Size Matters.

For once, I had a plan for today's post. It involved downloading Lost Ark, making a character, playing for an hour or two, then writing a quick rundown of my "Very First Impressions". If Lost Ark is anything like most other mmorpgs I've played  there'd be more than enough for a couple of thousand words, just talking about character creation. Sometimes I can get a couple of paragraphs just from the registration and download process.

As you can see by the lack of Lost Ark screenshots, none of that happened. There's a vey simple reason: it's a frickin' 72GB download! Steam estimates it would take about three hours. I suspect it might be rather less. I usually get considerably better download speeds than the 5Mbs they assume.

It wasn't the length of time it might take that put me off, anyway. I'm home until Sunday and I have nothing better to do than sit and watch a progress bar fill. The worst storm in thirty years is sweeping in from the West. It's a good time to stay indoors.

Seriously, it really is. Mrs Bhagpuss cancelled her work for tomorrow. She has to drive through a lot of country lanes and at best they're likely to be blocked by fallen trees. At worst one of those trees might fall on her. Even without the falling tree problem, our little car is light enough to be blown off the road altogether in the kind of winds we're expecting. Best stay home and play video games.

The Met Office has issued a Red warning ("Flying debris resulting in danger to life, damage to buildings and homes, roofs blown off...") for an area that stops short only a few miles from where we live. We're in the Amber zone, where the threat is slightly more nuanced ("A good chance that flying debris could result in a danger to life, Damage to buildings and homes is likely, with roofs blown off...") If I was a teacher I could get a whole lesson out of the way those warnings are graded by subtle use of qualifiers.

Amber or Red, I have no intention of going anywhere or doing anything for the next few days. I don't want to be hit in the head by a flying tree. I get enough of that in Chimeraland. I could happily sit in and wait for a game to download.

No, the reason I declined to press the button on Lost Ark was the sheer, bloody size of the thing. If I'd been eagerly anticipating it  the way some people have, a seventy gig download wouldn't put me off but it would still annoy me. For a game I'm not that bothered about in the first place it's enough to break the deal.

There have been several recent mmorpgs that I wanted to play a lot more than I ever wanted to play Lost Ark (Low bar, I know.) where the client clocked in around fifty or sixty gigabytes. I wasn't best pleased with them, either. Is it really necessary for these games to have such a Jurassic Park scale footprint? 

I'm pretty sure it's not. Oh, I know it's easy to make excuses, especially for games you like: the graphics are gorgeous... the world is so huge... there are so many systems... All things I've said about Chimeraland, which currently takes up less than 10% of the space Lost Ark wants to colonize, just over 7GB. 

If Chimeraland doesn't feel triple-A enough, how about the highly successful Genshin Impact, a game widely praised for its beautiful, sprawling, detailed open world? I haven't updated my copy for a while so it's probably grown some by now but currently GI takes up 25GB of my HDD real estate, about a third of what Lost Ark wants to throw a fence around.

There seems to be surprisingly little correlation between size of footprint, quantity of content, depth of gameplay or even visual sumptousness. Valheim, a surprise hit this time last year, only just creeps past a single gigabyte. New World, on the other hand, comes in at just under fifty. Having played them both for about the same amount of time, several hundred hours each, I'd have to say they feel surprisingly similar in many ways. 

I did many of the same things in both games and the many, many screenshots I took suggest that although their developers chose to employ very different graphical styles, the end results were closer than they might have expected. Each of them relies heavily on acres and acres of very natural-looking scenery, in which not an awful lot happens. Ambient wildlife, atmospheric ruins, weather and, especially, lighting effects do almost all the work. 

Valheim is procedurally generated. New World isn't but sometimes it looks like it might be. Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, has a much more hand-crafted feel. Painterly, even. Very little in the game feels random. Everything's drenched in detail, including half a dozen major cities. NPCs bustle about every map, following complex scripts. There's even a constant buzz of voiced background conversation. You'd think that would have to be more costly, not just in development time but in storage space on the client.

And yet, after almost ten years of continual development and two expansions, GW2 is only a handful of gigs larger than New World, where all the NPCs stand forever on their mark and only ever speak when spoken to.

It's about another five or six gigs larger at 51GB, to be precise. I'll be interested to see how that changes with the addition of End of Dragons later this month. I'd lay odds it still won't come close to Lost Ark's seventy-two big ones.

Lost Ark, of course, technically isn't new. It's been around for a while, having launched in Korea towards the back end of 2019. Its Wikipedia entry is remarkably sparse for such a massively successful title and I haven't been following the game in the least until these last few days, so I can't say whether there have been any "expansions" or expansion-like updates during that time. Even if there were, though, it wouldn't excuse this degree of bloat in just a couple of years.

Maybe it's because Lost Ark is viewed and played in isometric perspective. All the other games I've mentioned are 3D whereas Lost Ark is "2.5D", whatever that means. If so, it would be counter-intuitive. You'd think with half a dimension missing the footprint would be smaller, not larger.

