LFG? That's So Old School!

In a post about how he prefers playing ARPGs over MMORPGs these days, Belghast gave as one of the reasons the advent of "an era of progressively forcing you more and more into group gameplay". That surprised me somewhat. I'd have said the genre was still moving relentlessly in the opposite direction.

It's certainly true that there's been a proliferation of projects claiming to represent  a return to a lost golden age, a time when clearing even the smallest camp of Kobolds required a party of six, but all of those games are coming from independents, often with very small teams and limited resources. Most haven't even reached beta after years of development behind closed doors.

The last AAA MMORPG from a major games company that I can remember would be Amazon Games' New World, which I would say was very heavily focused on solo play. It has group play, of course, for both PvP and PvE, and at launch the main storyline included a fair amount of required group content, but changes patched in since have aimed to remove many of those roadblocks to soloing and open up more of the game to those with no taste for group play.

This, I would say, has been the trend for many years now and I can't say I've seen much sign of it slowing down, far less going into reverse. As Tipa reported recently, Final Fantasy XIV, or example, either the biggest or the second-biggest MMORPG in Western markets, depending who you believe, has been following a stated policy of  converting what was originally a group-required game into a group-optional MMORPG by re-working the entire core storyline to be playable with NPC henchmen instead of other players.

I rarely play Elder Scrolls Online, another of the more successful games in the West, but as I understand it from those who do, most of the content is readily soloable. Guild Wars 2's gameplay is based almost entirely on a kind of all-pile-on form of auto-grouping that effectively turns every encounter into solo-with-friends. Granted, ArenaNet did their best to retrofit a form of closed-group, instanced content into the model in the form first of Fractals, then Raids but both remain niche activities within the wider game.

About the only major mmorpg in Western markets that seems bent on forcing people into formal groups these days is World of Warcraft, a highly ironic trajectory for the game that was once seen as having opened the genre up for solo play. Given the extent to which WoW's playerbase appears to have contracted over the years, it's hard to imagine that choice being widely copied in the way the game's earlier, more accessible approach very much was.

As for the never-ending stream of imported games from China and South Korea, are there many - or any - that "force" players to group? There might be. I find it hard to say because although I regularly try these games out, I very rarely stick with them long enough to reach the level cap. What I can say with some authority is that if grouping is required there, it's not during the levelling process itself, which is pretty much universally a solo affair.

Of course, this is where my definition of soloing and Bel's may well differ. From everything I read on his blog, he consumes content orders of magnitude more quickly than I do and reaches the endgame far sooner, whereupon he runs into roadblocks to solo play I will never see. Playstyle heavily affects one's perception of how soloable an MMORPG feels.

As I've said many times, I always found EverQuest to be an excellent solo game, even back at the turn of the millennium. I'd been playing for a couple of years, very happily, before I ever really began to group as my main playstyle. I always found it very easy to set myself goals I could achieve without anyone else's help and I managed to keep myself very well-entertained for upwards of thirty hours a week just pottering around Norrath on my own.

That's not to say I never joined a group in those days. I often did but it was always my choice. I never felt the game forced me to group or even pushed me heavily in that direction. Grouping, even in EQ in 2000, was just another on a long list of interesting things you could do with your time, if and when you felt like it.

Thinking of the other immediately post-WoW mmorpgs I've played, from Star Wars: the Old Republic to Lord of the Rings Online to Rift to Wildstar, I get the feeling that the more grimly they hung on to the old concept of forced grouping, the worse they fared. What I remember from all of them is a perpetual retrenchment towards ever more accessiible content, requiring less and less commitment to any kind of formal group structure.

Even a game like Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, which modeled itself heavily on the original EverQuest, quickly shifted from a must-group policy to something far more lenient, although not soon enough to save itself. It remains to be seen how that game's spiritual successor, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen (Whose very name mirrors it's immediate ancestor.) will negotiate a path between the stated desire of players for group content and a commercial reality in which that often turns out to be the self-same thing that drives potential customers into the arms of less socially-demanding titles.

I'm wondering now if any of the numerous retro-revivalist mmorpgs we've seen Kickstarter campaigns or heard reports of funding rounds and capital investments for have actually launched. It's hard to be sure. I can't remember the names of many and anyway "launch" is such a flexible concept these days.

It's also quite a difficult topic to research. There's no widely-accepted term for these kinds of projects and searching for "new old-school mmorpgs" or "new retro-mmorpgs" mostly brings up lists of actual old games that are still running, of which there are many. I could comb through MMORPG.com's exhaustive list of titles or scan the Steam charts or page back through a couple of years of MassivelyOP news reports but life's too short for all that. We have AI now!

I asked the three big players, Bard, ChatGPT and Bing:

"Can you list all the in-development, early access, alpha, beta or just recently launched MMORPGS that claim to offer an "old school" or "retro" or "golden age" experience?"

The results were not particularly helpful but, at least in the first two cases, they were extensive.

Bard came up with a list of eighteen titles, conveniently alphebetized and bullet-pointed:

• Ashes of Creation
• Aura Kingdom 2
• Classic EverQuest
• Classic World of Warcraft
• Dofus Retro
• EverQuest II: Project 1999
• Lost Ark
• Mabinogi
• Old School RuneScape
• Peria Chronicles
• Project Gorgon
• RuneScape
• Ultima Online
• Valheim
• Vindictus
• Wakfu
• WoW Classic
• Zenith: The Last City

It then went on to offer a brief description of each of them, along with some of its usual, chatty commentary, signing off with "I hope this list helps you find the perfect MMORPG to scratch that old school itch." Bard really does want to be your AI pal.

Of the eighteen, I'd say only Project Gorgon really counts. It meets all the criteria in the prompt, being both an original mmorpg modelled on old-school gameplay and still being in Early Access. Old School Runescape, WoW Classic and Dofus Retro also sort of count but only because I didn't frame the prompt quite specifically enough to exclude actual revivals of older games.

The rest are either just old mmorpgs that are still running or don't seem to meet any of the criteria at all. The only one I've never heard of before is Zenith: The Last City, which isn't surprising because it's a VR game. It looks to be a standard mmorpg, not particularly retro. I'm kind of surprised we haven't heard more about it.  

ChatGPT offered me ten titles in a numbered list with brief descriptions of every game:

1. Ashes of Creation - This game is currently in development and claims to offer a unique and immersive MMORPG experience with a focus on player choice and agency.

2. Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen - This game is currently in development and aims to provide a classic MMORPG experience with a heavy focus on group play, challenging content, and a strong sense of community.

3. Crowfall - This game is currently in beta and offers a hybrid of MMORPG and strategy gameplay with a focus on player-driven worlds and intense PvP combat.

4. New World - This game was recently launched and offers a survival-focused MMORPG experience with a heavy emphasis on exploration, crafting, and player vs. player combat.

5. Legends of Aria - This game is currently in early access and provides a sandbox MMORPG experience with a heavy focus on player freedom and customization.

6. Gloria Victis - This game is currently in early access and offers a medieval MMORPG experience with a strong emphasis on realistic combat, crafting, and open-world exploration.

