the original character I started with and two are the NPCs I met as soon as I logged into the game. The fourth is an NPC the first two took me to meet immediately afterwards and the fifth is someone I met a little further on in the story, who was given to me as a reward for logging in for five days straight.

Since WW is a gacha game, I have to assume there's some way to buy draws to win Resonators from a pool but as I write this, I still have no idea what it is. I've seen nothing in my packs that opens up to give a free draw. No windows have popped up trying to sell me a bundle. I haven't even been offered one of those starter missions, where you have to go "buy" something for free from the cash shop, just so you know there is one and where to find it. 

I googled but I couldn't find a straightforward explanation of how the gacha process works in this game. In fact, the only way I was able to figure it out so I could write about it was by logging in and clicking on every icon to see what they all did. Thanks to that, I can now claim I know how to use the gacha system in this gacha game I've been playing for a month. I'm not sure that's indicative of a sound marketing strategy.

Just in case anyone cares, this is how it works. There's a system called Convene, which is accessible through an icon like a four-pointed star inside a circle that's always on display at the top left of the screen, alongside several others. I do now very vaguely recall the game demonstrating it at some point but that was when a new mechanic was being introduced every few minutes. I paid no attention and it was never mentioned again.

If you press the icon, a window a menu with several more options appears. Two of those let you draw for Resonators. One is a "Targeted Convene" for weapons and the fourth is the same but for Resonators. What a Targeted Convene might be is not explained.

The draws use a currency called Lustrous Tides. Somehow, I appear to have acquired 72 of those, I have no clue when or how. Each draw costs ten Lustrous Tides but there's a 20% off sale on at the moment so that makes it eight. I just tried it and got a gun, not a Resonator, so weapons would seem to be in the same pool. I wonder if that means they're equally important?

I could go on - there's a button that brings up some very extensive rules and drop chances - but I won't bother with any of that because the points I'm trying to make are unaffected by the minutiae.

My main arguments are that a) I've managed to play very happily for a month so far, without even seeing the gacha system in action and b) I still wouldn't be bothering with it if I hadn't gotten stuck on that boss fight, which from all I've read isn't even considered much of a speed bump by most players.

It started me thinking about what I wanted out of the game. I'm not sure it's what the developers want me to want, which would appear to be to keep spending money to become more powerful. But to what end? I can't even claim to be able to see what the point of getting more powerful in this game is any more. 

If I do, several things will happen. It will allow me to carry on raising my Union Level from 20 to 40, after which I'll need to do another, similar fight, followed by a third at 60, opening the path to the Union Level cap of 80. 

Granted, that has a certain attraction; some instanced content is capped to various Union Levels but, most importantly, it so are some of the chapters of the main story. Less helpfully, it will cause all the mobs in the open world to level up to the new Union Level tier, making fights across the board that much harder. 

On the plus side, it will also alter the loot tables so those mobs drop the correct mats and upgrades for the new tier but that, too, is something of an escalator to nowhere. Why get tougher to fight tougher mobs to get drops so you can get tougher to fight tougher mobs if they're all still the same mobs in the same places?

As must be obvious, that isn't much of an incentive for me. I don't see the appeal of things getting harder so they can keep on getting harder still. And it's not as though I even need to do it. When I stop and think about it, I can enjoy most of what I really like about Wuthering Waves without getting caught in that endless loop.

I'd like to see how the story turns out but I can watch it on YouTube if I want. I already have it bookmarked.  I can carry on exploring the world just as I am and I won't have to worry about the mobs getting tougher. I mostly only fight the ones that aggro on me as I'm exploring, anyway. 

As for all the side quests, regional quest lines, character story arcs and so on, which are the ones I'm enjoying the most, they all seem unaffected by Union Level. As far as I know, I can just keep on doing them. There's no shortage, either. There should be plenty to keep me entertained for a good while yet.

The really weird part, though, is that the game does even have a sort of difficulty setting although it doesn't become available until you win that fight. Once you begin to raise the Union Level cap, you can always go into the settings and reset it back to an earlier tier if you want, even though doing so doesn't stop your own Union Level from rising. 

If I did the fight again and won, I could reset the world to the previous tier and carry on leveling. That way, I'd end up overpowered for everything in the open world, which I admit does have some appeal.

All of this leaves me in a state of confusion about how to carry on, which is the main reason I wrote this post. I'm basically talking out loud to myself as I try to figure it all out.

Thanks for listening. I'll let you know what I decide.

Old Becomes New Becomes Old Again

I thought I might expand a little on a comment I left over at The Ancient Gaming Noob, where I was replying to some thoughts by Wilhelm and Potshot on the opening of Cataclysm Classic. As the rollout of expansions continues, the successive iterations and refinements Blizzard imposed on the genre are being brought to light all over again

I think it's very easy to forget how strange and different some of the simplest innovations seemed at the time. Potshot, who always seems to remember better than most the way MMORPGs used to be, reminded me of the impact Blizzard's basic addition of quest markers over the heads of NPCs had at the time.

Whether all that pendant punctuation was an original idea developed by the World of Warcraft team I'm not sure. It would be unusual if so, since their normal modus operandi has always been to let others take the risks before moving in to reap the benefits, once the value of a new idea has been proved. 

Honestly, I can't even remember where first saw what Potshot calls the ""Christmas Tree” effect". It wouldn't have been in WoW.  I didn't play that game until mid-way through Wrath of the Lich King. I would guess that EverQuest II, which launched a couple of weeks before WoW, also used something of the kind but I have no actual memory of whether it did or not. The screenshots I took at the time prove nothing since I always turned the UI off for aesthetic reasons.