Looking at a few comparable titles I have sitting on my hard drives that does seem to be a possibility. Divinity:Original Sin is over 50GB. Pillars of Eternity, despite the recommended spec asking for just 14GB, actually runs to almost double that on my system at 27GB. 

The real 800 pound gorilla in this room, however, isn't Lost Ark with its seventy gigabyte flex. According to Can You Run It?, Baldur's Gate 3 has a minimum requirement of 150GB, an insanely huge number confirmed by the most recent source I could find and, more to the point, by its own Steam page.

BG3, unlike Lost Ark, is a game I have wanted to play since I first heard about it. I've been patiently waiting for Larian Studios to finish writing the thing so I can jump on it when it leaves Early Access, where it is, apparently, looking very promising but far from finished.

After I balked at the size of the download, instead of playing Lost Ark this afternoon I spent the best part of two hours clearing some bag and bank space on the GW2 account I'll be using to play End of Dragons. There's bound to be a slew of new items I have no understanding of or use for but refuse to sell or destroy so I thought I'd get a head start on making room for them, so I can store them until the fourth expansion drops in a few years and delete them then.

It's a very lengthy process. I've been picking away at it for a week and I've barely managed to clear a couple of bags on a couple of characters. As for my bank vault, I think I might have freed up ten spaces out of the five hundred plus I've filled. (I already have the maximum permitted bank expansions because of course I do. Otherwise I'd just buy more, obviously.)

I'm sure it will come as no surprise to anyone to hear that my hard drives (All three of them.) are as rammed as my in-game storage. I have exactly the same tendency to throw anything and everything wherever it will fit, with no order or rationale to speak of. 

That's why I get annoyed when developers make things bigger than I think they need to be. If I'm incapable of showing any kind of restraint or responsibility, when it comes to keeping things in good order, surely it's incumbent on them to make the effort for me.

Since it seems most of them can't be bothered, I suppose I'll just have to do it myself. My new plan is to find some mmorpgs or other games I'm even less likely to want to play than Lost Ark and cull them from my computer. It would be nice if they were on Steam, not least because that makes them easier to re-install. Have to plan for regret.

Top of my hit list right now is Phantasy Star Online 2. Not only is it hogging a massive 101GB but it had the cheek today to ask me to find room for 3GB more. Not only do I never play the game, I don't even like it very much. 

The other obvious candidate is Atlas, a game I haven't played for three years and which I only ever played for about six hours, in total. I keep meaning to look at it again but I never do and I probably should admit I never will. That one's squatting on an incredible 111GB with an update pending.

Either one of those would allow Lost Ark to slip into an empty berth with room to spare. If I actually showed some self-discipline for once, I could get shot of both Atlas and PSO2 and then uninstall Lost Ark as soon as I'd had enough of it, rather than leaving it there to gather electronic dust for years.

If I did, I'd have enough room for BG3 when it finally arrives! What with that and having somehow managed to wring a two thousand word post out of not downloading a game, I'd say that would be quite the successful day.

Always Nothing Much To Say

For once this really might end up being one of those "short" posts I'm always promising. I don't have anything much I want to talk about but I didn't want to miss another day after I took Monday and Tuesday off while we took our first mini-holiday of the year. 

With the pandemic making proper travel far too unpredictable we're opting instead for random day trips with the odd overnight stay here and there thrown in as the mood takes us. On Monday we drove down to the south coast for a very enjoyable seaside break. The weather was positively Mediterranean, which made it very easy to imagine we'd gone somewhere more exotic.

It really was a short break although we packed so much in it felt a lot longer. We timed it all so neatly I  managed not to miss any of my dailies in Guild Wars 2. I did one lot around breakfast before we left and another just before bed when we got back. I suppose I could even have played an mmorpg while I was away - I have two or three installed on my Kindle Fire - but I didn't need much more entertainment than the sunset from our balcony.

Speaking of my Kindle Fire, it's starting to give me some concern. For the moment it will still take a charge, with a bit of fiddling about, but it likes to sit there bleating like a distressed sheep while it's doing it, something I find unreasonably disturbing. 

 

I tried several different chargers, one of which almost fried the whole thing, but eventually I discovered it's most likely the charging port beginning to fail, a very common design fault with Kindles. 

It's particularly annoying since I bought a Kindle quite specifically for the build quality, which I thought would be good. Certainly better than the several previous tablets I've had, some of which have developed faults on their own and the rest of which I've managed to break.

If I have to replace this one, I think the average lifetime of a tablet owned by me will dip below twelve months. I have a box of the things now. Some of them kind of work, in a way. Some are completely inert and I should throw them away. A couple could, theoretically, be repaired but since that would cost almost as much as the price of a new one it seems somewhat pointless.

It's getting to the stage where I do wonder if maybe I should just buy an iPad. The ridiculous upfront cost has always stopped me even considering it in the past but if I'd bought one as my first tablet it would probably still be working now. My iPod Touch is and that has to be at least ten years old. 