7. Fractured - This game is currently in alpha and offers a unique blend of traditional MMORPG mechanics and sandbox gameplay with a focus on player-driven content and exploration.

8. Camelot Unchained - This game is currently in development and aims to provide a traditional MMORPG experience with a heavy focus on large-scale PvP battles, player-driven economies, and deep crafting systems.

9. Starbase - This game is currently in early access and offers a sci-fi MMORPG experience with a heavy emphasis on player-driven economies, spaceship building, and exploration.

10. Project Gorgon - This game is currently in early access and offers a classic MMORPG experience with a focus on exploration, discovery, and deep crafting systems.

Crowfall is not in beta. It launched and then closed. It's in some form of undefined limbo right now. Legends of Aria was de-listed from Steam and is currently unavailable. Fractured was in Early Access but has now returned to closed development for technical reasons.

The rest seem like reasonable responses to the prompt, although I'd question whether Ashes of Creation or New World really count as "old school" or "retro". 

And finally, good old Bing. Bing really doesn't like to work up much of a sweat. Where Bard gave me eighteen possibilities and ChatGPT managed ten, Bing stopped trying after just three - but at least they weren't the most obvious three!

1. Ravendawn
2. Old School Runescape 
3. Aether Story 

Well, okay, Old School Runescape was obvious. I think literally having the words "Old School" in the name may have biased the results, so all credit to ChatGPT for not being drawn in to the easy option there.

I'd never heard of either Ravendawn or Aether Story, which turns out to be because they're both 2D, overhead perspective games and I pay no attention to those whatsoever. They do seem to match the general profile, though, and you can't get much more old school or retro than 2D top down gameplay.

All of which proves nothing much except that the current crop of AIs really don't make very good research assistants. In the absence of further evidence, I'm going to stick to my assertion that we aren't currently going through an era, or even a moment, where forced grouping is either the norm or a growing trend.

If anyone would care to offer the necessary evidence to refute that assertion, I'd be very interested to consider it.

Reading The Signs In Chimeraland

In a comment on yesterday's post, Redbeard expressed some surprise at the depth of  my involvement, not to say infatuation, with Chimeraland. It surprises me, too, although perhaps not as much as the complete radio silence across the rest of the blogosphere and the Western mmo press concerning the game's very existence. Am I literally the only one playing it?

Well, maybe around here I am, although my relentless battering at the gates seems to have triggered a flicker of interest in at least a handful of readers. I'm very much looking forward to reading the first First Impressions post from someone who's actually gone so far as to install the game and try it out (And got further than Character Creation, naming no names...)

Chimeraland may not have gathered much traction here in the West but as far as I can gather it's very much a hit in other territories, specifically Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines. I took the shot below of the server select screen yesterday at around seven in the evening. That's three in the morning over there, about the quietest time in any mmorpg.

Every server is flagged "Busy", the highest population marker available. The only exception is a new server that was just added and flagged "recommended" for new players. I tried to make a character there and it wouldn't let me. The server was too congested to allow more accounts to join.

Since the day I started, I have never seen my server at anything less than "Busy". There are houses everywhere, in all states of construction, from one slab dropped carelessly on the ground to massive castles.  Evidently a lot of people have been playing, even if they haven't all taken to home-ownership with equal enthusiasm.

Despite the evidence of occupation, I don't see crowds of people everywhere I go. Hardly surprising, given the local time, although it may have as much to do with the sheer size of the world. Chimeraland has four continents, all accessible immediately, making for a reported nine billion square feet of virtual land to explore and exploit.

The world around me isn't empty of other players as I travel, even so. Far from it. I see other people passing by on weird mounts. Trees fall around me as other players chop them down. At the one beast tribe outpost I know, there are always other questers, dropping by to pick up their dailies or buy things from the vendors.

I've seen plenty of big battles as players come together to bring down Noble or Grand beasts. As I mentioned in previous posts, I did try joining in a few times but it never went well for me. Now I just watch from a safe distance. 

Last night, though, I somehow found myself more personally involved in a communal enterprise. I was just along the riverbank from my house, looking for Green Rock to mine for Pale Jade, when I spotted a Totem. 

Lower-left, you can see a neglected, decaying home. It's made of wood and without repair moss has grown all over it. In the background is my house. It's made of stone and in pristine condition. I don't know how stone ages and I don't intend to test it on my own property.

There are various kinds of totems, two at least. If you activate them, waves of mobs appear, culminating in a mini-boss. There's xp and rewards to be had and they're quick, if not always easy. I'd been gathering for a while and I was in the mood for a fight so I set the thing off.

The first wave had barely started when another player came charging up and joined in. I have no clear idea how credit is allotted in Chimeraland but I've tagged on to plenty of big fights and no-one's sent me any angry whispers so I guess it's cool. Anyay, I was more than happy to have the help. 

Then something unexpected happened. A party invite popped up. I thought about it for a moment then shrugged and said "Why not?" Even though I don't do as much grouping as I used to, I'm never averse to a good PUG and I'm always more prone to accepting offers in a brand new mmorpg, if only so I can learn how the mechanics of grouping work, should I need to know later.

As with most things in Chimeraland, I still don't really understand it even after doing it. I accepted the first offer and another popped up to ask me if I also wanted to join Party Chat. I've never known a game that differentiated between speaking and non-speaking roles in a group context before. 

I accepted that as well, not that it made any difference. No-one ever spoke. Although, now I come to think about it as I write this, I never have a chat window open in the game. It's closed by default and I leave it that way. Maybe there was a constant stream of conversation going on the entire time. 

There certainly could have been because the party kept getting bigger and bigger. New players kept arriving and tagging in until there were five of us. Each time we reached the end of a set of three waves and downed the mini-boss, a big chest dropped. When I've done these totem events alone, that's when I stopped but it seems, as with most things in the game, my ignorance has been hiding things from me.

Each time, when I expected the fun to end and the party to disband, someone went to the totem again, clicked it and started another round. I didn't count them but there must have been half a dozen or more, each a little harder than the last. 

Finally, a really big mob appeared. I think he probably deserves to be called a Boss, not just a mini-boss. He took some time to whittle down and he had some impressive moves, not least the one where he flew about a hundred feet into the air and summoned a giant whirlwind. 

In the end we got him down and a more impressive, metallic chest appeared. We all looted that and suddenly I found myself all alone again. Everyone else had jumped on their various strange creatures and headed out in different directions. 

I struggled for a while, trying to find a way to leave the party, without success. After a couple of minutes there were just two of us and then there was just me. I went back to my gathering and mining, a little wiser in the ways of the world but not all that much. 

This is one of the stranger things about Chimeraland. I'm reasonably certain it's a well-populated, successful game at this early stage of its life and yet there's no evidence of the usual support structure I've come to expect. I'm used to even minor releases quickly generating wikis and guides and walkthroughs, especially when the official launch follows lengthy periods in Early Access or Open Beta.

Bless Unleashed, for example, was by no means a huge hit, when it launched last summer. Even so, there were plenty of resources available right from the start. I enjoyed learning the systems for myself because that's one of the biggest attractions for me of playing any new game, but I always knew that when I got stuck, as I inevitably did, I'd be able to go and look up the solution somewhere.