It doesn't really matter who had the idea first. It was undoubtedly WoW that popularized it and turned it into a genre standard, just as the game did with so many other features and mechanics. Even now, two decades later, the huge majority of MMORPGs employ many of the blueprints laid down by Blizzard devs and designers over the last twenty years. 

As long as I've been playing, there's been much discussion over whether the MMORPG genre or even the broader classification of MMOs is mass-market or niche. WoW had a huge footprint in its prime and games like Runescape and Lineage may well claim an even bigger impact in terms of sheer numbers but they still can't compete on the true mass-market scale with something like Call of Duty or Fortnite or Minecraft or League of Legends...

Add all the MMORPGs together, though, and it's a pretty big niche. It'd be tempting to assume it's a profitable business to be in, too, because people will insist on making the damn things. Then again, as we all must know by now, the best way to make a living out of developing games isn't always to end up with a finished product to sell.

Still, there are a lot of MMORPGs, old and new, and while there are considerable differences between them, they're mostly recognizable as part of the same family. Siblings, maybe. Certainly cousins. If they don't all have forests of punctuation points or even formal quest-givers, they certainly have some method for players to identify and access structured content with facility.

The MMORPGs that came before WoW tended not to bother with much - or any - of that. They preferred to let players work things out for themselves. Most didn't even have basic tutorials beyond "Press WASD to move". If you wanted to find out if an NPC had anything for you to do, you had to ask them. They certainly weren't holding up any "Help Wanted" cards.

By today's standards, the first wave of MMORPGs were astonishingly user-unfriendly. Developers expected players to have an enthusiast's knowledge and determination. What was then, pejoratively, often described as "hand-holding" was actively discouraged.

WoW's biggest innovation and the probable reason for its runaway success was the demystification of the process. While Classic seemed relatively challenging when Blizzard brought it back a few years ago, even that perceived level of difficulty was minor compared to what came before. 

In short, WoW from Vanilla through Wrath of the Lich King was, by comparison to contemporary expectations, easy and getting easier. But easier for whom?

As Potshot accurately describes it, Cataclysm represents the "the start of the era where we all play the single player game of WoW together." Almost all subsequent MMORPGs, other than the branch of retro-games trying to bring back the failed past, build on that beginning. Innovations like Warhammer's public quests and Rift's auto-grouping lead to the eventual, perpetual zerg of Guild Wars 2 and the flat, levelless world of Elder Scrolls Online. 

Over time, all barriers to entry are systematically torn down, with even the supposedly most challenging content being re-framed as available to all. Looking for Group becomes Looking for Raid or Instant Adventure. Storylines that once moved from solo to group to raid before the narrative concluded now reshape themselves into a series of Solo instances. 

Meanwhile, at endgame, developers double down on difficulty for the committed hardcore, creating a series of silos from which no-one escapes. Players either solo and accept that they're playing a somewhat inferior RPG purely for the benefit of having a little company while they do it or else they commit to a seeming endless round of self-improvement, trying to eke out incremental improvements to performance so as to be able to repeat the same content indefinitely at ever-increasing difficulty to no objectively discernible purpose.

Unsurprisingly, these choices do not appear to have even the same, minorly mass-market popularity as before. If you want a good, strong, narrative-driven, single-player experience with a coherent, meaningful story, there are better places to find it than in MMORPGs. And if you want to pootle around in your off-time with a few like minded friends, co-op gaming looks like a much better bet.

As Massively OP reported yesterday, a recent survey of 5,000 gamers revealed "over half of gamers play to unwind and destress". Perhaps more surprisingly, "46% also said they play for creativity and self-expression". 

Back when World of Warcraft began, the options for players to satisfy these desires were fewer. Gaming was more focused on challenge and competition than it later became. Players tended to be younger, have more time, better reflexes and be a good deal more willing to put in the necessary effort to "beat the game".

I think it's probably quite hard to credit now but when World of Warcraft blew up in the mid-2000s, a great part of its attraction was as a kind of video game you didn't need to be a gamer to play. So many grandmas played WoW to spend time with their grandkids it became a meme. And you didn't even have to have grandchildren in the game. I remember an interview on a radio show with a retired couple in their sixties who played WoW purely for the gathering and crafting and the point of the interview was that what those pensioners were doing wasn't as unusual as all that.

Most, if not all of that ground has been lost to the genre now. It's been ceded to a tidal wave of oddly disparate yet strangely similar genres: cosies, survivals, sims, sandboxes.

What they all have in common is permissiveness. They provide just enough structure for players to feel safe, while allowing them to set their own pace and choose their own path. You can burn through whatever narrative there is and climb whatever tech trees you're given and be done in a month or you can putter around, planting your garden and tending your crops, for a year. No-one cares. No-one judges. No-one tells you you're not playing the game the right way.

MMORPGs in 2024 are cursed with the expectations of endgame. Many have vast, explorable worlds filled with mystery and magic but there's no ostensible reason beyond natural curiosity to investigate any of it. Everything from the boosts in the cash shop to the exhortations of your guildmates tells you to climb the ladder to the top and be damn quick about it.

And when you get there, what's the reason to stay? Much less than there would have been had you been given a free hand to get there in your own time because there's no context to any of it any more. It's just there; a job waiting to be done. A job no-one is going to pay or even thank you for doing.

Potshot suggests this slide began as early as WoW's first expansion, The Burning Crusade, and reached terminal velocity with Cataclysm. If so, the genre's still in free-fall now. Nothing much has changed since then. Every new development in the genre seems set on closing down the possibilities, refining the process. 

And why not? It's a profitable-enough niche, isn't it? Why try to open it out, let alone carve a new one? Leave that to someone else. After all, there's no shortage of other developers, willing to try.

