New World has always looked gorgeous, even at lower fidelity, but with the much more powerful video card I bought last summer now able to run it at the higher settings, it's more stunning than ever. That was readily apparent the moment I logged in after a 13GB patch today to take a look at the Springtime Bloom event that just began.
The game generally does holidays well, with events that are accessible, entertaining and visually spectacular, although if there's a "but..." it's that they do tend to stick to a formula. I missed the first Springtime Bloom last year but the current one still felt very familiar, being formally almost identical to the Winter Convergence festival, which I've visited a couple of times.
Spring lends itself particularly well to the process, though, what with the focus on floral displays. The holiday is celebrated in the central cities of four of Aeternum's regions - Everfall, Monarch's Bluff, Weaver's Fen and Brightwood - or at least those are the ones that hand out gifts. I'm not sure if the rest also put up decorations and if not, why not.
There are also four Springtime Villages, one in each of the aforementioned areas, which is where you can pick up the event questline, spend your event tokens in the event shop and craft your event quest items on the event crafting tables. It's quite the event!
Each of the eight locations has a free package of holiday goods you can pick up once a day or thereabouts and they all have portals attached so in theory you could log in and zap yourself around the lot in a matter of minutes. I'll be doing that from now on but for this first rotation I had to do a fair bit of travelling to open up the portals I didn't already have, which meant it took me about an hour altogether.
I did also do a couple of the faction events on the way. They involve picking some highly suspicious flowers, which sounds simple enough until you find out every time you go near one a bunch of giant wasps appear and chase you about.
That in itself wouldn't be so bad if you could swat them but these are super-annoying event wasps, almost entirely immune to damage from anything other than event bombs. To kill them you have to lay down traps and lead the wasps into them, whereupon the traps explode, damaging but - annoyingly - not outright killing the wasps.
It took me about four or five traps each time to finish them all off and I was under half health by the time the last one pegged out so it's not a forgone conclusion you'll survive. Game developers seem to love mechanics like this. I'm forever having to lay traps or lead mobs into objects to kill them because somehow they're magically invulnerable to all other kinds of harm.
I have to wonder if there's anyone playing who genuinely prefers these kinds of dances to just whacking the damn things with a sword or an axe. Sometimes it gets to feel like there's no point even carting a weapon around, you get so little use out of it. And holiday events seem particularly prone to such shenanigans.
One thing about the plant-picking I did appreciate was the gigantic aerial signpost. Over each field hangs a huge rainbow ring you really can't miss. I didn't even know what it was when I saw it but it was so spectacular I headed over to investigate. That's how you bring people to the party.
As is the way of New World, there are plentiful rewards in the way of consumables along the way but the good stuff is gated both by event currency and event faction. Fortunately, both come fairly readily. I'm glad of that because there's some very nice stuff in the event store. Lots of outfits and some very nice furniture.
While I definitely would like the over-the-top four poster bed and the chaise-longue, as well as several of the flower baskets, I have already claimed a prodigious amount of free furniture from Prime Gaming giveaways and I'm struggling to find anywhere to put it all. I went to my house last time I played, which was only a few days ago, and was a bit surprised by how cramped it felt.
It's not like I bought the smallest one although I didn't buy the biggest either. Still, you'd think a three-story townhouse with a porch and balcony would be easier to furnish than that.
Gold is a lot easier to come by in New World than it was, rental costs were slashed to a fraction of what they used to be and I believe you can own more than one house. I might have to look into buying a second home, just to have somewhere to put all my free stuff.
I have no plans to return to New World full-time nor even part-time but it always was and still remains a very good MMORPG. I'll at least be sticking around for the rest of the spring holiday, even if all that amounts to is a quick flip around the festival sites every day or two.
And who knows what I might get caught up in while I'm there? A lot has certainly happened since the last time I played for any length of time, not least a whole, new expansion. I don't think I'll be buying that but I admit I'm tempted when I see someone cruise past me on the back of a lion, while I have to keep trudging along on foot.
Before I finish, I'll just give a quick thank-you to Heartless Gamer for pointing out the recent change from Alt-H to F10 when you want to hide the UI. F10 has been my go-to for that since EverQuest and muscle memory frequently has me pressing it in games where it's not relevant. I used it a lot today and it felt good.
It's amazing how the little things cheer you up sometimes, isn't it? Not that I wasn't cheery enough to begin with but it's nice to have one less niggle to worry about. It all adds up or counts down, whichever way you prefer to look at it.
Exactly a month ago
I said I wasn't going to be "dabbling with audio and video" any more," unless and until there are some very major
advances. Why? Because "It takes ages and I get nothing interesting out of it."
That remains true for AI-generated video, which still seems a long way from
becoming a consumer product. I keep a weather eye on it in case anything worth
mentioning develops but so far it's mostly more of the same five second pans
and uncanny-valley animation, with tiny, incremental adjustments only the
initiated will notice.
AI audio - specifically music - is another matter entirely. Seemingly
overnight, a cluster of apps have surfaced, each capable of generating
segments of songs that seem barely distinguishable from what, for shorthand
purposes only, I'll call the real thing. The first one I ran into was
Suno, which I
wrote about
briefly just over a week ago.
The AI aggregator
There's An AI For That
claims to be able to point you to
more than a hundred alternatives
to Suno but the one that's really getting all the attention is
Udio. I watched a couple of YouTube videos about Udio and it looked more than interesting enough to justify some
"dabbling".
Udio is currently in Open Beta. While that lasts you're free to create an
astonishingly generous 1200 songs a month. All you have to give them is an
email address. The
ownership rules
on what you make are pretty lenient too, although like all such services they
do ask you to credit them, while also retaining the right to do it for you if
they feel like it.
At first I just played around with the default text-to-song prompt. That gets
you two thirty-second clips, like the one below, for which I specified some downtempo electronica about an old horse looking back at his life.
The results were pretty good, although no
better to my ear than the ones I got from Suno. Once again, the weak point was
the AI-generated lyrics. And the titles, which most confusingly change every
time you edit or extend a song. AIs still really aren't great at writing
anything you'd want to read for pleasure.
