Bringing Things Up To Date

Having thought about doing it yesterday, today I bit the bullet and began patching all the MMORPGs on my desktop. What fun!

First up was Allods. That was neither alphabetical nor random. It was because, while I was choosing screenshots for yesterday's post, I came across a bunch of shots and it reminded me just how beautiful a game it is. With such great art design, rich with visual wit and flourish, plus very solid gameplay, unusual and appealing races, interesting classes and an all-round high level of polish I'm at a loss to explain either why Allods hasn't been more successful or indeed why I haven't played it more than I have.

I'm in a bit of a mess with Allods as it happens. I can't recall my old account details so I'm stuck with just the fresh account I set up to try the new starting zone. That I mostly played on my Windows 10 Tablet, where it works very well, but I very soon realized I don't want to play games in my lunch-break. I'd much rather read.

That's probably why, rather than just patch, the MY.com Games launcher decided to download the entire game to my PC. I didn't specifically use the launcher but it decided to get in on the act anyway.

This trend towards Launchers that supposedly manage updates for a company's full portfolio of games is very trying. SOE spent many years fiddling around with the concept and it never really worked better than just patching the games individually. Daybreak Games seem to have loosened up on that somewhat. There is still some kind of underlying unified launcher but I have all the individual game icons on my desktop and clicking those seems to start the update and log-in process just fine.

Trion has Glyph. What used to be Perfect World (and for all I know may still be Perfect World to the financial regulators) has ARC. Blizzard has BattleNet and so on. If it's supposed to make things easier...well it doesn't.

After Allods I patched WildStar, which went very smoothly, and then A Mystical Land aka Villagers and Heroes. That also took just a few minutes. I see from their launcher that they've had a level cap rise and added a new zone among other things. I wonder how my sheep is. Dead, probably.

From there I moved to Project : Gorgon but I actually updated that a couple of weeks back and apparently Eric hasn't added anything since then so it was playable immediately. I didn't play it. Instead I patched The Secret World and then EverQuest.

There was a time earlier this year when I was playing EQ quite regularly. Then I changed my All Access membership to the account where my EQ2 Berserker lives and that left the EQ character I was working on, my Magician, stranded on F2P. Well, legacy Silver, but it still locked her out of all the Double XP weekends that would have motivated me to log her in.

At least she's patched up and ready should a window of opportunity arise. I still harbor a theoretical desire to get her to 100 some day, even though the cap has moved past even that landmark now. And speaking of Landmark...

That's what I patched next. I'd been thinking about good old Landmark even before Tipa jogged my memory but I probably wouldn't have done anything about it. Given the total radio silence on the game for most of this year I didn't really expect it would need to patch but it downloaded almost 2GB of something. That sent me to the forums to check the Update Notes but I couldn't see that anything new had been added.

I did, however, find this news posted by Darrin "Talisker" McPherson just a week ago. Well, I call it "news". It's more like news that there might be news.

I'll get the details out to you all soon, but expect some new initiatives, team-up builds and changes to the adventuring side of things. Lets build some content together!

I have no idea what that means but at least it's some sign of life.

Elder Scrolls Online came next.  It set off at a furious pace as it downloaded a vast pile of files but it soon ground almost to a halt when I tried to save some time by patching Star Trek Online and Neverwinter on top.

They both use the aforementioned ARC portal these days and that didn't recognize either of my existing passwords. Resetting them was simple and both games patched at blistering speeds, apparently at the expense of ESO, which ground almost to a halt. There were several gigabytes of updates for both STO and NWO but together they were done in a few minutes. ESO is still patching as I write, well over an hour later.

That, really, is how I came to write this post. Something to do while ESO is patching. I thought I'd better not try any more until it finishes. It seems to be having hard enough time as it is.

Still to come I can see Rift and Trove (well, I can see Glyph but same difference), Dragon Nest Oracle, ArcheAge, DinoStorm and Lord of the Rings Online. Dragon Nest I actually do want to get back to playing. I was enjoying that one. Rift I've been having weird pangs over. I thought I was done with it for good but perhaps not quite yet. ArcheAge I always meant to get back to someday and DinoStorm I always do go back to, usually late at night on a whim.

And LotRO? Well it's always there, although some of the numbers Ravanel mentions in her recent post make me wonder for how much longer.  LotRO has always been a nightmare to patch so I'm leaving it til last.