Unfortunately, recent developments, like Iron Gate's obsession with making Valheim harder and harder or Nightingale's imminent conversion from online multiplayer to offline solo, suggest this new, easy-going Golden Age may be short-lived. Enjoy it while you can. Lessons, it seems, have very much not been learned.

I just hope it's not another decade before the next ideological wave rolls in...

It's Like That And That's The Way It Is

When I went to log into EverQuest II this morning so I could carry on with the new, excellent, awkward and frustrating Darkpaw Rising update, I spotted a link in the launcher to the transcript of a recent AMA by the EQII team on the new, excellent, not at all awkward or frustrating forums. I thought I'd have a quck look at it while the game loaded so here I am, nearly an hour later, not having played at all.

It's a long and very interesting read although much of that interest applies only to people who might actually play the game. A few of the topics and answers, though, I felt had some wider resonance so I've pulled them out for consideration here. I recommend anyone who currently plays the game, or used to and still cares about it, take a glance at the whole thing but for everyone else, this will probably be more than enough.

Since I can't keep my opinions to myself, I've added my thoughts as well. It's my blog so I can! 

 Q: Is there a possibility of opening up some art assets for community contributions as well?
Caith: Nope.The player studio project that many of the Daybreak games had going for a long time were both legal headaches as well as not viable financially. The amount of art resources (hours) required to work with a contributor far exceeded the amount of resources the teams could have simply allocated to an artist to complete the same work.

The thing I like most about this AMA is the way no-one balks at giving the real reasons for why things are done the way they are. Answer after answer comes down to some combination of not enough people, not enough time, much more complicated than it sounds, causes more problems than it solves or players didn't like it. Almost nothing is sugar-coated. It's like there was no marketing rep guiding the conversation and the Head of Studio, who was, actually wanted players to understand how game development works.

That said, I imagine the part Caith left out was that under SOE's ownership a whole load of projects were greenlighted that clearly couldn't have been profitable. They were presumably underwritten by Sony, a company that has long seemed quite comfortable with losing huge amounts of money. Perks of being a rounding error on the account sheet of a global multinational I guess.

Cut to the chase. You want me to kill 'em, right?

Q: Are there any plans or discussions involving a game wide stat/number squish? Is it just too much work for the team you have now or is it something that may possibly happen in the future?
Caith: There has been much discussion, but there are no plans for a game wide stat reduction for a variety of reasons. One of the primary reasons it is unlikely to happen is how content is designed in the game. EverQuest 2 was designed in a way that gives developers a lot of freedom in how they implement content, which allows them to make the content more flexible and unique. The downside of this is that developers can implement things in innumerable ways, and any rebalance of that content would be a manual process. So in short, a stat reduction would require hand tuning of almost every encounter in the game.

It might have worked for WoW, although the jury is still out on that, but it will never work for EQII. The part Caith left out is that EQII players fricken' love their big numbers. There'd be an outcry if DPS wasn't measured in trillions per second. 

At least, the folks still playing on the Live servers like it that way. Everyone else long since migrated to TLE, where the numbers are so much smaller and smaller numbers and simpler stats is one of the tentpole features of the upcoming Origins server, so someone at Darkpaw reckons on having cake and eating it too.

Q: Are the "suburbs" ever going to be returned to at launch state?
Caith: This is extremely unlikely to happen on a live server due to the amount of quest and NPC updates that have been made over the years, NPC’s have been moved and quest dialog updated to reflect the move, much less the quests themselves updated to function in the new zones they are in, etc.
Kaitheel: Our newly announced Origins server will allow you to step back in time and experience the cozy neighborhoods and all of the quests they had to offer!

There's some hard information about the upcoming Origins server buried in the AMA. The above answer confirms the long-lost neighborhood quests will be included, which is something I wouldn't have bet on. Elsewhere, it's also strongly suggested the intention is to get as close as possible to the original game as it was at that time and that the motivation for doing the server is to encourage both former players and brand new ones to take a look.

It is odd to think that the best way to get people to consider playing a game in 2024 is to make it look and feel like one from 2006 but I guess WoW Classic is proof that it works. Pretty soon everyone wil be doing it, if they aren't already.

Q: Will you bring back LoN?
JChan: Legends of Norrath was great when it was here, but we have no plans to bring it back currently. Spinning back up a whole new development team or taking away current developers to work on it would put stressors on the team right now that are just plain unhealthy for our long-term future. That being said, there's always the possibility that our situations will change in the future.

The answers to many of the questions boil down to some variation on "We're a small team and we're already at full stretch doing live events, expansions and updates." and that's the context of Jen Chan's answer here but that last sentence is intriguing in a couple of ways. Firstly it hints at a potential change for the better in terms of resources at Darkpaw and I don't see any sign elsewhere in the AMA of general feel-good platitudes so maybe she knows something...

Secondly, it doesn't explicitly rule out a return for Legends of Norrath, the EQ-themed collectable card game that shuttered eight years ago. I only recently deleted the game files from my PC on the final assumption it was gone forever, not that I actually played it when it was around anyway. I wouldn't have thought there was a chance in a billion it would ever return but given that plenty of other questions in the AMA received a firm, unequivocal "No, never", I guess now we can't rule it out.

Watch in amazement as I battle two bosses at the same time!

Q: Finally, when is DBG/DarkPaw going to seriously address tradeskilling. You know how long it has been since there has been new craftable bags or boxes, or totems? Not to mention, at one point in time we could craft the beginning gear and Jewelry needed and make a bit of change. Other than food/drink, spells, not much else anyone wants.
Caith: Bag space is a DB and systems issue, a ton of the functions in the game iterate over every single item that a player has in their inventory, including every bank slot, every house slot, etc. We are, and will remain, extremely stingy when it comes to increasing inventory space, because as soon as we do the next question becomes “when are you going to fix lag and decrease loading times”.

