Killing Time

If there's one thing that ticks me off it's finally settling down to play an mmorpg, only to find the servers are down for a patch. Or an update. Or a hotfix. Or whatever. Lots of names for the same thing: Closed. Come Back Later. 

It's not like the dark days of the twenty-oughts, of course. Back then, mostly, if your online game of choice was offline, so were you. You might, if you were lucky, still be able to read the forums, although as often as not they'd be Undergoing Maintenance at the same time. 

Before the free to play revolution, most of us didn't play multiple mmorpgs. I'd take a bet that an overiding majority played just one. Subscriptions cost money and making any kind of progress in the games of the day required a major investment in time. Even if the cost wasn't an issue, you didn't want to spread yourself too thin. 

Nevertheless, even from the start I always had a back-up plan. I applied to every mmorpg beta I heard of and sometimes I got in. There were more than you might imagine, too, although by no means all of them made it to launch.

Some of those betas seemed to go on for years. Even now, a couple of decades later, I can remember a few of the ones I'd turn to, when the servers in whatever game I would much rather have been playing went down. 

 

I can remember them but I can't necesarily remember what they were called, although a few stick in the mind. There was Endless Ages, of course, supposedly the first mmofps and also the first game I played where I had a character who could fly. Or use a flying mount. One or the other. I forget the specifics but I know I used to flap up and land in trees. 

That one did eventually launch. And fold. And relaunch. 

Another, Planeshift, is, amazingly, still running. Even more amazingly, two decades on, it's still in alpha.

I'm kidding. Sorta. It's in "Unreal Alpha" so I guess it's not a real alpha after all. Boom tish! Tip your waitress, I'll be here all week. 

I never really liked Planeshift. At that time it was one of those typical prototypes, where all you could really do was wander around and wonder why you were there. I used to fire it up now and again, more out of desperation than desire. I'd spend half an hour doing nothing very much then log out and wish I'd just read a book instead.

There wasn't a whole lot more you could do in the vikingesque mmorpg being developed by some obscure Scandinavian studio I used to visit every few months. I can't recall the name of either the company or the game. I think it began with a "D".

 

I liked, whatever it was called, even though it never really ofered even as much content as the most fly-by-night early access game would give you now. The shovelware floodgates hadn't yet opened and anything that let you make a character and walk around a couple of acres of barren tundra seemed like a gift.

It wasn't all alphas and betas. For much of my EverQuest/Dark Age of Camelot/EverQuest again career I did actually subscribe to a second mmorpg, The Realm. It, too, is still running. As I've observed on many occasions, mmorpgs are hard to kill. 

The Realm had one great advantage over other subscription games - it was cheap. The sub cost less than half the going rate. I forget exactly how much it was but $3.49 comes to mind. Or maybe it was £3.49. 

It seemed a fair price. In the age of 3D mmorpgs, The Realm was 2.5D. Playing it felt a little like moving cardboard figures with a stick, an approach adopted even more enthusiastically by another game I used to play, whose name also escapes me, although I remember it was being developed by a company called Missing Ink. No, wait, that was the name of the game. Gone now, all gone.

In the realm of The Realm, very much still with us, not much seems to have changed in a quarter of a century. These days a subscription will run you $4.99 although there is, inevitably, a free to play option. 

 

Who would choose to play any of these games today, given the overwhelming choice available, much of it for free, is an intriguing question, albeit one for another day. I didn't come here to wax nostalgic about these long-forgotten, even if still played games, nor to exhume them in exhaustive detail.

I could, quite easily. I could research the missing names, give historical context, describe the arcs of anticipation and disappointment, achievement or failure. It's all there in the strata. I've done it before, too. No doubt I'll do it again.

Not this time. The point of this post is to kill an hour while I wait for the EverQuest 2 servers to come back up, so I can play that game while I wait for New World to come out of "downtime" (As Amazon innocuously describe today's small adjustment to the recent, giant, disruptive and controversial patch.)

I could, naturally, have played any number of other mmorpgs while I waited, maybe Fallen Earth, Elyon or Allods Online, just to name three I've recently said I'd like to find time to play, but you know how it is. When the servers are down in the game you want to play, somehow all other games lose their luster.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've just checked and the servers are back up, so I'll be off. I have a Necromancer to dress and with luck it should take me just about as long as it takes Amazon to finish putting right those things they got wrong last time.