I think this excellent umbrella was a login reward but it could have been a drop in the totem trial. It's all a bit of a blur...

About the only semi-reliable source of information I've found for Chimeraland is the subReddit and that's as hit-or-miss as you'd imagine. Most Google searches I run for problems I can't figure out for myself bring up nothing but YouTube videos, very few of which are any help at all.

I wonder if this is at least in part the result of the cross-platform nature of the game? Are extensive wikis the province of PC players? Do mobile games also attract players willing to address themselves to documenting video games in obsessive detail or are they more likely to pull in players who just want to play?

For that matter, how many people are playing Chimeraland on PC as opposed to on a phone or a tablet?

Based on the original news release I read at MassivelyOP, which alerted me to the game's existence in the first place, I had been under the impression the January 6th launch was global. That certainly seems to be the case for the PC version but Kluwes mentioned in a comment that he hadn't been able to download the mobile version and it doesn't appear on Google Play for my Kindle Fire, either 

The headline of this article at GamingOnPhone clarifies matters: "Chimeraland is now live in selected regions", those regions being the ones I listed at the top of the post. The piece explains, if somewhat ungrammatically, "Since it is currently live only in these select regions so only the interested players residing in those regions only can play the game from their respective app stores" and then goes on to detail how players in other regions can get around the IP blocks.

Or you could just play it on PC. That works. Except PC players don't appear to be interested, which is both a pity and also quite odd. I guess this is exactly why games like this need to be on Steam.

Then again, Genshin Impact isn't and it seems to have done pretty well for itself. Remember when it appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, to huge interest and acclaim? Part of the narrative surrounding that unexpected success was that it might herald an era of free-to-play games that were actually content rich and polished rather than minimal effort cash grabs.

As well as flying me around, my Vultura has an astonishingly powerful fireball attack. I didn't get a shot of him in action but he did a huge amount of damage in the big fight.

Chimeraland looks very much to me like a fulfilment of that hopeful prediction. I'm sure it has plenty of flaws and it's entirely possible there's some whale-hunting or pay-to-win grind lurking in the end game, but as with Genshin Impact there certainly seems to be one heck of a lot of stuff to do before then and it all seems pretty well crafted and fun.

I'm definitely not in the business of promoting games. I just write about what I'm playing. If I sound enthusiastic about something it's because I'm enjoying myself, not because I have any agenda to make the game sound better than it really is.

I'm also painfully aware that I find a lot more pleasure in learning systems and mechanics in a new mmorpg than I'm ever likely to get from practicing and perfecting them. Most of my First Impressions and early gameplay posts are wildly over-optimistic about my prospects of playing the game long term. The truth is, I almost always wander off to play something else well before I even reach the level cap.

Even allowing for all of that, though, I think Chimeraland is something of a gem in the genre. I'm glad it's popular somewhere. Maybe if it rolls out that mobile launch around the world it'll even be popular here some day. And maybe then someone will start a wiki for it. I wish they would.

Maybe I'd even contribute, only I'd be the worst! As I'm coming to realise, almost everything I've written about the game so far is either factually inaccurate or a misunderstanding. I might have to do a whole post going back and correcting all the mis-assumptions and errors I've committed to print.

God forbid anyone googling for help should end up here!

Have Horse, Will Travel

 

I am still playing Bless Unleashed. According to Steam I've racked up almost fifty-two hours since the game launched three weeks ago. That's quite a long way short of how many hours I'd like to have played.

For some reason, even though I want to play, I keep finding myself doing other things instead. This isn't some kind of self-negating avoidance strategy or an indication that while I think I want to play I don't really. It's just that there's a lot going on right now and other stuff keeps getting in the way.

Even so, I have managed to play every day, even if it's only been for an hour or two. And I really have been playing. That Steam tally includes very little time spent idling at character select or tabbed out afk. 

There's a lot to do in Bless Unleashed and I don't mean busy work. I mean good, solid levelling and character progression. Levelling is as slow as I've seen in a new mmorpg for quite a while, although in part that's because I've declined to use any of the multiple xp boosts and buffs the game's been throwing at me. 

This is not to say it's poorly-paced; quite the opposite in fact. Levels in BU feel meaningful in a way that harks back to a much older style of mmorpg design. Each level matters. 

 

As a Priest, my spells are spaced out enticingly, with new abilities I very much want to earn sitting temptingly next to levels I have yet to reach. Other features and opportunities unlock as character level hits various markers. 

New dungeons and arenas open up every two or three levels. So far I've only tried a few but that already makes this one of the very, very few mmorpgs I've played in the last decade where I've willingly used a matchmaking system to pug a dungeon. And it's been... okay.

Since I've mentioned it, let's talk about my grouping experience so far. I've had one! That's unusual in itself, especially in a game that doesn't specifically require it. 

Actually, that's not wholly accurate. There have been a couple of quests that required me to complete an arena or a dungeon. I'm not sure the Campaigns in Bless Unleashed are quite as central to the game design as the MSQ in Final Fantasy XIV but I suspect you'd have problems if you tried to skip them entirely.

Even before the Campaign sent me there, though, I tried the matchmaking facility a couple of times out of curiosity. I was interested to see what my role in a group might be. 

 

I'm playing a Priest, supposedly a healing class, but I have almost no healing spells at all. Priests get one spell early on that summons a glowing ball of light about a meter away. It took me a while to figure out you have to go stand in it for a second or two, at which point it pops, gives you a big heal and puts a regen buff on you that lasts for a few seconds.

As you might imagine, that's awkward as hell to use in action combat, where half the time you're rolling and dodging and leaping about. I tend to cast mine inbetween kills to heal back up or ahead of time so I can run into it during a fight. 

In the couple of five-person dungeons I did I tried casting the heal bubble near other people as they were fighting or next to people who were low on health but only one person ever intentionally went into one to get a heal. I've seen people complaining in chat about how no-one in their dungeons understands how to use the bubbles and that's been my limited experience, too.

On the other hand, unlike most mmorpgs I can think of other than Guild Wars 2, back when people actually did dungeons there, Bless Unleashed doesn't care which classes make up a group. You don't need a tank or a healer. The matchmaker just slams the first five people it finds together without reference to levels or classes and lets you get on with it. Healing, at least up to the mid-twenties, does not seem to be a priority.

 

That's presumably why, even though there's an automated matchmaking system, general chat is full of people trying to put a group together the old-fashioned way. One person yesterday was offering his services repeatedly with the attention-grabbing tagline "I'm done grouping with matchmaking APES!"

For my money, the matchmaking is fine. Most of the two-person Arenas I've done have gone smoothly enough. There seem to be various incentives and reasons for higher levels to do lower level content so I'm always hoping to get matched with someone ten levels above me. 

All I have to do when that happens is stand back and press LMB while they kill everything, then pick up my loot and leave. Of course, now I'm in my twenties, sometimes I'm the higher level, so I have to do a bit more of the heavy lifting but that's fine, too. 