Ah, inventory! How we love to hate you and hate to lose you. I'm fairly sure EQII actually has the most generous inventory allocation of any game I've ever played, so clearly Darkpaw's definition of "extremely stingy" is a little different than mine, although I realise Caith here is talking about the parsimonious present and future, not the profligate past.

In general, though, this answer is a great example of the way giving in to the demands of one set of players is always likely to cause problems for another or, in this case, for everyone. Who'd be a game developer, eh?

Q: Could you all please bring back the map help for npcs, quest items and such?
Kaitheel: We have no plans to remove the current map system in game, where the quest givers and quest update conversations are given specific quest icons, but the short-lived blue regions on the maps that give direct locations of quest steps are not something we plan to bring back. They were useful, we agree, but they had some significant downsides. Downsides that outweighed the usefulness.

These blue regions presented every active quest target possible at that moment on your map, naturally drawing your attention to the map. We observed how little attention was being paid to the dialogue, the story, even the characters to fight and the world one was traveling through. It was not helpful for building the world, telling the stories of the world, or your immersion therein. Even I found myself paying more attention to the blue splotches on my map than I was to the quest journals or NPC conversations. The quest I was doing, my motivation, the quest givers – all of it was buried behind the ease of these blue regions on the map. So, coupled with the significant amount of time that they took to create, we chose instead to give more helpful journal text, with more specific points of interest, and labeled sections of the zone on the maps.

Kaitheel is the epitome of the quest guy. He loves writing quests and he wants everyone to appreciate them. Answer after answer in the AMA reflect it, just as answer after answer from Caith suggest he'd really rather be honing his stand-up at an open mic night somewhere. 

I tend to agree with Kaitheel on this although I did quite like the big, blue splotches when they were around. They were added in the era when all MMORPGs were backpedalling as fast as they could away from the origins and traditions of the genre. In attempting to remove all the obstacles and put in all the labor-saving devices, most of them cut-and-pasted ideas and mechanics from the wave of imports sweeping in from the East. That's when every older game added flying mounts, too. 

We still have those but now we're not allowed to use them until we've been everywhere on foot. So swings the pendulum.

This isn't the time to start another debate about immersion but I'd just mention that I wouldn't be enjoying each new expansion in EQII half as much if I couldn't open the wiki and copy the co-ordinates for every quest target into EQIIMaps to get a glowing trail and a map marker. If Kaitheel believes most players are finding their way by in-game landmarks, he's fooling himself. All that really happened when they took out the in-game quest markers was that the trade passed to a third party provider.

And now with the UI

Q: The exp gain in zimara went from one extreme to the next, could you all please balance that some?
Caith: The experience gain in Zimara is an example of where we would prefer it to be. It takes actual work to level up, and you have multiple routes to obtain experience, some requiring more attention (questing) and giving larger rewards, some requiring little attention (grinding mobs) and giving much lower rewards.

While we're on the subject of old chestnuts and dead horses... Is anyone ever satisfied with the rate of xp or leveling in any MMORPG? I very much doubt it. It's the Goldilocks story without Baby Bear. 

I'm almost at the end of the signature quest line for Ballads of Zimara with my Berserker and he's 10% into 128. I very much doubt he's going to hit the 130 cap before he runs out of quests. He might not even hit 129. I'll have to do repeatables or else try and finish the Collects, if those even give xp any more. 

I'm broadly in favor of relatively slower progress but this puts me right off  levelling another character, even with the suppposed 50% bonus for characters on an account where one character has finished the Sig Line. As for the future, when this becomes a step on the levelling ladder that has to be taken before you get to current content, you can forget it. It was fine having to revisit older expansions when it took a couple of sessions at most to hit the cap but a couple of weeks is too much by a lot. I guess I'll be finding a use for all those level boosts I stashed after all.

Also, how could the phrase "actual work" ever belong in any description of a process in a video game? I fear that, when the act of creating something other people use for entertainment becomes too closely tied to your own sense of identity, it's possible to find yourself losing perspective...

Q: Do you have any plans to reduce the number of spells? we have to use 3rd party addons to get an additional hot bar because of the honestly absurd amount of spells/clickies/buffs some classes have? Maybe allow us to combine some buffs to 1 button?
Caith: We’ve talked about it, and introduced some ways to reduce the amount of spells players need on their hotbar or rotation, but the resulting pushback from the playerbase has always been more negative than positive. Everyone wants less abilities, but not this ability, or that ability, or any of MY classes abilities. Ultimately, with the amount of UI performance degradation, less abilities on hotbars showing cooldowns, etc, the better as far as I am concerned.

As above, here's another great example of how giving in to one group's demands just exacerbates complaints from another. It's akin to Wilhelm's Law, which states that every feature in an MMORPG, no matter how widely despised, will prove to have been someone's favorite when removed.

Personally, I love my ten hotbars, at least six of them filled with spells I might and usually do use in combat. I can't remember what all of them are called - I can't even remember what some of them do - but I wouldn't want to be without any of them.

Q: I know it is impossible to make everyone happy and I love that H3 is difficult and not for everyone. Can we get a raid equivalent?
Caith: It is comparatively easy to find six likeminded players that enjoy an extreme challenge to get them into a challenging heroic dungeon, when compared to the task of finding a raid guild who all agree that they want the same level of challenge, failure, regroup, retry. The larger number of players seem to drastically increase the likelyhood of a player or subset of the players are frustrated and angry and only here because they feel like they have to be, thus leading to overall dissatisfaction with the content.

