On Provenance: Thoughts While Waiting For The Pandaria Remix

While Mrs Bhagpuss and I were out walking Beryl through some very muddy fields this morning, I had an idea that something was supposed to be happening today. I thought it might be the launch of the Anashti Sul server in EverQuest II, which made me quite excited. 

I thought, when we got home, I'd get that patched up, make a character, play for an hour or two, then write a blog post about it. I wasn't a hundred per cent sure I'd gotten the day right, though, so the first thing I did was check the launch date. 

I hadn't. It's a month away yet, not due to launch until 13 June.

Well, of course it is. I remember, now, writing about what a long beta it was going to be and how that meant Darkpaw had to be pinning a lot of hopes on the whole thing being a success. Just shows how much I listen to myself when I talk.

Still, I was pretty sure I remembered something was happening today and I was just about convinced it involved a new server starting up in a game I already played. I scratched around in the back of my mind for a while, trying to come up with a clue as to what it might be and then it came to me. Pandaria!

That was why I updated Battlenet and logged into World of Warcraft Retail a couple of weeks ago. I'd been thinking about taking a look at the Pandaria Remix event or, to give it its unwieldy official title, World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria.

And yes, that does indeed begin today. I'd be playing it now, with a view to writing about it this afternoon, except the doors don't actually open until teatime. The official start, which doesn't appear until the very last line of the lengthy official announcement, is 10.00AM PDT, which translates to six in the evening where I am.

That's fine, as far as it goes, although not great for me. I'll probably be eating quiche and watching the Chase about then, after which Beryl is likely to enter Evening Entertainment Mode and require an unhealthy amount of attention due to her innate Princessy tendencies. Even so, I should be able to get an hour or two in before bedtime.

A few bullet points on that:

• I'll be playing on my Endless Free Trial account, which allows me to make a character for the event but only level them to 20. 
• All Remix characters skip the first ten levels, stepping into Pandaland as fresh Level 10s. 
• A key selling point of this particualar dog and panda show is accelerated levelling. 
• The trip from ten to twenty is already over in a short session at regular levelling speed.

It is theoretically possible, then, that I might be able to log in, make a character, play for an hour, see enough to have something substantive to say about the experience and still have enough time left in the evening to put a blog post together. It'd be tight, though.

Which is why I'm writing this now, at midday, instead. Even though I don't really have anything new to say about the whole affair.

Ah, except I do. Last time I talked about it I'd only read the news reports and listened to some chatter. Now I've read the whole of that Blizzard news item I linked earlier and it's very interesting. 

Interesting to me, anyway, because the feature list reads like a Best Of from the last decade or so of EverQuest II. 

I'm not remotely saying these are ideas that originate there or that they haven't been used elsewhere, often, by other games. Plenty of them are generic to many MMORPGs. What I am saying is that I recognize versions of just about all of them from special ruleset servers in EQII that I've played on, as well as from the regular, Live game.

More specifically, a whole chunk of the Remix's remit seems to draw inspiration directly from EQII's Kael Drakkal server. In case you don't remember, that was the one where you started at 90 and all the content in the game was at the same level, which I admit doesn't sound very similar at all. 

This does, though:

EQII: "amazing new armor and weapon appearances made exclusively for the Kael Drakkel server"

WoW: "collect a variety of powerful new items and transmogs"

EQII: "Special loot drops along the way will allow you to upgrade your base gear as you progress."

WoW: "Each time you loot new items, you’ll have the chance for powerful new upgrades"

EQII: "Kael Drakkel armor appearances that will be usable on all characters on all servers"

WoW: "take your transmogs with you when you continue your adventures in World of Warcraft®:The War Within™"

 

All quotes verbatim from the two official announcements and the announcement for the update Kael Drakkal received nine months after launch.

I'm not saying none of this would have happened without Holly Longdale taking over as WoW's Executive Producer but it's getting hard to deny the equivalencies. They might not be immediately obvious to anyone who's only played WoW but as an EQII player, just about the first thing that comes to mind these days, whenever I hear about something new that's coming to WoW, is "That sounds familiar..."

Everyone spotted the debt dragonriding owes to Guild Wars 2 right away because GW2 is a much better-known game than EQII these days. A lot of the other innovations that seem to be changing the whole way WoW operates are coming in much lower under the radar, originating, as it seems they do, in a game most WoW players have probably never even heard of.

Whether this kind of cross-pollination is likely to create a stronger, healthier game remains to be seen. From my perspective as an regular EQII player who occasionally dabbles in WoW, though, it feels like a very positive development. 

I wonder whether the trend will continue in the next expansion. I do hope so. That would be interesting.

Into The Valley Of Ashes

Yeah... no. Not really. I cheated. Big time. If you're planning to visit the burning lands legit, you may want to skip the whole post. It's kinda spoilery. And you're gonna feel dirty after.