In the five-person dungeons it's a bit more nuanced. The wide spread of levels can mean someone's often dying a lot and someone else is doing all the hard work but mostly it's been a good team effort. No-one ever speaks, of course. And I mean no-one and ever. Okay, maybe once or twice, just a couple of words.

And yet, despite the apparent lack of social skills, a couple of the runs I've done have shown solid teamwork. People rez each other when they can, try to trade aggro, generally behave with a degree of attantion that goes beyond focusing only on what they're doing themselves.

I did one five-person arena where we had to fight a very large, very tough ogre. On the first attempt I loaded into the instance so late the gate had come down and I had to stand and watch through the wooden bars as the rest of my team tried and failed to beat the boss with just four. 

No-one yelled at me. No-one quit. When the last of them died they all respawned, the boss reset, the gate opened and we all went in, five of us this time. And wiped, after a long and arduous battle. Again, no-one complained, although one person left without saying anything. The matchmaker replaced them almost instantly and off we went again.

Aaand... wiped a third time. No-one spoke. I was sure the group would fall apart. I was about ready to call it myself. I didn't think we were going to get any further than we'd managed so far. We hadn't been able to get the Ogre down before he enraged and when that happened it looked like we had no hope at all. 

No-one else seemed to be giving up, though, so I went another round. And we won. People seemed to have learned from the failures. I know I had. We avoided some of the bad stuff, were more ready for the big attacks, more mindful of each other. And we all poured on the damage in the phases when it mattered. Nothing was discussed, people just observed, learned and acted. 

It was... good. Not as good as grouping with people who chat and discuss tactics and get to know each other, like we did back in the olden days. But still... good. I enjoyed it. I'll do some more. 

Going back to what I was saying, before I interrupted myself with tales of teamwork and the unexpected pleasures of pugging, levelling in Bless Unleashed has direction and purpose. It doesn't just feel like a makeshift way to keep people hanging around. It feels both absorbing and satisfying, in and of itself. 

When levelling matters, outlevelling becomes a viable option for circumventing obstacles. At level twenty-three I ran up against another solo instance in the Campaign involving a fight I didn't feel entirely confident I could win. It might have been possible but rather than bang my head against it to find out, I opted to carry on levelling. I'm hoping that another two or three levels should tip the balance in my favor. 

If not, I can always get a couple more but first I'll need to find some new quest hubs. In pursuit of those and other sources of xp, I've been exploring, ranging further and further across what's turning out to be an extremely large map. We're talking Black Desert distances here. 

I finished all three of the introductory questlines for the three NPC "Unions" (aka factions), all of which conclude in the immense, imposing and very beautiful city of Sperios. I thought about it as I rode through the broad avenues, opening teleport stations and taking in the sights, then I decided to throw my lot in with the crafters union, the Artisan's Society. 

 

They immediately sent me on an initiation quest that took me deep into unknown territory, opening up huge swathes of uncharted countryside and any number of villages, towns and settlements, in several of which NPCs were just waiting for me to come along and sort out their problems with spiders, wolves, errant girlfriends, over-protective boyfriends and the like. 

By the time I got to the third part of the Union quest I was facing mobs four or five levels above me. Once again I had to withdraw to more appropriate territories to hone my skills and add a couple more levels.

My immediate goal is to get to twenty-six when, if my sources are correct, I should come into possession of an Estate. I don't know just how Bless Unleashed's "housing" works but I've heard it comes with a significant amount of storage and that's more than incentive enough.

As for this post, I'm going to leave it at that for now. I'm very conscious still of just how much about the game I don't know, let alone understand. I don't want to sound as though I have it all figured out when I absolutely do not.

I will say, though, that I think Bless Unleashed is the most satisfying levelling mmorpg I've played for a quite a while. It feels very old school in that respect, without feeling at all old-fashioned. I suspect I'll be levelling a couple more characters of different classes before I'm done with it. 

For once, it feels as though that wouldn't be a complete waste of time.

Fight For Your Right (To Party): WoW CLassic, EverQuest

There was a time for me when weekends in MMORPGs were all about grouping. Admittedly, we'd be going back a long way. All the way to 2000-2001, I'd guess. I tend to think of my early days in MMORPGs as being mostly a solitary experience but that was never really the case.

I did solo a lot, partly out of choice, partly out of necessity. When I came back from the game store on that fateful day in November 1999, clutching the oversized cardboard box containing the EverQuest CD-Rom and accompanying book-sized manual, which I'd been reading on the bus journey home, I was more than a little nervous about where it might take me.

Stepping out into a virtual world was all well and good. I was up for that. I wasn't worried about the fantastic monsters that might try to tear my character limb from limb. I was much more wary of the real people I was likely to meet, people who might want to talk to me about... well, who knows what?

The first couple of sessions were so chaotic and confusing that talking to anyone, real or imaginary, was scarcely an issue. Working out what the heck was going on occupied all my mental bandwidth and then some.

After a few days I got the hang of the basics and started to plan. Yes, in those dim, distant days I did make plans... kind of. I read a lot of online guides about how I should approach this weird new world. I'd done quite a lot of research before I even bought the game, trying to decide between the then Big Three, Asheron's Call, EverQuest and Ultima Online,  a decision later tested to destruction when, inevitably, I bought both the others to see if I'd made a mistake. I hadn't.

Long before my curiosity got the better of me I had to work out what to do with the game I'd chosen. I knew it had some social elements but even a cursory search on Netscape Navigator (for which I probably have as much nostalgia as for any MMORPG I've ever played) brought up plenty of suggestions on how to play EQ as Billy No-Mates.

Most of those suggestions, some of which I still have, printed out and preserved in one of the three lever-arch files that sat next to my 14" CRT monitor as I played, were awful. Not just unhelpful but plain wrong. Whoever thought Dwarf Cleric was the best choice for a solo class/race combo in EQ in 1999 needed a sound slap with a wet haddock.

So I made a Dwarf Cleric. It took me two weeks to get to Level 11. Probably about 40-50 hours at least. It would have been 80-100 but by then I was already sharing PC time with Mrs. Bhagpuss. Looking over my shoulder as she played, at least as soon as she'd managed to stop laughing, she decided she had to play too.

For a couple of months we took it in turns, sharing an account in flagrant contradiction of the EULA and any shred of logic. Sharing an account is not a good idea for so many reasons.

One of us would play while the other sat in an armchair and watched, giving "helpful" advice and making "amusing" comments so, in a way, I wasn't even soloing when I was soloing. There was something of a team effort going on - or a sitcom.

Blackburrow, on one of EQ's Prog Servers. I forget which. Not exactly the authentic experience.

In game, I didn't really talk to many people directly. I tried a few groups early on, mostly in Blackburrow. They were disasters. I died so much I couldn't really see the point. I went back to making my own way, where I died less but levelled even slower

Meanwhile, Mrs Bhagpuss was networking. In no time at all she'd found a crew to hang with. I can remember a couple of their names even now. I carried on my own sometimes merry way, trying different classes, different servers, reading yet more mostly misleading guides.

By the time Ruins of Kunark, EverQuest's first expansion, appeared in April 2000, we had a computer each. Mrs. Bhagpuss played upstairs and I played in my "study" on the floor below. We still watched each other play now and again but mostly we were, literally, in our own worlds.

