Ho Ho Ho No-Goes

As I mentioned last week, I've been working on this year's Inventory Full Advent Calendar, for which I've enlisted the help of several generative AIs. It's been a lot of fun, although honestly I could have come up with a better list of possibles just by randomly following YouTube links - and a lot faster. 

In fact, most of the better tunes I've found so far have come to me in just that way, even if I do have to give the AIs credit for providing the seeds that started those searches going.

I also said I was planning on not posting about methodology until after Christmas so as to avoid spoilers but I'm not going to spoil anything by writing about the stuff I'm not going to use so I might as well get a post out of that as well. If nothing else, doing it this way has certainly raised a few new flags about just how unreliable the AIs can be, even after you take into account their well-known weaknesses.

For example, Bing sometimes gets credit for showing its workings by providing links to its sources. Yes, I know I did say earlier that I wasn't going to get Bing involved, due to Microsoft Edge being so insistent on pushing every other browser into a ditch but it so happened I clicked a help link in Windows 10 Settings today and it opened Edge without asking so I thought since it was already there...

Before I get to what I've actually been asking the AIs to do, let's just see what happens if I let them recommend me Christmas songs of their own choosing. Here's a prompt I gave GPT3.5 just now:

Disregard any previous conversations on this topic. Starting afresh, please give me a list of Christmas songs suitable for a musical Advent Calendar to be published on a blog.

Certainly! Creating a musical Advent Calendar for a blog is a wonderful idea. Here's a list of Christmas songs that you can include in your Advent Calendar:

1. "Jingle Bells" - Various Artists
2. "Silent Night" - Traditional
3. "Deck the Halls" - Nat King Cole
4. "Joy to the World" - Whitney Houston
5. "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" - Gene Autry
6. "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)" - Nat King Cole
7. "O Holy Night" - Mariah Carey
8. "Winter Wonderland" - Michael Bublé
9. "Feliz Navidad" - José Feliciano
10. "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" - Pentatonix
11. "White Christmas" - Bing Crosby
12. "O Come, All Ye Faithful" - Elvis Presley
13. "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" - Bruce Springsteen
14. "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" - Andy Williams
15. "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" - Frank Sinatra
16. "Little Drummer Boy" - Pentatonix
17. "O Little Town of Bethlehem" - Sarah McLachlan
18. "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" - Brenda Lee
19. "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" - Traditional
20. "Sleigh Ride" - Leroy Anderson

These songs cover a mix of traditional and contemporary Christmas tunes, and they should provide a delightful and festive experience for your readers. Feel free to customize the list based on your preferences and the theme of your blog.

Festive maybe. Delightful? I hardly think so. Suitable for a shopping mall, perhaps. Not for this blog.

To avoid this sort of nonsense, I've been giving the AIs some clear guidance. My prompts have varied but the one I used for Bing, which I'd previously used at OpenAI, was this:

Please give me a list of some very obscure Christmas songs in the following genres - folk-rock, Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter, shoegaze, vaporwave, freakbeat, alt-country, Americana. The songs must be very obscure. Nothing that has ever been in the Billboard Top 200 or the Top 40 of any Independent chart. They can be recent or older but no earlier than 1955.

The most recent free version of CHATGPT available through OpenAI is GPT-3.5. Bing, which is also free to use, claims to be running on GPT-4. Which is better?

 

We'll see what Bing said later but first here's how GPT3.5 responded:

Certainly! Here's a list of very obscure Christmas songs in the specified genres:

1. Folk-Rock:

   • "Snow Queen" by The Mamas & The Papas
   • "Winter Night" by The Wind in the Willows
   • "Love Surrounds Us Everywhere" by Pearls Before Swine

2. Laurel Canyon Singer-Songwriter:

   • "Christmas Cards" by Jill Sobule
   • "Snow" by Judee Sill
   • "Christmas Morning" by David Crosby

3. Shoegaze:

   • "Snowstorm" by Galaxie 500
   • "Star Roving" by Slowdive (not explicitly a Christmas song, but has a dreamy winter vibe)
   • "Winter Song" by The Dandy Warhols

4. Vaporwave:

   • "Yule Log" by 회사AUTO
   • "Christmas 通路" by waterfront dining
   • "ふわっと、さようなら" by サクラSAKURA-LEE

5. Freakbeat:

   • "Magic Potion" by The Open Mind
   • "Don't Believe in Christmas" by The Sonics
   • "Christmas Tree" by King Khan and the Shrines

6. Alt-Country:

   • "Nothing But a Child" by Steve Earle & Allison Moorer
   • "Christmastime in Washington" by The Hold Steady
   • "Christmas in Nevada" by Willard Grant Conspiracy

7. Americana:

   • "Christmas Must Be Tonight" by The Band
   • "River" by James Wesley Stemple (not to be confused with Joni Mitchell's "River")
   • "Old Toy Trains" by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

These songs span a range of styles within each genre and offer a unique twist on the holiday season. Happy listening!

I cut and pasted every one of those into YouTube. Then I did google searches on all the ones that weren't there. It wasn't pretty.

As far as I can tell, a dozen of the twenty-one listed tracks don't exist at all. I can't even find an obvious point of confusion, like two song titles jumbled together or a real song by the wrong artist. It looks as though the AI just conjured them out of its twisted imagination.

Two are real but as far as I can see have absolutely nothing to do with Christmas or even winter. One has the right band but the name of the song is slightly off. Another is a genuine song but doesn't seem to have been recorded by the listed performer.

That leaves just five songs that are about Christmas, are called what the AI says they're called and have actually been recorded by the band or artist named. It's not a great result, is it? 

As far as the Advent Calendar goes, it's even less useful than that might suggest because one of the tracks (Don't Believe in Christmas by The Sonics.) I used last year and two of the other real ones are very much not to my taste. That leaves just two I might actually use, although I did find a few more from the YouTube suggestions that came up when I was looking for the non-existent ones.

You'll note that I didn't specify how many songs I wanted when I framed the query. I just vaguely asked for "a list". Bard and GPT3.5 both chose to interpret that as three songs in each category. I was expecting the same from Bing but I didn't get it.