So, I read Wihelm's post on the arrival of Valheim's penultimate biome, the Ashlands, and I watched the weird, animated promo video that bizarrely looks like it could have been made for anime Valheim clone Dawnlands...

And then I thought "I suppose I ought to go take a look at it for myself". 

But I wasn't really feeling it.

Valheim was amazing when it first arrived. It came out of nowhere and I'd never played anything like it. I went in cynical and ended up spending nearly four hundred hours there. By the time I got to the end of the Plains, though, I felt like I was done.

After that, I played a whole bunch of games that were like Valheim but different. In some ways maybe better. Valheim has a clarity of purpose the Palworlds and Nightingales don't but after a while that clarity can begin to seem less like a virtue, more like a limitation.

I tried the Mistlands - very briefly - but as Wilhelm has made quite clear, the Mistlands aren't all that much fun. What's more, they're not intended to be.

Iron Gate haven't gone the full passive-aggressive dev route, snarling back at players who don't play the game the way it's meant to be played, but they have made their intentions very clear. There's a post on the official website entitled Getting Ready for the Ashlands and, while it's friendly and helpful enough in tone, it does let the mask slip now and then:

"We also want to remind everyone that Valheim is meant to be a difficult game"

I have no problem with that. Nice that they're being up front about it. I would just like to make it equally clear to Iron Gate that I have absolutely no interest in difficult games. I avoid them at all costs. 

Clearly there's some discrepancy here, what with my four hundred hours played. I can clear that right up. I didn't find Valheim as it originally appeared to be "a difficult game", in the same way I didn't find EverQuest circa 2000 to be "a difficult game". People might say that but it wasn't my experience.

I found the two quite similar in some important ways. I found they required more care and attention than other games and they certainly took up a lot more of my time. You had to play them slowly, carefully, thoughtfully. I found them to be games that could, on occasion, make me quite cross. I did not, however, find them "difficult".

As Wilhelm's report on the Mistlands makes plain, the difficulty in that biome comes primarily from design choices rather than through gameplay. The land is jagged and unnavigable, while the field of view is obscured. It makes doing just about anything a pain in the neck.

That is the kind of difficulty I prefer to avoid, which is why I haven't attempted to play through the Mistlands content properly and am unlikely ever to do so. The new Ashlands content looks somewhat more manageable in that you can at least see where you're going and the terrain is flat but given that access to it is somewhat gated by completion of the Mistlands content, nopeing out of one effectively bars you from the other.

It may still be possible to make it across the burning waters (They literally set fire to ships other than the special one you have to build just to get there.) and limp through the opening encounters in your best Plains gear. It was certainly possible to explore the tougher biomes in the original game while still wearing armor from much earlier. At a certain point, though, it will surely become inevitable that you gear up from the last biome to do the next one and that means eating all your Mistland greens before you get your Ashlands pudding.

I am not going to do that but I still want to see the pretty new places. And they do look quite... well, not pretty, exactly. Impressive, let's say.  

Fortunately, although Iron Gate are keen to have everyone play their game properly, they're also unusually lenient in lending out their tools so you don't have to. Not only does the game have some fairly powerful difficulty settings up front - you can make all mobs non-aggro for example - even better it has a hidden set of developer tools that allow for even more radical rule-changes.

They did make the tools a little harder to find. You used to be able to bring them up just by pressing F5 but that probably caused a few too many customer service issues so now you have to make your alterations in the host platform, be that Steam or Game Pass. It's still extremely simple to do, though. There are full instructions in this PCGamer article.

The dev command I needed to go visit Ashlands was the one that lets you fly. I didn't decide to use it until I'd tried to get most of the way on my own. I knew it was the only way I was going to do the last part, across that fiery ocean, because I certainly wasn't going to be building any flameproof boats, but I did think I might be able to get as far as the opposite shoreline to take a screenshot of the smoldering land across the water.

I didn't do too badly, either. I ported to my southernmost foothold from back when I was playing regularly and headed further south overland from there. That took me through a swathe of Mistland, where I met some Dvergr Dwarves and had several conversations with Odin's Ravens, Hugin and Mugin, all of which was quite entertaining.

I also ran into an Infected Mine within the first five minutes, something that took Wilhelm a great deal longer. That's one of the more annoying aspects of Valheim's procedurally generated content. I had the same issue with one of the biome bosses - Moder, I think - who somehow eluded me for much longer than it seemed to take anyone else to find them.

I strongly advise against going into an Infected Mine just for a look-see. It has to be one of the most repulsive places I've ever visited in a game. Not the "mine" itself - the architecture is really quite impressive. No, it was the "infected" aspect that made my skin crawl.

Coming back out pretty swiftly, I carried on south until eventually I ran out of both land and light. I was stuck on a pillar of rock when night fell and I couldn't see anything at all. That was when I decided to quit pretending I was exploring and just take the tour.

With flight enabled I was able to swoop over the ocean above a forest of rocky spikes rearing out of the water to land on the grey/black/orange/red shores of the Ashlands. And they are impressive, if you're into hellscapes.