I played on Brell Serilis, then Test and later Luclin, Lanys T'Vyl and eventually on almost new server SOE opened to meet the ever-rising demand. Mrs Bhagpuss stayed on on Prexus, where we'd started, until somehow, a few years later, we ended up on the EU server Antonius Bayle. There we grouped together for almost two years. We made a whole raft of mutual friends and associates and it became the peak of my grouping career, but all that was still far in the future.

Kunark changed things for me in a number of ways, not least in how it changed my willingness to group. Within a few weeks of the expansion's launch I was in the habit of soloing my Druid in the mornings before I went to work and then again in the evening, when I came home. I got her into the twenties and started to hang out in what was, at the time, thought of as the armpit of Norrath, Lake of Ill Omen.

LOIO was the pre-cursor of The Barrens in World of Warcraft and of Paludal Caverns in Luclin era EQ.  /ooc was famously salty and ribald. The zone was always packed. There were always multiple groups forming and recruiting to work the many recognized camps, some of which were effectively small, open-zone dungeons.

I can't now remember how my confidence grew to the point where I felt not just able but eager to advertise myself in /ooc as available for healing and support duties (not that we called what a Druid did "support" in those days, but it was often the role I took, all the same). I'd taken to duoing quite often with a French-Canadian Paladin, hunting along the shores of the lake, so maybe that eased my social anxiety, which was, perhaps, higher then than it is now, although it's always been more a desire to have complete control over my time than any nervousness about talking to strangers.

My concern in accepting groups has always been "How do I get out of this when I want to stop?" rather than "What am I going to say to these people?". As must be evident from this blog, I rarelyl run out of things to say.

The pick-up groups (another term I can't remember us ever using back then) in Lake of Ill Omen solved that potential problem. They were fast-forming and fluid. People came and went all the time. Because most of the camps were either outdoors or in ruins with multiple entrances, when someone needed to leave it wasn't like trying to get a replacement down into a dungeon.

Sadly, all my screenshots from EQ before about 2005 seem to be lost. Here's one from round bout then.

Saturdays and Sundays became the time when I grouped. Particularly Saturday after breakfast until lunch, then again around late-afternoon. I'd have breakfast, log in, and see if anyone was recruiting. If they weren't I'd /ooc "22 Druid lfg". Just that, usually.

Contrary to Belghast's excellent and highly-recommended guide on getting groups, in EQ back then, public channels always got you groups fast. Well, they got me groups, anyway. I don't recall having to wait more than a few minutes most sessions. Sometimes I'd get a tell asking me if I wanted to group before I'd even asked. Druids were in demand back then.

I used to have my preferences. I loved the Sarnak Fort, especially Back Door. It was fast, frenetic, frenzied and you could run if things went totally south. As they often did. If I couldn't get the Fort I'd take whatever came. There was always something.

As I recall it, grouping like this didn't move my xp bar all that fast. There wasn't a lot in the way of exciting drops, either. It was faster than soloing but, at least for a Druid, one of the best solo classes, not by much.

What it was, though, was fun. Really good fun. Exciting, amusing, entertaining and, eventually, exhausting. About two hours at a stretch was enough for me. I'd break for lunch then solo in the afternoon, playing any of my army of characters on half a dozen servers, before coming back for another group session after tea.

When Scars of Velious arrived at the end of the year my Druid was just barely high enough to meet  the entry level requirements. In more than six months, playing anything up to forty hours a week, I'd managed to advance from the low twenties to the very beginning of the thirties. I did play a lot of characters but even so, leveling was slow back then.

Lake of Ill Omen, for which my Druid was now almost too high, gave way to Iceclad Ocean, where I spent my time pulling Dervishes from the base of the ominous Tower of Frozen Shadow. At the very bottom of the level range I found it harder to get groups and there was more waiting around but every Iceclad group needed Harmony and Ensnare so I usually got picked up eventually.

From there on the barricades were down. I zig-zagged between solo and group play at will and whim for the next few years, eventually ending up grouping more than I soloed for around eighteen months at the height of the Planes of Power/Legacy of Ykesha/Lost Dugeons of Norrath era, late 2002 to early 2004.

After that my desire to group faded, slowly. I grouped a good deal in EverQuest II for the first few months but my PC struggled in dungeons and I was playing second cleric to Mrs Bhagpuss on main heals, which wasn't ideal.

When EQII's population all but collapsed under the impact of WoW's far greater accessibility and much superior gameplay (before Scott Hartsman rode in on his white charger) we went back to EQ, where we changed servers and made a new set of friends for a while.

We stayed about six months, grouping sometimes but nowhere near as often as we had done on Ant. Bayle. We returned to EQII, where we played mainly on Test. We went to Vanguard at launch and stayed a year and a half. We came back to EQII yet again, moving to the Freeport F2P server when it opened, where we stayed until finally moving to Guild Wars 2 in 2012.

Another thing about grouping... I hardly take any screenshots. Someone tends to die if I do. Usually me.
Much safer to take selfies solo.

All of that I remember as the Duo Years. We learned to play as a highly effective and versatile team of two, plus pets, often playing classes that weren't ideally suited for trying to do with two people what the game expected would need four or five. I main healed as a Necro for years with Mrs Bhagpuss tanking as a Bruiser!

Duo play is a form of grouping, of course. Bearing that in mind I can honestly say that over twenty years, even though I tend to think of myself as a solo player, I have repeatedly chosen group play over soloing when given the chance. Even then, I bet I've spent far, far longer soloing.

In the last five years I've barely grouped at all. The all-pile-on open group/zerg playstyle introduced in Rift and exemplified by GW2 has made formal grouping seem almost archaic. I only group now if I absolutely have to.

It's a mindset WoW Classic is doing its best to change. I don't think it's any kind of exaggeration to say that in the last two weeks I've been in more groups than I've had in the last two years. They're classic pick-up groups like the ones I remember so fondly from Lake of Ill Omen. They last as long as they need to last and when I want to move on I say "thanks for the group" and off I go. I feel free, empowered, not trapped and claustrophobic, as I did in FFXIV Main Quest treadmill a few years back.

I spent much of Sunday afternoon dying in a determined but not very competent (no healer for a start) group in Redridge. All my armor fell off. I ran out of food My bear was complaining bitterly and threatening to leave. I had a great time. Everyone was upbeat and in the end we got what we'd come together for in the first place - the head of some orc with an unpronounceable name.

Then I spent forty minutes duoing in some orc-infested cave with a very competent and cheery Paladin three levels below me. I would have carried on longer only I had to stop for tea.

It felt like the old days. Weekend casual pugging for fun. When I finish this post I'm going to go do some more. It's so busy stil I bet there's a weekday pug scene. What could be better?

You can call it nostalgia if you like but I'd prefer to look at it as good game design. Whatever it is, I'm just going to enjoy it while it lasts. I might even try a dungeon run.

After all, what have I got to lose apart from the cost of repairs?

Trust And Hope: FFXIV

This morning I succumbed to peer group pressure and logged in to Final Fantasy XIV. Everyone's been talking about the latest expansion, Shadowbringers, for weeks now. It's having a similar effect on my willpower as water has on stone.