And finally, a word of pure common sense from Caith. I never liked raiding and never did much of it but when I did, back in EverQuest, raids could have as many as 72 people. Can you imagine the time it took just to get everyone facing the right way? Is it any wonder I decided it wasn't for me?

Stockholm Syndrome doesn't actually exist but if it did it sure would explain why some people say they enjoy raiding.

And on that not at all controversial note, I'm off to do what I meant to do four hours ago, namely play EQII.

Once Human Beta 3 - First Impressions Plus Comparisons With Beta 2

I've sometimes claimed that one of the big benefits of having a blog is being able to look back and compare my memories with what I actually said at the time.  Now, for once, I'm actually going to do it.

The game I'm revisiting is Once Human, which I started playing during Beta 2, back in December of last year, and which I stopped playing, before the beta ended, in the following January. In that relatively short time, I wrote about it quite extensively, posting my First Impressions on 13 December, with lengthy follow-ups on the 14th, 15th, 18th, 19th, 21st, 25th (Yes, Christmas Day!) and 28th.

On 1 January, I posted a very positive "Mid-beta Review" in which I said 

"As far as I can tell, the beta has about another three weeks to run, although I've yet to find an official date. I'm torn between carrying on as I have been, spending almost all my gaming time there and making the most of my access while it lasts, or quitting while I'm ahead to avoid bitter disappointment, when the mean devs take my new toy away. 

What I should probably do is wean myself off the beta gradually, reducing my play-time slowly as I simultaneously re-introduce other, much-neglected games to the mix." 

It seems that's what I did because I didn't post about the game again until 10 January, my last substantive post about it until the start of Beta 3. I skimmed through all of those posts last night. It wasn't a quick read by any standards. I didn't run them through a word counter but I'd be amazed if they come to less than twenty thousand words altogether. Might easily be thirty.

I made some notes as I was reading but given that level of verbosity I imagine I missed a lot. Still, I pulled out enough salient points for a short post. Maybe not that short, if precedent's any guide...

Before I get into the details, I have to say it seems like a lot has changed. Starry, the NetEase studio behind Once Human, is clearly engaged in a genuine beta process here, not just a marketing excercise, although inevitably there's plenty of marketing going on, too. I'm always wary of comparing subjective impressions like this but it was only a couple of months ago I was last playing and the feeling of change in the new beta I was already forming is largely supported by the record.

The whole game feels different this time and I'm not convinced it always feels better. Let's have some details.

Communication Breakdown

There's plenty of praise in my posts on the last beta for both the writing and the voice acting. Nothing I read last night mentioned any jankiness or glitching there. This time, as Scopique observed in his post about the current beta, conversations now sometimes repeat when you reach a decision point in the dialog tree. 

There also seems to be some confusion over whether the player character talks or not. Last time I mentioned my character didn't sound quite how I'd imagined she would. This time she seems to have been afflicted with selective mutism. Sometimes she speaks, other times she settles for gestures and facial expressions.

I'm also noticing more variation between the on-screen text and the voice acting than I remember and for the first time I'm seeing translations that aren't wholly convincing. On the plus side, almost all of the untranslated Chinese text has disappared. 

It seems apparent that both translation and voice-over are works in progress. I hope the final versions match the best on display, which would mean a high standard but I worry things might go the way of so many other imported titles, with quality translation at the start and sporadically in key scenes but something less satisfactory elsewhere. Fingers crossed on that.

The Easy Life

This is a tough one. My immediate impression is that everything feels much easier but when I come to examine why and how that might have come about I find myself somewhat at a loss. I can't nail down any specific changes but on an objective level, comparing my progress now with what I recorded in the last beta, it's undeniable that I've progressed much faster and had far fewer difficult moments. 

It's true that back then it was all completely new to me, while now I'm going through the same content for the second time but I really don't think familiarity and foreknowledge can account for the sheer speed with which I'm flying through the storyline. I've only played a handful of sessions, most of them quite short. but I'm already further ahead than I was by the time I stopped playing last time and, as must be evident from those posts, I played a lot.

Back then, I clearly remember having any number of long, tough fights with regular mobs. There was a lot of running away, healing up and some dying. In one post I mention having to leap out of a window to escape being overwhelmed and in another I talk about being mobbed by wolves while trying to do a quest hand-in. I recall stuff like that happpening pretty much non-stop.

This time there's been nothing like it at all. Everything's been very comfortable, even though in comparison to last beta, my character is far less prepared and not as well-equipped. In fact, I've done almost no prep at all. I've just been winging it with whatever armor and weapons I happen to find. For a while I was even just using whatever ammo I looted from chests although I have now finally made myself some bullets.

I haven't done anything about buffing myself and I haven't looked at any guides or walkthroughs and yet I've somehow managed to beat the first two instance bosses on the first try. Last beta, I didn't even dare take the first of those on until I was four levels above what the game reccomended and I made sure to supply myself with a ton of ammo and healing consumables before I went in. 

This time I rocked up two levels below the suggested minimum, went in with whatever I had on me and won easily, even though I ran out of ammo and had to melee the boss for the last quarter of its health. It felt inevitable I would win and it was fun even though I was totally half-assing it.

As for the second boss, I didn't write about that one last time but as far as I recall I don't think I ever beat it. I remember trying and the attempt being a total pain. No fun at all and it took ages. This time, when I got to to that point in the story I went in to see what would happen and ended up I finishing the instance quite easily, even though the game was throwing a hissy-fit and crashed just after I killed the boss, which unfortunately may have bugged my quest.

I probably need to do a bit more thinking on this but it does seem to me that everything is just a lot easier now and not just the fighting.