I won't bother describing the view. That's why I took all the pictures. I will say that the place is a great deal more built-up than I was expecting, with stone arches and runestones all over the place, along with some quite substantial towers and forts. 

Skeleton warriors and archers stand guard, large animals lumber around, firebirds whirl overhead. The place is teeming with activity. I imagine with mob aggression switched on it would be a slaughterhouse.

Since I had them all quieted down, I assumed I was completely safe to explore. That'll teach me.

I was standing under an arch, watching some orange globule do something or other, when there was a surge and a roar and suddenly I was dead. I still have no real idea what killed me. It won't have been a mob so my guess is a spume of lava erupted from the flow nearby and incinerated me. 

Or I could have died of heat exhaustion. I had the UI switched off for taking screenshots so I wouldn't have seen any warnings. Just goes to show you can never let your guard down in Valheim. Even when you think nothing's out go get you, something is.

I'd set the death penalty to the minimum, so I respawned wearing all my equipped gear. I had very little on me anyway. It doesn't matter if I get it back in any case because I'm as sure as I can be that I'm done with Valheim, at least as a game I actually play. 

I will almost certainly return to potter about in the original biomes (Okay, maybe not the Swamp.) but nothing I've seen of the Mistlands or Ashlands makes me feel it would be worth the time and effort required to master and tame them. I might fly around some more to see the sights. I might even put up a portal or two for easy access but I'm only ever going to be a tourist there.

I'll be very happy to hear about other peoples' adventures, if anyone has any. There were certainly plenty of people writing about Valheim a couple of years ago. At the moment, though, it seems as if the only blogger still interested in adventuring there is Wilhelm. 

Even though it's still technically in Early Access, I get the feeling Valheim has pretty much done all it's likely to do, commercially. I see from the Steam Charts that the arrival of Ashlands has pushed numbers up but it's still only around 10% of the game's peak. 

I suspect I'm not the only one who feels they've done Valheim and it's time to move on.

Moving On...

Following some helpful advice in the comments to my last post, this morning I took advantage of the dying hours of World of Warcraft Classic's free weekend to move all my characters off their current server, Hydraxian Waterlords. 

Not that I wanted to move them anywhere. I would have been perfectly content to leave them where they were. Hydraxian Waterlords has been a very pleasant place to play. It makes little difference to me whether it's busy or quiet. I mostly play WoW as if it was a single-player game anyway.

But it wasn't my choice. Hydraxian Waterlords is scheduled to close when Cataclysm arrives. Not that I'd have known if it hadn't been for Pallais and Shintar explaining the situation. 

In fact, I still can't nail down an official confirmation from Blizzard. There are some very recent forum threads asking Blizzard not to close it and trying to rally support to keep it as the only EU-RP server but although everyone acts as if it's a done deal, no-one bothers to link to an official closure announcement.

Working on the dubious assumption that it's better to jump than be pushed, I made the decision to take my characters' fate into my own hands and move them anyway. Maybe they could just have sat tight and nothing would have happened but who knows?

The Free Transfer process is both simple and confusing. For a start, you have to somehow magically know about it already to access it. If the server really is about to close and free transfers have been offered, I would have expected either an in-game notification or an email to my account address. Then again, I have a suspicion free transfers off Hydraxian Waterlords may have been open continuously for a couple of years now, since the last time Blizzard threatened to close the server, so maybe they sent out notices then.

Once you know the option exists, you have to go through the cash shop to take advantage of it. That's how it's worked in most MMORPGs where I've done something similar in the past, although there have been cases where I was sent a token in the mail, which seems like a more elegant way of doing it. 

Blizzard gets points for not asking for banks to be cleared or guild permissions reset or auction house listings to be removed or any of the myriad other fussy housekeeping tasks I've had to fiddle about with in other games. It's a straightforward change of address with no complicated paperwork.

Unfortunately, they lose points for the all-round kludginess of the whole thing. I moved seven characters to two different servers and at no point was I ever entirely sure if the transfers had gone through correctly. The feedback from button-presses is all but non-existent. 

My confidence in the process wasn't improved when the first transfer I tried crashed fairly spectacularly, spitting out a chunk of incomprehensible code. Along with the error message there was a button to Reload UI. I pressed it and it dumped me back to character select, where the character I'd been trying to move had vanished altogether.

It was only a level 10 priest I will almost certainly never play again so I wasn't all that bothered but it made me apprehensive about moving the others. In the end, they did all transfer successfully, with no further crashes, although there was an unnerving moment when I went to log into the new server, only to find I had no characters there at all.

If in doubt, relog. I started over and there they all were, so that was fine. More worrying was the string of gibberish attached to the end of one of my characters' names.

It hadn't occured to me that someone on the destination server might have prior right to a name I was using. I rarely have much trouble with that sort of thing. I tend to pick names no-one else would be likley to think of so I'm generally safe. 

And that was how it worked out for six out of seven of them this time. The exception, naturally, was my highest level character. It bloody would be.