I tried to limit myself to MMOs I have at least a glancing blow's chance of playing in the next month or three, although by "playing" I really mean logging in, looking at my inventory, wandering around the main city for a few minutes and logging off again. That still leaves a few icons on my desktop that go to MMOs I really can't see myself getting back to any time soon - Istaria, Eldevin, Ryzom - although even though as I type those names I can feel interest stirring anew.

There's also City of Steam, which, being browser-based, doesn't need a specific update and whose main storyline I am determined to finish before they finally shut the servers down, assuming they haven't already - I didn't check. Then, naturally, while patching I saw at least two newish MMOs I hadn't previously heard of that I almost began downloading and as I write I've thought of another four or five that I thought I had installed but which don't seem to have desktop presence any more.

Enough! That way madness lies. And ESO is at 75% now. By the time I choose some screenshots and a title it should be done.

Here We Go Again : Villagers and Heroes

What I really need is a new MMORPG. That's what I'm always telling myself as I look at the twenty-plus already waiting on my desktop.

There's that Age of Conan box still sitting, sealed, on the bookshelf to my left, for example. That's a game that always looks great in screenshots. I ought at least to give it a try before Funcom go out of business. Or what about SW:ToR? It's clearly going somewhere these days although I'm not sure anyone knows where. Wouldn't it be terrible to ignore it for five years and then find out it had been great all along? That's a mistake I don't want to make again.

Anyway, I blame MassivelyOP. They will keep putting out these little teasers for things that sound interesting, MMOs I've never heard of, or ones I'd forgotten were still around, like Villagers and Heroes.

V&H is not a new game. Far from it. It's not even new to me. It started off several years back as a cheerful little browser-based romp going by the ultra-generic name of "A Mystical Land". I played it briefly back then and found it mildly amusing, especially in the way some of the NPCs were so blatantly rude to the player characters, but it never really stuck.

At some point there was a name-change to the scarcely less-generic "Villagers and Heroes" Some gameplay tweaks followed but although I popped back once or twice it still didn't grab me. Now here it comes again, this time trading under the title Villagers and Heroes: Reborn. The screenshots from the latest revamp looked promising, it was already installed, the icon was even right there on my desktop, so...

I tried my old login details and they worked. The new version of the game updated in a few minutes. I read the extensive patch notes while I waited. AVG threw a fit but I overrode that, gave it the relevant permissions and off I went for another round.

Apparently I'd made it as far as level nine last time. There was my old character. The graphical revamp appeared to have turned him nut brown. He looked like a seventy-year old farmer. I ran him around for a while until it occurred to me that since the entire start of the game had been given a makeover I'd be better off starting from scratch.

The game, which is F2P, allows you three character slots. Since there are four classes, the extremely traditional Warrior, Wizard, Hunter and Priest, I'm guessing you can buy at least a fourth slot to make up the full set. I already had a Hunter so this time round I went for Wizard.

Character creation is excellent. Really, really good. The whole look and feel is solid, professional, warm and inviting. There aren't a whole lot of subtle variations to be made to how your character looks but the choice is reasonable.

All the time you're on the character creation screen some plummy-voiced old thesp chats away in the background. He seems to have an agenda of some kind, or possibly a grudge. Maybe against you. It gave the whole thing a vaguely sinister, off-color air that I liked a lot. I wouldn't trust him to get me a donut from the commissary, I know that much.

As you go through the selection of starting skills and abilities, choose which part of the realm you hail from and flip through the pages of your biography, each choice you make adds a detailed paragraph to your character description. It's a very effective way to give every character an automated version of the kind of detailed background dedicated roleplayers would make up for themselves but no-one else ever bothers with. I thought it gave at least as good a result as GW2's similar system.

V&H also has by far the best random name generator I have ever seen. I spent about fifteen minutes just playing with it. It brings up a huge variety of names in a range of formats - ordinary one-word names like Norman or Rose, forename and surname pairs, portentous titles, typical fantasy gibberish, surreal combinations and straightforward names you might imagine working alongside in an insurance office...

I almost went with Katie Buck Mutton. I could feel her character coming through so strongly just from that name. Too strongly. I thought she might just take me over. I plumped for something plain and simple and in I went.

There's one of those fly-past introductions to the world, voiced by the same unreliable narrator. It judders and jerks, which is a known bug, and if it had lasted more than the minute or so it did I think it would have made me motion sick. Then you touch down in the new starting zone, Ethos Island.