Bing, as I have noticed before, tends to be quite parsimonious with its findings. Whenever I've asked it to work on the same prompt as other AIs, Bing's reply has always been the shortest. This time it outdid itself with its brevity. In answer to the exact same prompt, this is what Bing offered:

Other than the obvious fact that it's a third of the size, the first thing to say about that list is that Bing has a better hit rate when it comes to listing songs that do in fact exist. I was able to find four out of seven of those with no trouble at all. 

As far as I can tell, although the Beach Boys recorded an entire album of Christmas songs, "Christmas Time" is not on it. They did later cover Christmas Time (Is Here Again) by the Beatles though, so I guess we can give Bing a pass on that one.

I'm pretty sure Lush did not record a song called Snowfall, although it's bastard hard to be sure since all searches on the keywords are dominated by the retailer of the same name, whose odorous (Not to say odious.) products stink up the high streets of so many English towns. I can't even go into one of those stores without my eyes starting to stream so I'm not a fan. I saw Lush the band live at a festival once though and they were fine. Didn't tear up once.

Lush are also undeniably a shoegaze band; one of the best-known along with the likes of Slowdive and Ride. Bing is a bit hit-and-miss on genres in these results. I can't really see The Raveonettes as folk-rock... maybe at a stretch ... but The Monkees are categorically not freakbeat by literally any definition.

Some seem defensible. I wouldn't have lumped the Beach Boys in with the Laurel Canyon phenomenon but this is one occasion when Bing has backed up its argument with convincing evidence. That footnote, which goes to an article about the documentary movie "Echo in the Canyon", explicitly cites The Beach Boys as a key band in the movement. I should probably watch it, then I might know what I'm talking about.

While we're on the subject of Bing's citations, this is where I did actually learn something. Namely, don't trust the links they provide any more than anything else an AI tells you. You might well think that because Bing is providing actual links to its sources, they'll go to something that confirms what it said but that would be to fall into its trap.

Check them for yourself.
1. yourtango.com2. dw.com3. americana-uk.com4. vanityfair.com5. tayloronatrip.com

Firstly, six out of the seven footnotes assigned to specific songs go to the same online article: 30 Obscure Christmas Songs That Are So Underrated, compiled by Erin Watson and published by YourTango.com in December 2020. It appears all Bing did to fulfill the brief I gave it was lift almost all its results from another list. 

It's a bit like being asked to bake a cake for someone's birthday, buying one at the supermarket, putting it on a plate and then putting the plate on top of the empty box so everyone can see where it came from. And then expecting everyone to congratulate you on how clever you'd been to find such a good cake.

Except, to stretch the analogy far beyond breaking point, a close look at the ingredients would prove the cake couldn't have come out of that box at all. Bing may claim it filched six out of seven of its suggestions from that listicle but if you bother to read it all the way through, you'll find only one of them, Christmas Song by The Raveonettes, there. The rest aren't even mentioned.

I was particularly keen to find proof of the existence of Last Christmas by Saint Pepsi, a supposed cover of the Wham classic that GPT3.5 had already tried to convince me was real. It's not. None of the AIs seem able to cope with vaporwave at all, which seems somehow both appropriate and ironic at the same time.

I also searched in vain for any mention of the equally imaginary Snowfall by Lush, which obviously wasn't going to happen but even Low's quite genuine Just Like Christmas or the equally real Monkees and John Prine tracks were nowhere to be found. In some kind of doubling down on deceit, Bing seems almost self-destructively willing to refer doubters directly to the most damning evidence of it own lack of veracity. 

Even the footnotes along the bottom are weird. Only a couple refer directly to the listed tracks. The other two appear to exist purely to demonstrate that, yes, Bing does know more about the Laurel Canyon Sound than I do. It's not a competition, Bing!

Fortunately, I find all of this highly entertaining. More so than playing games right now, which is why you're reading about this instead of Tarisland. More positively, where AI is concerned, I've been having much better luck getting the image generators to come up with pictures to match the songs. That at least is something AIs are getting quite good at doing.

As for the songs, I have forty-three possible tracks listed so far to fill the twenty-four days of Advent plus Christmas Day. I might try to make it a nice, round fifty and post two a day or I might just winnow out the chaff and go with the best of the bunch. 

Honestly, that would probably be best. There's some strange stuff in there. 

However I decide to do it, It's going to be fun! No, really! It is! I promise.🤞

Notes on the AI used in this post.

Apart from the obvious. 

Header image: Dreamshaper Alpha XL2 (50/50) from the prompt "Inventory Full Advent Calendar . Rock & Roll images. Cartoon Art". I did a bunch of these and all the others were variations on an actual advent calendar but with no rock&roll whatsoever. This is all rock, no calendar. I thought that was preferable, even though every rocker seems to be some kind of mutant. I think I can see Keef and Roy Wood in there too...

Second image: Same model but at 50/0. Prompt. "The Beach Boys as Laurel Canyon folkies. 1960s underground comix poster art. No photos." Just looks like the regular Beach Boys to me. No sign of underground comix influence. Not a poster. Otherwise, exactly what I asked for...

Third image: Same model, also 50/0. Prompt: "Last Christmas by Saint Pepsi . Vaporwave" The AI clearly has no idea who or what Saint Pepsi is or might be but who can blame it for that? It does seem to have an idea what a vaporwave asthetic looks like, though. Nice image, anyway.

One For The Cheap Seats, Please!

A few weeks back, when Darkpaw announced pre-orders for the upcoming EverQuest II expansion, Ballads of Zimara, along with details of the various tiers and prices, I speculated that I might be up for buying the Collector's Edition, a snip at a cent under $70. 

It would have been the first time I'd bought anything other than the basic version but I've been in increasingly urgent need of a better Mercenary for a while now and the Collector's Edition includes a Legendary quality Mercenary, Familiar and Mount. It also throws in a new prestige home and a few other fripperies and honestly it's not a bad deal at all for a regular player. 

It is a bit Pay-to-Win but I think that ship sailed over the horizon years ago, not just in EQII but in pretty much every MMORPG I've played. I certainly don't have an issue with higher grades of Expansion Packs giving an initial advantage so long as the regular pack remains a viable baseline for normal play and I've never had a problem with that, so I'm good.

Usually I've been able to source the upgraded Mercenaries, Mounts and Familiars I want by way of in-game activities, whether from running regular instances or from special events or holidays. Over the last expansion cycle, though, I haven't really played as much as usual and also haven't always had the luck of the dice with RNG. I'm generally fine as far as mounts and familiars go but my merc is really starting to show his age.

