Fun In Southsun : GW2

Everyone and their Aunt Aggie has weighed in already on GW2's Secret of Southsun update. I'm late jumping that train so I'll keep it short.

It's a big improvement. It's tighter; more focused thematically and geographically than Flame and Frost. Judging from map chat people seem to like the content better. More importantly they're using it. I've spent much of this week in Overflow and I don't even play primetime hours for Yak's Bend.

Ravious has issues with the delivery system. I think Southsun makes a better show of laying out the intel than earlier iterations but it remains a rattly old communications chain all the same. If you're going to replace a system that works (quests, tasks, missions) with one of your own making it's probably incumbent on you to make one that works better. This doesn't.

Don't have nightmares.

Still it gets the job done. There have been complaints that using the Achievement system this way builds in spoilers and it does but I can't say I felt there was much in there to be spoiled in the first place. If there's anything that makes sense of the Molten Alliance storyline then it passed me by. I also admit to not remembering either Inspector Ellen Kiel or Canach. If I met them before then I apologize. They didn't make much of an impression, obviously.

Southsun isn't heaving with people day and night out of love of story anyway. ArenaNet built a farm and everyone put on their straw hats and set to work tilling the fields. The prize fruit, Southsun Supply Crates, seem rare as arctic strawberries but there's compensation in everything around. Blood, scales. poison sacs, karka parts and passiflora; huge coin and Magic Find buffs; karma trains the like of which I haven't seen

Festival? Does he mean the Dragon Bash? That's here?

outside WvW.

The best part of the Southsun update is the community-building. Map chat is filled with helpful people answering questions on where to go and what to do. Events are called all the time. Mesmers are puzzle-porting just because they can. Commanders running their tags are using them to focus PvE zergs. Anyone getting knocked down gets picked right back up again. It's a microcosm of what the whole game could and should be; communal, mutual, positive, open, empowering.

Any mesmers porting to JP?

It also occurred to me quite early on that it isn't an entirely new phenomena. I've seen it before. Now where could that have been? Ah yes, of course! Southsun is an Everquest Hot Zone. It reminds me of nothing so much as the weekends we spent in Dulak's Harbor or Grieg's End farming xp and hoping for the augs to drop. Hot Zones always were a great idea. Every MMO should have them.

This is a good direction. This is what we want. Well, it's what I want. Wouldn't it be great to see this approach rolled out to different parts of Tyria every two or three weeks? Intense, focused bursts of content that funnel a critical mass of players to a specific map, offering desirable, distinctive rewards for a limited time only. Yes, it's a dirigist approach but don't we all need a little direction from time to time?

Just Ride : City of Steam, GW2

There were no horses in the 20th Century. They didn't begin to appear until the very end of 2001 and it wasn't 'til the spring of 2002 that I saw my first. It was coming on summer when I finally saved up enough money to buy one all my own.

Horses in those days were very different to horses as we know them now. It took a while to build up to a gallop and you really had to lean back on the reins to bring them to a halt. Turning a horse was like moving a grand piano in a small room. That didn't matter so much. I hadn't bought mine to get anywhere faster. I'd bought it to sit and think.

Sitting astride a horse was... well it was sitting and sitting mattered because only by sitting could you get your thoughts back in order and regain the energy you'd used up casting spells, energy you'd soon enough need to cast more. Meditation, we called it. Medding, the way we spoke back then.

Quickly horses passed from luxury to necessity. The ability of a cleric to keep a party alive depended on having a good seat. It wasn't merely that thought flowed more clearly when mounted; lions, goblins, bandits, anything used to seeing a seated gnome as snack-food or spare change lost focus when a horse came into the picture. Mounted clerics no longer got picked on the moment they opened up their spell-books.

We were very happy with our horses. I don't recall anyone observing that horses were all very well but they'd prefer something more leathery. Still, wished for or otherwise, not much more than a year later the fashionable thing to be seen out riding was a drogmor and with drogmors the stable door stood wide, never to be bolted.

In the years since almost every world has learned to ride. Horses, tigers, dragons, mechanical pigs; there's nothing so outlandish someone won't throw a saddle on it. In some worlds mounts transcend gravity; flying carpets, hot air balloons, jetpacks. Get me up in one of those? Hell, yes.