What I really wanted to do was upload my own lyrics and have the AI set them
to music for me. Both Suno and Udio can do that but the free version of Suno
is quite strict in what it allows you to do with anything you create using the
service. Udio, at least while it's in beta, is much less restrictive.
With that in mind, I started playing around with Udio to see if I could get it
to show me what one of my songs might have sounded like, had I ever managed to
get a band to play it the way I wanted it played, something I only rarely and
fleetingly achieved because musicians, even incompetent ones, annoyingly have ideas of their own.
I can't help but be struck by the similarities with the way I used to have to find a group before I could
complete certain content in EverQuest. That all changed with the addition of
Mercenaries, after which I pretty much never needed to speak to another human
being in the game again. AI might just be my musical mercenary solution...
The first problem I ran into was one of duration. Not the thirty-second limit
on segments but the way the AI simply speeds the song up to get all the words
in. If you give it half a dozen lines it sounds fine. If you give it two
verses it starts sounding like The Dickies.
The answer to that is to break the thing up into sections of suitable size and
stitch them together, something that's very easy to do using the simple and
intuitive interface. If you get muddled, there's a very helpful
FAQ.
It took me about half an hour to complete my song, which clocked in at 2.44.
Just about the perfect length.
It's made up of an intro, two verses, a chorus, a third verse, a second chorus
and a coda. That's how I originally wrote it except for the intro, which
someone else would no doubt have tacked onto the front whether I liked it or
not, had I allowed a bunch of actual musicians to get their hands on it. Along with
a solo and some kind of break, no doubt, because musicians always try
to complicate things.
When it was done, by far the most surprising thing about it was that the vocal
melody, paricularly in the verses, sounds uncannily similar to the one I
actually wrote back in the mid-1980s. Eerily so, in fact. If I had one of my
old cassettes, I'd upload a version I recorded back then, for comparison.
Sadly, even if I was able to find one, I fear all you'd hear after thirty-five
years is tape hiss.
The chorus didn't sound much like the one I wrote. More worryingly , the
second chorus didn't sound much like the first. It may be that there's a way
to cut and paste sections so they're identical but if so I haven't worked out
how to do it. I just told the AI to do it again and it did, but differently.
The effect of having the same lines sung in two different ways works quite
well, although if it's not the same each time I don't think it actually
qualifies as a chorus. There's also an odd moment when the singer appears to
improvise a couple of words I didn't give her, one when she rushes the
begining of a verse and another when she slurs a word. Oddly, all of those
seem to add to the faux veracity of the thing.
Not quite as charmingly quirky are the moments when the segments grind a little
against each other before they settle in. All told, though, I have to say it's
a better job than most line-ups of any band I ever played in would have been
able to come up with. It may not be professional standard but it would
definitely have gotten us through any audition needed to play the back room of
a pub back in 1985.
Once I was passably content with the music I thought about adding some
visuals. I was planning on uploading it to my YouTube channel so I could link
to it here and it's nice to have something to watch while you're
half-listening, I always find.
My immediate thought was to have another AI make me a video based on the audio
file but on investigation that turned out to be way more trouble than I
was prepared to take. I've futzed around with that sort of thing before and it
always seems to be me doing most of the work.
As far as I can tell, while the actual output of AI-generated video keeps getting more and
more sophisticated, the amount of technical expertise and sheer effort to
produce anything longer than three seconds is constantly accelerating too. I was
pretty sure it would be quicker to knock something up myself from some old
camcorder footage I had lying around so that's what I did.
Actually, it wasn't that much quicker because once I got started I couldn't
stop fiddling about with it. I had it done in about an hour and then I thought
it would look better with the lyrics and that took an hour more. In the end I
got something a not very imaginative twelve year old would probably be mildly
embarassed to hand in for media studies homework. Good enough!
The thing to remember here is that I'm very easily pleased. I can hear and see
most of what's wrong with what I've made but I still think it's pretty good
anyway. I've already watched it half a dozen times and there's every chance
I'll watch it half a dozen more.
In fact, the only thing likely to get me to stop is making another one
with another of my old songs. I'm very curious to see whether the
shape of the lyric, coupled with the intended style, does indeed force the
whole thing into a certain melodic pigeonhole. Did I only imagine I was
creating those tunes all those years ago, when really they were inherent in
the words I was writing and the subculture I inhabited?
I'm aware that we stand on the very edge of musical annihilation here and that
in a matter of years or possibly months it may be literally impossible to know
if anything we hear contains any human emotion or experience at all. And yet, I'm not unduly concerned. Against such worries I set
my faith in the ability of all true creative souls to turn every technical
innovation into a means of self-expression.
I'm old enough to remember when album sleeves sometimes bore the
passive-aggressive rubric "No Synthesizers". The line between
authenticity and artificialty is constantly being re-drawn.
This video I made for a song on which I played none of the instruments and
didn't sing a note has words I wrote and images I shot. It sounds remarkably reminiscent of the demo I recorded more than a quarter of a
century ago in a rented room with a friend with a guitar and an acquaintance with a drum kit. Only better.
What's more, I can feel the new pushing out the old. I can already feel the AI singer's phrasing replacing the way I always heard it in my head.
Don't ask me what's real. I'll only tell you "Everything".
After I hit Publish on
last month's post
about not being able to watch the third and fourth seasons of
Roswell New Mexico, I did what I said I might do and re-upped to my VPN
of choice, which happens to be
Mullvad. It's very cheap, has no registration process to speak of and happily supports
ad hoc comings and goings with no need for any kind of subscription.
Also, it has a cute logo of a mole wearing a hard hat. Not that I'm saying
that influenced me in any way.
The only drawback is that Mullvad doesn't support Windows operating
systems older than Win10, as I found out when I went to use it on my
laptop, which stills chugs along on Windows 8.1, partly because I had
thedisk but mostlybecause it's too ancient to run anything
newer. Luckily, Mullvad supplies its own work-around, which just requires some
cutting and pasting so it can piggyback on a third-party service, the
name of which I forget and which I'm too lazy to look up.
Have we been here before? I feel like I'm getting deja vu.