As a result, I've been umming and aahing over whether to buy the Collector's Edition, without ever coming to a clear decision. The pre-order page cautiously confirms "expansion available before December 31 2023" so I hadn't been treating the problem with any kind of urgency until last week, when Senior Community Manager Angeliana confirmed on the forums the expansion would go live on 29 November.

That's only a week away now so I figured it was about time I made up my mind. A couple of hours ago, I ordered the base edition at $29.99. With my 10% All Access Member's discount and converted to Sterling, that meant I paid £22.61, which I consider a bargain. I generally get a bare minimum of a couple of month's play out of an EQII expansion, often a lot more, with the limiting factor almost always being how much I feel like playing EQII in general rather than any significant variation in the expansion content itself.

The main reason I went for the base edition in the end was simple. I just find it very, very hard to see any expansion to any MMORPG as worth more than £30-35, tops. 

For me, it doesn't really have anything to do with what you get for the money. It's all about functionality. It doesn't really matter how many extras the marketing department throws in - in the end I'm always going to be playing the game the same way I always have; dabbling, dipping, sampling and generally ambling through the available content, picking off the low-hanging fruit and feeling pretty good about it. Most of those extras I just won't need.

I know starting out with a full roster of current-expansion Legendary companions would have a material effect on the perceived difficulty of the new content but it's not like I find EQII expansions punitively hard. Sometimes there are a few speed bumps along the way but mostly it's a pleasant amble through attractive scenery as I follow the Signature questline to its conclusion.

It helps a lot that I'm never in a hurry to get there. We get one expansion a year and I'm very happy to take most of the twelve months getting to the point where I have nothing much left I want to do. Sometimes I find myself in more of an extended EQII mood and finish up the adventure and tradeskill questlines by the end of January but if I still haven't had enough by then I have half a dozen alts I can take through it all again.

Of course, for most people the questing is over in a few days at most. Then the serious business of chain-running instances and gearing up to chain-run them again at higher difficulty begins. Thanks but I'll pass.

Given all of that, you might wonder why I need to pre-order at all. I could just buy the expansion on the first day after launch, when I log in. To be honest, the main reason I pre-order is just to get it out of the way. It makes no material difference financially so "why wait?" is as valid a question as "why pre-order?"

The other reason is that, while we Standard Edition scrubs don't get much, we don't get nothing. The base edition comes with a boost to Level 125, something I don't really need, but also with a stat boost item I definitely do. 

There's one in every expansion. In the past it's been variously an illusion or a house item. Of late it's been a pet. Last time it was the aesthetically pleasing Takish`Hiz Peafowl. This time it's the less visually arresting Wroughtlands Smasher, some kind of elemental. 

I'm not all that bothered what it looks like, although I could do without the thunderous sound effects as the thing stamps about behind me. I'm more interested in how big an upgrade it is. This one comes with the usual, standard 10% bonus to every type of xp but there's around a 30% boost over the Peafowl to all base stats and better than that for Potency and Ability Mod, two of the real essentials.

That's a big help but I'm still going to need a new mercenary and the pack I've chosen won't do anything about that. The other reason I decided not to trade up, other than the cost, was a realisation that I already potentially have the means to solve that particular problem without getting out my credit card.

The cash shop sells bundles of Mercenary Crates (And Familiar Crates for that matter.) and I'm sitting on a pile of Daybreak Cash I don't know what to do with. It's true the crates are lootboxes - you don't know exactly what you're going to get and you might not get a "good" one at all - but you always get a merc of some description and my current merc is so far behind the curve, even the low-end mercs from the current season would be an upgrade.

As that suggests, the crates do come in "Seasons" and it's my understanding each season is an improvement on the last (Well, it would have to be, wouldn't it, or else no-one would buy new crates.) My tentative plan is to wait until the next season begins, then splurge some of my DBC horde on crates in the expectation that anything I get will be an upgrade.

It is actually a lot more complicated than that, what with Mercs having gear, levelling up and especially the fairly new "Mercenary Battalion" buff that accrues from a combination of all the mercs you own (I still don't really understand how that works.) but my main aim is to get a merc that can heal me more reliably than my current one, so we have fewer of the unnerving Hail Mary passes we had during the last expansion.

To give Zel credit, he's done a fantastic job up to now but the poor old lizard really needs a rest. I think it would be pushing it to take him into another expansion. Well, too far into it, at least. He'll probably still have to do the opening scenes of this one. 

I don't know when the next season's likely to start but I imagine it'll be a while before his replacement can take over.

The First Thirty Seconds Are Pretty Good...

I'm always saying I wish I could write shorter posts. Well, here's one.

It's a First Impressions piece on a new MMORPG-related game. It would be a much longer post if could play more than thirty seconds at a stretch. 

So far that's all I've managed. 

It's not because the game's difficult. It's not difficult at all. 

It's because it keeps crashing.

It's probably my fault. I'm not playing the game in the way it's intended. 

It's a mobile title, available for Android and iOS. I'm playing it on PC, using Bluestacks. 

It installs normally. It starts up just fine.

Every time I play I get a couple of fights in or I open my bags or I click on a reward and the whole thing freezes.

It's frustrating. It looks like it might be fun. 

From the little I've seen (The first three fights, mostly; the map up to what you could think of as the second screen) the mechanics are simple but satisfying. 

It feels good to play. Just not for long.

Gameplay is simple. It's just as well.

There seem to be absolutely no instructions at all. 

No tutorial, no tool-tips, no cut scenes, no explanatory notes. It just... starts.

The PC controls on Bluestacks work well. Your character follows the mouse pointer as you drag it. 

You click on two buttons (A sword for melee, a pistol for range.) to fight. 

To do everything else, you click on a Backpack icon to open a menu. Rewards, quests, level-ups and so on. 

Clicking stuff there is what caused most of my crashes.

I'd stop clicking there but it's hard to avoid. The fighting is sedate and steady but the rewards you get for doing it are manic. 

Mobile games seem to thrive on hurling rewards and power-ups at you. This one's no exception.

I'm guessing it must either slow down eventually or start costing money but it's only a guess. I can't keep the game going for long enough to find out. 

I think I started it seven or eight times before I gave up. More, probably. 