Last night I rode a Steambike for the first time. There wasn't really anywhere much to ride it, just around the tight streets of Heartland Road. I'd been gifted the bike on arrival from The Ironwaste, a terrifying wasteland teeming with skeletons whose gauntlet must be run unless you wish to spend the rest of your life living on charity in The Refuge.

I had no idea how much I'd missed riding until I kick-started that bike and heard it purr. All these months traveling the length and breadth of Tyria on Shanks's Pony I knew something wasn't right but you get used to these things. Now I know. It's wrong and it's been wrong all along.

It's just plain wrong to run everywhere. It's not realistic, naturalistic or immersive. It's silly. Even in our own quotidian world we mostly go mounted, to the corner shop on roller skates, to a friend's by bike, to the next town over in a car. And when we go somewhere on foot we walk. We don't run.

I'm done with jogging. Wishes are horses. Let's ride.

Less Isn't More. More Is More!

Curious to see how perceptions vary. For Tipa there's way too much, for Keen there's far too little. Me, my head is about ready to explode as my struggling MMO mind tries to calibrate the possibilities. If Calvin would just lend me his Duplicator...

I'd buy Gems for one of these

Rift going F2P affects me not. Storm Legion did nothing for me other than kill most of the remaining interest I had. I'm already paid up until somewhere around November but I've yet to log in this year so nothing changes there.

Still subbed to all SOE games and playing virtually none of them. Try and get at least a few hours of EQ2, DCUO, Everquest and/or Vanguard in each month but its a real struggle finding time. Thought I would be back in EQ2 for the third slice of Velious but that would really be a waste without being able to level over 92. I'm not throwing away all that xp and all the gear requires 93 at least so that's on the back burner until we decide to get Chains of Eternity, which may never happen.

Neverwinter remains that new game I like but not enough to play instead of things I like more. If this was a slow patch I'd be burning through but it's anything but that.

Sand, sun, skeletons

City of Steam is very slightly less appealing than I was expecting, largely because I preferred it when it was more of a mysterious, atmospheric setting with not all that much of a game attached rather than the very good game in a rather less-convincing setting that it has become. Also I want to be a Goblin and I don't want to do everything all over again so I'm holding some of my fire. Playing every day all the same.

Go on, jump. I double-dog dare you!

A beta I'd written off as unplayable and highly disappointing has done that thing betas rarely do and turned itself around. That's back on the menu. Another beta's in the wings that I already know I want to spend more time in and probably buy the game when it launches. A third beta I've been in for ages and hardly ever manage to play because the server's rarely open at a convenient time. All those.

That leaves the huge bulk of my game time in GW2. Loving my dailies, my meta-events and WvW still, and after that lukewarm reaction to three months of Flame and Frost I'm more than a little astonished to find myself loving the new Living Story episode as well. Probably go into more detail at some point but the short version reads "Now that's more like it!" By which I am talking largely about the presentation, not so much the content. The content of Flames and Frost was fine.

No Intentional Bumping

All of which just leaves that totally unexpected entry from waaaay over in left-field, Dino Storm. Playing every day, loving it. Great change of pace and color palette and gloriously sloooooow. Why is it that MMOs supposedly aimed at a younger audience often require more stick-at-it-ness and patience than the stuff adults get spoon-fed?

No more time. Karka to crush, ratlings to rout, dinos to ride.

Flame + Frost = Farrago: GW2

"Is that it?" was the refrain that echoed across Tyria as the first chapter of the Living Story limped to a close last night. Listening to map chat in Lion's Arch it was apparent that few players had read the press releases, seen the interviews or had the slightest idea what was going on.

Most did know that they were one achievement short of a Box Prize though, and not surprisingly, quite a few thought there might be a pot of gold at the end of the three-month long rainbow. There wasn't.

Next it'll be CCTV in Lion's Arch, you mark my words!

The pot of gold, such as it was, had already arrived with the conclusion of the Rox and Braham storylines more a week ago. A ticket for a pair of exotic gloves too utterly hideous even to contemplate wearing. No-one paid much attention at the time, what with the new dungeon and all. Even the anticlimax was anticlimactic.