On the other hand, although the iPod hardware lasts forever, it's been a long time since anything much would run on it. The most recent version of iOS my Touch can use is so out of date there's barely an app left that will accept it.

 

But enough of my problems. Let's talk about Crowfall's. And Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis's. 

I imagine I'll have something more to say when Crowfall launches three weeks from now but for the time being I'm done with it. I found it a very strange experience indeed. As I wrote, I kind of enjoyed myself even as I was thinking what I was doing was utterly pointless. And quite possibly stupid.

The extended tutorial takes you all the way to the soft cap at Level 30. I believe you can do five more levels after that but to do so involves a bizarre necromantic practice by which you dig up body parts to upgrade your "Vessel", the disposable entity you've probably been thinking of as "my character". That's a habit you're going to have to break.

With increasing effort I pushed through to thirty. The entirely linear questline takes you just about that far although I did have to kill a few extra mobs along the way to fill out a few small gaps. It was fairly painless. Xp for mob-killing is decent and the sacrifice mechanic, where you throw items you've looted from mobs into a fire, gives significant bonuses.

At thirty the game sends you to the zones that used to be a separate world called the Infected, a tripartite Realm vs Realm set-up similar to so many others. As many people have observed, good luck finding anything to do there. I ran around for an hour or so and saw one other player. And he was on my team.

When I went to Reddit to see if other people were finding the whole thing as weird and ill-judged as I was (they were) I found many cynics recommending ignoring the quest line completely and just grinding mobs from the get-go. 

 

Apart from one or two obvious white knights, the near-universal opinion seems to be that the New Player Experience is about as useless as it could possibly be. It determinedly trains players to expect an on-rails PvE questing experience and then throws them into a game with literally no quests of any kind, where almost the entire gameplay consists of fighting other players. It would be disorienting enough if there were any other players to fight. It's completely mystifying when there are none.

The general theory appears to bethat the dev team, having given up any hope of making the game they were originally planning, settled for bolting something they could manage on the front and leaving it at that. I have no idea where the truth lies but I'm going to say right now that I can't see how this game is going to find any kind of audience after launch, much less make any money.

PSO2:NG is having very much the opposite problem. As MassivelyOP put it today, when they reported on the apologies and compensation coming to players very soon, "having so many players that it’s hard to play isn’t a bad problem to have". 

The lag that's had Sega handing out the goodie bags hasn't affected me at all. I'm not sure I noticed it even once. I was playing in EU hours on the east coast NA server but even so there were loads of people around and everything was silky-smooth all the time. 

I haven't played much since the last time I posted but I do keep thinking about it. I was trying to work out how I could have wrung the small amount of pleasure out of Crowfall that I did and it came to me that I just want a good, old-fashioned mmorpg leveling experience right now. It seems like a while since I last had a new character I cared about in a new game I didn't already know pretty well.

For the reasons I gave in the first impressions posts, PSO2:NG isn't going to be a game I devote a lot of time to but it might just have to stand in for that game until a more suitable one comes along. That might be Bless Unleashed, which I find myself almost pining for after my brief beta exposure, or I guess it could be New World.

Amazon are really priming the pre-launch pump right now, with press releases and lore and gameplay videos aplenty. It's all having an odd effect on me. I find myself less and less excited at the prospect of playing, not least because the game seems to be lining itself up to be the next Elder Scrolls Online, a game I never really got on with all that well.

I have an uncomfortable feeling New World is going to end up being one of those games I'll harp on about having been "so much better in beta". Not because it was better, of course, but because it was smaller, more manageable and less overwhelming. 

Really, all I liked doing there was exploring, gathering and fighting zombies. It was extremely atmospheric and very relaxing. I can't say the prospect of a full-on quest-hub exprience with instanced dungeons was what I imagined I'd be getting when I pre-ordered. 

Still, I'd sooner have that than what the poor sods who pre-ordered Crowfall are going to get, that's for sure!

Movin' Too Fast: PSO2:NG First Impressions Pt. 2.

When I came to look at the screenshots I'd taken for this, the second part of my Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis First Impressions post, I was a little taken aback to find how few there were to choose from. That could have meant one of two things: either I'd found the game so bland or downright unpleasant to look at I hadn't want to take any pictures or I'd been so engaged with what I was doing I hadn't thought to.

It was the second. PSO:NG isn't the most beautiful of games but it's definitely not an eyesore. The textures are a little strange, with that peculiarly scratchy feel that seems to be endemic to a certain kind of generic spaceworld setting but there's no shortage of striking views and spectacular scenery. 

I had plenty of time to appreciate that as I spent an hour or so exploring the hinterlands of the small central city. I was looking for things I could kill to grind a little xp. I'd stalled on the main quest sequence at a stage requiring a specific "Battle Power". That was literally the quest: "Achieve a Battle Power of 830 or greater".

I was already quite close. The obvious way to heave myself over the line seemed to be to level up. If I'd been able to find anything to kill it might have worked, too. Why I couldn't still puzzles me somewhat.