Doesn't matter. The point isn't to discuss the nit-picking details of how I'm
passing myself off as a New Yorker these days. It's to say that, as I
suspected, no amount of digital camoflage was ever going to let me watch those
two missing seasons, which I still haven't seen, for the simple reason that
no-one is streaming them for free anywhere.
They are for sale as digital downloads and, courtesy of my spoofed IP
address, I could theoretically buy them from Amazon and a few other
places but I'm neither ready to pay that price yet nor certain how it would go
with my UK payment credentials if I tried. It might come to it eventually but
for the while I'm holding off to see if the show returns to a streaming
service I can access, one way or another.
Since I'd paid for a month anyway, I thought I'd see what else was available
that previously hadn't been, when I was geo-locked to my genuine physical
location. The first show I thought of was...
Housebroken (Season 2)
Housebroken, for those who neither know nor likely care, is an American
animated sitcom made for an adult audience, featuring a poodle called
Holly, who runs therapy sessions for animals in her neighborhood out of
the front room of her owner's home, while she's out at work. Holly is voiced
by Lisa Kudrow, who you will certainly know from shows like
Friends and... well, just Friends, really, although god knows no-one
needs another show on their resume if they have that one.
I really enjoyed
the first season
of Housebroken. There are only two but a third has been commissioned so it
must be doing okay, even though it has no more than a mediocre 6.4 on
IMDB. I'd give it something closer to an 8, I think. The best episodes are very
funny but it does lack a little in consistency.
The second season is noticeably more cartoonish than the first in that it
makes more extensive use of the freedom of animation to stretch the boundaries
of a supposedly realistic setting (If you can call anything where cats, dogs,
hamsters and pigs sit peacably in a room together without tearing each other
apart "realistic". Oh, and they talk and some of them run businesses
and... you know what, forget I ever used the word...)
There are also several of those set-piece episodes where characters meet
versions of themselves in dreams or perform musical numbers in the style of a
broadway show or parody other shows and movies. Sometimes all of those at
once. Also, there are a surprising number of scenes - even whole episodes -
where one or more of the animals is on drugs.
At times I thought it seemed a bit much for one season - especially the
second. You don't usually get too much of this sort of thing until later in
the run, when the writers are either running out of ideas or the show is so
popular they feel they can get away with anything.
That's not to complain, though. Mostly, the more surreal it gets, the funnier
it is. I particularly enjoyed the episode with the
Thelma and Louise parody. And there's really not much point making an
animated comedy about talking animals if you don't lean into the
possibilities.
The voice acting is uniformly good. There's a plethora of famous guest voices
but none of them unsettle or unbalance the gestalt of the regular ensemble.
The writing is sharp enough, although the comedy can also be also very broad.
It's a difficult trick to match those two approaches. Mostly it comes off
but even when it doesn't, things generally move fast enough you're past
it before you notice.
The animation is fine. Better than functional, not spectacular, always in the
very recognizeable, American made-for-TV style. It sits well in that
tradition, not surprising when you find the studio behind it is
Bento Box Entertainment, best known for Bob's Burgers, a show I
have never watched but which, from the title alone, sounds like it must be the
most American show ever.
It is mildly ironic that such a US-oriented studio should name itself
after an iconic Japanese artefact. I'm sure there's a story in that, which
leads me neatly, if unexpectedly, on to...
Toradora
Toradora, as I'm sure someone reading this already knows, is an
anime in which male lead Ryuji's ability to put together a perfect
Bento Box features heavily. I wasn't going to talk about that show today. I
had other ideas but when the universe gives you that kind of nudge it'd be
crazy to ignore it.
Not just the anime but the whole IP is a big deal in Japan. It began as a
series of light novels,
a concept
I wasn't familiar with a year ago but now know quite well from work, where we
seem to be selling more and more of them.
We don't currently stock English translations of this particular series. They
do exist but they don't seem to be in print at the moment. If they were, I'd
order the first in the run to see if it matches up to the anime, which is one
of the best I've seen.
Of course, my minimal exposure to the form makes that a judgment of limited
value but don't take my word for how good it is. Here's
another opinion. Or just google the reviews. They're uniformly excellent.
It's widely considered a classic in the high school romance/coming of age
genre but it's considerably more nuanced, thoughtful and just downright odd
than that pigeonhole would suggest. The cast isn't huge - there are two
central characters and something like half a dozen close supporting roles -
but everyone, even the minor, recurring characters, gives a strong impression
of depth and solidity.
The narrative throughline, which meanders chronologically through the school
year for the full twenty-five episodes, somehow manages to be at once coherent
and sprawling. The show opens with a fairly defined concept: Ryuji and
Taiga both have ferocious reputations and/or appearances that make
their classmates fear and/or respect them. Naturally, over the course of the
series, it will be revealed that they are nothing like as scary as everyone
thinks and of course they will be revealed to be made for each other.
Yeah. Right. Good luck with that! It's true we get there in the end but as
with all the best trips, it's the journey that counts, not the destination.
Pretty much every cliche is overturned. Every plot twist you see coming goes
somewhere else. Every major character has their own journey to take and all of
them end up being more complex than you'd imagined.
I never knew from one episode to the next what to expect but I found the whole
thing so emotionally involving I literally pumped my fist in the air and
yelled "Yes!" at one crucial moment and threw both my arms in the air
with a despairing "FFS!" at another. This is unseemly behavior for
anyone but especially someone about to hit retirement age.
I watched it with the English (American.) dub and I rate the voice acting very
highly. I've long been an advocate of V.O. with subtitles but in the case of
anime I think I'm definitely leaning towards the dubbed versions. Or maybe
I've just been lucky so far.
It's fair to say this is my kind of show but I would recommend it to anyone.
It's heartwarming in the best way but also thought-provoking and challenging.
The ending, which remains controversial, takes some getting your head around,
I'll tell you that for nothing. I was all "Wait! What?" until I had a
good long think about it but I'm cool with it now.... I think...
In keeping with my comments from the last time I wrote about stuff like this,
I'll be getting Toradora on DVD. Anything you want to watch again needs to be
on hard copy now, as I think we can all agree. Which brings me neatly back to
where I was going before, and ...