Even back when it was called A Mystical Land this was always a game with strong, clear art direction and visual flair. The revised visuals keep the cartoonish look but bring it very much  up-to-date. The colors zing, everything looks solid, rounded, firm. It's one of those games that looks better when you're inside it than it does in screenshots (some games are the opposite) so, given that it looks good in screenshots...

When it comes to gameplay, V&H isn't breaking any new ground. It has been described as a "PvE Sandbox" and maybe it is but it sure has a lot of quests too. I like MMORPG questing. I like to read all the text, listen to all the dialog, follow all the plots. Anyone who doesn't like doing these things is not going to have a epiphany while playing Villagers and Heroes but for people who enjoy a well-written MMO quest with a sense of irony, a fluid prose style and a light touch, there's plenty here to enjoy.

I found myself caught up in the main storyline rather easily. Just what did failed Mayoral candidate Rhoda drop into the spooky old well after dark? What made Clementine deClancy vanish? What do the blood symbols on the note Chauncey's brother found mean?

The main-line quests are presented in great detail, first in the initial quest dialog and later in a diary-style write-up in your journal. Someone who actually knows how to write spent a long time over this stuff and it shows.The side-quests, of which there are many, get the same attention on the dialog but only a brief note in the diary. Every aspect of the UI, from the Quest Journal to the Inventory to the Crafting Window, is crisp, clean and very user-friendly.

It was nice to see that the residents of the realm haven't received any kind of politeness makeover. The unbearably snobbish Clementine dismissed me as a "filthy little ant" and Viggo thinks I have "a hooligan mouth" and sent me on a quest to get some soap to wash it out!

As I wandered about trying to find some I bumped into various crafting and gathering  trainers, which derailed my good questing intentions. Although I took Tailoring and Plant Lore at character creation, after a couple of hours play I somehow ended up as a Smith and a Miner. Doesn't matter - in V&H you can do all the things and on the evidence so far you'd want to because all the things are fun.

So, here I am in Lower Ethos Island down by the docks, looking for parchments stolen by the disturbingly intelligent local rats. I know how to Gnogment my weapons and I already killed a Daily Bounty Boss. If I was in the market for a new MMORPG this one would be in with a fair chance. Better than fair.

Good thing I don't have time for another MMO then, isn't it?

Running For Home

At some point in the recent past Mad Otter, the company behind A Mystical Land, must have decided having the blandest name in MMOdom did them no favors in the 'getting attention' stakes so they changed it to Villagers and Heroes, which frankly isn't that much of a zinger either. I played A Mystical Land a few times when it first appeared. I quite liked it, with its jaunty oompah music, cheerily crazed NPCs and lightly ironic humor but there are just far too many MMOs around and cute, quirky offerings don't get much of a look in. It didn't stick.

It must be incredibly hard for MMOs to build traction nowadays. There are just so many of them, mostly there and thereabouts of reasonable quality. You can try out new ones as you find them but whatever curiosity you might have had is easily satisfied in a few sessions, after which you realize you're never going to devote the time to the game that it deserves because, well, it's an MMORPG and even the lightest will eat up most of your life if you let it. So I forgot about A Mystical Land and being a browser-based game it didn't even leave an icon on my desktop to remind me it existed.

Mad Otter hadn't forgotten me, though. Last week they sent one of those "Hey! We're still here! Where are you?" emails so beloved of marketing departments the world over. And it worked, to a degree. I logged in, anyway, just to see what, if anything, had changed along with the name.

See? Germans do have a sense of humor.

A lot, it seems. There's now a client you can download if you prefer not to play in a browser window. That took just a few minutes to install and patch. My old sign-in details worked and my level seven Hunter was there waiting, glaring out at me with his grizzled, leathery old-man face.

He might have wished he'd stayed forgotten because a couple of minutes later he was dead in the dirt, the first boar he'd pinged with an arrow having killed him with two swipes of its tusks. It's hard to forget how to play a guy who only has a bow, auto-attack and one skill so it wasn't that. It was more that a Level Seven Hunter probably shouldn't be pinging arrows into a Level Twenty-Nine pig in the first place.

I have no memory of where I logged that hunter out all those months (or is it years?) ago. Maybe I was exploring, got out of my depth, camped for the night and never came back. Maybe Mad Otter changed the zones around while I was gone but left the character data alone. Whatever it was, I was at the wrong end of a map crawling with nasties, any one of which could eat me in a couple of bites.