A handy pop-up appears every time you cross a zone line telling you what the new area is called and what Battle Power would be best to take on the challenges you might find there. The area immediately outside the city was flagged for BP 800. It sounded perfect. 

Shopkeep! Service!

 

It wasn't. All the mobs I could find were either Level 1 or Level 15. Absolutely nothing in between. At level five as I was, the low ones gave me almost no xp while the high ones killed me in a couple of hits. After I'd worked my way all around the city walls with no success I decided on a change of plan.

First I went shopping. I had a stroll around the city, looking at all the mechants. There were quite a few.

PSO2:NG has a penchant for interactions with NPCs for many of its systems and mechanics. Part of the tutorial introduces you to the game's method for upgrading weapons and armor. It's not crafting as such. I believe there is crafting in the game but no friendly NPC has popped up to tell me about it yet. 

The upgrade system involves merging similar items with the one you want to upgrade while using another item as a catalyst. To access the interface you need to go to an NPC. I had a few swords left over from the quest that explained the mechanic but I didn't think I had enough. I found a vendor who sold them and bought some more. While I was browsing I spotted a better sword than the one I was using so I bought that as well.

There was a small crowd at the stall where the NPC who ran the upgrade franchise was standing. I shouldered my way to the front and got to work. The first batch of swords didn't get me quite over the line but I threw in the one I had equipped, which I'd already upgraded for the tutorial. That did the trick.

It sounds fussy but I found it engaging. I don't know if later developments allow you to perform these kinds of operations through the UI but I kind of hope not. Going to a specific location in a city or outpost, be it an NPC or a crafting station, is something that eventually loses its appeal but in the early stages of learning a game I find it works well to create a bond between player and world.

Summer re-runs.

And it's quite a nice world, at least when the DOLLS aren't trying to blow it up. The small central city is a pleasant place to hang out between missions. I love the wall screens that show the opening cinematic from the game itself. That's a very clever touch. I stood and watched the whole thing play. It was a lot better without the music.

Ah, the music. Let's deal with that now the subject's come up. I rarely switch background music off completely in mmorpgs. I often turn it down so it really is in the background, where it ought to be but I still like to know it's there. 

Not so with PSO2:NG. I have heard plenty of worse tunes but few that distracted me as much. After the third or fourth time I found myself unable to concentrate even with the music turned down to a normal level, I turned it all the way down to not much more than a murmur. I doubt I'll be turning it back up.

Getting back to the city, I noticed an appealing bar with outdoor seating and plenty of benches. It's a shame there's no mechanic to let you sit down on any of them but that's something most developers don't see as a priority. 

The ability to sit on chairs is often touted as a sign a game wants to be thought of as roleplay-friendly. PSO2:NG doesn't immediately strike me as a game made with roleplayers in mind. Then again, it does have what feels like some solid lore behind it and the series has been running for a long time, so I'm probably talking through my hat here.

Oh, I wish I hadn't mentioned hats. I still haven't found a way to take mine off. I don't believe there is one. I'd re-roll but I'm not convinced this is a game I'll stick with long enough for it to matter. The reason for that is the combat. 

The only combat shot I was able to take and even then it's after the fight.

 

Not that the combat system is bad. It isn't, not at all. On the contrary, it's very good. Far too good for me. Even in the tutorial, fighting involves all kinds of special moves and extra key presses. When the game's trying to explain elemental weaknesses and specific location targeting at level five you know you're supposed to be taking the fighting seriously.

Combat training in mmorpgs tutorials is usually a formality. Hit this target dummy three times so we know you can tell which mouse button is which. Kill three goblins who probably couldn't beat you in an arm-wrestling contest if you took all of them on at once.

Not so here. I died several times in various combat trials during the tutorial. One instance went so badly I gave up and logged out - not in a fit of pique but because it was the only way I could find to reset the thing and start again. 

I had similar problems with some of the movement training. PSO2:NG is hyper-kinetic. You can run, glide, jump, double-jump, wall-jump... And you have to demonstrate your skills in all of them before the main quest will let you carry on. 

It took me a few tries to get a passing grade. The wall jump I found particularly challenging. It wasn't frustrating, though. It was fun. Part of the reason I spent so long running around the city was because I was experimenting with my movement skills and enjoying the freedom they afford.

There's even a side quest to climb to the top of a very high mountain. I took that and then wished I hadn't, at least for a while. But I persisted and eventually I found myself way up in the clouds with a solid sense of a job well done. It felt more somewhere between the sheer joy of climbing in Genshin Impact and the grim satisfaction of finishing a jumping puzzle in Guild Wars 2.

I've come across exotic movement and kinetic combat in other mmorpgs. The thing about PSO2:NG that makes it different is the way it rams both of them together. It took me a while to figure it out but the reason I couldn't kill some of the DOLLS I was faced with in missions turned out to be because I was naively determined to keep my feet on the ground.