The Conners (Season One)
Thanks to my VPN I am finally watching the Roseanne follow-up that
began all the way back in 2018. Really? Was it that long ago?
I wanted to watch this from the moment I heard of it. Roseanne was one of
those shows from the '90s that benchmark the decade (Even though it actually
started airing in the very late 'eighties.) Roseanne, Friends,
Frasier - whatever ran in the 10PM Friday slot on Channel 4. It's weird
to think it now but in the UK, at the time, those and more like them were
considered niche viewing only suitable for the minority channel, at least at
first.
Of all of them, the only one I have never re-watched is Roseanne but my
memories of it, more than a quarter of a century old, remain surrisingly
clear. It must have made an impression. The final season, which aired in 1997,
I have pegged in my mind as The End Of TV, mostly because it came just
two years before I started playing EverQuest and gave up watching TV
for a decade and a half. Not because it was... not great, to put it
politely.
Apart from that last season, though, I loved Roseanne. Not Roseanne the
character, or Roseanne Barr the actor, both of whom I always found
annoying, but the rest of the cast. (Okay, not Martin Mull either. He
was even more annoying than Roseanne...) so I was naturally interested when I
heard the show was getting a sequel.
That happened in 2018 and everything was apparently going jut fine until
Roseanne
torpedoed her own show
with an exceptionally ill-advised Twitter rant. That looked to be it for the
revival until she magnanimously opted out of the show she'd created under her
own name, leaving the rest of the cast to carry on under the family banner.
When I learned that it would be coming back without the titular character my
interest actually increased.
And then I somehow never managed to watch it. I mean I could have. I
think it came out here on Sky originally. It's now on Sky Go,
whatever that is. Also Apple TV for some reason. It just hasn't
appeared on any of the channels or services I'm registered with or subscribed
to or can get for free so I kind of forgot all about it.
The Conners is, however, on Netflix in the USA and now, thanks to my
VPN disguise, it just shows up on my Netflix account as if it was always
there. Which is weird. You'd think there'd be some code to stop that.
I'm very glad there isn't because I'm really enjoying The Conners. It's stagey
and occasionally awkward but it's all the characters I remember, behaving like
they should. Everyone looks suitably older and more shop-worn although I'd
have to re-watch the original series to judge just how far to the left the
politics has shifted. It feels like it must be a long way, especially since it
seems that in the one, short revival season made before she dropped out,
Roseanne was written as a Trump supporter.
John Goodman, Sara Gilbert and Laurie Metcalfe are all as good
in their familiar, familial roles as you could hope and
Lecey Goransen is better as Becky than I remember, although
maybe I'm thinking of Sarah Chalke, the other Becky. There were
famously two Beckys...
As an actor, I don't think Laurie Metcalfe has a setting below "Over the Top" but she's counterweighted by Sara Gilbert, playing Darlene with
perfect, dry understatement as always. Amusingly, Michael Fishman's
DJ is as bland and underwritten as an adult as he was as a child, to
the point where it has to be an in-joke.
Of the new characters, I really like Ames McNamara as Mark, the
cross-dressing, gay middle-schooler. Child actors can be awkward but he seems
astonishingly natural in what must be a very challenging role. His elder
sister, Harris, played by Emma Kenney, is winningly reminiscent
of her mother, Darlene, at the same age, while somehow looking, sounding and
acting completely different. That's a hell of a trick.
The rest of the newbies I'm still getting used to but I'm only in Season One.
The show has a very poor rating on most of the review sites I've checked, some
of which might relate to residual loyalty to Roseanne Barr or to the show's
unexpectedly liberal political stance. I broadly approve of the politics on
show but even I was surprised by just how "woke" Darlene has grown up
to be. I remember her as more of a Daria-inspired nihilist than any
kind of social justice warrior.
I'll have to go back and re-watch Roseanne to see if I'm mis-remembering that.
I guess I could faff about, trying to find out if and where it's streaming and
whether I can access it but I just checked and you can get the box set of the
whole nine seasons for under £35 on Amazon so I think I'll just save myself
the hassle and buy it.
Of course, then it'll just sit around on a shelf, unopened, like all the other
box sets in this house but at least I'll have the comfort and security of
knowing I could watch it, if I wanted to.
I was a little startled to see this news reportfrom MassivelyOP, when it popped up in my feed this evening. It's all about "a selection of officially licensed GW2 flower seeds based on some of the plants found within Tyria". The MOP piece doesn't specifically say they're for sale but that's the impression I got and it made me think.
I have a garden. I don't like gardening but I have one anyway. It came with the house. It's not small, either.
When we first moved in, thirty years ago, we used it a lot. Then the kids left home and we mostly forgot about it for a while. When we remembered it was there it took me several years to hack it back into a manageable state.
It's not at all bad now although it's fortunate fashion has moved on from the manicured perfection of the aughts to a looser, wildlife-friendly feel. Our massive pile of brushwood isn't evidence of neglect any more - it's a hedgehog sanctuary. To prove it we have actual hedgehogs. I've seen them.
I grew up in a home where gardening was a serious enterprise. We had two very large vegetable gardens, an orchard, a couple of lawns and plenty of decorative flowerbeds and shrubs. My main interest in gardening as a child was avoiding it.
About all I'm prepared to do now is trim the hedges, tidy the paths and keep the grass short but I did go so far as to scatter some wildflower seeds a while back. I even watered them occasionally. They grew quite nicely and weren't any trouble so I thought I might get some of these amusing GW2 seeds and have a go with those. It would amuse Mrs. Bhagpuss, at least.
There's a link in the piece so I clicked on that. If I was startled by the news item, I was floored by the website itself.
For a start, it's so glaring and harsh. Neon on a field of black. It reminds me of a GeoCities home page from the 'nineties. What really set me back, though, was the means through which the various seeds can be acquired.
They aren't for sale after all. They're free but only to selected applicants and when I say "selected" I'm being quite literal. For a chance at the "rare" seeds you need to "
Anyway, that's how I've been spending my evening. It's dark so I can't do much gardening anyway. That's my excuse. (I have a million excuses for not doing the gardening. This year, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand of them involve rain.)