All of which lengthy pre-amble brings me somewhere close to the subject I sat down this morning to discuss, namely how very, very much easier travel in MMOs has become and how that's not just because of instant map-clicking and flying mounts and nor is it necessarily a Good Thing.

You're not kidding!

Let's examine the predicament of that poor old hunter, whose situation turns out to be much worse than than it first appeared, not like that wasn't already bad enough. On respawning after death in Villagers and Heroes you reappear at the point at which you entered the zone. Sounds fantastic! All our Hero (I'm guessing he's not a Villager) needs to do is turn around and go out the way he came in, presumably back to an area that he was able to manage before, otherwise how did he get here in the first place?

Problem is, while he was napping someone put a huge pile of logs in front of the gate he came in by, logs that clearly aren't intended to be jumped or climbed and even when he somehow managed to scramble past them the gate turned out to be firmly locked. If that was ever a zone-out it isn't one any more.

Never mind! A Hero never loses hope. A quick bag search reveals some kind of Hearthstone. Phew! One click and all his troubles will be over. Or they would be if he'd ever bound it anywhere. Which he hadn't.

At this point, when playing MMOs long-past, beads of sweat would begin to form on the brow as you realized the magnitude of the task ahead. Having died and respawned far from where you wanted to be, having neglected to rebind in an appropriate place, the prospects for your next few hours play looked bleak. A session of sneaking, hiding, planning and running; a journey filled with nail-biting tension that could end at any time in a surge of panic and despair followed by the grim realization that now you had to do it all again, possibly in your underwear.

A look at the map suggested that the one and only working exit to the zone was a good way down to the south-east. The only good news (apart from the fact that I had a map) was that there was a path leading all the way there. A winding path across which psychotic wildlife wandered at will sure, but still a path.

So the little Hunter ran down the path, jumped through the portal, arrived in a nice, safe village and that was that.

Anticlimax much? It's a modern MMO, what did you expect? He'd die? Of course he didn't die! He got hit a couple of times, poisoned, his health dropped to about twenty per cent and that was more than I'd bargained for but he just kept going and in the end he was fine. And if he had died on the first run, so what? It took maybe forty-five seconds, tops. He'd just get up, dust himself off and do it again.

What's wrong with that picture? Wilhelm sums it up perfectly in a recent post on his trip back to Deklein in internet spaceship MMO EVE.

"Then in null sec I was back on the jump bridge network and home in Deklein in a few more jumps.  Home again, home again. It is sort of like EverQuest back in the day, running from Qeynos to Freeport or Butcherblock.  It took all evening, I didn’t really gain anything besides a change of location, but it still felt like an accomplishment."

When old-timers talk about fast travel and what was lost this is what they mean. It isn't that anyone hankers for the inconvenience, frustration or mind-numbing boredom that would come from slogging across miles of safe, unthreatening landscape were you to remove Waypoints from GW2 or flying mounts from EQ2.

Thanks for visiting.
Maybe leave it a while next time, hey?

It isn't that most even want every means of fast, safe travel to be eliminated. It isn't that at all. I would not myself want to go back to the days when travel was always slow, difficult or expensive, often all three at once. I love my flying mounts and fast, safe transportation between major population centers and key destinations is always a good option to have. If you choose not to take that option, however, or if carelessness or lack of forethought leaves you with no choice, then isn't it preferable to have an adventure trying to get home than face a dull cross-country jog on which you run as fast as or faster than everything that tries to catch you? No wonder all those wolves give up so quickly.

No, the baby got thrown out with the bathwater last time and throwing out another isn't getting to get us anywhere. We need to get both babies back in the bath where they belong, happily gurgling and splashing soapy water over the sides. Hang on, I've lost control of this metaphor, let's get some help...

SynCaine has an insightful, allusion-free post on bringing the old forward into the new in which he observes

 "That’s not to suggest you can simply copy/paste 1997 UO, release it with updated graphics, and profit. Changes to the formula are needed, but outright abandoning the core is clearly not working. So when MMO fans talk about bringing back the ‘good old days’, it’s not because they want everyone to sit around a mob spawn for 12 hours daily, or because they would love to play a game where they lose everything at the bank all the time."

Talking about what made the older MMOs so memorable and distinctive, Keen points out

"MMOs are the sum of their parts; The good parts add and the bad part detract, but the entire game wouldn’t be the same if any piece went missing."

There. That's telling it straight. I just hope Brad McQuaid isn't the only one listening.