No-One Uses Cameras Any More!

Back in December I dedicated much of a post to raving about how great the screesnhot feature in Once Human was. To summarise, at the time you needed to craft an actual, in-game camera before you could take screenshots. Once made, the camera operated like a tool in the game. You had to equip it and point it at things to take pictures. 

I loved it but it seems no-one else did because it's gone. Instead, there's an annoying radial menu you can access immediately. It takes you to the same functionality but all of that immersive granularity has been lost. Or all that irritating busy-work. I guess it depends on your perspective but it's certainly another example of how the game is being simplified.

What's The Driving Age Around Here, These Days?

Acess to everything players consider essesntial seems to have been speeded up. By the time I got a motorbike last time I must have been in my teens. I know I'd already moved house so it must have been a week or two into the game at least. This time I got my driver's permit in my second session. I think I was about level five or six. 

I didn't have to do anything for it, either. An NPC just gave it me. I thought it might be a loaner but I've still got it so I guess it's mine now. I appreciate the convenience but I think I'd rather have built it in my workshop from parts. I'd value it more that way.

Where's The Mayor? ^[1]

In the last beta I didn't post about going to the first town, Deadville, until I'd been playing for five days but I did say I'd already been there a few times so I don't think it can have been that much longer than it was this time. Still, I'm pretty sure I wasn't there in my second session. Both times I didn't go until I was prompted so I think they've bumped a few things up the schedule in the revamped "Journey".

Last time, when I did get to Deadville, it seemed like there was more going on. Claire is still there with her van, offering the same quest but I didn't get any prompts to talk to the Mayor, who used to give the long speech leading into the Keefer Sutherland storyline. I can't imagine that whole sub-plot has been taken out but maybe it's been shifted down the timeline. 

Conversely, I met another guy in Deadville, called Lowe. He's a sharp dresser, who could have come straight out of The Secret World. Was he there before? I'm pretty sure he wasn't but I do seem to recall hearing some of what he has to say, so maybe he's been relocated or his lines have been re-assigned. 

Which leads me to... 

Wow! You've Really Changed Since I Last Saw You!

Don't try to deny it. I have the screenshots to prove it. 

The mysterious girl you meet in the opening cut scenes, who apparently represents the ruined world's best hope for recovery, used to be called Cyo. Now she goes by Mitsuko. Then there's Mary. She used to be a blonde who dressed like a lab assistant on the way to a meeting. Now she's a brunette in Lara Croft's cast-offs.

I'm fairly sure a lot of other NPCs have had a makeover too but I can only prove it for the few whose photos I took.

A Possible Loss Of Whimsy ^[2]

I'm not a hundred per cent certain on this one but I think they may have removed the whole Whim mechanic. If so,  it would be a shame. It was an interesting one. 

The gist of it was that every time you allowed something bad to happen to you, like getting poisoned by polluted water, there'd be some negative effects but you might also gain a "whim", a potentially positive side-effect, like being able to swim further before becoming exhausted. There was a whole theoretical meta-game there, involving taking debuffs to gain specific, situational benefits, that looked like it might be fun. 

I said at the time I thought it would end up being complicated and lead to some awkward choices for min-maxers but it didn't seem like a bad idea altogether. It may still be in the game but I've had a couple of things happen to me that I think would have triggered whims before and nothing's happened. There's been no word of the mechanic in the tutorial yet, either.

I won't write Whims off just yet. They may just have been punted down the timeline or their apparent absence could be a corollary of my moving through content so much faster this time around. Perhaps my whims lie ahead of me still. I hope so, anyway.

In Conclusion...

I could go on but I'm all too aware much of this could resolve itself as I progress and I'd have to come back and explain myself, so I think I'll leave it at that for now. 

What I really wanted to convey is how whole enterprise just feels different, somehow. Specifically, it feels more like a game and less like a virtual world.

I'm not saying it's better or worse. Just different. It's swings and roundabouts, as usual. For every loss of immersion there's an improved quality of life. For each interesting choice that's gone missing, there's one fewer annoying obstacle. If nothing else, I certainly appreciate the less-arduous combat.

At this point I was tempted to invoke the "better-in-beta" argument but I'm beginning to understand that's a more nuanced phenomenon than I've previously allowed. I'm developing a theory that early-mid beta builds tend to include a lot of features that interest developers more than players, which means they tend also to appeal to Explorer archetypes like myself, people who enjoy discovery for its own sake.

In probably too many cases, a lot of those not so user-friendly systems and less-intuitive mechanics, the ones that fascinate those of us who enjoy finding out how things work but which frustrate everyone who just wants to get on with playing a game, get left in for launch and then have to be hastily removed afterwards. It has to be better, commercially and aesthetically, to get all that sanded down in beta but it does explain why I sometimes find the finished product bland and unsatisfying compared to the prototype.

None of which changes my opinion that Once Human is on its way to becoming a pretty good game. What I do anticipate is that when it does launch later this year it won't be quite as weird or wonderful as it could have been. Whether that will harm or enhance its chances of success I guess will depend on just how smoothly Starry are able to handle the transition from the game the developers wanted to make to the one they think players will enjoy. 

At the moment, it looks like they still have some work to do.

[1] - He's still in his room, standing in the dark. He also still has all the dialog that tells you about the area. He just doesn't offer a quest any more, or at least not to me.

[2] - Yeah, this is just wrong. I was misremembering how Whims work. They're caused by decreasing sanity levels, not environmental conditions and they're still in the game. Or the guide explanation for them is, anyway. I haven't gone crazy enough to become whimsical yet.