I tried different virtual machines, different settings. Nothing made any difference.

I suppose I should try it in NOX, just for the sake of science. Hold on a moment... 

Nope. Crashed there after about ten seconds.

Until I can get the thing to run, I think that's all I have to say about it. 

These are my First Impressions: Might be fun if it worked.

Oh, I suppose I should say what it is. It's Pirate101: Plunder Hunt.

Let me know if you get it to run, won't you?

Always Look On The Bright Side - More Tarisland CB2 First Impressions

MassivelyOP has a First Impressions piece up about the second Tarisland Open Beta that broadly correlates with my own experience so far. It's a tad more critical than I would have been but that's not surprising. These days, I often find reviews of just about anything - games, books, movies, albums, TV shows - harsher than I'd be.

It seems to me the older I get, the more tolerant I become, which I thought was the opposite of how that was meant to go. I can't tell if it's the wisdom of experience, slipping standards or just that I can't be bothered to get worked up about stuff that doesn't much matter the way I could when I was young sprat of fifty or so. 

Whichever it is, I like to think it's an improvement. Still, it's always worth bearing in mind, when you read anything here these days, I'm probably giving a pass to stuff more rigorous critics would call out - and that applies double to MMORPGs, where I find myself very easily pleased compared to how I would have felt a decade ago. So long as a game keeps me amused for an hour or two and doesn't make me swear at the screen I'm most likely good with it.

Which just about sums up my experience with Tarisland. Although I haven't been posting about it much, I have been playing the beta every day and enjoying it. Chris Neal at MOP calls Tarisland "middling but a solid and fun game" and that's about where I'm at wih it, too. 

One area where I would slightly disagree with Chris is in the localization, which he finds "as rushed and machine translated as most of the dialogue out of Black Desert. I haven't played Black Desert for a long time and I can't remember exactly what the English translation was like there but leaving specific game-by-game comparisons aside, I wouldn't say Tarisland's translation was bad.

It's not good. Don't get me wrong on that. It's inconsistent, for a start. It's apparent different individuals or teams have worked on different text delivery systems, so the feel and sound of in-game documents, quest dialog and voiceover can sometimes differ noticeably in both idiom and fluency. 

Also, Tarisland suffers from that somewhat annoying quirk common to almost all MMORPGs, translated or otherwise, that have both written dialog and someone speaking it, which is that the words you're hearing don't always mach the ones you see on the screen. It's perhaps unusual in that neither the written nor the spoken version has the edge over the other. They're both generally okay but it can be distracting all the same and it does look a little unprofessional, even if every game does do it.

By the general standards of English localizations of Korean and Chinese games, though, Tarisland comes in well above par. I can't think of a single time I literally couldn't understand the meaning and very few incidences of glaring grammatical errors or mangled syntax. Mostly it's that constant awareness that you're reading or listening to people saying things in a way that doesn't feel entirely natural or authentic.

And that's what's so weird about it, given Tarisland's unacknowledged but widely-recognized role model: I've always felt almost exactly the same way about the stiff, oddly formal sentence structure and inauthentic demotics of much of the quest text in World of Warcraft. That game often feels as if it's been written by a partiularly stuffy academic so in a peculiar way, Tarisland's stiff localization brings it closer to its source material than a springier, zingier, snappier conversational style ever could.

Chris is also a lot harder on the storyline than I would be, calling it "shoddy at the best of times". Well, it is. There's no arguing with that. Where I'd differ is in expecting anything better. Frankly, the story in almost every MMORPG I've ever played could quite reasonably be described as "shoddy at the best of times". The genre isn't the place to go for narrative depth, originality or nuance. I count myself lucky if the story even makes sense!

All the central stories in most MMORPGs are really there for is to act as a rack of hooks on which to hang combat instances and levelling opportunities. It's true some developers - Square Enix would be the first to come to mind - like to think of their games as story engines but the more successful at that goal they become, the more likely they are to drive players to skip the cut scenes or at least go make a sandwich while they wait for them to be over.

I've mellowed somewhat on story in MMORPGs, something I used to consider actively harmful to my enjoyment of the game, but I'm nowhere even close to wanting to have to wade through a sludge of ponderous, portentous, self-important narrative just to get to the next quest objective. I like my MMORPG stories to know their place and stick to the Three Fs - fast, functional and, if possible, funny.

Tarisland's questing gets two Fs on its report card. It zips along and it does a great job of getting me to new parts of the map I might not visit otherwise. As for funny, though, I couldn't exactly say it's a rib-tickler. I'm trying to remember a single intentionally amusing moment in either the MSQ or any of the many side-quests I'ver done and so far I'm coming up blank.

The MSQ is as melodramatic as you'd expect. It's one long existential crisis, studded with betrayals, revelations and dust-ups. As Chris suggests, it's main strength is some decently memorable NPCs - I really like Princess Catherine and Lorne's not bad - but the plot is pretty much the same plot as every MMORPG ever: everyone's relying on you, the player character, even though you just fell from the sky and no-one, least of all you, knows who or what you are. Now go find these McGuffins and save the world!

The side quest are a bit more interesting, if only in how reliably mawkish and sentimental they can be. Every MMORPG has a quest where you have to re-unite estranged lovers or act as a matchmaker or help someone commemorate a dead loved one but Tarisland sometimes seems to have nothing else. Oh, wait, yes it does. It has numerous NPCs who've carelessly lost something and need you, a perfect stranger, to get it back.

It feels like those tropes cover about 80% of all the side-quests I've done in my 33 levels so far. And honestly, it's fine. I've read all the quest text - yes, ever word of every quest I've taken - and I can remember, oh, probably two or three of them. I was interested enough in the stories they tell for exactly as long as it took me to kill the mobs or grab the items and bring them back and then I wasn't remotely interested any more. And that's just how it should be. 

Another area of the game Chris dismisses as not really worth the time and effort is crafting and gathering. I was going to do a post about that part of the game at one point but now I'm not. 

The gathering is about the same as it is in most games. If you like it in WoW or EverQuest II, you'll like it here. If you don't, this isn't going to change your mind. Crafting also looks like it's going to be fairly boilerplate but also sufficiently slow and grindy that I'm not about to devote the time to it in a beta that would allow me to make any meaningful comments on how it works, let alone whether it's any fun.