The little things, that is. Not the big ones. Fixing those could take a little longer.

Everything Is Everything Else

As David Byrne once said, well... how did I get here?

I remember I was doing what I do most nights, right before I go to sleep. Typing semi-random words into YouTube. Following whichever link looks interesting. The name of a band. A song title. Something I've never heard. Or heard of.

Nothing like Transvision Vamp. I have heard of Transvision Vamp. I have heard Transvision Vamp. Of course I have. I remember them very well. Early 90s outfit. Fronted by shockheaded blonde Wendy James. Made a thinnish glam racket. Had a couple of minor hits. Media loved to love to hate them.

I never thought much of them at the time. Hadn't thought about them at all in at least twenty years. Still, I clicked, out of some dim nostalgic curiosity.

A couple of things happened.

They were a lot better than I remembered. That thin sound had filled out. It aged well. I watched a few live performances. Wendy James seemed fierce and funny. A good deal more self-aware than I imagined. And then, among the titles that filtered down the right of the screen, one leaped right out and smacked me in the heart.  

Where did she go? Out. What did she do? Everything

 
There is, sadly, no live take of Hanging Out With Halo Jones on YouTube or anywhere else. As others have said, this will have to do.

Halo Jones is possibly my favorite British comic series of all time. If it's not Alan Moore's best work ever it's damn close and Ian Gibson certainly never drew better. I have the originals in my piles of 2000AD up in the loft and I have the three graphic novels somewhere closer to hand. I'm going to read the whole sequence again although it scares me a little to think about doing it.

So, anyway, here I am at Halo Jones via Transvision Vamp and I'm reading the comments because yes, I am one of the people who not only reads the comments on YouTube but finds them interesting and often revealing.

There aren't many but in the last one someone says "There was a Halo Jones play too." There was? Did I know that? The faintest bell chiming somewhere far away...

Which is how I came across this piece of pure magic:

Eight and a half minutes of utter genius. When I saw it was a fringe performance I didn't expect much. How wrong I was. I just wish someone would post the entire thing. I just wish I'd been there.

I looked for more but that's all there is. Oh, and a few scraps of another production at the Leeds Thought Bubble. They don't have anything of the power of this performance.

And what does this have to do with MMORPGs, anyone still reading may well be asking themselves? Patience. I'm getting there.

I'm getting there but I can't tell you how. All I know is that somehow, from  Transvision Vamp and Halo Jones I found my way to what was lost, by way of the  latest Game Archeologist piece on MassivelyOP. Although it turns out I could just have checked my own back pages...

Syp's piece has absolutely nothing to do with any of this except as a catalyst. It's all about BBS gaming. I never saw a Bulletin Board in my life, much less played a game on one. As I read, though, my mind slipped to which forgotten MMOs might still be out there, waiting for Syp to (dis)cover them.

My list of most fondly-rememberd MMOs includes several that are no longer running. Vanguard and Free Realms, obviously. Rubies of Eventide, which I often mention. Endless Ages, which was there so early on and broke so much ground (and which appears still to exist in some form or another...I'm on that right now...but one thing at a time).

There's also one that Mrs Bhagpuss and I played in beta and liked a lot for no very good reason. I was under the impression that it never launched. I seem to remember the client just stopped connecting to the server one day and I thought I'd read that whoever was behind it decided not to release it in the West after all.

I haven't been able to come up with the name for a long time. I don't have it in my old log-in records. No-one ever mentions it anywhere to jog my memory. And this is where the chain breaks yet holds.

Somewhere along the way, reading about BBS games, listening to Transvision Vamp, watching Halo Jones, all the  while thinking about dead MMOs and googling all of it, I came across a mention of the Ferengi, those gnomelike aliens from Star Trek. It wasn't even anything about them, really. Just a play or a song that used their name.

I have no clue where or what it was even though it was only a day or two ago. Whatever it was triggered a flash of insight that blanked everything else. The name of the forgotten MMO was Ferentus! 

All the many other times I've seen the Ferengi mentioned, that never happened. It took that particular set of circumstances to create the necessary neural connections. So it seems.

It turns out that Ferentus never did launch but it lived long enough in open beta to develop quite a following all the same. It was known under three different names. Ferentus in North America, Herrcot in Germany and Xiones in South Korea. Even now there are people hoping for an emulator. That's never going to happen but someone has come up with a text-based homage. I played it. It works.

