Don't mind me - I'm still seething. Not much to report on the MMO Obsession front lately, although not for want of trying at least. An almost conspiracy-like combination of technical troubles serving to keep me mostly offline since last week; ISP troubles, server troubles, network issues, and somewhat bizarrely, some Friend of Humanity having at the Internet with a twelve-bore, and being successful enough to stop me getting anything useful done in any online game for the majority of Monday night.
Living in the UK, as I do, I'm largely oblivious to the whole nest of vipers that is 'Gun Control in the US', but damnit man, when innocent Intertubes are lying in a gutter in Cleveland, bleeding out all my packets, something has to be done! Especially annoying, as Monday, I was trying to get some research done in response to this article:
Clickable Culture: ‘Playboy’ Pulls Out of ‘Second Life’?
In which we learn that, er, Playboy has pulled out of Second Life. I'd heard they were there, of course, and giggled along with everyone else, but just passed it off as yet another Corporation of Suits trying to cash in on our free spirited utopian cyberparadise, maaaan....or some such. The point is that I don't have the faintest idea what they're actually doing, or hope to do in there, so figured it was time to find out for myself. (Purely for the articles, you understand!)
I'd also heard a lot, but learnt nothing about, IBM's Second Life Presence, and a friend recently showed me around some kind of Second Life Presence by the actual and real Swedish Government, some kind of virtual embassy I think, which probably needs further investigation. I hope they have Ferrero Rocher this time!
Anyway, I lagged to death, probably thanks to some joker fragging most of the Internet in one go (How does that even happen? I thought the whole point was that the Internet is a series of tubes!), and gave up in the end. I'll have another go soon, and will probably have some ill-informed and pretentiously wordy stuff on "Real Life Meets Second Life" here in due course, with mostly SFW pics!
The rest of the time was spent mostly Not Staying Connected to Guild Wars for Very Long, and this included last night, which I'm officially re-designating 'Monday', on account of the actual Monday not counting. Adjust your calendars accordingly! We did manage to get a little bit of progress done though, before I gave up in disgust...
Having located the source of the mysterious and deadly plague on Shing Jea Island, (and subsequently cleaned up the whole mess in the second of the two Attribute quests, An Unwelcome Guest), Master Togo is now en route to the meet with the Canthan Emperor to find out just what the hell is going on. He's taking along his entire retinue of Headmasters, and his Most Promising Students (Hello there!), making the whole thing one huge school trip, only with less getting thrown out of petting zoos for heavy petting, less shouting and running in museums, and more martial arts mayhem and deadly magics than the last one I ever went on.
This all takes us to the Mainland, which seems to be the bulk of the campaign proper, much like Nightfall, and at last takes us to Kaineng. I'd seen the thing on the worldmap, of course; a vast sprawling metropolis which covers about a quarter of the entire mainland continent, shown in an obviously man-made shading of rectangular city-blocks and crisscrossing streets, and was suitably impressed even then. What looked to be dozens of explorable zones, all within the city itself.
I do like a good city in these games, but often, for reasons of gameplay, they aren't usually that convincing; merely a few streets in which a bank, an armourer, and a blacksmith can exist. You tend not to worry about these things after a while, and just accept it all. But Kaineng is absolutely huge, and I can easily visualise hundreds of thousands of people living in such a place. It positively dwarfs Ironforge (Ha! See what I did there?), and even the obviously Bladerunner-esque Omni-1 of Anarchy Online doesn't come close. The nearest I'd seen previously was perhaps Paragon City in City of Heroes, and maybe the rambling futuristic city of Neocron.
When I was new at all this, I loved the wilderness. The Mountains of Mystery, The Forest of Isolation, The Plains of Solitude, The Swamps of Wherethehellarewe?... all that. That was where the monsters lived, where High Fantasy happened. Mostly it was the idea of remote distance making for the Epic Journey. The family Baggins would have much less to write about in The Red Book of Westmarch if both Smaug and Sauron had uptown penthouses in some prosperous highrise district reachable from the suburb of Hobbiton by the number 56 bus.
As time went on though, I started to appreciate the idea of 'The City' as a venue for a different sort of adventure. The Thief games rarely ever leave the unnamed City. Planescape: Torment, my all time Best! Game! Ever!, happens almost entirely within the confines of Sigil, the City of Doors. More elaborate and refined reading showed me The Book of the New Sun, Viriconium, Gormenghast and Perdido Street Station, even the later Ankh-Morpork based Pratchett books (Night Watch in particular); all outstanding works of Fantasy Fiction, which contain the passion and heroism and derring-do of the more traditional works of escapism, and yet also bring a certain freshness, and relevancy, with a depth of close detail that it is hard to find in a moorland expanse several hundred miles across. Most of us live in cities, true, but they can still be places of escape, the unusual and elaborate fiction. Most of all, a city can have a life of it's own, can be a nebulous entity in it's own right, in a way a mountain range cannot. A wilderness is a backdrop, but often, a city is an active participant.
All a matter of personal taste, clearly, and for most of us gamers, they way it actually plays is probably more important, but it is nice to have a really dense, sprawling City to run around in for a change. It's easier on the dry-cleaning, for a start.
Our first job was to find Master Togo, who had gone on ahead, and this took us out into the first few districts; Kaineng Docks, The Marketplace, and the Wajjun Bazaar. Interesting places, all tangled ramshackle walkways, steep canyons of tenements and shacks, and all about the place place, dozens of non-combatant Canthan Peasants. These, and the constant background ambient hubbub of voices really help maintain the impression that here is a place where people actually live and work, rather than just stand about with huge sacks of gold, waiting to buy limitless volumes of monster gunk from passing adventurers. Of course there are enemies too - at the moment mostly members of a somewhat destructive Jade Brotherhood, who seem to be hell-bent on butchering their way through these dockside districts. Maybe it's a civil war, or more likely, the plague had got here before us. I'm sure we'll find out in due course.
These are L20 mobs now, although we aren't that far off the cap ourselves now, L17 each. The city architecture presents numerous tactical opportunities for the Brotherhood, and quite quickly, we learned to fear apparently empty streets, with conveniently placed low bridges over them. Nasty tendency for those to spew out abseiling ninja death squads!
I'd seen a few comments about how drab Kaineng was, presumably referring to this 'low-rent' style of slum architecture and decrepit texturing in these early areas. Hopefully other styles of cityscape will turn up along the way, but I do quite like these claustrophobic man-made ravines so far. Ask me again in a month though!
Master Togo was located, and our next job was to pass on some Bad News to a Soon-To-Be-Grieving Mother. I'll have to let you know how that went, as about then, after the eight zone-resetting disconnect, I decided to call it a night. Internet gunshot wounds not withstanding, hopefully there will be more tomorrow... hell, maybe even an actual Mission!