One innovation I haven't seen elsewhere and which I thought was both useful and intriguing occurs right at the start of your crafting career. When you follow the quest that sends you to speak to the various Crafting Guilds so you can choose your tradeskill (There are five but you can only learn one.) the game tells you just how popular with other players on your server each of them is. 

Since Tarisland is aiming for a largely player-driven economy, in which crafted goods will play a major part, that's potentially a highly significant piece of information and one I can't recall any other game having told me before. Since this is a beta, I picked the least-popular, Artisan, which equates to Engineering in WoW or Tinkering in EQII.

If this was Live, I wouldn't have touched it with a ten-foot pole. I'd have gone for Tailoring so I could make my own bags. Instead, I was swayed by the notion of being able to craft my very own Invincible Kitten mount. Obviously, since that's a high-end luxury item, I was never actually going to be able to make one in practice but I liked the idea that I could in theory. 

All of which speculation and hypothesis raises the question of whether I will play Tarisland when it goes Live. And the answer is... I'm not sure. I'll certainly play it  - it's F2P so why wouldn't I? But will I play it? Or, as Chris puts it in that First Impressions piece, does it "feel like a home game"?

Hmm. Probably not but only in the same way WoW doesn't feel like a "home game" for me. What WoW feels like is a "holiday home game"; a place I know and like and where I'll always be happy to visit and stay for a while but not a place I'd ever plan on settling down for good. I have a fairly lengthy list of games like that and as of now I can't see any good reason not to add Tarisland to that list, when it launches.

It's a fun game and I think it's likely to be quite successful. I can imagine we'll be hearing about it for many years to come and I wouldn't be surprised if some of that chatter comes from me, on occasion. I don't think it has any chance of becoming my next Guild Wars 2 or even my next Noah's Heart (Yep. Still playing.) but I'm betting it'll be in the mix, somewhere.

And that's why I'm probably not going to do all that much more in this or any future beta. I've already played through the first thirty or so levels twice and while there has been new content the second time around, most of what I've been doing has been repeating quests I did last time. I don't want to reach the point where I'm already burned out on the first thirty levels before I even get a permanent character.

That said, I am having fun, so I'm not going to stop altogether. I might just be a bit more circumspect about playing the beta "as live", which is what everyone seems to be doing. I get a strong sense there are plenty of people who wish Tarisland would just get on and launch already and I might be one of them.

We Want You For A New Recruit

When I saw last week that Digital Ink had revamped character creation and the tutorial for DCUO, I was torn. Half of me wanted to ask "Why now?" while the other half was yelling "About time!" 

DCUO has been around for well over a decade now. If I remember correctly, there's been more than one overhaul of each of these systems in the past. When you hear a company has spent time and resources on revamping the very beginning of a twelve-year old MMORPG, you have to wonder why they've bothered.

It has to be remembered that the considerations involved in changing the tutorial and the character creation suite in an ageing game are completely different. After a dozen years in service few, if any, MMORPGs are enjoying any kind of continued growth. Most of the people playing have been playing for a while and newcomers, if any, are most likely to be formers players coming back after a layoff.

Not many of those players are going to be interested in the tutorial, especially when the game allows them to skip it entirely as DCUO does, either going straight to the starting zone or, by way of a level boost, directly to endgame. I'm not sure why a company of DI's size, with limited resources that need careful management, would decide, out of the blue, to revisit the one part of the game you can almost guarantee most of your customers don't care a whit about. Then again, as it turns out, I do have an idea about that...

The finished article. Hmm. That's a name for another character...

Character creation, on the other hand, is a perennial and it's even more important in a super-hero game, where what how you design your character is considered crucial. DCUO is also reasonably alt-friendly, with a decent number of character slots, two major factions, multiple starting zones and mentors, and an extensive backdrop of customization options, including costumes and housing. It's more than likely that seasoned players will be revisiting character creation repeatedly throughout their time with the game.

As I say, super-hero games do rely more than most on having a lot of options at character creation. The demographic that's drawn to the sub-genre tends to enjoy spending hours designing both costumes and power sets, not to mention trying to re-create their favorite branded heroes and villains with as much verisimilitude as possible. 

DCUO's character creation has always felt cluttered and confusing to me. I've been through it many times and the expreience has rarely felt great. I often couldn't find what I'm looking for in the overcomplicated menu system and when I did, it frequently didn't look like I hoped it would or even like the description suggested it should.

Back when the game began, it used to be even worse, although I can only vaguely remember why. The original version was even more clunky, that much I do remember, but it was a long time ago and it's all a bit of a blur. The version we've had for a while wasn't as bad but the new one is a lot better again.

All the relevant information, tidily presented.

Gone are all those confusing, nested menus with their arcane subroutines and overdramatic aesthetics. Instead, there's a brief list of top-line categories at the head of the screen and a neat, simple menu of major options on the left. 

When clicked, those in turn reveal another very straightforward set of more detailed choices for each subcategory. No more of the old version's spinning wheels and swooping arcs and good riddance to them all. The revamp may not be as flashy or futuristic but it's a heck of a lot easier to navigate and easier on the eye, too.

Visually it's a clear win. Functionally, my impression is that it's a great improvement too but I'm a very occasional and casual player. The feedback thread on the forums from when the update was on the Test server (There's absolutely no indication on the regular forums that anyone else has even noticed the changes.) points out a number of drawbacks I didn't notice. Some are nitpicks but others seem quite significant, like many of the Style options not becoming available until you get into the game itself and there being no option to change the colors of your outfit, something that seems like a rather surprising omission. 

The testers also know far more than I do about the costume changes and additions, most of which I wouldn't have been able to pick out of a line-up. I did notice a generally improved level of detail, though, and some of the really awful clothing choices seemed to have been consigned to the recycling bins, thank god. I wouldn't say I was overwhelmed by the choices on offer but consider me decently whelmed, at least.

When you select a power, there's a visual demonstration. (Where appropriate.)

I went through the full customization but you can skip the fine tuning if you just want to get on with the game. The new character creation suite includes a number of templates based on iconic characters like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman or Lex Luthor. You can just pick one of those, maybe make a few, quick cosmetic changes and you're done.