All of which just proves what a wonderful new world it is that we all live in. Any day we can wake up and ask ourselves how we got here and have no idea and it's still all good. As Rodice says, "No matter how far you get, they'll fetch you back here and bust you to pieces".

Pieces are all we're made of. But what pieces!

You Got The Look: Villagers and Heroes

Villagers and Heroes is turning out to be one of those off-the-beaten-track MMOs that just clicks with me. In that respect it follows in a great tradition that goes all the way back to The Realm, which I used to play for some light relief between sessions back in Everquest's  Ruins of Kunark era.

Thinking back on other amuse-bouche MMOs that I ended up developing a taste for, there was Ferentus, one of the earlier Eastern imports, which never got out of beta, Endless Ages, Crowns of Power, NeoSteam, Argo and probably quite a few more I've forgotten. The king of them all was the very much-missed Rubies of Eventide, which closed down when one of the owners took umbrage with some of the players, powered down the server and locked the source code in a cupboard. Literally.

After they die many MMOs seem to slip into a ghostly half-life. Of the games listed above, Endless Ages had a couple of attempts at revival and still has people tinkering with the code trying to get something working, NeoSteam has now closed in all territories but appears to have an established "Private Server" scene and Argo was supposed to be returning under new management but now seems to have gone for good. Crowns of Power still has a website where you can download the game and even a "Server Status" page that suggests it's running but the forums tell another story.

I'm on a cart. I SAID I'M ON A CART!

The Realm, of course, just keeps on trucking. Next year will see the 20th anniversary of this venerable genre institution. That's twenty years as a subscription mmo, by the way; a 2D subscription MMO. Who said the sub model was dead?

Villagers and Heroes itself is, as I mentioned in the previous post, on its third iteration although it has continued to operate continuously through the various makeovers. This version really seems to have nailed it for me. It always seemed like a game I ought to enjoy more than I did and now I do.

Yesterday, while I was playing GW2 rather desultorily, as many people seem to be right now, what with the giant iceberg of Tuesday's update looming on the horizon, I found myself thinking, not about the new builds I'd have to be choosing, nor even about jumping ship to play my Necro on Ragefire or do my weeklies in EQ2. No, I was thinking about the plot in V&H and wondering what might happen next. And also about how nice it would be to do a bit of crafting and gathering in those bright, cartoon fields and orchards of that mystical land.

It's not always bright and colorful. Sometimes the world goes all watercolor pastel.

In the end I spent about five hours in V&H yesterday, following the plot, training up my Woodcrafting and my Bug Hunting, backtracking to complete and hand in some of the plethora of quests I seem to have acquired (and inevitably acquiring more in the process). It was a relaxing, involving and thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a Sunday.

I only stopped because I ran into an annoying bug where each NPC I approached would only reply to me with the dialog of the last person I spoke to. I'm hoping that will have fixed itself by  the next time I log in. If not I guess I'll find out how efficient the petition system is.

At low levels there seems to be an enormous amount to do and the pace of leveling is just about exactly as I like it. My new Wizard dinged level 8 last night. It took about eight hours to get there from character creation. Of course, she's also level 10 or more in almost all of the crafting and gathering disciplines, of which there are quite a few. I think she only has Cooking and Fishing left before she completes the introductory "get all these to ten and come back and see me quest" someone gave her right at the beginning.

I believethe level cap is 65 so there would seem to be a lot of mileage just in leveling up. What the end game is I have no idea and nor do I care very much. I'll think about that if I get there, which I don't imagine for a moment I will. A look at the map suggests a large and inviting world to explore, though, and if it's all as interesting and accessible as it has been so far, who knows?

Why do some MMOs feel inviting and fun to play while others can be such a struggle or feel so bland? There must be a whole raft of reasons but the look and feel is crucial. If that isn't right then whatever glories lie hidden beneath the surface are likely to stay there.

I knew an Eamon at university. He was studying architecture and talking to him taught me a lot about the relationship between form and function. If that's him he's really let himself go.

Appearances may be shallow but they have a big effect on whether I want to start playing something - if it looks delicious in screenshots it makes me want to dive in. Aesthetics aren't enough to hold the attention long-term though unless they come with  great sense of design to back them up.