I renamed him and with that I was done. I now have four characters on Pyrewood Village and three on Mirage Raceway.  Those were the only available options under the free transfer system, which made me think I'd been wasting my time. 

They're both PvE servers, or "Normal" as Blizzard calls them, both with similar-size populations and similar faction balances. I can't see it makes any difference which of the two becomes my new home. I might just as well have done nothing and let the automatic relocation shunt me on to whichever it felt like, if and when Hydraxian Waterlords does finally close.

It's done now, anyway. In the not entirely likely event that I resubscribe for Cataclysm Classic, at least I know where I'll be.

Cataclysm? What Cataclysm?

Since Blizzard was desperate kind enough to offer me a free weekend in World of Warcraft Classic, it seemed rude to refuse. Even if I couldn't see any real point to it. 

I can totally see what Blizzard stands to get out of it. More players for Cataclysm Classic, of course. And what do players mean? Money! From a player's perspective, though, what could four days in the dying embers of Wrath of the Lich King Classic under the Cataclysm pre-patch offer? 

Don't look at me. I haven't been following this thing. I have a vague idea there are some tweaks from the original Cataclysm in the pre-patch but that might just be me getting it mixed up with something else. There are too many of these retro servers to keep up with nowadays.

I'm not even sure what version of "Classic" I have access to for the next couple of days although character select clearly indicates Cataclysm is already with us. Last time I played Classic was several years ago, just before the boycott. Back then, there was only one Classic. Now there are loads of them. I may not have been playing but I've been reading and I remember reading about Seasonal servers, Hardcore servers, Classic-Classic servers, Burning Crusade Servers and WotLK servers.

I remember there were deadlines when you had to do something or not do something to avoid or initiate server moves but I wasn't subscribing so I missed all of those. I remember Shintar explaining what would happen to my characters if I did absolutely nothing but I don't remember what she said it was. 

I am still on the EU/RP server Hydraxian Waterlords, I'm pleased to say. I thought I might have been relocated. I know, since I last played there, the server has at various times been everything from a ghost town to bursting at the seams. In the hour I was there this morning, I saw not one other player but it's hardly a representative sample. Still, you might expect to see someone in Ironforge on a Saturday morning.

As I said in a comment on Wilhelm's post on the free weekend offer, I didn't get anything from Blizzard to let me know in advance it was happening. The email inviting me finally turned up this morning, about a day and a half after the doors opened. It doesn't give you much confidence in the marketing department, does it?

Getting my Classic characters up and running again was both very simple and unnecesarily complicated. I opened Battlenet and the launcher immediately offered me an update, which I took. Unfortunately it had nothing to do with Classic. It was a 13GB download for Retail.

I worked out how to swap over to Classic, technically very straightforward to do while at the same time being very obscure. That, naturally, needed another download, although a much smaller one, thankfully.

One thing Blizzard does do better than almost anyone else is get you in and playing once you've worked out what version you want. The Play button lit up green in a matter of seconds even though the download had only just started.

I logged in to character select, where I found my Classic characters, tapping their toes and twiddling their thumbs, still waiting for me - all seven of them. I'd completely forgotten I had so many. 

I picked my highest, the Level 52 Dwarf Hunter and woke him up. He was down by the water's edge in Feralas. God knows why. Several notices popped up telling me various things including the surprising news that talking to other players is now an opt-in preference. Chat is disabled by default. I think we can all draw our own conclusions there.

A lot had changed, including all my Talents, which had been reset. I also had no combat abilities on my hot bars for some reason. There was no doing anything until I got that lot sorted.

It took about fifteen minutes. It's the kind of admin I don't particularly mind but it's surely not the best way to welcome back the prodigal. If nothing else, it did give me a moment to think about what I might want to do with my gifted time. Unfortunately, even after a quarter of an hour pondering on it, I still had no idea.

While I was re-assigning Talents and replacing hot keys, I did notice I was now entitled to a whole load of new abilities, some of which I was probably too mean to pay for last time and others that have no doubt been added to the game since I left. In the absence of anything better to do I ported back to Ironforge and made my way to the Hunter trainer, where I bought everything I was offered.

After that I headed out into Dun Morogh in search of the ranch where they train you to ride and sell you something to ride on. I was quite pleased with myself that I remembered where it was, although I did go to the Gnome riding school first. I'd also forgotten that Dwarves gad about on rams, which was quite a pleasant surprise.

I had 84 gold on me, which was more than enough to buy everything including a fast White ram. I even had some change left at the end. Whether I have more in the bank I have no idea because after taking a few screenshots I logged out. I just couldn't think of anything else worth doing.

I suppose, if I was serious about coming back for Cataclysm, I could carry on levelling up but I'm not even sure if I'm on a server that's going to be updated. The icon the launcher plonked on my desktop when it started patching is named "Burning Crusade Classic". 