Did they recast the Flash again?

 

Double-jumping and wall-jumping in combat seems to let you hang in the air for ages and ages. Fighting massive monsters involves using them like a springboard then pummeling them around the head and shoulders like a frenzied hawk. Or it does when I'm playing. Other times you need to be spinning them round and round so you can smack the weak spot in their back or running between their legs to stab them in the foot.

It's fast and furious and a lot of fun but it's also a lot of finger-work. I can handle it for a few minutes but the idea of keeping it up for a session is terrifying. And of course I ought also to be putting combos together and exploiting weaknesses and generally making good use of all my ever-growing bag of tricks.

That's not going to happen. I can barely hold my own with a big DOLL at level six. There's no hope of me being able to play the game at the higher levels, not even the easy solo stuff. Well, probably not. I guess I'll find out as I go along.

If I stick around, that is. I don't imagine I will. Compared to what seems to be expected of me here, other action-oriented games like Black Desert Online or Genshin Impact seem positively restful. 

My overriding first impression of PSO2:NG is that it's a strong, solid, entertaining game. It has excellent combat that I'm sure many people will absolutely love. Neither the graphics nor the story look set to win any awards for originality but the game looks good enough to justify spending long periods staring at it and it has a story that seems to be about as coherent and comprehensible as you'd expect. As an imported game, the translations are excellent and the voice acting (of which there doesn't seem to be all that much) is convincing. The UI is a little idiosyncratic but it works.

All in all I'd give it a solid B+ from the little sliver I've seen. As I said, I don't think it's really my sort of thing and I do have a lot of other mmorpgs to choose from, old and new, so I can't imagine I'll be devoting much time to this one. I'll probably give it a couple more goes then put it quietly away.

Don't let that put anyone else off, though. This is definitely the right game for someone. Just not for me.

Burning Down The House: Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis - First Impressions

There is such a thing as too much fun. Right now I'm struggling to keep up with the torrent of game releases, open betas and free weekends. It almost seems as if there's a new announcement every day. It's one thing to stay on top of the news, quite another to take advantage of the opportunities.

Just this morning, when I logged into Steam, I ran straight into another: five-days of Fallout '76 for free. It's a game I've never considered buying, although this would be the ideal time. It's on sale at 66% off. 

I've read enough blog posts about it to be curious enough to take a run around for free, though, so I dithered my pointer over the "Play Game" button for a few seconds before getting a grip. I do not have time for this. No, really, I don't.

The current glut of new games highlights a curious irony in the way I've engaged with the mmorpg genre since I started blogging about it nearly ten years ago. Way back in 2012, when the blog was fresh and new (well, new, anyway), when I was still in the process of leading all my hobbyhorses out of the stables and riding them around for everyone to admire, I wrote a whole post on how I don't like tutorials. And what have I done ever since?

Review tutorial after tutorial, that's what. I play a lot of new mmorpgs and write a lot of First Impressions pieces but half the time the tutorial is pretty much as far as I get before I lose interest and wander away. 

Judging by the costumes you start with, I'm guessing there's a cash shop full of outfits.

 

I was thinking about it this morning. I could quite feasibly start a blog where all I did was review tutorials. Most tutorials are good for a couple of posts; some can be stretched a good deal further than that. Throw in a few YouTube playthroughs and I probably wouldn't need to find more than a couple of games a month to sustain a regular posting schedule of two or three posts a week.

I don't in fact intend to start a second blog right this moment and if I did it would not be all tutorials all the time. If I did, though, I'd call it "Press WASD To Move". Who the hell would want to read it is another question but that's never been much of a concern here. 

Just as well because "here" is where all those tutorial reviews are going to keep turning up. Look! Here comes another! Brace yourselves.

Today's example comes courtesy of Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis. Like Fallout '76, this is a game I never intended to play. I remember being very mildly curious about the original Phantasy Star Online many, many years ago, mostly because mmorpgs were a lot rarer back then and PSO was not easily accessible to Western players.

I was never curious enough to do anything about it, though, and by the time the sequel appeared I'd all but forgotten the game existed. It was only when PSO2 received a very belated Western release last year that I began to pay it a modicum of attention. I probably wouldn't even have given it that much, had Belghast and one or two others not blogged about it a few times.

PSO2 scarcely had time to bed in before PSO2:NG arrived to replace it. The relationship between the two rests somewhat obscurely in the hinterland between sequel, expansion and revamp. I'll leave that discussion to someone more familiar than I with what came before. I'm just going to talk about what I've seen for myself.

Manon strikes me as a character with something of a backstory.

 

I played PSO2:NG yesterday for three and a half hours. That's a clue in itself as to how I felt about it. Three and a half hours is quite a long time to play a brand new game fresh out of the box. Developers used to cite statistics suggesting players often take not much more than a tenth of that time to make up their minds. 