If you fancy growing some Tyrian flowers and you live in the UK, which is as far as Seed Saga is prepared to send them, I suggest you get started on your essay right away.
Good luck. I'm sure the competition will be fierce.
No plan survives contact with the livestream, as the saying goes. I sat down at my PC this morning with all kinds of good intentions. Then I clicked a link to what I thought was a clip from Lana del Rey's headlining set at Coachella last night and it turned out to be the livestream of her on stage right now. So that was my morning gone.
Well, an hour of it. Lana was midway through her set when I arrived, or thereabouts. I knew it was being livestreamed but by my calculations yesterday she was due on around four in the morning my time and since I'm not (Faron) young enough for wolf hours any more, I abandoned any idea of watching her play live, live.
Either I can't read a time conversion or she went on stage really late. I mean, she always starts late but that would have been about three hours, which is a bit much even for Lana. Looking at it now I think it was a bit of both. I was a couple of hours out and she was an hour late. Sounds about right. (Yeah, it's not, though. A news report I saw confirmed she actually went on early, for once. Clearly I can't read a clock.)
Reality is fluid. We all know that. Over the course of my time playing MMORPGs there's been a consistent drift away from real-time events towards recyclables.
When I started playing EverQuest they still had GMs. Actual, live human beings sitting in an office somewhere (San Diego, presumably.) in front of a screen, logged into a game they could change on the fly. Many times I was off somewhere, in Qeynos Hills or South Karana, hunting gnolls or camping aviaks, when the word would go out that something was happening in West Commonlands or Greater Faydark.
Maybe there'd be werewolves. Sometimes undead. Once, I remember, it was three giant Aviak Avocets. Whatever it was, you could guarantee mayhem.
People reacted differently. Some yelled for a wizard to port them to where the fun was happening. Others in the drop zone started heading in the opposite direction, complaining loudly and bitterly about the disruption to their camps. At various times I've been on both sides but mostly I wanted to go where the chaos was.
More meaningful than ad hoc GM events were those set pieces that only happened once. The opening of the Plane of Hate in EverQuest or Greenscale's Blight in Rift. The karka invasion of Lion's Arch in Guild Wars 2. These are things you remember forever if you were there - or wish you had been if you weren't. They carry weight because they only happened once.
Gamers, though, are about the most risk-averse group imagineable. It's not always apparent, given the risks they say they like to take, but really what they almost all crave is a do-over. It's fine to wipe but there has to be a second run. And a third. It's fine to miss out so long as you never miss out.
Everyone must have a chance at everything, always. God forbid anyone should come late and the bus leave without them.
Commercially it makes a lot of sense. What business wants to leave their customers behind? You can't sell them stuff if they aren't there to buy it. ArenaNet took a long time learning that lesson but in they end they did, which may be why GW2 feels so stolid, staid and ordinary now, not reckless, strange and weird, like it used to.
It's unfashionable to offer non-repeatable content in games but of course it's the norm in music. We can all buy the records or access the streams whenever we want but if you want the thrill of seeing Lana bring out Billie Eilish to do Video Games you're gonna have to be there.
Or you could be watching it on the livestream. That's not the same but it's not watching a clip later in the day, either.
Livestreaming is odd. I don't do it often but I totally get it and if I didn't this morning I was given an object lesson in why and how it works.
When I clicked that link I thought I was going to watch a recording. That wold have been great because I love Lana and I'm always happy to watch her perform but I certainly wasn't feeling any obligation or desire to drop everything else I had planned so I could carry on watching until she stopped. A recording you can watch any time and it's always the same. Kind of the point.
As I started watching, though, I noticed the comments waterfalling down the side of the screen. That didn't seem right. I scratched around a little and yes, this was live.
And everything in that moment changed. I opened the screen to full, sat back and just basked. It felt real. Not like being there but like being somewhere.
About a dozen times I had that tingling sensation like static crawling over the skin that means something really special is happening. I'm prone to that, which makes me special, apparently.
I read about it once. Like ASMR, not everyone experiences it. It means something.
"Pleasurable valuation of music is associated with increased functional
connectivity in the brain between auditory cortices and mesolimbic
reward circuitry" or in other words "People who get the chills have an enhanced ability to experience intense emotions".
Which is all very well but it doesn't factor in the extra thrill that comes from knowing what you're experiencing is a unique, real-time event that can never be repeated. That's a whole other existential ball of string.
Here we chance wandering into the treacherous waters of authenticity, a stretch of rapids I prefer not to navigate just now. My oft-stated position is that subjectivity is all we have and therefore everything is by definition as real as everything else but that doesn't sit well with everyone and anyway it doesn't forward my thesis here that recording is not live performance.
It isn't, though. And livestreaming isn't either. Livestreaming is a peculiar limbic state somewhere between the two. I know it. I can feel the abrasion where the two rub together.
For about twenty-five years one of the most important things in my life was live performance. Specifically, seeing bands play live. At times I went to two or three gigs a week, for months in a row. I rarely went less than once a month in the whole of that quarter century.
And then I stopped. I won't rehash the reasons but for the next twenty-five or thirty years I slowed down to almost never and then to actually never.
For a good chunk of that time livestreaming didn't exist other than in broadcast transmission and when did TV ever show anything other than sport live? It'd have to be on the scale of Live Aid before they'd clear a schedule for music. And I didn't watch Live Aid.
I can't say I've watched a lot of livestreams, even now, but I've watched a few and it is different than watching a recording of the same thing. It's not just music or sports or public events, either. Even watching someone play a game on Twitch feels different to watching a "Let's Play" on YouTube.
The difference isn't even indefinable. Something liminal in the mind knows the possibility of change exists even if you're not consciously thinking about it. Something could go wrong. Something unexpected could happen. Nothing you're seeing or hearing has a predefined outcome. And most importantly, this will only happen once and that one time is now.
Also, by watching when you know others are watching, you feel somehow part of something larger. It's the effect many of us claim for MMOs, where it doesn't matter that you play with others, it matters that they're there. So many intangibles. They pile up.
There are games in the pipeline that claim they'll provide a personalised service, with gamesmasters on hand to create bespoke events on the fly. If those events turn out to be anything other than rote I predict a clamor for repeats until there's no-one left who hasn't done them all, by which time they might just as well have been scripted anyway.