Oh, wait, no it isn't! It takes water centuries, millennia, to wear away stone. This is more like water dripping on a wedding cake someone left out in the rain.

Hang on, I'll go out and come in again.

So, obviously I haven't bought the new expansion because why would I? I didn't buy the last one or the one before that. I have a dark and troubled history with FFXIV.

I was entranced by the original trailer for the first version, way back in 2009. I applied for and was accepted into an early phase of what was to prove a rushed and hurried closed beta. There I found a game that, while appealing in many ways, was very clearly nowhere near ready.

The mood on the beta forums was volatile. Many, many testers pointed out, at length and in detail, all the things that were wrong, all which desperately needed fixing before launch. Others claimed everything was fine or if it wasn't it soon would be. Square Enix responded enigmatically or not at all.

In September 2010, after a brief open beta, Square Enix launched the game, virtually unchanged from the dry, slow, dull and, crucially, incomplete build we'd been telling them wouldn't fly. The critical response was savage. Players liked it even less.

I knew how bad it was because I'd been playing it all through beta, albeit not often and less and less as it became apparent nothing was going to change. And yet I still bought it. At least I think I did. I guess I must have, because the original CD is here on my desk as I type. Perhaps there was something magical about the world I didn't want to let go.

The same absolutely could not be said of the gameplay, which was stultifying. Square must have agreed because they extended the "free month" that came with the purchase of this subscription MMORPG, first by one more month, then two. 

By December 2010 the game, which continued to receive a mauling every time it was mentioned, (infrequently by then) seemed little improved. The subscription fee was waived indefinitely and the game effectively ran as a Free to Play title for the next two years.

While it was free, I dipped in and out. It became one of those games where I enjoyed sightseeing and hanging out but didn't feel the need to level up or really do anything beyond wander around taking screenshots. At least, I assume I took screenshots. I always take screenshots. Where they are now, though, I have no idea.

By January 2012 the game, which had finally received enough work to bring it up to minimum standard, was deemed good enough to charge money for. You needed a subscription to play, so I stopped.

As everyone knows, that wasn't the end. New director, Naoki Yoshida, had already deemed the game unsalvageable in its current form. He was deep in the process of rebuilding it from scratch, a project which took another year and a half.

In November 2012, FFXIV closed with a typically impressive trailer and an even more typical shambles in the game itself. A much lengthier alpha and beta schedule than the rushed version I'd been in followed but I chose not to subject myself to it. In retrospect that was probably a mistake since, as Giant Bomb puts it, "Unlike the original release's beta test, where nearly no feedback was taken into account, the game underwent a great many changes while in beta testing due to player feedback."

But once bitten... Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? Apparently not. When the open beta arrived I played it and persuaded Mrs Bhagpuss to try it as well. And then we bought two copies when the game went live in August 2013.

FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, as it was now called, was a huge improvement in many ways, not least in the gameplay itself, which had evolved from what critics once derided as "dull, tedious, and outdated" (Giant Bomb op cit) to something that might, charitably, be described as "traditional".

In fact, combat still felt quite slow by modern MMO standards but it was undeniably an improvement. The world itself was much better. Gone were the peculiar invisible walls and the extremely obvious repeated tiles and textures. In came a wealth of quirky, characterful detail.

We were on sabbatical from  Guild Wars 2, which we'd been playing for a year. GW2 was a great MMORPG but we'd maybe kinda burned out a little. There was a non-trivial chance we might have chosen Eorzea over Tyria.

We didn't. There were a number of reasons but chief among them were two hardwired requirements: a) to progress through the main questline and b) to do it by grouping in instanced dungeons. Contrast that with GW2, where even now, after seven years, three accounts and seventeen Level 80 characters, I have never finished the original Personal Story, nor felt I needed to. As for five-player dungeons, far from being required, they're all but forgotten.

In FFXIV, as far as I know, you still have to go through the same progression via the Main Story Quest unless you choose to skip it entirely. You can begin in the expansion of your choice if you prefer: that's an option.. What you can't do is play through only the parts that interest you. Neither can you play through the dungeons on your own, using some kind of "story mode", as is common in other MMORPGs.

Or, I should say, you can't yet. One of the less-heralded features of the new Shadowbringers expansion is the "Trust" system. I paid very little attention in the lead-up to the expansion, so the first I heard of it was in this post at Blessing of Kings.

It reminds me strongly of the original Guild Wars, where you could choose to play group content with a team of AI-controled NPCs rather than rely on the vagaries of pick-up groups. The mechanic is being promoted on the basis that it helps players, especially those with DPS characters, to avoid long LFG queues, something you'd imagine wouldn't be a major problem in brand-new, required content in the latest expansion for a popular game like FFXIV.

It seems like an excellent solution to a problem much more likely to exist lower down the game, that of getting new or returning players through existing content rather than encouraging them to skip it altogether. It also seems like a good way to encourage a demographic that has, until now, very probably looked at FFXIV with some suspicion to take another look.

As yet there's no word on whether the Trust system will be retro-fitted to the rest of the game but I would lay odds it will. Eventually. I have some issues with Naoki Yoshida's hyper-paternalistic approach but one thing I will give him credit for is this: he knows how to manage an MMORPG for maximum effect over its anticipated lifetime.

FFXIV is being run in the way ArenaNet claimed they would run GW2 but never have: in the expectation that it will last for many years, both holding an audience and attracting new players. Yoshida often alludes to certain changes not being appropriate or necessary yet. He seems to have a sound understanding of what existing players will put up with and for how long and what needs to be done to bring in new blood. So far it seems to be working very well.

Unfortunately from my own point of view, that means I'll haveto wait a long time before I get what I want, which is a Final Fantasy XIV largely free of top-down controls over what I do, when I do it and who I do it with. But we're getting there, slowly.

I just have to hope I live long enough to enjoy it when it comes.

The Way We Play Now

A couple of Blaugustians have been riffing on the ever-popular topic of soloing in MMOs. It's a question that's as old as the genre itself. I very clearly remember it being a hot-button issue even when I started playing EverQuest almost twenty years ago and I'm willing to believe it goes back longer than that.

It's also not a subject that's amenable to rational discussion. Views tend to polarize harshly. On the one hand you have the "it says Multiple right there on the box" crowd, who believe the entire meaning and purpose of the genre is collaborative and social and anything else is a betrayal of trust. On the other there's the "my time, my dime" crew, who feel it's their right to play the game any damn way they please.

Inbetween comes a vast mass of hybrid opinions, all truly held and passionately expressed. And everyone wants validation for the way they play, even if they don't think the way other people play is valid at all.

Fine, so far as it goes, I guess. It's always good to have something reliable to argue about. But then I got to wondering... is there really any meaning  left in the terms solo and group anyway? Haven't we moved into new modes altogether now?

Oh, of course I understand you can still group and raid and so on. The games support it and there are contexts in which it's even necessary. Communication and organization still matter. No-one's saying the gameplay differences no longer exist at all. But was the gameplay ever what people were really arguing about?