What we did get was a bonfire and just how appropriate, in this particular case, was that? You've been driven out of your home by a bunch of burning creatures chanting about fire and setting your settlement ablaze. Do you really want to see more flames? Okay, it's cold in Hoelbrek so the warmth may be welcome but they already have rather a lot of open fires there. All the time. How special does it make you feel that they lit one more little one? And as for Black Citadel, where you're sitting on a solid metal floor that conducts heat and where the enemy at the gate even before all the recent kafuffle was always the Flame Legion? Does any of this make any sense?

In someone's dreams. Not in mine.

Then there's Rox and Braham. Hmm. These two characters that drop out of nowhere. The big, buff Norn and the wide-eyed catgirl.That we all follow. Whose story we are mostly watching, facilitating, a story clearly not our own. After that video I can't but think we're seeing Our Gods walk among us in their Mortal Form. Are we comfortable with that?

Is this whole thing a complete mess or what? I'm not saying its not been fun but has any of it made any sense to anyone? Has anything since the game launched made any sense? Did The Mad King destroying the Lion Statue make sense? Okay, he's mad, he gets a pass. Did the Karka make sense? Did Tixx make sense? The Super Adventure Box? Anything - anything at all - about the Living Story?

Might there be a whole lot of people working very hard on personal projects, obsessions,

We can't all be famous

ideas, getting them into the game with very little in the way of top-down, authoritarian control? Might things be getting greenlighted on a prospectus containing not much more than "wouldn't it be cool if...?"

Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing. Not at all. For my no money it's a considerably better thing than, for example, the approach Rift ended up taking, where players must at all costs not be annoyed, nothing disruptive must ever happen and everyone must get a Fair Go. That makes for an admirably solid, reliable experience but one which, after a while, tends towards the dull.

At least with ANet (as with SOE all these years) you never know quite what might happen next. Sure, some of it, arguably most of it, doesn't really come off but rather a sporadic splurge of exotic failures than a steady stream of stuff designed not to annoy anyone.

In a day or so we're off to Southsun Cove for a couple of weeks. If Team Spring Break (Really? You really want to call yourselves that? In public?) can make that a place worth spending more than five minutes in then I'll be impressed. After that, who knows? This over-excited PR blurb certainly isn't letting on but apparently "it does all tie together".

I'll believe that when I see it but I don't mind if it doesn't. It'll almost certainly be just as much fun if it all falls apart.

Step Off The Train: City of Steam

Just a few opening thoughts after some five hours' play:

There could hardly be a lower barrier of entry. You don't even need to register; you can just use your existing Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Windows Live account. In due course you'll be able to use Steam as well, at which point there will be a downloadable client but for now the browser version looks great and runs smoothly in both Firefox and Chrome. The occasionally flaky Unity Player has only crashed on me once so far, which is pretty impressive for the first couple of days of a very busy Open Beta.

When I say City of Steam looks great I should qualify that a little. It looks great once you overcome Mechanist Games' best attempts to make it look terrible. For some insane reason the game defaults to an isometric perspective with a fixed camera. I was about ready to go on the forums and start ranting about this crazy decision when a tool tip appeared pointing out that the little camera icon in the bottom right of the screen restores normal free camera movement. That, in my very strong opinion, should be the default, as it was in every previous stage of development. Had I not already been committed to playing City of Steam from previous experience there's a good chance I would have stopped playing it, probably for good, after about ten minutes. Isometric perspective does this game no favors whatsoever.

Not sure about these pants

Indeed, most of the default settings seem likely to put people off, so I strongly advise anyone trying it out to fiddle with the controls before even starting the tutorial. The first thing I did was put all the graphic settings to maximum, which I would imagine would be trivial for any PC used for gaming. Then I put it in Full Screen which required me to reset the screen resolution. Why can't MMOs automatically set the screen resolution to match the native desktop? They almost never do, which means that your first impression of the graphics is almost always much worse than it needs to be.

A few tweaks to overhead names and the visuals were set. The music, wonderful though it may be, is set far too loud so that got turned down. After the screams of ratlings woke Mrs Bhagpuss this morning and I got the benefit of her live impressions of what she'd heard through the wall, some other sound settings got dialed down as well. The sound effects, particularly in combat, can be rather strident.