One Against Many

I am still playing Nightingale. What's more, I'm playing it more than I expected, now I've come to the end of the story. And I'm not entirely sure I'm happy about it.

Angry Onions left a comment on the recent post about the Steam Sale in which he talked about playing just one game at a time, maybe for hundreds of hours. Most people reading that will relate, I'm sure. 

Wilhelm has been running a series in recognition of and response to EverQuest turning twenty-five, in which, among other things, he's been revisiting some of the key locations he remembers from his early days in the game. He's also posted several times on other topics related to the anniversary. I haven't said much about it here, although I've made up for my silence by leaving lengthy, anecdotal comments at TAGN, in part as something of a sop to my own feeling I ought not to be letting such a significant event pass by unacknowledged.

Not that I was ever going to let that happen. It is, after all, an anniversary year for EQ, and although I often mention that I started playing in 1999, it wasn't until November that I finally logged in and made my first character. 

I did think of waiting until my own twenty-fifth anniversary with the game before marking my time there with some sort of celebration here on the blog but that would clash awkwardly with the twentieth anniversary of EverQuest II, which will also arrive in November. I was there for that one. 

I was there before, actually, having been in the closed beta since, I believe, September 2004. No doubt I'll get to the details when the due date arrives but the relevant point here is that back then, when EQ was turning five and EQII had yet to be born, Mrs Bhagpuss and I, along with everyone else in our EQ guild, felt we had to make a choice between one or the other.

And it wasn't the first time. A couple of years before that we'd been through the same thing when Dark Age of Camelot launched. We went through it again with a friend and guild-mate for the launch of Horizons and once more with another friend during the surge in popularity that hit World of Warcraft in 2005. 

In those four examples - and I could quote plenty more - twice we said our goodbyes and left for the chance of something fresh and new, twice we stayed behind and waved goodbye to people we'd spent hundreds of hours with until then. These things happened all the time and although it would have been perfectly practical to keep in touch, even in the days before social media made it hard not to, mostly we never did.

I can't speak for offline games of the period but back then, if you played MMORPGs you tended to play them serially. Very few people tried to play more than one at a time and for good reason. 

Firstly, most required a subscription. That would have been a problem only for the very frugal and those on a strict budget but seeing that a large proportion of the target demographic was made up of players still at school or college, that probably meant most of them. A decade down the line it became quite common to hear veterans boast obnoxiously about their favored financial circumstances but not so much in 1999-2004, even if characters were changing hands on EBay for hundreds of dollars a time back then.

More important than money, though, came time. Doesn't matter how much you have in the bank, you only get the same twenty-four hours in your day as the rest of us. Playing MMORPGs, especially if you took it seriously, as so many did, might as well have been a full-time job. 

It was commonplace for people to play twenty-five hours a week. Forty wasn't considered at all unusual or extreme. I have always tried not to work full-time but for my core EQ/DAOC/EQII years, during which I played very socially, knew lots of people and joined in with all kinds of group and guild activities, I, like almost everyone I played with, was either in full-time employment or full-time education. 

I worked five days a week and still somehow managed to play EQ for 25-40 hours on top. With that level of commitment I was able to hit the level cap on a couple of characters and stay abreast of current group content. Barely. If I'd wanted to kick on and raid or even work on getting my characters into an acceptable state just to to apply to join a raid guild (As Mrs. Bhagpuss did, successfully and, thankfully, briefly.) I think I'd have had to give up sleeping.

The idea of playing two such games simultaneously would have been laughable to most people then, which is why it became such a contentious, emotional issue whenever anyone declared their intention to move to another game. No-one in my experience ever responded to announcement of that kind with "That sounds cool! I'll get it too and we can still hang out!"

You were either on the bus or off it. Guilds made rules about it. Loyalty and responsibility were factors. Even if you were the kind of player who mostly soloed, unless you were a complete loner a new game meant the end of your friends list and back to being the new kid nobody knows.

I was thinking about all of this yesterday, first when I read MassivelyOP's discussion topic about playing MMOs in retirement and later, when I was doing some prep work for the series of posts I'm planning for my aforementioned celebration of the EQ Silver Anniversary. I logged into EQ partly to pick up my Anniversary freebies but also to start collecting /played information on all my characters there.

Both the EverQuest games have a useful function whereby you can see the exact date and time you created your character and how many hours you've spent playing them. Strictly, how many hours the character has been online, I guess. If you were in the habit of going AFK for hours a time as many were, the definition may blur a little, especially if the character was a Bazaar trader.

I didn't even get around to checking the server with my most-played characters so I haven't yet seen the really big numbers. It's probably just as well. The lesser names from the deep past are disturbing enough. Even characters I know I only ever played for a few weeks have /played times measured in days. 

For example, one of my several druids, Cassice, a character I created in 2003 but barely remember playing at all, other than to log her in briefly in recent years to port somewhere and take a few screenshots for a blog post, somehow made it to Level 48, racking up almost five days online.

To put that in perspective, if Cassice was a Steam game, at 116 hours she'd be third on my Hours Played list after only Valheim and New World. It would be one thing if all that time spent came with a fund of anecdotes, amusing stories, or emotional memories but I can't fricken' recall a single time I ever played her! And she's just one minor character out of literally dozens. 

That was how MMORPGs were. Even now, although progress is much faster, they still eat up relatively large chunks of time compared to other genres. It may only take a couple of weeks to hit cap where once it took months but that's only the start. 

The idea that these games are more casual and require less commitment only really stands up if you play them the way I was describing earlier. Where it took me hundreds of hours just to reach the level cap back in 2003, now I could do it in most MMORPGs in a few sessions. Even in EverQuest, provided I could get groups for the last 35 levels. That, though, would just be the start.