Form follows function as the modernists used to say and the new UI is exemplary in that regard. Everything looks both crisp and modular and explains itself immediately by use. There's no fiddling about wondering what to press or where to click. It looks great and it works first time. Given that we spend so much of our "play" time operating the interface, to have doing so feel like a sensual pleasure in itself goes a long way towards encouraging a preference for one game over another.

Concretizing the sense of discovery.

Villagers and Heroes may not look spectacular but it's crisp and clear and charmingly stylized. When Mrs Bhagpuss peered over my shoulder and saw it for the first time she said "You're in a cartoon" and yes, it does have that look of a quality animation from the mid-late 80s about it. The typography reminds me of Wizard 101, another game whose style strongly enhanced and supported its gameplay. I really like that pseudo-brushstroke font.

The game also has solid sound direction and a really striking musical score. Unlike, say, Syp, I'm not a huge fan of video music in its own right. There are plenty of pieces and melodies that have a strong emotional effect on me but it's usually because of the memories they invoke rather than any intrinsic musicality of their own.

The music in fantasy MMOs tends to be of a type; sweeping synthesized orchestral pomp, blaring, brassy martial bombast, would-be wistful pastoral warbling and the like. Villagers and Heroes, at least in the few starting zones I've seen, is a little more sonically adventurous. It has, for example, some off-kilter, edgy, piano improvisations that nag uncomfortably in the background. Unsettling, particularly in a starting zone.

I stumble upon The Vinton Village Festival. Prancing Pony eat your heart out.

At one point I even stopped playing to listen, which is a very odd thing to find yourself doing. I'm not sure whether it's a good decision commercially but I certainly prefer it to the usual fantasy elevator music. I guess that jazz feel is all of a piece with the general maturity and sophistication of the aesthetic.

For a game that has a cartoonish look that would appear on the surface to be aimed at a younger audience Villagers and Heroes has an oddly adult feel. The main storyline is mostly the usual fantasy nonsense but there's a strong undertone of sexual jealousy and infidelity running through it. I seem to remember that the original launch of the game as A Mystical Land made reference to fairy tales and there's definitely some of that Germanic fairy tale darkness around the edges.

Let my light banish your darkness!

What with a very busy week at work and the fallout from tomorrow's giant patch bomb Villagers and Heroes probably won't get much play for a while now but it's done enough already to establish a firm position in the hierarchy of "MMOs I Might Play Quite Often", something the previous two versions never really achieved.

I was even looking at the cash shop, which looks very reasonably priced, especially to someone coming from ANet's outrageously expensive Gem Store, and there's a better than even chance I'll spend some money there if I carry on playing. I fancy a house and some sheep and the bags are really cheap. As Maldwiz pointed out to Tobold, we all have the same 24 hours in our days so what we do with them is our choice but the choice is far too hard.

Better the Beta You Know: GW2, EQ2

I bought Guild Wars 2 this week, a game that doesn't yet exist. Spinks think this demonstrates poor organizational skills on my part. Ravious put his hand in his pocket but he's a little concerned about where we might end up if a precedent is set. Just to give a little perspective, I was chatting with someone at work yesterday who told me that he and his girlfriend are going to see Michael MacIntyre in August. They bought the tickets last August. Paying for things that don't yet exist is not something ArenaNet just invented.

As I've said before, how we pay for MMOs is quite possibly the single least interesting aspect of the entire MMO phenomenon. We're all adults. We can spend our money how we like (although if it genuinely makes a meaningful difference to your household economy whether you spend £50 on a video game this month or in three month's time it's entirely possible you shouldn't be spending it on a video game in the first place, but then, hey, I'm not your dad so knock yourself out!). No, the part of the discussion that spun out of this which interested me was whether or not beta access counts a "benefit" to players.

So, crabs again?

I've done a lot of MMO betas. My first was Anarchy Online, for which they sent me the client in the post, on CDRom. I still have it somewhere. I spent most of a week trying to install it. Never got it to run but that didn't stop me buying the game when it came out, when it still didn't run. Anarchy Online remains the benchmark for the worst MMO launch ever. I think it was three months before they actually charged anyone a subscription because that's how long it took before the game was playable.

From then on I applied for pretty much every MMO beta and got into plenty. A surprising number of my fondest, most lapidary memories of a dozen years spent trekking through virtual worlds come from betas. The thrill of using a jet-pack in Endless Ages (still the best flight experience I've had in an MMO); seeing the Capryni scatter as they scented a prowling Gingo in Ryzom;  riding into Lomshir for the first time in Vanguard.