I thought I remembered reading there weren't going to be any permanent BC servers but I was hardly paying full attention. Anyway, I thought that if you did nothing to stop it, you automatically carried on along the progression rails to whatever expansion station came next. Maybe I got shunted into a siding.

I'm thinking, though, that the whole point of Cataclysm was the remaking of the Old World. Wouldn't you want to start a new character to play through that anyway? I'm pretty sure that's what I'd do. If so, it makes it even harder to work out what this free weekend is supposed to do for me.

The danger with please-come-back offers like this is that if you don't actually come back, they can be a waste of a perfectly good weekend. In this instance, it was good to check in with my old Classic characters again, see they were still where I left them, wherever that was, but I don't think I'll be doing much more before the gates clang shut again on Monday.

Unless, that is, anyone has any ideas. Is there anything useful I could do now that would help, should I decide to try Cataclysm Classic in a couple of weeks? Answers in a comment, please...

Songs You Don't Hear On The Radio (Edit)

Friday night is music night! I think you'd need to be my grandparents' age to get that reference and they would be closing in on 130 if they were alive now. Wouldn't that be weird? Anyway, the only reason I know the tagline is because I used to hear them listen to the show back when I was a child. And anyway, this is Friday morning. 

Glad we got that cleared up. Now, what do we have today that would have confused, frightened or outraged my grandparents? Well, most of it, I guess, and I mean that literally. I have to guess. I have no idea what my grandparents thought about any kind of music made after about the 1930s because I don't recall them ever expressing a single opinion - or even a passing comment - on any of it. It was simply as if it didn't exist in their world.

It's weird, now I think about it, especially given that I grew up in the sixties and seventies, in the middle of a culture war just as heated as the present; a war in which pop music was frequently on the front line. I do know, if they could somehow eye what's in the charts now, they'd be in shock - quite possibly literally - over the language deemed "acceptable" in a pop song these days. They used to switch the TV off if someone said "bloody". Can you imagine what they'd make of a song that opened "you make me fucking sick"?

Streetwise - Pretty Sick

Of course, even today, that's probably not something you'd hear on mainstream radio, which is why we still have radio edits. You'd need to go just the slightest bit off-piste, to one of the minorly specialist but really still very close to the center digital stations, like every hip dad's favorite, Radio 6, here in the UK. Or much more likely you'd be served it by your personal algorithm, on the streaming platform of your choice, which would most likely be Spotify.

It is hard to imagine my grandparents coming to grips with Spotify. My mother, now in her early nineties, wouldn't be able to figure it out either, probably. At least I wouldn't want to be the one to try to explain it to her. If she could get to grips with the concept and the controls, though, she might well get good use out of it.

My mother has always been more interested in modern music than you'd expect. When I was listening to the Clash back in 1977 she said they sounded like the Rolling Stones and asked me to turn the volume up so she could hear them properly. Around the same time, when I was clearing out my record collection, planning to sell all my unfashionable prog and metal albums, she asked me to let her keep everything by Uriah Heep. One time I came back from college to visit and found her doing the vacuuming to Very 'Eavy, Very 'Umble.

Even in recent years she's been unpredictable in her musical fads and fancies. In her eighties, she developed a taste for Bruce Springsteen. That lasted a couple of years. I guess it's not so unusual. This next guy is in his eighties right now...

Shark-Shark - John Cale

Two posts I've been meaning to write for the longest time: Old Duffers Who've Lost It and Old Duffers Who Still Have It. Working titles... The problem is, some of them will insist on sliding from one category to the other and back, sometimes in the same week. Cale pretty much stays in his lane: Living Legend.

Getting back to Spotify and the rest of the also-ran streaming services (Is that fair? Is anything else as big? Apple Music maybe? Amazon Music Unlimited? I doubt it.) I can't really make jokes at anyone older's expense because I don't use Spotify either. It's not that I can't - it's that I don't listen to music that way any more. Haven't for a long time. Streaming would be pointless for me, no matter how many songs the service held or how good the algorithm.

I no longer use music as background except in the car or when I write posts, sometimes. And at work, but where I work there's no phone signal so... 

I hunt my music down and swallow it whole, in gulps. I follow the links in news stories or reviews, just like I would have done back in the days of the ink press, although now I just have to sit back and click, not go down town and ask the irritable guy behind the desk to put vinyl on a turntable so I could hear a track in the Listening Booth. 

Several hours of your Saturday afternoon gone, just to hear a tune or two each from a couple of new albums through a pair of sweaty headphones. Not your own sweat, either. Try and tell the kids that now...

When I want to hear something new now, I go look for it with my mouse. Sometimes I don't find anything. Other times I find way too much. Or too much to share here, anyway. It's been like that a lot, lately. There's so much good music out there.

Gold River - Parannoul

This, for example. I didn't find it all by myself. It was a link I clicked from one of the webzines. Do we say "webzine" any more? I doubt it. Stereogum, it was. I just checked. 