There are also now some indications of "difficulty" although as some commenters in the thread point out, it's not really clear what makes one archetype, power set or weapon choice more or less difficult than another. Then again, I guess blasting enemies with fire, ice or electricity is always going to be pretty straightforward compared to fiddling around with gadgets or learning to perform a martial art to such perfection it counts as a super-power.

All things considered, I'd definitely call the Character Creation revamp a success. What's more, I can easily see the reason for it. The tutorial, which I played through immediately afterwards, I would also classify as a considerable improvement but the reason for doing it is less readily apparent.

It's not like there wasn't a viable tutorial already in place. DCUO has always had one although it has changed several times over the years. I've played through different versions but I don't have a clear memory of any specific iteration. They all merge into one. As far as I can remember, the gist of the thing has always been the same: Escape From Brainiac's Ship.

That looks hugely more impressive than what I remember of Brainiac's old ship.

You log in to the game for the first time in the ship as it hangs above Metropolis. You fight your way through waves of drones, bots and minions, encouraged by Oracle over a comms link, until you draw the attention of Brainiac himself.

 Superman is there to assist you although, somewhat unconvincingly, he expects you to do most of the work. Eventually, after a lot of fighting and a stream of typical tutorial instructions on how to do some very basic things, you either either defeat Brainiac/blow up the ship/escape or something of that kind. As I say, despite having done it a bunch of times, I forget the exact details and anyway I think they've changed more than once.

The new tutorial is basically that but faster, tighter, slicker and a lot more fun. I remember the earliest version being a slog and later ones still taking a while. This one zips along. The fights are easy, there are a lot of bots but they die fast, there are some nice set pieces and the final battle with Brainiac is quick and satisfying.

Of course, that's my impression as a casual. Almost everyone in the Test feedback thread disagrees. Some of the detailed criticisms are very valid, like there not being time to study the tooltips before the fighting starts or things being mentioned that are then not explained. The bulk of the complaints, however, seem overly concerned with the tutorial's ineffectiveness at preparing new players for DCUO's admitedly challenging endgame.

Good to be able to see out the windows at last. And to have windows.

This I find bizarre. Who expects a tutorial for brand new players to teach endgame tactics and gameplay? Why should it? This is the same tutorial that begins by telling players how to use WASD to move! Having bounced hard off even some of DCUOs simpler group content, I completely get the need for some kind of introduction to its quirks and complexities, but a New Player Tutorial is not the place for any of that. 

Call me old-fashioned (Actually, I'd rather you didn't. Seriously.) but isn't that what those first thirty levels are for? And, yes, I know the game positively encourages you to skip the levelling process with a Level Boost these days but that just suggests there should be a separate, high-end tutorial that comes with the Boost, not that you should scare the capes off the genuine newbies by throwing a a whole load of endgame detail at them on their first day.

What almost everyone does seem to agree on, and you can count me among the crowd, is that the new tutorial is a huge graphical improvement. Everything in it looks way better than it used to. The surfaces and textures all look sharper, the ship's rooms and corridors look more luxurious and most impressively of all, you can see outside!

Brainiac's ship has always been a looming presence in the game itself, hanging threateningly in the sky above Metropolis. Now you can look out of the portholes to see the great city laid out beneath you as you speed through the corridors, seeking your escape. It makes the whole thing feel more immersive and makes your predicament that much clearer.

Like the revamped character creation tools, the new tutorial isn't flawless but it's certainly an improvement. Unlike character creation, however, it's a lot less easy to see why it was deemed necessary. 

I'm no engineer but should it be sparking like that? And on fire?

As those testers say, it does nothing for anyone seeking to learn how to play the game beyond a basic, introductory level, so it's not going to be much use to current players looking to refine or improve their skills. It has to be meant solely for new or returning players and frankly I can't imagine many returnees bothering to go through it when there's a Skip Tutorial button right in front of them.

That really just leaves brand new players. Are we to imagine Digital Ink thinks there's a sufficient number of people who've never played the game before to justify this use of resources? I suppose we must. They've just done it, after all.

Thinking it through, there is one reason that makes sense: it has to be aimed at a hoped-for influx of new blood from the upcoming launch of the game on the newest generation of consoles, PlayStation 5 and XBox Series X. According to the Development Update issued in August, that's happening "this Holiday Season", by which I think they mean next month.

DCUO has famously done very well for DBG on consoles and those consoles have themselves been selling like crazy, at least when would-be players could get hold of them. It looks as though the developers have decided to do their damnedest to make a good first impression with all those juicy first-timers that might roll in when the game appears on the new tech.

I always take a selfie in front of Bibbo's billboard.

And that seems like a sensible use of resources. If a lot of people get shiny new consoles under the tree, perhaps at least some of them will give the old game a try. There's more competition on consoles for MMORPGs than there used to be but DCUO does at least have the advantage of a major IP that almost everyone likely to get a games console for Christmas is likely to recognize - and it's free!

I'm not getting a PS5 but I might play, too, at least for a while. Inevitably, in making what was supposed to be a throwaway character just to see what had changed, I've ended up with one for whom I already feel a mild affinity. I mean, just look at the name I came up with - The Foxecutioner! With a name like that, I pretty much have to play her, at least for a while.

I might even try to play her properly; figure out what all these "Rock, paper, scissors" references are all about; see if frying baddies with electricity is more fun than setting them on fire...

At the very least, I need to get her to Level 9 so she can have her base. Shouldn't be hard. She's Level 5 just from doing the tutorial.

And that's how they get you.

'Tis The Season

Wow! Has it been two weeks already? Seems like a lot less than that since I last posted about what I'd been listening to lately. Oh, wait... that's because I keep shoehorning songs I like into posts that have nothing to do with music! It's almost like what I listen to is part of some kind of organic whole or something. Crazy, right?

Anyhoo...

Stuff's been piling up. Better release the pressure before something blows.

Oh, before I begin, I'm sure you'll all be glad to know I've been working on my musical Advent Calendar and this year I've got help. AI help. 

I asked Bard first but that didn't go well. All Bard does is make stuff up. Then I went to ask Bing but apparently you have to go through Microsoft Edge for that now (There are workarounds but they're too fiddly-diddly to be bothered with.) Edge is like fricken' ivy. If you let it get a toehold you're scraping it out of the cracks for a week so screw that. 