One-offs used to signal thrills. Now they smack of elitism and entitlement. We don't like them. We won't stand for them.
From here it would be so easy to fold back into the argument on preservation. If something's worth doing, is it worth doing forever or is there a value in evanescence?
I vacillate. Some days I say keep it all. Some days I say it's all going to burn anyway so let it and enjoy the heat.
What I am sure of is that being there is better than not being there, even when being there is not being there. The total weight of my life is still heavier for contiguous experiences like this morning's than without, attenuated though they are.
Everything may be equally real and yet. Some things are realler than others. I can't square it but I can feel it. Can you?
The plan for today was a music post but they take a while and the
weather's turned warm and fine so that's not happening. The garden won't tidy
itself, more's the pity.
Instead, how about another Friday grab-bag? I think I have enough bookmarks
for one of those...
Is it, Though?
The headline on the news report at
MMOBombtrumpets "The World Of Pantheon: Rise Of The Fallen Is Looking Much Better
With The New Lighting Update". News Editor Troy Blackburn seems really impressed:
"...the most impressive thing they have implemented into Pantheon: Rise of the
Fallen is the improved lighting.... The video does a fantastic job of
highlighting the changes to the lighting system and it's amazing how much of a
difference it makes."
I was curious to see it after that build-up. I'm broadly in favor of
the new graphic style Visionary Realms have chosen and it's looked pretty good in the videos they've put out so far to promote it. This one? Not
so much.
The video wasn't produced by VR themselves but by a YouTuber called
Redbeardflynn (No relation to our own
Redbeard, at least I'm assuming...). The video itself is perfectly fine. It's what it
shows that bothers me.
These things are always a matter of taste but to my eye, many of the
Befores in that video look more atmospheric and characterful than the
largely bland and over-illuminated Afters. It's not that I think the new
lighting is in any way bad. I just can't see it as much of an
improvement. By and large, I prefer it the way it was.
It does, I suppose, have the merit of making it easier to see everything,
which seems to be in keeping with the direction the game is heading.
I'm beginning to think that, when and if it ever reaches an official
launch state, Pantheon won't look much like Brad's original vision at all.
That may or may not be a bad thing. By then the whole retro scene might almost be ready for a revival of its own, it's been going on so long now. I'm not entirely sure who the target demographic is any more, anyway. People who plan on playing video games when they retire? If so, maybe it makes sense to make everything easier to see.
Maybe they should include a magnifying glass in the Collector's Edition.
Anyone Got A Map?
Just a quick follow-up to
yesterday's post
about the latest EverQuest II update, Darkpaw Rising. Attentive
readers may have noticed a throwaway line in which I described it as "excellent, awkward and frustrating". It's all of that and what's more it's meant to be.
The new instance is based on, although by no means the same as, the sprawling dungeon included with the old
Splitpaw Saga Adventure Pack from June 2005, a time when the
EQII development team at SOE was still taking no prisoners when
it came to accessibility. Almost two decades later, someone at
Darkpaw clearly thinks the time has come to revisit that
aesthetic.
The new update is... challenging. What it mostly challenges is your
patience. If you're the kind of person who yells "Yippee!" when they
realise the quest they're on is sending them deep into a maze or someone who keeps a pad of graph paper and a mapping pen always to hand in the fervent hope a cartographic opportunity may arise, you're going to love this update.
If you're everyone else, you're going to tab out after ten minutes and start
searching for help. I did and found nothing so I gritted my loins, girded my
teeth and got on with it.
In a couple of hours or so I'd killed every last gnoll in the place, as well
as all the bats, snakes, mushroom-men, earth elementals and any damn thing
that moved. I'd bought some tracking scrolls in the cash shop so I could find
my quest targets and now there was literally nothing on track. Not a living or
undead thing left in the place and yet I still had plenty of unfinished
quests, some of them asking me to kill mobs I'd not seen at all.
That was working as intended. The dungeon is meant to take more than one run to complete. It has multiple levels with some areas
inaccessible without the use of crafted devices such as ladders or teleport
crystals. I knew all that. I'd even stopped to do the tradeskill instance so I could make the items I needed. The problem was, I couldn't figure out where
I was meant to use them.
In the end I decided to do some proper research, which eventually paid off. Searching for all kinds of variations on Darkpaw Dungeon/Instance/Warren got me nowhere but when I googled Darkpaw Maps I finally got some hits. In
case anyone reading this is thinking of giving the new content a look, I'm
very happy to share what I found.
There's a page on the wiki but it's tucked away under the heading
Darkpaw Warrens Maps. It has several links to some maps made in beta by a player called
Taled, along with a fairly comprehensive quest
walkthrough.
Taled says he's not planning on uploading the maps to EQ2Maps (Although now I check he has at least posted them on the forums there so someone else can do it.) so you'll
have to install them yourself. Luckily for the less technically-minded among
us, he's included
comprehensive instructions, which I followed and can attest work perfectly. There are also some PoIs you can add to the maps, which is an even fiddlier process but if I can manage it, anyone can.
Thanks for the maps, Taled! I'd be lost without them. Literally.
Ever Wish You Hadn't Bothered?
Remember those
two posts
back in March, where I went through every act on the
Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition longlist and gave my thoughts
on all of them? Well, that was a waste of time!
Yesterday, the organisers announced the eight names that made it through to
the shortlist. No mention of my favorites, of course. I wasn't all that
surprised. There wasn't a lot that interested or impressed me on the long list and I was fairly sure the few I did like wouldn't make the cut.
That said, I did think George Houston would make it onto the shortlist. He looks like a star already. But nope. No sign of him, or of the
wonderful Chloe Slater - who, to be fair, may only have that one, great
song...oh, wait...
Of the eight, most seem like solid, musicianly picks. I guess it's in keeping
with the way Glastonbury is these days - slick, professional, polished and
more than a little dull. I guess they didn't call it Worthy Farm for nothing. Not like the old days, although god knows the old
days weren't all that great, either.