I'd vaguely heard of Parannoul before but I had no clue if it was a person or a band or what kind of music it might be. Writing about Gold River, the 'gum's Tom Breihan opened strong with: "There’s a new Parannoul song out in the world this morning, which means you should stop whatever you’re doing and listen."

So I did. Now it's your turn.

 King of the Slugs - Fat Dog

Didn't find this for myself, either. These guys are all over my feeds at the moment. Another Next Big Thing. There's always one. Actually, there are usually about fifty.

I'm tempted to say it sounds a bit like the Pop Group at the start but it doesn't take long to turn into Pigbag. Much like the Pop Group themselves, I suppose, although that was only Simon Underwood. 

I did a whole post once about how most songs are too long and I like things short and snappy. A list of songs I like would not entirely bear that assertion out. I'll do a Long Song post one day. Almost all my very, very favorite songs are five minutes plus. This, by the way, is not one of them. I do like it, though.

One more I had fed to me, I think, then we'll get to some I discovered all on my own. Well, with the help of YouTube's Recommends algorithm, but I did the detail work.

Thot Daughter - Harmony

Okay, I might have "discovered" Harmony for myself, once. I can't remember. I just know she's been on the blog before. This one I can't claim credit for but I have been listening to it a lot. It's kinda compulsive. I wish it was longer. (Cf. previous comments.)

Apologies if the title and chorus offend. I know I didn't write them but I am sharing them, so I guess it kinda comes down on me, too. Still, if song titles and lyrics tend to get your dander up this might not be the best blog to be following, some days. It's lucky my mother doesn't read this, although she might like some of the tunes.

Wet Summer - Mörmaid

Probably not this one. Very recently, I expressed the opinion that AI-generated video would not be producing anything worth seeing for a good, long time. I watched this entire thing with total attention, riveted by the bizarre, hypnogogic imagery. It was only when I read the comment thread I realised it was created using AI. 

My opinion still stands. As one of the commenters says, "...it's pretty clear even with ai you at least for now you still need a creative human intelligence steering the ship or what comes out is lame". Used as a tool for creativity, AI has its place alongside all the others. Just keep it on a firm leash and don't let it run around loose, savaging the scenery.

The song, however, is entirely human-generated. I think. It's getting very hard to tell. There are whole channels on YouTube posting nothing but AI-generated songs now, if you didn't know, and loads of them are getting hundreds of thousands of views. I'd link a couple but I really don't want to encourage it. It'd be like Noah inviting a couple of termites onto the Ark.

Superbloom - Amy O

This one, on the other hand, looks almost as if it should have been made by an AI, even though it patently was not. The lyric seems pretty associative at first, too. Until you think about it. I feel we're on the cusp of an infinite feedback loop, where generative AI and human creativity whirl around each other faster and faster, snapping at each other's tails until it's impossible for an outside observer to know where one ends and the other begins.

Only there won't be any outside observers. Just us and the AIs, trapped in a sack like drowning kittens.

Dopamine - Lemoncello

I do like a coincidence. I'm not one of those people who think they mean something. As a nihilist, I like best that they don't. 

I had two new songs brought somehow to my attention on the same day, both called Dopamine. What are the chances, eh? Probably not that low, actually. Shall we ask the AIs if they can figure it out? Yes, let's!

Gemini says (After a very long preamble with lots of made-up statistics.) "While it's not a common occurrence, it's not entirely impossible for two songs titled "Dopamine" to be released in the same week." Well, no shit, Sherlock. It happened!

The other Dopamine, by ex-Belle and Sebastian member Isobel Campbell is better but it doesn't have a video. See how shallow I am?

 

My Crush - Muque

The thing about Japan is, once you start, there's no stopping. Every time I find one great, new, Japanese band, I find a dozen. And don't get me started on anime. I really should have listened back in the 90s, when people tried to explain it to me.

I went with Muque as a representative sample of the kind of pool I've been splashing around in but I could have gone for Hitsujibungaku, if I was exactly sure what I was talking about. Which I am not. This is them sounding like it's 1995 all over again. And here they are, looking and sounding eerily like my favorite band of all time, Dolly Mixture, back in the early 'eighties.

Primrose Hill - Rachel Love

Speaking of the Dollies... Rachel seems to be currently in the process of re-inventing herself as Rachel Love. This came as something of a surprise to me. I've been subbed to the Dolly Mixture mailing list for many years and I get the occasional notice about something or other, usually a rare showing of the documentary Take Three Girls that whoever owns the rights infuriatingly refuses to release commercially, preferring instead to allow it - infrequently - to be shown at festivals or art exhibitions that always seem to happen hundreds or thousands of miles from where I live. 

They keep mighty quiet about what the individual members, Rachel, Debsey and Hester, might be up to and it was purely by chance I stumbled across the above video, which is three years old. Turns out there are three Rachel Love albums now. I have all of them. They're wondeful.

I really need to do a proper Dolly Mixture post some day.

 Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl 

 Ian Sweet

You wait all of recorded time for a cover of Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl then two come along in a month. Or something. I still prefer Yeule's but this is great, too. 

Literary Mind - Sprints

Always good to end with a couple of bangers. And oh, look! Here's one now! 

Riding in on the new Irish rock renaissance train, here come Sprints. Maybe I should have said "sprinting in"? Nah. that would have been tacky. This isn't their current single but I like it better. Also, it gives Broken Social Scene a run for their money in the "sing the same words so many times they don't mean anything any more" stakes.

And finally. Who else?

360 - Charlie XCX

Now the picture at the top of the post makes sense! Or maybe not. Exactly what Yung Lean and Bladee had to do with either the video or the song is unclear but the new Bladee album, Cold Visions, is fantastic. Do yourselves a favor and listen to it after you're done with Cindy Lee.

I mean, you did listen to Diamond Jubilee like I told you, right?

Mish-Mash Or Mosh?

Mish-mash today, music tomorrow. That's the plan. Might be more mish-mash, though. Or musical mish-mash. Yep, probably that.

But that's a day away. Now, there's this:

EverQuest II - A Difficult Experience

Or rather a difficulty with experience. I continue to trundle oh-so-slowly through the levels on my never-ending journey to the cap. Seriously, it is so slow now. I know it was crazy fast before but this is ridiculous. 

When I finished the Signature Questline I was about half-way through Level 128. After a bunch of post-credits quests, of which there are an unusually large amount, including an entire instance which also counted for a weekly or a daily or something, I have made it all the way to two-thirds of the way through the same level. Nearly.

I checked the xp every time I did a hand-in and it was running somewhere between 1.5%-2% per quest. The instance might have been as much as 4%. At this rate I will run out of all the regular quests before I hit 129. There are loads of dropped quests, where you get the starter from mobs, but even if I was willing to do all of them and able to get the drops, I'm still not sure it would get me to the cap.

I googled it, thinking there would be no end of complaints and plenty of advice but there's nothing much. No-one seems to be having an issue with it, which makes me think I must be doing something wrong.

I did find this extremely detailed guide on how to set yourself up to solo Ballads of Zimara in the most efficient manner but although it contains some useful information on gear and particularly on what adornments to slot, it says absolutely nothing about XP. and how to maximize it. The assumption seems to be that you might have trouble with the content, which has not been the case for me at all.

It's nice that someone went to the trouble of putting all that information together but as a couple of people point out in the comments, BoZ is one of the most welcoming expansions in years for new-and-returning players. You can just play through it with the gear you get at the start and the NPC who gives it to you even tells you how to set everything up for best effect. It's the precise reverse of recent expansions in that the fights are easy but the XP comes slowly. Min-maxing your gear does nothing to help with that.

Fortunately, the gameplay is fun in and of itself so I'm relatively content to keep picking away at it but I have to say that playing for an hour and a half and only getting about 10% of a level is a nostalgia trip I wasn't expecting when I bought the expansion. I'd say I hope they tweak it a bit for the next one but I suspect most players are pretty happy with it as it is so I'm not expecting any U-turns come the end of the year.

More M&Ms, Anyone?

Then again, it's all relative. I'm sure my current leveling speed in EQII will look like hyperdrive compared to what Monsters & Memories players will have to endure. Or enjoy. I mean, it is a self-selecting pool of masochists whose eyes light up at the sight of another opportunity to grind all weekend to get a couple of levels in a game that's not even in Early Access yet.

I feel entitled to snark because I may well be splashing around in that pool myself come June, when M&M stages an "Open Playtest". No information on start and finish dates other than it'll be late in the month but presumably it will be on for at least a few days. There's also likely to be a Stress test before then, if you really can't wait.

I missed the last opportunity to trudge uphill in the sandstorms both ways but I'm going to do my best to give it a try this time. I played it once and liked it and I keep hearing good things about the game. 

Since they'll both be available to play at around the same time. at least for a while, it'll be interesting to compare M&M's merciless recreation of the genre's deep past with the Anashti Sul server's attempt to replicate the way things had progressed about half a decade later. I suspect the slow leveling I'm whining about in BoZ will look like fast-forward in comparison to either of them. Maybe that'll encourage me to get my head down and cap out there. I kinda doubt that'll be how it works but let's hope.

Don't You Have Anything Better To Do?

I was very much more than a little surprised to read today that Peter Jackson is going to make "a new batch" of Lord Of The Rings films. Seriously? Hasn't he had enough yet?

I don't know how many films make a batch but the first is going to  be arriving in 2026. It's called Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, presumably because they're not confident cinemagoers will remember who Gollum is without a nudge. Andy Serkis is going to star. He's clearly not worried about being typecast as a speciality act. I think I saw him in something recently where he wasn't wearing prosthetics or a motion-capture bodysuit. Can't remember what it was though.