When you consider the game uses a control system that would never be my first choice, has a setting that's never been one of my favorites, has scrappy, scratchy textures that generally feel slightly abrasive on the eye and, perhaps most tellingly of all, demands a level of skill to play effectively that I simply don't possess, the very fact that I stuck at it for almost four hours is probably all I need to say.

Yeah, that's not going to happen. I'm going to give chapter and verse on why I played for as long as I did and why it's more likely than not I'll go back and play some more.

The game opens with a swooping introductory video which I didn't watch because the music was so loud I was scrabbling for some way to make it stop. Once I'd sorted that out I had to pick a "Ship", a neat conceit for a space-opera game to use for servers, before it was on to the main event: Character Creation.

You can make two characters for free. If you played the previous version you can import that character. There are four races, all basically human, although only one is actually called "Human". Of the other three, one is a human in a mech suit, another is a human with horns and the third is a human with long ears. You can call that last one an elf if you want.

Like Crowfall, PSO2:NG neatly sidesteps any gender stereotyping by not referring to gender at all. The choice here is Humanoid Type 1 or Humanoid Type 2. It's going to be very interesting to see how this develops. I wonder if having just two choices is going to present a problem in the future, no matter what those choices are called.

Where did you get that hat, where did you get that hat?

 

There are plenty of options but the very first is a choice between three "Base Characters". DO NOT TAKE THIS LIGHTLY! I did and it was a bad, bad mistake. I picked the one with the funny hat because it lreminded me of the hat Michael Jackson used to wear when he was about twelve years old and I thought it would be funny. 

So far I have not been able to find any way to take the hat off! As far as I can tell it's glued to my character's head. She can change her hairstyle but she can't take off her hat. It's space magic of the worst kind. If I carry on playing I am going to have to re-roll because I cannot go through life, even virtual life, looking like that.

It gets worse. I spent a long time fiddling with the many sliders trying to get my character to look just right. I was pleased with what I saw in the editor but when I saw the same character standing next to the first two NPCs I realized what I'd done: I'd made her face as round as an apple. 

Compared to every other character I've since seen in game, NPC or player, mine looks inert. I'm not sure why, exactly, but her face neither moves nor has definition. If she could take her hat off I'd redo her - you get five hours to make changes for free, after which you have to pay - but the options available don't let you go back as far as the Basic Character. 

All in all I'd say Character Creation in PSO:NG is good but not great. There are a lot of options and you can make a reasonably diverse range of appearances but the controls are not always intuitive and mistakes are easy to make. Of course I may be bitter because that hat.

The game begins with a cut scene. I watched that and then I started playing with the graphics. You can actually do this in character creation but I was too excited to think of it then. I go a bit peculiar when I get my hands on a new character creator.

Mindful of my experience in Crowfall, I checked what default setting the game had given me.

Well, that seems harsh! Over the course of the next few hours I gradually ratcheted my graphics upwards until by the time I logged out they were on Super. The game looked better and better and my performance remained exactly the same. 

Movement was smooth and fluid, there was no hitching or stuttering, nothing flickered or glitched. The entire time I played everything felt as smooth as butter and just as sweet. Even when I arrived in the main city and there were other players everywhere my frame rate remained the same and I had no graphical or performance problems of any kind.

About the only difference I could tell was the fan on my graphics card had to do some work. Most times I play most games you can't even hear it. I checked the temperature and it was more than fine. I'm forced to assume whatever algorithm the game is using to determine appropriate settings is either ultra-conservative or just broken.

With that sorted it was time for action. In short order I learned how to move, jump, glide, fight and open boxes. My character and her two companions met, fought and defeated a DOLL, the game's oddly-named prime enemy. It was a good fight. We won. Then half a dozen more DOLLS arrived and a big, musclebound oaf with a bare chest leapt in to save us.

 

Here I am to save the day!

I confess I took against him. And the game, for a moment. It seemed so retrograde a scenario, the plucky but barely competent girls being rescued from the big bads by a brawny boy. I still think it's ill-judged but the revelation that the man was the father of one of my companions and the mentor of the other, along with his concern for his as-yet untrained daughter did give some ameliorating context.

As things progressed my concerns withdrew a little. The writing, while in no way original, is better than merely competent. There are some nuances. The voice acting is variable but the actor playing the big fellow makes him seem genuinely concerned rather than merely overbearing. Conversely, the other Meteorn (Just go with it. It'll take too long to explain.), my second female companion, turns out to be oddly reticent and uncertain. After a while I could see why intervention might have been deemed necessary. The three of us really wouldn't have been able to handle all those DOLLS.

After that it was on to the usual introductions. The big man, subverting his stereotype, went off to cook us all dinner, while I wandered around the village introducing myself to the locals, doing them favors and getting a series of short instructive lectures in return. It was jolly restful. I should have known what was coming.

I'd get those drinks down you while you have the chance...

The evening concluded with a cookout and dance party on the beach. With horrifying inevitability my host declared his intention to make absolutely certain no harm ever befell his paradisaical home or its innocent inhabitants... whereupon a vast portal ripped the sky apart and a fleet of spacecraft screamed across the bay, disgorging an army of DOLLS, which set up on the revelers with grim abandon.