And the bugs. My god, the bugs. Pushing through a gap in geometry to break into someone's house in Endless Ages and not being able to get out again (that was a re-roll). Falling for fatal damage every time I even passed close to a griffin tower in EQ2.  The plain unplayable lag in Rubies of Eventide, Horizons, EQ2, Vanguard... well, every beta ever at some point, come to think of it.

Waiting for the end of the world

This is where I should make a confession. I really like bugs in MMOs. I see them as content. I've probably had almost as much fun out of bugs over the years as gameplay, which is partly why EQ2 Test was my home server for more than five years. I like finding bugs and I like reporting them. I've had everything up to and including all my characters vanishing from bugs and while I get as annoyed as anyone would when I can't do what I was planning, dealing with a funny, odd or flat-out game-breaking bug sometimes turns out to be a lot more involving and thought-provoking than whatever I had in mind. It's true dynamic content.

 A huge part of the interest in playing MMOs for me has always come from trying to understand how they work. It's one reason I don't like tutorials much. I like to observe, gather data and test hypotheses while playing. I like it best of all if I'm never quite sure, even after extensive research, what the hell is going on. Bugs open up the cover so you can see the gears whirr and betas pull back the curtain so you can see backstage. More than that, you can chat to the stage manager, the make-up artist and the props team. A good beta will offer multiple channels of communication with the developers, from ad hoc in game chats through organized content testing to lengthy forum discussions. It's not one-way traffic, either. In a good beta you have a real chance to influence the detail, even the direction of the game you eventually hope to play. I've seen countless changes made in good betas as a result of player feedback (and countless more ignored but, hey...)

Wonder if woodworkers get a scratching-post recipe?

That's a good beta. A bad beta is one where nothing you say, nothing anyone says, seems to be getting through to anyone that cares. Where feedback is ignored, issues glossed over or there's always a "miracle patch" just round the corner. I'd name names but the NDAs for betas like that never end. (The only genuine miracle patch I ever saw was in the final week or thereabouts of EQ2 beta when, after a month of game-breaking, unplayable rubber-banding lag and innumerable fiddle-faddling changes to changes to changes that had just about everyone playing believing the launch should be delayed at least another three months, we logged in one day to a lag-free, reasonably smooth, certainly fit-for-launch MMO. They said they had one last patch that would fix most of the major problems and they really did. Of course it didn't address any of the gaping holes in the underlying design - Scott Hartsman had to come in and start on that six months later, but you can't have everything. At least it ran! )

Mandatory letterbox format preserved for disbelieving future generations

Then there's the opportunity to say "I was there", although that can be a very bittersweet experience. Some MMOs I've beta tested have been more to my taste at some point before launch than they ever managed afterwards. It can be a little galling to remember that the game you're playing not only could have been better but was. I'd rather know, though, than not know.

And finally there's the end. The day it all stops. Sometimes the server just closes and re-opens as "Open Beta" the next day and it's all a bit of an anticlimax, but often there's a big party, or an apocalypse. My favorite beta memory ever comes from EQ2. Everyone gathered at the Claymore in Antonica for a party before the world came down but right at the very end, just before the countdown started, I decided to go into the great dark in my own Inn room, just me and my cat. I just made it back in time to sit on my bed and then the world ended. You just can't buy that.

Boom, out go the lights.

Oh, wait, now you can! That's where we came in. Will GW2 beta weekends have any of the benefits I'm gushing over? You wouldn't think so. They will be totally nonexclusive, open to all for the payment of a fee. They'll be isolated weekends, not a continuum. It's unlikely that a community will have a chance to develop (a beta community can be a very different beast from a Live one). Above all, people will have paid to be there and will have entitlement issues off the scale compared to those normally seen in betas (not that those aren't often ridiculous in themselves).

These weekends will probably be much more like the marketing-led Open Betas MMOs throw out like chum to bring in the fish they hope to land at launch. But maybe not. Rift's beta weekends were proper betas, even at the end when they were letting everyone in. Every single Rift beta weekend was arguably more entertaining than any weekend post-launch. Any way up, I'm happy to have the opportunity, even if I did have to pay for it. It's money I would have spent in any event and it will buy fun I otherwise wouldn't have had.

I'd have preferred to have gotten into the closed beta, all the same.