The split between solo and group players (and then again between everyone else and raiders) was always a matter of policy, not of practice. The issue wasn't whether you could solo but whether you should.

Committed groupers always felt there was something suspicious about soloists: something louche, untrustworthy, not quite proper. Meanwhile, dedicated soloists regarded group players as a herd: helpless alone, lost without their self-appointed leaders, a state of being to be pitied, not envied.

Fragmented hints of those sentiments still surface occasionally but such a sense of elitism is much harder to maintain when the structures of the games themselves so self-evidently deny it. It's difficult to pin down exactly when things began to change, but change they most certainly have.

Vanilla WoW, now often cited as a golden age of mutual reliance and group-friendly gaming, was seen by many at the time as the not-so-thin end of the wedge where solo content was concerned. Compared to what went before it was solo-friendly in the extreme.

As Blizzard doubled down on solo play then doubled down again, introducing automated group-making and Looking For Raid, Warhammer brought in the concept of the Public Quest. You didn't need an invite any more to play with the people around you.

Rift took that idea and spun an entire game out of it. Finally, Guild Wars 2 did away with almost every concept of group play to create a world in which all content was shared content and everyone was de facto soloing together.

Ah, yes. Soloing together. It seemed such a revolutionary concept at the time. I remember Gordon, in what was possibly his last-ever post for his much-missed We Fly Spitfires blog, describing with bemusement his experience of completing events alongside another player in Guild Wars 2.

He was concerned that they never spoke but of course they had no need to. Modern MMOs don't require you to talk to each other even if you do choose to group. As Sandrian says, "Most of the chatter in random dungeons... is virtually non-existant. People don’t really talk and if they do it’s often only a “hello” or “goodbye”.

These days, even content that is undeniably not soloable is still played solo. I spent much of yesterday in World vs World. Sometimes I ran alongside the zerg, outside the squad. Sometimes I was squadded. It made little difference either way.

Other times I stood around in keeps and camps, scouting, guarding, skirmishing. I herded yaks and fired cannons. I spent a glorious couple of hours helping in a surreal attempt to upgrade Dreadfall Bay by filling North West Camp with omegas. The whole time I was with people, but on my own; talking, but talking in map or team chat - to people standing not ten yards away.

In this 21st Century life, the boundaries between public and private, social and solipsistic are blurred if not broken.  Families, friends and co-workers sit in the same rooms and communicate by text or email or Twitter and Facebook. Watching television with friends means lying in your bedroom alone, tweeting smart remarks to your followers.

Gaming used to set cultural leads although lately the trends have been all the other way. "Gamer" is fast becoming shorthand for "conservative". Perhaps that's why the murmurings about the value and purity of group play have grown a little louder of late.

Nascent conservatism aside, it seems unlikely the wheel will turn full circle. The new asymetric social systems we all use and most of us enjoy are too convenient to give up. It seems peculiar to think of the early noughties as "a simpler time" but perhaps they were. Maybe we did all have more time then and more patience.

Or more likely we had less choice. If we'd been able to click a button back then to get a group how many of us would still have stood by the bank spamming "Rogue lfg" hour after hour? When Pantheon (and that other would-be hardcore, old school title I won't name, for fear of calling up one of its hyper-vigilant developers like He Who Must Not Be Named) finally arrives, will there be a deluge of defections from solo-friendly games like WoW and GW2?

I doubt it. We don't do a lot of things in the same, semi-formal group-friendly way we once did and not just in our gaming. The generations following on will see both socializing and friendship in a different way, not just to their parents and grandparents, but to every generation going back to the caves.

What it means to be human is changing. In this way, perhaps MMORPGs simply got there first.

Harmonic Feedback

Keen posted a short but revealing analysis of one of the most intriguing aspects of MMORPG gameplay (and, I guess, video game gameplay in general) - repetition. When I started blogging one of the very early posts I wrote was "Again! Again!" because I've been fascinated by the role repetition plays in entertainment for far longer than I've been playing MMORPGs or even video games.

Immediately before reading Keen's post I'd just finished Pitchfork's retrospective review of Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music", a masterpiece of supposed repetition. The experience of first hearing that album in the week it was released haunts me to this very day.

At the time I was merely mortally terrified by it although I came to love it later but I did for a long time believe the narrative that explained the double album away as four identical 16 minute slabs of noise. It's not. It's not anything like that.

Mark Richardson's review gives away something of the paradox whereby the same surface, penetrated, reveals different depths. Keen brings the same insight to MMORPGs with his EverQuest "hold a room and pull to it" example. It's one I have often called upon to try and explain why doing the same thing over and over is different from doing the same thing over and over.

Keen is searching for the line between good and bad repetition. It lies in chance. In chaos. in serendipity. If you read the Pitchfork review it refers to the way that Lou Reed placed two guitars with open tunings against amps so that they would not just create harmonic feedback but "with two guitars occupying the same space, the interactions between the instruments [would] create additional harmonics".

This is what happens in MMORPGs as they were originally designed. Specifically, it's what happens in the classic EverQuest play session, where a number of individuals are clustered in a fixed location around which mobs spawn and roam, to and from which a single player ventures and returns.

On the surface the situation appears extremely static. Having "broken" the room or the camp the players huddle in a corner and wait for a puller to go out and come back. They then unleash their spells and attacks on whatever comes along with him until it dies, whereupon they wait while he goes to get more. This they do for hour after hour.

Like Reed's unpredictable harmonics, however, the dynamics in play at the EQ camp are beyond the players' ability to predict. There are too many variables and too many of them are unknown. There's always the possibility that something will spin out of control.

For a while good players can shape the room. A good group will know the spawn times of the static mobs and the pattern of the roamers. A good puller will maintain consistency and avoid coming back with more than the group can handle, even if that means dying alone, out of aggro range.

A very good group will keep an accurate record of when each mob they kill dies, allowing them to predict the staggered and changing pattern of their respawns. With sufficient knowledge and a huge amount of concentration the process can be rendered predictably repetitive.

But not forever. No group, however skilled and experienced and attentive, can predict or control what happens outside their sphere of influence. They hold the room or the camp but the old EverQuest is a shared world. There are outside factors.

Another group or a single player may at any time disrupt the flow. Roamers can be killed, or held in combat, at far points of their range, out of sight, disrupting their patterns.

Different kinds of mobs with different strengths and abilities may spawn, randomly, unpredictably. In original EverQuest some of those unforeseen spawns might even have the ability to Charm players or their minions, turning the party against one another mid-battle. And of course, there are are the players themselves, always subject to unusual outside forces from a momentary lapse of concentration to a spilled drink to a kitchen fire.

EverQuest and MMORPGs like it were never truly dynamic, changing virtual worlds. Left to run with no players they would exhibit predictable patterns that would settle into stasis. Well, probably, although like the tree falling in the forest, who would know? Even between the faction-controlled NPCs and mobs there was always a modicum of randomness.

With players, though, nothing was ever the same. Nothing could ever be the same.

For weeks - months - around 2002/3 Mrs Bhagpuss and I would spend several nights a week in Velketor's Labyrinth. We liked Back Wall if we could get it. We'd clear and set up there with four other people permed from the pool we played with back then.