We fought them. We beat them back. Then a gigantic spaceship like one of the Easter Island heads blown up to the size of a small moon arrived and began razing every building in the village to the foundations with blazing blue laser beams. 

My character and her two friends were told to run for the caves and we didn't need to be told twice. I could see we were so far out of our league we didn't even deserve to be carrying the oranges for half time. The big guy seemed to think he could handle it. I had my doubts. I was right, he was wrong.

Uh oh! That can't be good...

The first part of the tutorial ended with everyone but my character and her two companions either dead or missing, the village destroyed and a general sense that the world as we'd known it was at an end. Just like the end of every other Tutorial Pt. 1 in other words. This is literally the same basic plot as used by Blade and Soul, Bless Unleashed, Guild Wars, Allods Online... 

It gets used over and over because it works. At least, it does when it's done well. It establishes a connection between the player, their character and the world that feels comfortable, pleasant, desirable, welcome... and then it rips almost all of that away, leaving the player feeling something's been lost that they want back. 

Do it too well and you get pre-Searing Ascalon, a five level tutorial a whole load of players moved heaven and earth to keep alive forever. Do it badly and you get Rift, a confusing mess almost everyone hates. PSO2:NG does get it just about right, although I did come out of the far end wondering just how the hell the planet was going to survive.

No-one's walking out of that.

 

That's not the end of the tutorial but it's the end of this post. I think I was only Level Two when I came out of the first phase and the next introduces a whole bunch of movement and combat concepts that I barely managed to understand let alone perfect. I was Level Five by the time I got through that section and it deserves a post of its own.

Whether it will get one depends what else happens between now and Monday. We're going away for a couple of days at the start of the week so there probably won't be any posts here after the weekend. If I don't get the second part of this First impressions piece done before then it's going to be too late to bother.

In case that happens I'll say now that I was quite impressed with Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis. I don't think it's the game for me for quite a few reasons but I would bet it's going to be the game for somone. It's well-made and it has a good feel about it. 

Of course, I have only seen the tutorial, but I've seen a lot of those and I've seen plenty worse.

Bullet Time

There was no post here yesterday because I had to take my mother to the eye hospital to have a cataract removed. That went well but I didn't get home until just before dark so I thought I'd skip a day. 

It's only the sixth I've missed this year. Probably some kind of record. I'm not really sure. I find I'm less and less interested in statistics where the blog's concerned. In the early years I used to pore over them obsessively but as time went on my interest waned, partly because I felt they were becoming less and less reliable but mostly because I realized I just didn't care much any more.

That drift has started to accelerate recently to the extent that I began googling for ways to turn google analytics off. Oh, the irony! Didn't find any, either. 

I could just not look at them, of course. I was down to no more than a five minute glance at the monthly report but then Google started sending me emails. Quite snippy, they are, telling me things are wrong with my blog and I damn well ought to do something about them  because I'm letting the side down. At least that's how I take them. It might just be me.

At first I tried to comply with their peremptory demands but after a while I got irritated and looked into what might happen if I didn't. Apparently my rankings would slip and the blog might not show up in searches any more.

So be it. I think it's probably too late to worry about that now. If my intent had ever been to attract random page views I pretty much scuppered any hope when I started to insist on using incomprehensible and utterly irrelevant titles for almost every post. I even dropped the little coda I used to use saying which game a post was about because I felt it detracted from my obscurantist aesthetic.

I am planning on adjusting some of that attitude later this year. Indeed, I've already started, although more informative titles are about as far as I'm likely to take it. I am not going to be digging into the html code Blogger generates to correct the perceived anomalies that unsettle Google's crawlers. I would suggest that since Google owns both of them they might want to do it themselves if they're that bothered.

And with that passive-aggressive opening (alright, just aggressive) it's on to the meat of the post. Except there isn't any meat to speak of. More like a few table scraps. I have a few teeny-tiny topics that barely merit a paragraph, let alone a post. Time to break out the bullet points.

 

• Welcome to the neighborhood.
  

The EverQuest franchise has a new Community Manager. Since I thought it was worth a mention when the old one left I guess I ought to extend the same courtesy to the new one now he's here. His name is Accendo and yes, he is a he. Someone asked and he said so. 

Both the threads (old game and new) pour yet more praise on the departed Dreamweaver while putting pressure on the new guy to step up and follow his lead. Based solely on the answers Accendo gives I suspect that pressure will be resisted but we'll see.

• Oops! I missed one.
  

There was (at least) one obvious name missing from my recent list of mmorpgs to look out for this summer: Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis. Really trips off the tongue, doesn't it? Then again, probably better than Phantasy Star Online 2.5, which is what it seems to be.