The Tutorial, which has changed radically in every incarnation so far, has changed yet

Yes, but does it make my bum look big?

again. It no longer really feels like a tutorial at all, more like an in media res opening that never stops. It took me about two hours to get through it last night and all of that felt like normal gameplay. That works marvelously in every respect other than the basic purpose of a tutorial, namely familiarizing you with the controls. Several hours later and sitting comfortably at level 9 I couldn't say I yet have a firm grasp on more than half of the UI and only the very vaguest understanding of how stats and gear work. I got a pop-up once telling me I'd got an upgrade. Just once. What was so special about that item compared to all the other upgrades I'd already found is anyone's guess. As for systems like Crafting and Transmuting, trial and error appear to be the only tutorials on offer.

In this first phase only Humans are available. I picked the quasi-Soviet Stoigmari. The website has excellent lore on all the races but none of it is available during character creation, which ought to be rectified. Each character comes with family; a long-suffering elder sister and a naive younger brother in this case. Although amusing, clever NPC and background dialog is one of CoS's strengths, the comedy Russian-English accent of my character's brother Aleks makes little sense. Surely two brothers would be talking to each other in their own language and hence wouldn't make ethnically stereotypical grammatical solecisms? Never mind. It made me smile, that's what matters.

Once you reach Refuge, the aptly-named refugee sector of The Nexus, the previous long
section in which you find and clean your house seems to have vanished. The house is still there; you get it as soon as you arrive. You have to clean out both the clellar (which is much larger than the actual house) and the sewer beneath it before you can settle in. The debris on the floor and the empty bookcase and pantry remain but I didn't get the quests to fill them. Neither are the stores in town boarded up and requiring a quest to pull up the shutters. I'm guessing most of these quests may still exist; just further down the timeline.

And stay out!

Instead I found myself on a long main quest sequence to open the Sky Dock. I'm running around saying I'm helping the recovery effort while actually following a secret agenda of my own dictated to me by someone I don't know and can't see, who is talking to me on an ancient artifact I found. It's all very mysterious and quite relentless.

So far I'm enjoying City of Steam as much as I expected, which is a lot. As I also expected, it's a game to be taken in bites, not at a sitting. There's a good deal of freedom of action but only around a linear path and after three hours this morning I feel like I've done a day's hard labor. I do hope it won't be necessary to do the entire main quest line on every character just to unlock access to each area. I imagine it will, though.

Ah well, it's not like I haven't had to do that before.

Dinoville Calling : Dino Storm

Hands up everyone who's heard of Dino Storm. Now put your hand down if the first you heard of it was Beau's review at Massively. Yeah, me too.

Smile when you look at me, punk.

I'm always ready to try a new MMO, particularly if it doesn't need a download and registration doesn't ask for anything more than username, email and password. Dino Storm runs in a browser but there's a standalone client if you prefer. Either way, if you decide to give it a try you'll be riding your Dino and yelling yippee-ki-ay in a matter of minutes.

Doing what? Well, after a very brief and to the point session in Character Creation you'll find yourself dressed as a cowboy or cowgirl loping into the sprawling gold-rush town of Dinoville astride a lean, sharp-faced dinosaur. Doesn't look like the most comfortable of mounts but don't worry, bigger and better Dinos are coming your way. If you don't mind a little honest hard labor, that is.

Almost since I started playing MMOs I've had a habit of winding down the evening either with a potter around the low levels in an old favorite like Everquest or Vanguard or a quick run through something lighthearted or whimsical. The habit started with The Realm over a dozen years ago and since then many games have filled the role: NeoSteam, Rubies of Eventide, Ferentus, Eden Eternal, Dragon Nest, Argo...more than I can remember.

Recently when I'm done with GW2 for the night and my mouse pointer is hovering over the Neverwinter icon I've found it suddenly veering away to click instead on the Sheriff's badge with the reptilian eye set dead center. Neverwinter is fun but Dino Storm is funner.

Planning regulations? What planning regulations?

For a start it looks great. The colors are bright and cheerful without being brash or garish. The environments are simple but feel solid. The animations are smooth and fluid and the UI is intuitive and a pleasure to use.