Mostly it was the same names. The spiders were always the same spiders. Every session was much the same. Every session was wildly different.

This is the good repetition that built MMORPGs. The repetition that replaced it, the kind Keen can't warm to, isn't bad. It's just different. Or rather it's not.

Instancing changed everything and yet it didn't change things all that much. I was happy to see it. Lost Dungeons of Norrath, which brought instances to Norrath, is up there with my favorite MMORPG expansions ever.

In LDoN dungeons there is only your group. It's a closed circuit. And yet, every session is still different. The parameters for change may be constrained but there's no such constraint on human behavior. 

You can zone into an instance you've done a score of times before and have someone do something you never imagined anyone would do. We once had a Necromancer respond to the first pull of the evening with an AE fear that sent everything the puller had brought scurrying deep into the dungeon, only to return with every mob they passed along the way. Things like that happened more often than you'd imagine.

Instanced dungeons with pick-up groups can be more repetitive than open dungeons with a static group. Or not. There's a hierarchy of predictability but the hierarchy can be unpredictable.


Nevertheless, as we move from the sprawling, uncoordinated virtual worlds of the late 20th Century into the silos of the early 21st the opportunities for chaotic revelation decline. As the genre pushes towards predictability, even-handedness and, most of all, solo-friendliness, the likelihood that if you do the same thing the same thing will happen continues to increase.

The tip of that knife is what Keen describes; repetition without dynamic gameplay. Which is fine in itself. As he says, his wife likes it. Lots of people like it. I like it. If what you're doing feels good each time you do it why would you not want to keep doing it?

I spend a lot of gaming time nowadays doing things whose outcome is relatively assured. Playing overpowered characters alone in closed instances I know well. It's relaxing. It can be satisfying when it leads to acquiring something desired; experience, faction, loot.

It's ironic in the extreme, though, to hear the gameplay of old MMOs described as "repetitive" when compared to that of the new. Were any developer to try and re-introduce the old kind of gameplay to an unfamiliar audience, raised on the MMOs of the last decade or so, I suspect that complaints of repetitive gameplay would be the very least of their worries.

Playing In The Big Leagues : DCUO

If you run around in just about any MMO without a guild tag up you can expect to get unsolicited invites. Sometimes it's a whisper asking if you're looking for a guild. Sometimes it's a drive-by pop-up.

Occasionally you run into that annoying recruiter who hears "I'm not looking for a guild right now" as a challenge to his recruiting skills but usually all you have to do is make the right polite demurral or simply not respond at all and you're on your way. Which is what I always do.

Except last night, playing DCUO, I didn't. I was in a Metropolis Police Station shopping for clothes (as you do), when a League Invite window popped. Leagues, naturally, being how guilds are known in the game.

And I accepted it. I don't know why. I liked the name - DC Bombshells - and I also liked the name of the person who'd sent the invite, both of which are always positive indicators, but mostly I was just in a mellow, "it's a grouping kind of game" frame of mind.

I said "thanks" and no-one replied so I guessed it was going to be one of those "we recruit the entire server" kind of organizations. Which is fine. Being in one of those is like still playing solo only now you have a tag so you're more anonymous than ever.

With that ice broken I was in for more socializing. Since returning to the game I'd taken a minimal amount of trouble to read my skills, check my loadouts, spend my Trait Points and grab a couple of upgrades so I was about as ready as I was going to be.

The next step of the Episode story arc was a four-person instance. I queued it and it popped in a matter of seconds. The Episode instances so far have been role agnostic so queuing as DPS isn't the drag anchor you'd expect.

The instance went very well. In keeping with modern practice no-one spoke as we followed the quest tracker instructions, which could largely have been condensed to "Kill everything and go through the next door that opens".

As battle progressed it occurred to me that, as DCUO has one of those rare, welcome, native screenshot functions that auto-hides the UI, I might be able to get some decent combat shots. Getting screen grabs of fights involving your character that don't look like an explosion in a firework factory is hard enough but doing it without dying can be next to impossible so I was surprised and delighted with the results.

When I came to look them over, it wasn't just that I had a few nice pictures for the blog: I could actually see - for the first time ever - what my character does in a fight. I had no idea that when she uses her "Whirlwind" attack she flies around her enemies at ankle level, parallel to the floor, for example.

I'll be taking a lot more in-combat shots because they look great. I wouldn't go quite that far in describing what my character looks like but she certainly looks a lot better than she did in yesterday's illustrations. It was looking at the unseemly outfit she was embarrassing herself with in yesterday's post that made me open the Style tab and rethink.

DCUO may not match the legendary superhero fashion show that was City of Heroes but the Style system is a robust entry in the MMO appearance stakes. I don't have a whole lot of Styles earned and learned yet but I was able to put together something I'm a lot happier to be seen rescuing citizens in.

The instance proceeded efficiently and without drama until someone spoke up to question one member of the party who seemed to be in the wrong place doing nothing very much. There was no reply but a couple of minutes later I noticed the slacker had dropped from the group and been replaced by a new person. No "Vote to Kick" window popped so I guess he left of his own accord.

That was as awkward as it got. Well within my tolerance levels for pugging. We got to the final boss - Owlman - and knocked him around for a few minutes. Then we stood there like lemons while he and bad Commissioner Mayor Gordon played "pass the buck" for a while before Owlman pulled some trick from his Owlbelt (I'm guessing) and made his escape.

Fun times. The group broke up while I was reading my reviews in the window of shame that pops after an instance. I was, of course, lowest on every count - DPS, Healing, the other one. Well, I did beat the guy who left halfway through, but not his replacement. Still, no-one yelled at me and you could at least see I'd been doing something.

I went back to my Lair to go through my bags and sort out any upgrades that had dropped and I was standing around doing that when I heard voices. DCUO is a game with a lot of voiceover work so I just assumed it was Superman or someone nagging me to do more pro bono but gradually it dawned on me that DBG probably wouldn't pay voice actors to chat at length about their builds in some kind of simulated in-game version of a podcast.

I'd completely forgotten that DCUO has inbuilt VOIP. What I was hearing was a couple of people in my new League, chatting away. That was freaky. They sounded quite pleasant though so I turned the sound down a little and left them on like a radio station in the background.

That got me looking at the League tab. I don't think I've ever opened it before. I discovered that I've joined a League that only accepts female characters. Googling the League's name makes it clear why that is. Once upon a time I'd have known that without having to look it up but my obsessively detailed knowledge of the DC Universe stops dead in its tracks around 1989.

I don't know what counts as big in DCUO terms but DC Bombshells has over 400 members and there were twenty or twenty-five on the whole time I was playing. It looks as though I've joined an active organization at least.

Whether that's going to encourage me to log in more often or make me find something altogether different to do remains to be seen. Joining guilds has had both effects on me in the past. Whatever, it makes a change.

I'm not a fan of "getting out of your comfort zone" in principle. I've always held comfort to be aspirational not problematic. I do need reminding sometimes, though, that a comfort zone can stretch a fair old way and still stay pretty comfy.

I think I might be able to push this one a little further yet.