CHATGPT4, though. That one works. It was a lot of help, came up with some great suggestions. Give it a snappier name, it'd make a great imaginary friend. Oh... there's an idea...

I'd love to do a post about the methodology involved (Hah! Like there is one...) including all of Bard's funny little ideas, but it would be spoilerific so I'm going to save it for a postscript when Advent's over. Meanwhile, that's what I'm working on. 

Obviously, I'll be getting the AIs to help me with the pictures this year, too. That'll be loads more fun than trawling through endless pages of crappy royalty-free Christmas "art", searching for the 0.01% that doesn't make me ill just looking at it. Also, the results will be orders of magnitude better. Oh, brave new world...

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. But first, before we deck those halls, let's clear these decks!

Suburban House - Holly Macve (Feat. Lana del Rey)

Since we're in a seasonal mood, let's start with this gorgeous slice of wintery despair. I was previously unaware of the existence, let alone the work, of Holly Macve. I try not to think about how many bands and singers I've never heard or even heard of. It terrifies me.

Holly worked with Colin Dupuis, who worked with Lana on Ultraviolence. Lana said in an interview Holly would be her pick to play Lana in a biopic. Pop music is like this now. I imagine it always was. Actually, when I think about it, I know it always was. Nothing much changes, does it?

Alma Mater - Bleachers

Well, some things do. For example, Bleachers made a song I can listen to twice. I never thought it would happen. For all Jack Antonoff's close involvement with some of my favorite music of all time, I've never heard anything by his band I didn't find bland and uninteresting - until this. 

Granted, it sounds like an American Analog Set demo, except for the parts where Lana chips in, but that's what I like about it. Co-writing credit for the two of them, too.

Satellite of Love - Snail Mail and Thurston Moore

For my birthday I got Ezra Furman's extended essay on Lou Reed's Transformer, the 1972 album from which Satellite of Love comes. I haven't read it yet but the chapter on Satellite (Each track gets its own chapter.) is called "Lou and Pop".

I'm not sure it's exactly "pop" but it's certainly one of the most commercial tunes he ever wrote. Given that Transformer represents one of the peaks of his commercial success as well as housing both of his Big Pop Hits (Walk On The Wild Side and Perfect Day but you didn't need me to tell you that.) it's always puzzled me this one didn't chart too.

There have been many covers and most of them are better than this one but I love how ragged it is, especially since it exists primarily as a promo for Fender guitars. Snail Mail (I'm guessing we aren't supposed to call her Snail, like it's her first name...) is wildly off-key at times and Thurston doesn't seem to wake up until close to the end and yet the sum of the thing is so much greater than those shaky parts. 

It's sloppy genius. As Furman says right at the start of the chapter on this song, "Lou Reed is a control freak". He'd have hated it. But then he hated everything. It was part of his charm.

How Could You Let Me Go - Vashti Bunyan & Devendra Banhart

Okay, I can see where this is going. This is what you get for opening with bleak, bleached-out, winter chill full of despair and loss, then follow it up with ennui, regret and more despair. It sets a mood and that mood sure ain't Christmas. I suppose we're going to have to get it all out of our systems before we can move on to the fun stuff.

There will be fun stuff... won't there?

070 Shake - Natural Habitat ft. Ken Carson

Yes, Virginia, there will be fun stuff. But first you have to eat your greens.

When he says "Kerosene. Kerosene. Kerosene", doesn't it make you think of this? 

Now that was a band that really knew how not to have fun.

String Machine - Gales of Worry

Ah, that's better. I think we're easing out of it now. This is what they like to call "bittersweet" isn't it? I guess all Americana is kind of like that. Filled with nostalgia and tinged with regret but still looking to tomorrow with a glimmer of hope.

It's a bit weird, the way he looks a little like Andy out of Parks and Rec and sounds a little like Craig Dermody from Scott and Charlene's Wedding but I'll take it.

Chanel Pit - Tierra Whack

Do you think she means "Charnel Pit"? I mean, the lyrics would support it. But no. She means Chanel. Oh, she's the smart one. I love Tierra Whack. Never heard one bad track by her.

Also, now I come to listen closely, this might only be fun until you listen closely.

<Listens closely>

Nah, it's still fun.

Rodeo Tragic - Partner Look

I'm tempted to put this one in the "Too clever for its own good" bin but I'm giving it a pass for the horsey.

Highways - Pony Girl

Oh god, we're just going backwards now but I typed "horsey" and thought "pony" and here we are. 

Is this the same Pony Girl that did Candy that I posted back in August? It is! Score another for Canadian Art-Rock. 

Billy - Horsegirl

Why fight the inevitable? This has one of those long noise intros that I'm not over-fond of but stick with it. Once the actual song arrives it's magnificent. Which is more than you can say about the sound quality but it's Jarrett with his iPhone again. 

Okay, I don't know he has an iPhone. 

I bet he does, though.

Tanto - Cassie Marin

Ok, time to bring it home. Always leave 'em laughing. Or at least not curled in a corner in the fetal position.

Of course, I have no idea what she's singing about. Could be pure nihilism for all I know, not that that's necessarily a bad thing. 

The title means "So much" if that helps. (Unless it's the Japanese dagger but I doubt that. I had one of those in EverQuest, I think. I always wondered what it was. It was tiny.)

Rodney - Birthmark

The Talking Heads is strong in this one, which falls into the category of making lemonade. Also the best of it. And laughing at yourself to stop from crying. All of that.

It would work just fine on daytime radio with no-one really listening to the lyrics and the video is funny enough to cover. Then again, no-one's going to be programming a song called "Rodney" on daytime radio.

Nothing Lasts Forever feat. Grimes - Svedaliza

So true. Including this post. Not actually what I was planning to go out on but everything else I have is a downer so... 

 

A Note on the AI used in this post.

Not much. Just the header image, which is by RealCartoon XL v4, a model based on SDXL 1.0 It's the third iteration from the prompt "Lana del Rey and Tierra Whack sharing hot chocolate in a snowy winter scene. Cartoon." Weights are 50/20/50. Yes, there are three weights now.

DIng! Ding! Round Two! - Tarisland CB2 First Impressions

Tarisland Closed Beta 2 - Day Two. Ding 20!

It sounds like a lot but the first of the Day One goals for the Seven Day Goal Perk is "Reach Character Level 20" so I guess it's not.