Dinoville itself is a strange place. The dusty Old West buildings bristle with vidscreens  and where you'd expect to see hitching posts there are computer terminals. The Splitscreen Games website doesn't shed much light. Here's the FAQ entry on Dinoville in its entirety:

Dinoville may look weird but the tasks on offer there are very familiar. Kill those Smilodons, water these plants, deliver these letters. All the old favorites. The quest mechanics are excellent; slick, efficient, organized. On the left of the screen is your Game Guide which gives a very clear idea of what's on offer, who to speak to and where they are. Dailies and quest rewards appear there too. The quest dialog is short and pithy. It would probably seem bland if it wasn't for all the official dinosaur names; somehow being told to go kill ten Entelodons offers an off-kilter frisson you'd never get from plain old boars.

Morals are as lax as you might expect in a Wild West Gold Rush boom town. Okay, maybe not that lax - there's a conspicuous absence of Saloons and Dancing Girls - but in a game that's supposedly aimed at a young audience it's somewhat surprising to be asked to Roll the Bones and play the slots. Gambling's quite the thing in Dinoville. Best part is, it seems you always win.

Combat is very straightforward. Point your Laser Gun and get your Dino biting and down

You should the one that got away

things fall. Leveling is surprisingly slow. I've put in several hours and I'm only level four. Lots of goodies come your way when you level so there's plenty of incentive to crack on, not least the chance to upgrade to a bigger, better dino mount. Further in the distance lie all kinds of shenanigans. If I read the Game Guide correctly there's not only the prospect of controlling buildings and camps that can make you a fortune but there's open PvP over the ownership of said assets. Not to mention you can run for Sheriff. How that works I have not the slightest idea.

Will I ever find out? Will this be one of those MMOs I come back to in short bursts year in, year out or will I have forgotten it in a month or two? What about Splitscreen's other two MMOs, Pirate Galaxy and Steel Legions? Are they worth a look too? And more to the point, how come I never heard of them 'til now?

What else have I missed?

News Round-Up

News is not my thing, but sometimes a bunch of stuff comes along that demands attention.

Domino, the ex-EQ2 Crafting Dev has a blog that she rarely updates. It's on my blogroll but in no time at all today's entry will be pushed down out of sight by the many much more prolific bloggers and this is a post that deserves not to be missed.

In thirteen years of playing MMOs, Domino is the games designer who I have seen have the most dynamic, incontrovertible impact on any game I've played. With the blessing of Scott Hartsman, himself by far the most effective games producer I'm aware of, Domino took EQ2 crafting by the scruff of the neck and shook it into something tantamount to a game within a game.

Her introduction to the 2006 Ten Ton Hammer interview she reproduces says more about the MMO genre than a hundred Ask Me Anythings ever will. When she says "The dev team didn't have anybody who really understood what the players in this niche wanted" its like Toto pulling back the curtain.

I was beta-ing whichever EQ2 expansion was Beghn's last hurrah as EQ2 tradeskill dev and I vividly remember staring in disbelief at some of the things he was doing. In the interview Domino is incredibly professional even before she was a professional but I think the feelings of the craft community back then show through even so. Beghn was just awful. We would willingly have taken anyone instead of him and as we began to realize what we'd got when we got Domino in his place we literally could not believe our luck.

Incredibly, the same thing happened in EQ1 when Naiami Denmother's husband, the House Ogre Ngreth, took over from whoever had the revolving tradeskill seat before him. As far as I know Ngreth is still there. SOE take a ridiculous amount of stick largely because of that one terrible event when the NGE was imposed on Star Wars Galaxies (something that probably should properly be laid at the door of LucasArts) but my strong belief is that, as a company, they really do try to do the best they can. These two appointments prove it.

Then there's the announcement that the upcoming City of Steam beta will be open to all. This is reported on Massively by Syp and I'm more than willing to take his and their word for it, although I see nothing to that effect on the official website.

I don't want to oversell City of Steam but I've been writing about it since I was fortunate enough to stumble across it in pre-alpha. It just clicks with me. Unless something very strange happens, expect to see much more about it here after what we must now surely call Open Beta begins in  a couple of days' time.

Finally there's the latest video from ArenaNet. The two people involved seem very nice and I really don't want to say anything snarky, but let's just say watching it made me go "Oh, that explains everything!"

That's all from me, I'm off to DinoStorm, about which more soon.