Anyway, for completion's sake, the eight shortlisters are The Ayoub Sisters, Bryte, Caleb Kunle, JayaHadADream, KID 12, Nadia Kadek,
Olivia Nelson, and Problem Patterns. If you want links, you can find them in the
aforementioned posts.
I'm kidding!I know no-one here cares!
End With A Tune
I did say I wanted to do a music post today. I guess I'm halfway there. I've
been bookmarking a lot of stuff to share of late but on review I'm not wholly
convinced it's all up to the mark. I mean, I like all of it but a lot
doesn't really stand out from the pack the way it probably should if I'm going to pull it out for special attention.
This does, though.
I LUV IT feat. Playboi Carti -
Camillo Cabello
She's a pop star, apparently. I hadn't heard of her but that means nothing. Pop's changed, hasn't it?
For the better.
A lot of things I've liked lately seem to have had
Playboi Carti somewhere around them, too.
Also, I love that video, particularly the very last shot with the bloodstain
slowly spreading and that wonderful expression she pulls...
And we're done. Real music post soon, weather permitting.
When I went to log into EverQuest II this morning so I could carry on with the new, excellent, awkward and frustrating Darkpaw Rising update, I spotted a link in the launcher to the transcript of a recent AMA by the EQII team on the new, excellent, not at all awkward or frustrating forums. I thought I'd have a quck look at it while the game loaded so here I am, nearly an hour later, not having played at all.
It's a long and very interesting read although much of that interest applies only to people who might actually play the game. A few of the topics and answers, though, I felt had some wider resonance so I've pulled them out for consideration here. I recommend anyone who currently plays the game, or used to and still cares about it, take a glance at the whole thing but for everyone else, this will probably be more than enough.
Since I can't keep my opinions to myself, I've added my thoughts as well. It's my blog so I can!
Q: Is there a possibility of opening up some art assets for community
contributions as well? Caith: Nope.The player studio project
that many of the Daybreak games had going for a long time were both legal
headaches as well as not viable financially. The amount of art resources
(hours) required to work with a contributor far exceeded the amount of
resources the teams could have simply allocated to an artist to complete the
same work.
The thing I like most about this AMA is the way no-one balks at giving the real reasons for why things are done the way they are. Answer after answer comes down to some combination of not enough people, not enough time, much more complicated than it sounds, causes more problems than it solves or players didn't like it. Almost nothing is sugar-coated. It's like there was no marketing rep guiding the conversation and the Head of Studio, who was, actually wanted players to understand how game development works.
That said, I imagine the part Caith left out was that under SOE's ownership a whole load of projects were greenlighted that clearly couldn't have been profitable. They were presumably underwritten by Sony, a company that has long seemed quite comfortable with losing huge amounts of money. Perks of being a rounding error on the account sheet of a global multinational I guess.
Cut to the chase. You want me to kill 'em, right?
Q: Are there any plans or discussions involving a game wide stat/number
squish? Is it just too much work for the team you have now or is it
something that may possibly happen in the future? Caith: There has been much discussion, but there are no plans
for a game wide stat reduction for a variety of reasons. One of the primary
reasons it is unlikely to happen is how content is designed in the game.
EverQuest 2 was designed in a way that gives developers a lot of freedom in
how they implement content, which allows them to make the content more
flexible and unique. The downside of this is that developers can implement
things in innumerable ways, and any rebalance of that content would be a
manual process. So in short, a stat reduction would require hand tuning of
almost every encounter in the game.
It might have worked for WoW, although the jury is still out on that, but it will never work for EQII. The part Caith left out is that EQII players fricken' love their big numbers. There'd be an outcry if DPS wasn't measured in trillions per second.
At least, the folks still playing on the Live servers like it that way. Everyone else long since migrated to TLE, where the numbers are so much smaller and smaller numbers and simpler stats is one of the tentpole features of the upcoming Origins server, so someone at Darkpaw reckons on having cake and eating it too.
Q: Are the "suburbs" ever going to be returned to at launch state? Caith: This is extremely unlikely to happen on a live server due
to the amount of quest and NPC updates that have been made over the years,
NPC’s have been moved and quest dialog updated to reflect the move, much less
the quests themselves updated to function in the new zones they are in,
etc. Kaitheel: Our newly announced Origins server will allow you
to step back in time and experience the cozy neighborhoods and all of the
quests they had to offer!
There's some hard information about the upcoming Origins server buried in the AMA. The above answer confirms the long-lost neighborhood quests will be included, which is something I wouldn't have bet on. Elsewhere, it's also strongly suggested the intention is to get as close as possible to the original game as it was at that time and that the motivation for doing the server is to encourage both former players and brand new ones to take a look.
It is odd to think that the best way to get people to consider playing a game in 2024 is to make it look and feel like one from 2006 but I guess WoW Classic is proof that it works. Pretty soon everyone wil be doing it, if they aren't already.
Q: Will you bring back LoN? JChan: Legends of Norrath was great when it was here, but we
have no plans to bring it back currently. Spinning back up a whole new
development team or taking away current developers to work on it would put
stressors on the team right now that are just plain unhealthy for our
long-term future. That being said, there's always the possibility that our
situations will change in the future.
The answers to many of the questions boil down to some variation on "We're a small team and we're already at full stretch doing live events, expansions and updates." and that's the context of Jen Chan's answer here but that last sentence is intriguing in a couple of ways. Firstly it hints at a potential change for the better in terms of resources at Darkpaw and I don't see any sign elsewhere in the AMA of general feel-good platitudes so maybe she knows something...
Secondly, it doesn't explicitly rule out a return for Legends of Norrath, the EQ-themed collectable card game that shuttered eight years ago. I only recently deleted the game files from my PC on the final assumption it was gone forever, not that I actually played it when it was around anyway. I wouldn't have thought there was a chance in a billion it would ever return but given that plenty of other questions in the AMA received a firm, unequivocal "No, never", I guess now we can't rule it out.
Watch in amazement as I battle two bosses at the same time!
Q: Finally, when is DBG/DarkPaw going to seriously address tradeskilling.