This news does not excite me at all. I saw the first three Lord of the Rings movies on release and I own them on DVD but I've never felt the need to watch them a second time. I also own the Hobbit trilogy and I haven't even watched that once. Plus I managed just one episode of the Amazon series and that was one too many. Are they making any more of those? I hope not.

I imagine another "batch" of movies is going to bring on the old "tide that floats all boats" effect for Lord of the Rings Online, which in turn might mean some bonus income and attention for EG7. Maybe as an EQ/EQII/DCUO player I'll benefit in some abstruse way form the trickle-down effect there - because we all know that's a real thing...

And Finally...

I know I said it was a music post tomorrow but I always like to end these things with a song. Let's see if there's anything appropriate in the slush pile. 

Ah, yes! From the post about Aussie thick-neck rockers I never got around to compiling. It'd be a shame not to share this one.

My Name Is Jim - The Smashed Avocados

Just be glad it's the only one you're getting. For now, anyway.

On A Journey

There's been a lot going on Chez Bhagpuss recently, one way and another so I haven't been able to put anything substantial together for a while. I don't want to miss my regular cadence so I'm going to keep tossing stuff up as I can but posts might get a little random. Fair warning. 

Also, really, would anyone have noticed if I hadn't said anything?

Today's little pleasure is a bounce off a post by Aywren about a game I hadn't heard of, called AFK Journey. That, I have to say, is not an inspiring name for any game but Aywren made it sound pretty interesting, the screenshots in her post looked pretty and it seemed like it might make a possible replacement for the recently-shuttered Noah's Heart, so I downloaded it and gave it a try.

The first thing I'd say about it is that it's absolutely gorgeous to look at. I spent more time staring at the pictures and admiring the art than I did playing the game. I don't really need to describe it because the look comes over well in screenshots and I took a few of those.

Secondly, the writing isn't at all bad. As Aywren mentioned, the plot isn't anything new but the prose is sprightly, the dialog sparkles and the characters have plenty of personality. It's a fun read, although reading is optional because all dialog is also fully voiced and the voice acting is convincing and enjoyable to listen to. I didn't skip ahead once, which is always a recommendation.

As for gameplay, I played for an hour or so, enjoying the view and the chat. Other than that, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

Most of what I saw seemed to be an extended tutorial but it didn't teach me anything much beyond how to use the virtual joystick to move. AFK Journey is a cross-platform title but it was clearly designed with Mobile in mind. Few concessions seem to have been made to convert it to a format familiar to PC players.

During the tutorial, messages kept popping up telling me to click on things so I clicked where I was told and on we went. Unfortunately, I rarely had much of an idea why I was clicking ,so when it came time to do something on my own I was often none the wiser.

Following the main storyline had me traveling through the world in three-quarter perspective, stopping mostly talk to people, which seemed straightforward enough. Coins popped into my bag occasionally for no reason I could fathom but who complains about free money? As I trotted through the delightful, if sadly fire-ravaged countryside, there were allies to gather, fires to put out (of course.) and baddies to fight (Or were they?) At no point did I feel remotely in control of any of it.

After a while, I worked out how to auto-run to the next quest objective, something I would have appreciated if I hadn't been able to see chests in the hedgerows just waiting to be opened or teleport stones just waiting to be added to my map. If I allowed the game to whisk me on to my next appointment, it ran me straight past all of them, so I kept jumping off auto-run to go grab loot or open a waystone. Then I'd get into random encounters and fights with bandits and wildlife so in the end I decided it would be easier to do my own navigating.

Fights were frequent and incomprehensible. There can be up to five of you in the team and any number of opponents and if you click some icons on the right of the screen, little pointers appear over peoples' heads. What they mean, I have no idea. Luckily, there's one button you can press that seems to make everyone sort themselves out and get on with it so I just used that every time and sat back to watch.

I'm one hundred per cent sure that's not how it's meant to work. I'm certain there are tactical elements you're supposed to be concerning yourself with, if only because the whole point of gacha games is to build teams and swap your cards in and out for maximum effect. Usually it's quite clear how you do that. Not this time. Or not to me, at any rate.

That said, the game does get off to a fairly steady and manageable start. After a while, though, the windows and prompts and suggestions begin and then it's everyone for themselves. 

Games of this kind generally have a ridiculous range of features, mini-games, rewards and gimmicks. AFK Journey is no exception. I generally do anything that's quick, easy and gives you free stuff and or that I find fun in and of itself. After that, I ignore the rest but in this case I ignored everything because once again I was having difficulty figuring out what I was supposed to do.

I realize all of that would probably work itself out over time. I've played plenty of games that confused the hell out of me to begin with but which turned out, in the end, to be much simpler than they seemed. Normally, I'd be happy to carry on for a few more sessions; see if the fog lifted; let the shape of the game make itself known.

In this case, I'm not sure I'm going to stick around that long. The game has potential but there are a lot of games with potential out there, some of them at least as pretty or well-written and many a lot more comfortable for me to play. 

Still, I have AFK Journey installed now and I don't not like it... We'll have to see how it goes from here.