BlizzCon 2018 At Defcon 1

I'm not currently playing World of Warcraft. Much as I like WoW, I never really do play it, or not with any commitment, other than that six-month burst almost a decade ago. I haven't even been able to find a window in my oh-so-busy schedule to play the Legion expansion I was given for my birthday two years ago.

Doubling down on my lack of involvement, beyond my occasional dabble with WoW, I have never played any other Blizzard game, so I have absolutely no reservoir of nostalgic affection on which to draw. I can't even pretend to the smallest vestige of interest in any of the games in the current stable, not Overwatch or Hearthstone and especially not Diablo, the point and purpose of playing which has always entirely eluded me. The very little I do know about any of them comes from people who do play, whose blogs I follow.

With such a deep well of uninterest I wasn't planning on commenting on anything Blizzard had to say at that in-house celebration of self-love, BlizzCon. I do find these conventions bemusing. Even in the headiest days of EverQuest, when Sony ran the annual Fan Faire (later known as SOELive) I never felt an inclination to attend.

I never noticed the shoulder marking before today. Is that new?

The fact that it happened, mostly, on the other side of the world may have been a factor but chances are I wouldn't have taken the trouble to travel ten miles for a gaming convention. I find limited appeal in standing in a packed hall for long hours while people try to sell me stuff or in sitting on a hard plastic chair while non-professional speakers take hours to explain things I could read in minutes (or more likely seconds) in the comfort of my own home.

Not that I haven't been to plenty of similar events. I spent all of the 1980s and some of the 1990s going to comics conventions. I was close friends with the organizers of some of the biggest of the time and I took my turn stuffing bags, running security and even hosting panels. The novelty wore off fast, though, and it only took a few cons before I swapped the dealers' hall and the panel rooms for spending the whole weekend in the bar.

I'm certainly not knocking the social aspect. Meeting friends in an environment conducive to endless conversation on topics of mutual interest isn't something that needs arguing against, or not by me, anyway. These days I'm pretty sure I couldn't hack a whole long weekend of sleeping on floors, drinking from midday to midnight and generally behaving as though life was performance art but I'm happy to have done my share way back when.

In fact, it's curious what you notice after a long layoff. I'm guessing my druid could always turn into a bling elk but somehow I missed it...

I meant to let the entire 2018 BlizzCon slide. It wasn't really even on my radar. I suppose I'm mildly (very mildly) curious about the Classic WoW experiment but nowhere even close to caring enough to consider paying for a sneak preview. I'll wait for the inevitable blog reports.

Why, then, am I even mentioning it? Because, as usual, its all but impossible for anyone with even the smallest interest in MMORPGs to escape the event horizon of World of Warcraft and, by implication, of its creator company, Blizzard.

I read, with increasing mystification, accounts of the firestorm of outrage surrounding the announcement of a mobile version of Diablo. To a non-afficionado it didn't seem like much of a story. When the first news squib crossed my path a couple of days ago I barely gave it a thought.

I was momentarily attracted to the idea of a new MMO I could play on my tablet but then I realized that a) I don't play any of the excellent mobile options I already have installed (Dragon Nest Mobile, Villagers and Heroes, AdventureQuest3D, Celtic Heroes...) and b) it's Diablo. At that point I would have forgotten about it entirely, only apparently to do that would mean missing the entire part where Blizzard, cackling like evil carnival clowns, smacked the stunned audience around its collective face with a wet mackerel.

And here's another! I swear I can't remember this "travel form" option. I'm going to name it "Elk or Whelk". Maybe that will help me remember to use it.

To gain some kind of context, I tried to imagine a situation where I was expecting, let's say, an official announcement of Guild Wars 3 and what I got instead was notification of a mobile version of GW2 produced for ArenaNet by GameLoft. Okay, I'd be a little disappointed I wasn't getting the big win but I'd also be excited about the consolation prize. It's more of a thing I like. That's always good, isn't it?

The idea that this is some kind of zero sum game, where resources dedicated to a mobile app come from the same pool that supplies a PC game, seems bizarre. This is diversification not assimilation. The entrenched, embattled position taken by one group of gamers when faced with another shouldn't pain me the way it does. It's been the way of things in every special interest group ever, after all. It's still disheartening, though.

Even more disappointing were the comments levelled against leveling. From MassivelyOP's Live Blog summary:

Q: Character progression, especially with leveling, is not satisfying. Wouldn’t a level squish be a good thing?
A: It’s a great question; we are not satisfied with what leveling has turned into. A level squish would be a big ordeal, but we agree something needs to change. It’s not tenable to add more levels at the top.

I like leveling but these days everyone seems to be against it. We're marching towards a world of vertical zones and horizontal progression whereas I, to quote a recent anonymous commenter to this blog, hark back with affection to the days of "...yearly expansions in SOE style with very limited pool of assets and primitive flat zones with mobs randomly scattered around." Well, every six months was better but I'd take yearly and the rest of that sounds just about perfect!

Then there was the weighing in against randomly generated fun:

Q: Why is there so much RNG in the game? (Huge cheering.) Do you have plans to move away from that, where the time we spend is productive? (More huge cheering.)
A: We’ve always tried to navigate these waters; our concern with having things on a vendor is that you could mark the date on the calendar. (This is being claimed as a downside.) 

Where do I even begin? Productive? Productive?? Is this paid work now? Are we on the meter? I had this weird idea I was roleplaying an adventurer not clocking on at the Amazon Warehouse.