You know how long it has been since there has been new craftable bags or
boxes, or totems? Not to mention, at one point in time we could craft the
beginning gear and Jewelry needed and make a bit of change. Other than
food/drink, spells, not much else anyone wants. Caith: Bag space is a DB and systems issue, a ton of the
functions in the game iterate over every single item that a player has in
their inventory, including every bank slot, every house slot, etc. We are, and
will remain, extremely stingy when it comes to increasing inventory space,
because as soon as we do the next question becomes “when are you going to fix
lag and decrease loading times”.
Ah, inventory! How we love to hate you and hate to lose you. I'm fairly sure EQII actually has the most generous inventory allocation of any game I've ever played, so clearly Darkpaw's definition of "extremely stingy" is a little different than mine, although I realise Caith here is talking about the parsimonious present and future, not the profligate past.
In general, though, this answer is a great example of the way giving in to the demands of one set of players is always likely to cause problems for another or, in this case, for everyone. Who'd be a game developer, eh?
Q: Could you all please bring back the map help for npcs, quest items and
such? Kaitheel: We have no plans to remove the current map system in
game, where the quest givers and quest update conversations are given specific
quest icons, but the short-lived blue regions on the maps that give direct
locations of quest steps are not something we plan to bring back. They were
useful, we agree, but they had some significant downsides. Downsides that
outweighed the usefulness.
These blue regions presented every
active quest target possible at that moment on your map, naturally drawing
your attention to the map. We observed how little attention was being paid to
the dialogue, the story, even the characters to fight and the world one was
traveling through. It was not helpful for building the world, telling the
stories of the world, or your immersion therein. Even I found myself paying
more attention to the blue splotches on my map than I was to the quest
journals or NPC conversations. The quest I was doing, my motivation, the quest
givers – all of it was buried behind the ease of these blue regions on the
map. So, coupled with the significant amount of time that they took to create,
we chose instead to give more helpful journal text, with more specific points
of interest, and labeled sections of the zone on the maps.
Kaitheel is the epitome of the quest guy. He loves writing quests and he wants everyone to appreciate them. Answer after answer in the AMA reflect it, just as answer after answer from Caith suggest he'd really rather be honing his stand-up at an open mic night somewhere.
I tend to agree with Kaitheel on this although I did quite like the big, blue splotches when they were around. They were added in the era when all MMORPGs were backpedalling as fast as they could away from the origins and traditions of the genre. In attempting to remove all the obstacles and put in all the labor-saving devices, most of them cut-and-pasted ideas and mechanics from the wave of imports sweeping in from the East. That's when every older game added flying mounts, too.
We still have those but now we're not allowed to use them until we've been everywhere on foot. So swings the pendulum.
This isn't the time to start another debate about immersion but I'd just mention that I wouldn't be enjoying each new expansion in EQII half as much if I couldn't open the wiki and copy the co-ordinates for every quest target into EQIIMaps to get a glowing trail and a map marker. If Kaitheel believes most players are finding their way by in-game landmarks, he's fooling himself. All that really happened when they took out the in-game quest markers was that the trade passed to a third party provider.
And now with the UI
Q: The exp gain in zimara went from one extreme to the next, could you
all please balance that some? Caith: The experience gain in Zimara is an example of where we
would prefer it to be. It takes actual work to level up, and you have multiple
routes to obtain experience, some requiring more attention (questing) and
giving larger rewards, some requiring little attention (grinding mobs) and
giving much lower rewards.
While we're on the subject of old chestnuts and dead horses... Is anyone ever satisfied with the rate of xp or leveling in any MMORPG? I very much doubt it. It's the Goldilocks story without Baby Bear.
I'm almost at the end of the signature quest line for Ballads of Zimara with my Berserker and he's 10% into 128. I very much doubt he's going to hit the 130 cap before he runs out of quests. He might not even hit 129. I'll have to do repeatables or else try and finish the Collects, if those even give xp any more.
I'm broadly in favor of relatively slower progress but this puts me right off levelling another character, even with the suppposed 50% bonus for characters on an account where one character has finished the Sig Line. As for the future, when this becomes a step on the levelling ladder that has to be taken before you get to current content, you can forget it. It was fine having to revisit older expansions when it took a couple of sessions at most to hit the cap but a couple of weeks is too much by a lot. I guess I'll be finding a use for all those level boosts I stashed after all.
Also, how could the phrase "actual work" ever belong in any description of a process in a video game? I fear that, when the act of creating something other people use for entertainment becomes too closely tied to your own sense of identity, it's possible to find yourself losing perspective...
Q: Do you have any plans to reduce the number of spells? we have to use
3rd party addons to get an additional hot bar because of the honestly
absurd amount of spells/clickies/buffs some classes have? Maybe allow us
to combine some buffs to 1 button? Caith: We’ve talked about it, and introduced some ways to reduce
the amount of spells players need on their hotbar or rotation, but the
resulting pushback from the playerbase has always been more negative than
positive. Everyone wants less abilities, but not this ability, or that
ability, or any of MY classes abilities. Ultimately, with the amount of UI
performance degradation, less abilities on hotbars showing cooldowns, etc, the
better as far as I am concerned.
As above, here's another great example of how giving in to one group's demands just exacerbates complaints from another. It's akin to Wilhelm's Law, which states that every feature in an MMORPG, no matter how widely despised, will prove to have been someone's favorite when removed.
Personally, I love my ten hotbars, at least six of them filled with spells I might and usually do use in combat. I can't remember what all of them are called - I can't even remember what some of them do - but I wouldn't want to be without any of them.
Q: I know it is impossible to make everyone happy and I love that H3 is
difficult and not for everyone. Can we get a raid equivalent? Caith: It is comparatively easy to find six likeminded players
that enjoy an extreme challenge to get them into a challenging heroic dungeon,
when compared to the task of finding a raid guild who all agree that they want
the same level of challenge, failure, regroup, retry. The larger number of
players seem to drastically increase the likelyhood of a player or subset of
the players are frustrated and angry and only here because they feel like they
have to be, thus leading to overall dissatisfaction with the content.
And finally, a word of pure common sense from Caith. I never liked raiding and never did much of it but when I did, back in EverQuest, raids could have as many as 72 people. Can you imagine the time it took just to get everyone facing the right way? Is it any wonder I decided it wasn't for me?