Back then, it was entirely possible to make leveling the point of playing. Lots of people never made it to the cap and even those who did often just started over on another character. Modern MMORPGs tend to have all the grind at the cap, not before it, which may be why it's now so tempting to play lots of them, either serially in short bursts or even all at once. 

A big part of the attraction of the genre has always been the sense of satisfaction that comes from progression. The Ding Effect, if you will. That's why Tipa named her blog Chasing Dings, I imagine. Game hopping, now that leveling is so accelerated, gives you those dings in spades but when the levels run out, you have to figure out where the next dopamine hit's going to come from and it can be disheartening to realize it's going to involve a hell of a lot of one kind of grind or another. 

Much easier just to jump ship to the Next Big Thing because, after all, what did you commit to? Nothing.

Survival games package up a lot of that progression-satisfaction into tidy packages. Easy to understand, easy to achieve, they just keep on coming. It's very smart design. I suspect if we could see the numbers we'd find people stick around longer in new survival games than they do in new MMORPGs, even if both lose almost everyone in a matter of months. 

Nightingale feels particularly slippery in this respect. I was expecting to be done with it not long after I made it to The Watch and the end of what story there is in this Early Access build. That has not happened. I'm still playing several hours a day and even as I type this I'm itching to play some more.

It would be an exaggeration to say Nightingale has an endgame right now. As far as I can tell, there's no equivalent of raiding or stepped-difficulty dungeons to gear up for and take on. Instead, there's the genuine sandbox of infinite Realms, each different from the rest yet none of them as different as all that. 

That, however, is not what's holding me. It's the crafting. It's tricksy. As I explained a while ago, there may be only quality grades but there are also a number of sets (I don't know for sure how many.) plus some single pieces and as I am only now discovering, the sets have their own baseline stats that put them into some sort of hierarchy. 

This means that if you imagine, as I did, that you're done once you've upgraded all your gear to Epic you are very much mistaken. All you have is the epic version of whatever set you started with. If there's a better set, the epic version of that will be better too.

Since upgrading each piece requires forty essences from each of three tiers and since these essences cannot be recovered by salvaging the item (That just nets you Essence Dust.), every time you discover a recipe for a potentially superior set of gear, you have to begin again from Common and work your way back up to Epic.

That would be time-consuming enough but in Nightingale, materials come with stats that can be passed on to the items they make. It's a confusing process I don't claim to understand in full but I do know that if you genuinely want to have the best gear, you're going to have to acquire some very specific materials and combine them in some very specific ways. At the least, it involves hunting named creatures for Fabled materials and crafting particular Realms with perks that generate rare gems. 

There's probably a lot more to it than that, I imagine, but I'm hitting a plateau in my ability to care. I like the exploring, the gathering, the hunting, the crafting and the general ambience and I get a dingish buzz out of making new items and upgrading them but...

...increasingly I'm finding myself wondering "What is the point?" it's a very dangerous question to ask about any video game but especially about the kind that rely on gear-based vertical progression to hook you in. In MMORPGs, though, there's generally at least a token purpose to it. You need the better gear to do the harder content where you get the better-still gear to do the even-harder content....

Nightingale doesn't have that. And without an appearance system, it doesn't really have much of a stake in the fashion wars endgame, either. Thanks to the The Watch, there is the potential to strut around like a peacock, daring everyone to ask you how you managed to get yourself looking so fantabulous, but even there, in a game with no player economy, no broker, no bank system and no social structure to speak of, the opportunities to catwalk your way to fame are limited.

All the same, it is that minimal interaction with other players that just about allows me to think of what I'm doing as purposeful. Other players can see what you're wearing and everyone displays a gear score next to their name. I'm doing a few Vault runs every day and I feel some small obligation to contribute. I don't mind the occasional carry but it gets embarrassing if it happens every time. To that end, I can convince myself that continuing to upgrade my gear is socially responsible rather than some kind of nervous tick I can't suppress.

Without that fig-leaf, I'm not sure I would carry on playing. The prospect of taking the game offline, as so many have apparently demanded, seems to me to be almost surreally misguided. Other than to speed up zoning and avoid disconnections, something that could presumably be achieved with better network code and hardware, why would you want to remove the one and only objective reason for continuing after the story ends?

I could give a few answers to my own question there but I'm not going to bother. I'm a little concerned that I'm pulling too hard already on a thread that could unravel the entire tapestry. Almost a quarter of a century after I came home from work carrying that original EverQuest box, I'm finally starting to wonder if I'm getting too old for all this.

Not because I can't perform physically. I may be stiffer and slower but I can still handle most of what I ever could in an MMORPG or similar. Not because I've lost interest, either. This length of this post is ample evidence of that. No, the problem, if it is one, is that I find myself thinking more often of what else I could be doing with the time instead.

Ironically, that's less of an issue when I'm jumping between games, uncommitted, searching, scratching around for something that will hold my attention for an hour or two. Then, gaming feels like a perfectly reasonable part of a varied entertainment diet. It's only when something digs its claws in and won't let go, like all those old MMORPGs did once and like Nightingale threatens to do now, that I start to feel uncomfortable.

I never really felt that way when I was playing MMORPGs, even though objectively I spent far longer doing it than I have done or ever will do with survival games. It's because in an MMO, the presence of thousands of other players, many of whom who I can actually see or hear all around me as I play, normalizes things. It can't be so bad if everyone else is doing it, right?

Once you take all that striving and grinding into the private sphere, it becomes a lot harder to see it as benign, I think. Which is why, for my offline gaming, I prefer to narrative experiences with a clear ending. 

If I'm going to be doing something that's a completely pointless waste of time, at least I'd like some company while I'm doing it.