I really wasn't interested at all in PSO2 (much neater) when it finally made its long-overdue debut in the West last year. Belghast wrote about it several times and it neither sounded nor looked like anything I'd want to play so I didn't bother. The revamped version looks considerably more interesting. It's been given a complete graphical revamp and from screenshots it looks orders of magnitude better. The old quests and combat have been completely replaced and the game now has a proper open world. I'm still not sure it's for me but at least now it looks interesting enough that I want to find out for sure.

It's available on Steam, although it's a huge download, just shy of 100GB. I have it all set up and ready to go so expect an ignorant, uninformed and highly inaccurate first impressions piece any day now.

 

• Dust on the lens.
  

Shintar queried in the comments whether I had my graphics settings for Crowfall turned down to the minimum. I said I'd check next time I logged in so I did and I had. 

Not my choice. I usually allow a new game to choose its own settings but if things look odd I go in and fiddle about. Crowfall didn't look odd, just bland. When I checked, though, I'd been assigned the lower of two settings: Basic. That didn't sound good. The only other option was Medium, which didn't sound much better. 

I swapped to Medium and it made a surprising amount of difference. There was nothing the higher definition could do about the exceptionally bland and undetailed design but it did do plenty for the lighting and the textures as should be evident from the screenshots. I'm guessing there are settings above Medium. There'd have to be, wouldn't there, or else you couldn't really call it "Medium". I assume the game has checked my aging hardware and decided anything higher would be a fire hazard. Probably best to bear that in mind whenever I say anything uncomplimentary about Crowfall's graphics from now on.

• How much?!

I took the hint and thought about upgrades. I forget how long ago I bought this PC but it could have been five years. It might even be more than that. And it was low mid-range then. Given the kind of games I play, though, it's very much more than adequate and I haven't seen much reason to change anything.

Until now. It's not so much that time's catching up with me. It's more that there are finally some new games I'd like to play coming on stream and they have recommended specs significantly higher than anything I can match. I probably should do something about it before I can't even meet the minimum specs.

With that in mind I went to look at new CPUs and graphics cards. I specifically bought a PC that's easy to upgrade with the intention of doing just that rather than replacing the entire thing. What I wasn't expecting was that I'd be able to replace the entire rig for scarcely more than the cost of the two key components. I'm not sure how that works but it makes me think I might as well soldier on as I am until the time comes to scrap the whole thing and start over.

And maybe Crowfall's an exception, anyway. New World's coming later in the summer. I never had any problems with that in the betas. It ran smoothly and looked amazing. If the release build does the same I think I'm fine for now. If not, I guess I'm going to have to spend some serious money.

 

• Garbage In, Garbage Out

In common with many of us, the Nosy Gamer has been wondering whether Final Fantasy XIV on its  way up might have passed World of Warcraft on its way down. As part of the evidence he referenced a website I hadn't heard of before: MMO Populations. 

I've always been interested in specifics on how many people play certain games but the methodology employed didn't inspire confidence: "By combining online social activity, sentiment tracking, public statistics, rankings and more MMO Populations estimates the total subscribers, players and active daily players for the top MMOs". Still, I thought it was worth a look.

I didn't spend very long on it. By the time I'd scanned through the "big list" of more than a hundred mmorpgs I'd seen as much as I wanted. 

The list includes several of my all-time favorites, including Vanguard, City of Steam and Fallen Earth as well as some I wish I'd been able to play, like EverQuest Online Adventures and others I yet hope to play, like Pantheon and Ashes of Creation. You'll notice all of those either closed down years ago or haven't yet been made available for general play.

According to the list Vanguard "is estimated to have 42,600 total players or subscribers". The detail does say that this month's estimate for daily players is zero but if you mouse over the graph on the same page, for June 2021 the figure is 1209. Even if they were polling the emulator, the most people I've ever seen logged on at once didn't hit double digits.

As for City of Steam ("estimated to have 4,865 total players or subscribers") 462 people supposedly logged in this week. Logged in to what is the question. As far as I know there isn't even a private server for City of Steam and believe me I've looked. I'd be playing on it if there was.

There are lots more fascinating facts where those came from. I'm sure I feel far more confident about Pantheon's prospects, for example, now I know that "12,484 people play per day, with a total player base of 1,314,070." Go have a dig for yourself. It's very entertaining.

 

And that will have to do for now. I have a feeling there were other burning issues of the day I was going to be flippant about but I can't remember what they were and anyway I want to go try Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis. Or PSO:NG as I'm happy to call it. It's  nice to say out loud, too, so long as you sound the "P". Otherwise you're just saying "song" and that's very weird.

Next week and the week after that I'm officially on holiday, although since I'm still furloughed the only material difference from every other week this year will be twenty per cent more in my pay packet. We've abandoned any plans for foreign travel in 2021 but I will be taking a day or two out of my busy schedule of staying home playing video games to go visit some interest spots a little farther afield than normal. 

We might even stay overnight. If so, that will almost certainly mean a few more missed posts, although maybe "missed" isn't exactly the right word. I'm fairly confident it'll take more than a few days of me not posting for anyone to start "missing" anything.