Since this isn't Steam, I can't say exactly how long I've played so far. I was having fun so I wasn't counting the minutes but I'd guess it's been something like two or three hours altogether.

 Probably three. We'll say three.

By "Complete a craft" they mean "Choose one". It's a single click...

I was a few hours late logging in after the test started yesterday. When I got there, I was faced with a choice: a drop-down menu offering the option of making a character on the NA Server Cluster, EU or a couple of others. 

In the first Closed Beta, the UK defaulted to the North American servers but this time location trumped  language and I was pointed towards Europe. I demurred. My preference is always to play on American servers whenever possible. It's a cultural thing. Also my ping to the East Coast is fine. 

Tarisland isn't region locked, thankfully, so it was always going to be my decision, but there was another factor to consider. An indicator warned me how populated the servers were. The EU server was green; the NA server was amber. 

Actually, I think. It might have even have been red. I should have taken a screenshot. Anyway, it was clear NA was a lot busier than EU so I decided, since it was only a beta, to go against my principles and stay local. 

When I did, this is what I got:

Bait & Switch

That's the EU server. You can see it selected, faintly, at the bottom of the shot. 

Oh well. If I was going to have to wait, might as well wait for the server I actually wanted to be on. I cancelled and re-selected NA... and logged right in. No queue whatsoever.

Either I misread the population screen or the colors didn't mean what you'd think they'd mean or I should have submitted a bug report. One of those. Whatever. Didn't care. I was in. 

Next hurdle; make a character. 

I was perfectly happy with the Hunter Bard I played last time and I would have made her again, only I thought for the sake of the blog I probably ought to try one of the new classes. There was a bit of confusion when I thought the new ones were called "Phantom Necromancer" and "Shadow Swordsman" but I got that sorted out and picked the one I wanted.

You mean I have to carry this thing with me all the time?

The one I wasn't interested in is indeed the Shadow Swordsman. The one I was after, the one with the lantern and the moths, the one I wrote about in a post a few days ago, when I did in fact refer to her as the "Phantom Necromancer", is actually the Phantom Priest. 

She is a Necro, in that she summons undead, but she's also a healer. It's an interesting hybrid that reminds me a little of Vanguard's Bloodmage, although not a lot since, like all Tarisland's classes, it's nowhere near as original or unusual as that flattering comparison suggests.

Still, it's a decent class from what I've seen. The whole "Kills things with moths" thing that came up via the promo video turns out, sadly, not to be true. Well, it might be somewhere there in the visuals if you zoom in closely enough but moth-wrangling plays no substantive part in gameplay that I could see. The moth is a myth.

Tyler Edwards let drop the fascinating fact in the comments the other day that "purple emperor butterflies are attracted to corpses", something that turns out not just to be true but to be even weirder and more macabre than it sounds. Off the back of this startling revelation, I decided to call my new character Purple Empress. 

Butterfly in the rain.

I didn't expect to get that name and I didn't but only because it was too long. I thought again and with no more hope of success went for Butterfly. To my amazement, no-one had nabbed that yet, so Butterfly is who I am for the next two weeks.

Character creation didn't take long because there aren't all that many options. Once in game everything zipped along much the same as last time, at least from what I could remember, which was never going to be much when we're talking about something that happened four months ago. 

By the simple expedient of not reading any quest text, I got through the Tutorial and the section of storyline that takes place in the main city in something like less than half the time it took me before. I found I could remember roughly how the plot went and it all seemed about the same to me but if there were any subtle changes, I would have missed them, going at that pace. Probably not really pulling my weight there as a beta tester but hey, I filled out that long-ass survey again, so don't judge me!

All of that got me to Level 16 in my first session. After lunch today I played for another hour or so and made it as far as Level 20. Again, thngs seemed much the same, although crafting looked to have been hugely fleshed out and there was a whole new thing about Inscribed Stones. I'll probably cover those seperately in another post. I definitely have something to say about the crafting.

When I hear the name "Gaia", somehow I imagine something very different...

Once again, I was struck by just how slick the game is. It's very polished for a closed beta. Also very busy. I suspect this game is going to be quite popular. There were people everywhere. General chat was so crazy I had to tab out to Guild (I'm not in a guild so that was nice and quiet.)

It was apparent from the constant jabber on LFG and other channels that a lot of people aren't just goofing around in a silly beta for some game they'll never play again; they're setting themselves up for Live. Guilds weren't just recruiting, they were setting application criteria and touting their benefits, just like in a real game. The intention was clearly to build up a critical mass of members and hit the ground running whenever launch arrives.

When I filled out that survey, I made sure to tick every box that mentioned "casual" or "fun" or "explore" or "story". I get the strong feeling that Tarisland doesn't just want to look and feel like modern-day World of Warcraft, it wants to attract the same demographic so any effort I can make to mitigate against that happening seems like it would be worth it.

It's not the greatest story ever written but I'll take it over running dungeons any day.

The wild card here is cross-platform play. WoW does not have to concern itself with the different needs and desires of desktop and mobile players; Tarisland does. I'm not entirely sure how compatible those two broad groupings are. Since most everything has to be cross-platform these days, I guess we'll soon find out.

That's about as far as I've gotten up to now. I think I was either in the high 20s or low 30s when the last test ended so I have some way to go before I start seeing new content. I think I'd better slow down a tad and pace myself, not least so I can give myself a chance to notice if anything's changed.

Another reason to drop the pace is I have no real idea how to play this new class I've chosen. The Bard was much easier to come to grips with quickly. The Phantom Priest seems quite fiddly by comparison. I quite fancy joining LFG as a Healer but I'm going to have to read some tool-tips quite carefully before I try anything ambitious like that.

Meet here tomorrow and we'll carry on from where we left off.

Luckily, the class can dual-spec as DPS. I think that might be safer at first. No-one cares what the DPS is doing, especially in a beta.

One thing that's definitely the same as last time is I'm having fun. It's a very enjoyable game, at least for a week or two. I can already say that having just the one starting area and funnelling every character through the same questline is going to make alting very annoying, so I'm not sure I'd find a lot of replayability in Tarisland, but for a single character it looks like a potential runner.

And now, I'm off to kill a few gnolls, make a few levels and see if I can't get a better mount than this clumsy, great rhino. It's always nice to have goals.

More as I discover it. Until then...