In trying to find a good spot to take a screenshot I fell off a waterfall and got swept down this giant whirlpool. I knew something was up when the UI vanished and the black cut-screen borders appeared. Turned out to be some instance related to Demon Hunters, which reminds me; I could make one of those...

Yes, it is a friggin' "downside" if I can "mark the date on the calendar", when my character gets a specific piece of armor or a weapon! These things should come as the spoils of a mighty battle or the entirely surprising, serendipitous outcome of a chance encounter, not the "reward" for saving up fifty box-tops and sending them in!

Whatever happened to "heroic adventure"? Okay, I can get behind the idea of a simulated economy in a virtual world but this is not that! Geez! Token systems suck and what they suck is all the fantasy, wonder and joy out of what was once a playful, imaginative, childlike experience, currently in danger of being reduced to nothing more than yet another adulting exercise in faux-responsibility and bloody "productivity".

The cheering in the room, as reported, is dismally echoed by the jeering and sneering in the comment thread, which itself follows the lead of some of M:OP's staff writers. I really ought stop reading this stuff. I'm getting to the age where I need to think about my blood pressure.

I imagine Demon Hunters are all about the rituals. They certainly use a lot of candles.

It wouldn't matter since, as I said, I don't really play much World of Warcraft. Except that, even in these reduced days of maybe "only" three million subscribers, what happens in WoW often sets the tone for the whole genre. Odd, when you consider the extent to which Blizzard sits back and lets other MMOs act as a test-bed before adapting and implementing whatever they deem to have value, but there you are.

The genre moves inexorably onwards towards places some of us would rather not go but there will always be backwaters - or so I hope. If there are, I plan on wallowing in them.

More positively and optimistically, I continue to enjoy the unnamed new game that on paper shouldn't appeal to me at all. Perhaps Blizzard's influence on MMO development is on the wane, anyway. I'd like to think so. I don't think it's been the ruination of the genre but then again I don't believe it's been its saving, either. We'll see what happens when WoW Classic arrives next Summer.

Not If You Paid Me: Tera, Diablo 3

Ironically perhaps, given my recent musings on the joys of beta-testing I've decided to forego two fairly major offerings this weekend.

I never played Diablo or Diablo 2. I don't really like Action RPGs. No, that's too weak. There's no "really" about it. The last action RPG I played was Dungeon Siege, which I bought on release back in 2002. I only played it a couple of times. I can see the case on the shelf from here; hasn't been opened in a decade.

Is it the gameplay that doesn't work for me? I don't think so. Dragon Nest is actiony as all get-out and I love that. Run into a pile of mobs, hammer the mouse button, slam them into the air, shoot a bunch of furniture and see it explode...what's not to like? Nor is it the over-the-shoulder three-quarter, third-person perspective or the relatively small characters and mobs. City of Steam has all that and I love it.

It's the pointlessness of it all, I think. I'm very aware that whatever "point" any of this stuff may have has to be self-imposed. I'm not about to argue that there's some ur-significance in playing MMOs that's absent in other forms of video-gaming. And I strongly believe that no leisure activity needs any more "point" than that when you've finished doing it you're glad you did and might even consider doing it again.

No miss, I am not "looking for action"

That's not a feeling I get  when I spend time on an action rpg. The sub-genre seems to strip-mine the larger, slower version (do we call that the Inaction RPG?) for the raw ore of killing stuff and grabbing loot. It's like having an iced bun without the bun.

Maybe I'm doing A-RPGs a disservice. I haven't really played one for a decade, after all. And I'm not going to start with the D3 Beta. I might take a run at Path of Exile though, if only to see how a New Zealand developer's take differs. I don't think I've ever played any kind of RPG from Down Under.

That's D3 out of the running, which leaves Tera as this weekend's possible free preview candidate. Tera is at least an MMO, which makes it inherently interesting, to me at least. I've read plenty about Tera and all its multifarious controversies, from the prurient character modelling to the legal catfights, the in-yer-face advertizing to the contested claims of originality. None of that bothers me enough to put me off giving it a look for free.

The screenshots and videos look attractive. Nice scenery, bright colors, amusing very large monsters. I do like a very large monster. Should be worth a download, no? Well, I got as far as reading the FAQ.  And I got as far down the FAQ as the part about using Alt or Esc to bring up a hotbar to do stuff and only using the mouse to attack. Oh, and "The one tip every TERA player needs to keep in mind is that survivability depends on not standing still." No. Not even No Thanks. Just No.

Big world, small horizons

I'm not interested in having to run about all the time. I'm not roleplaying the frigging Duracell bunny! If I have to dodge when something's coming my way, fine, that I can handle but don't tell me I have to keep moving or I'll move alright, all the way to another game. And don't force me to use the keyboard to open hotbars or menus when you could just put the goddam things onscreen and let me click them with the mouse. FFXIV tried that and look how well it worked out for them.

I'm already sufficiently apprehensive about the GW2 controls and combat. Acid test for that comes in just under a week. I don't need to spend this weekend trying to unlearn twelve years of MMO muscle memory for a couple of sessions in Tera only to have to do it all again only differently in a few days. For Guild Wars 2 I'll make the effort. For Tera? Not going to happen.

Just a boy and his skinned cat looking for adventure

Shame, really, because all SOE's games will be inaccessible for the whole of Monday and I might have given either of these a fair go. Not to worry, plenty more fish in the MMO sea. Maybe I'll take a look at LotRO's fifth anniversary party, explore Loong some more, pick back up where I left off in Allods, do some sub-20 Rifting, try to complete Eye of the North in Guild Wars, see if I can get out of the starting village in Aerrevan...