Immersion in the Nebulae of New Eden

Back to the immersion track again and this time I am going to change things up completely, leaving behind the fantasy realms of Middle-Earth and Norrath for outer space.  It is time to take a crack at EVE Online.  That is, after all, where this tear about immersion started a while back.

This should be easy, right?   CCP even ran an ad campaign around the “I was there” idea, which seemed to me to be a clear suggestion that immersion was a thing.

Of course, that was made for the Incarna expansion a decade back and ends with the player in the ship hangar of the captain’s quarters, a feature gone from the game for about four years at this point.  It was not a high point for the game and the relations between CCP and the players.  But it was trying to get at something about the game.  Was it accurate though?

EVE Online has a lot of things going for it when it comes to immersion.  It is a futuristic dystopian space empire game, which means not only can the game get away with a lot, but things that might seem immersion breaking in a fantasy MMORPG like Lord of the Rings Online are perfectly acceptable in EVE.  There are no naming conventions to break, no cultural references that you can make that aren’t ancient history in New Eden, things like in game chat channels and voice comms are totally appropriate to the setting.

And the game even enforces a bit more reality that your average MMO.  In the future currency is all electronic… it is mostly that way today… so a cash balance at your finger tips that is measured in the millions or billions of ISK is totally within the scope of what one should expect.  But the magic storage back doesn’t exist.  You can’t store something in your hangar in Jita then run over and pick it up again in Amarr.  You can’t even use the magic mail service that exists in WoW and EQ and so many other titles to insta-ship things to yourself or others.

Which isn’t to say there are not delivery services in New Eden.  They’re just run by other players.  Contracts, scams, industrial enterprises, spies, piracy, it is all there.  I even think the space flight aspect is probably more realistic to what we ought to expect that your typical dogfight in space simulator.  Do we think people will fly ships by the seat of their pants or do we thing computers will do the calculations and take the ship where you want to go?  I think entering a command to warp to a particular destination is probably more likely.

So here is the odd twist, at least for those of who read my posts about the game.  If I am writing about some big battle where thousands clashed and ships were exploding left and right… that even probably involved very little, if any, immersion for me.  Or maybe it is a different sort of “in the zone,” I am not sure.

But generally with those fights when were on voice comms with hundreds of people in a fleet and you’re getting instructions over your headset and trying to follow broadcasts and keeping an eye on your position and you overview, it can be a lot of work, a lot of switching around and not focusing on one thing, and getting focused on something is an easy gateway to immersion.

Add in time dilation and the UI not responding and having the outstanding commands window up and having the FC change their mind based on intel coming in on a channel that he can hear but you cannot…. it is probably very warfare realistic… but it not something that where I get that “I was there” feeling.  It feels very much like a video game.  An amazing, complex, video game with thousands of people involved, but still a video game.

One of the problems with EVE Online is that I spend a lot of time playing the game while tabbed out in some other window.  I am looking at Jabber channels or something in Discord or one of the many web sites with game information like DOTLAN or zKillboard… or maybe just looking up something that was mentioned on voice comms or linked in fleet chat.

Which is, like so much, is perfectly in sync with the technology age of the game.  Of course we would have access to all sorts of data… and data overload can be a thing.  If you have the wrong overview setting or mis-heard a command because something else was going on of the FC is too excited and only keyed up his mic half way into what he was telling us… but that is all very realistic too.

What isn’t, however, is the UI itself.  The game has gotten better over the years, doing things has become smoother, but having to fumble around with that user interface that is suppose to represent the state of the art technology thousands of years in the future doesn’t quite sell it.

Okay, so where do I find immersion in the game?

I can get there in big fleet fights, but usually only if I am flying logi, the repair ships that accompany a fleet into battle.  I can get into the zone in that role, and it is one of the reasons I spend as much time as I have over the years doing so, because your part of the battle is fairly small.  You need to stay on your anchor and keep an eye on broadcasts, locking up and repairing ships as they call for help.  This is often facilitated in a fight by a spy in the opposing fleet who will communicate the enemy’s next target.  Somebody in command will call out the name of the next target and tell them to broadcast for reps and we’ll all lock them up so they will have repairs already on them as hostile damage begins to land.  When things are going well it can be an assembly line of reps, one ship after another until suddenly the broadcasts stop if the fight has gone your way… or until the logi ships start dying off too quickly and you can no longer hold and then your side is probably on the losing end.

That is certainly a thing.  And even in smaller fleets, especially Reavers fleets, I can get in the zone flying a combat ship rather than logi.  Having an FC you know and trust and knowing what you need to be doing can get you there.

But for the most part immersion is kind of a solo thing for me in New Eden.

While most of my posts about big fights don’t involve immersion, almost every post I have made about doing some minor task… usually flying a ship through hostile space on my own… has involved some immersion moment.  Especially when I jump through a gate in low sec or null sec space and find hostiles on the other side.  I was reminded of that last week when I lost a Purifier to a gate camp.  I came through and saw them on the overview, that they had the gate bubbled, and my heart rate went up noticeably as my body responded to that sensory input with an little jolt of adrenaline.

A physiological  reaction to something that happens in game is pretty much proof of immersion in my book.

Anyway, looking back at what I have written so far I have been meandering.  That is often my style.  But I don’t need this to be 10K words, so I am going to try to pull immersion in New Eden into better focus by comparing it with my past two posts, which were about LOTRO and EQ in order to tease out what elements of the game help me find immersion and what works against it.  What do they titles have in common for me?

For LOTRO I listed out:

• Familiar lore
• Good adaptation of the lore to the game
• Feeling of place within the game
• Mechanics are familiar but not identical to other fantasy MMORPGs
• Familiarity with the game
• Well done landscape that feels like Middle-earth

And for EQ I said:

• Feeling of place within the game
• A connected world that required travel
• A feeling of different places in that world
• A simply huge world at this point
• A freshness that has somehow remained with me
• Night/light really changing the feel of the game
• A sense of danger in the world
• Mercenaries if you can’t find a group now

Lore comes up right away for LOTRO.  Without Tolkien’s works behind it LOTRO is just a poorly implemented fantasy MMORPG.  Lore is key to the experience for me.

Not so with EQ and not so with EVE Online as well.  The lore of New Eden just doesn’t do much in the game for me.  It isn’t compelling for me and is, in some cases, a bit annoying.

For example, the idea that ships in New Eden have crews is dumb, an artifact of somebody slipping a mention of crews into the old game wiki.  Nothing in the game supports the idea of crews and much argues against the idea.  Even those who love the idea of crews gladly toss aside the complexities involved with their pet theory.  Where do they come from?  Are they impressed into service?  Are they slaves?  Who willingly gets on a ship with an immortal capsuleer who will be reborn if the ship blows up?  Are planetary conditions so bad that people are willing to die?  This is a plot hole worse than where they go to hire henchmen in James Bond movies.

I am a proponent of the lone capsuleer theory.  The game takes places thousands of years in the future where technology has made capsuleers immortal gods of the space lanes.  Am I supposed to believe we have the technology for that and faster than light travel, but somehow my missile bays need somebody standing around loading them by hand?  I think not.  Besides which, how do my skills and implants and boosters affect ship systems unless it is me running everything.  I am alone on the ship, I am a part of it and it is an extension of my body.  This is the lore hill I will die on.

Sorry, got a little carried away there.  Let’s just say that the lore is a split decision for me on a good day.

I am going to skip down on the LOTRO list to familiarity with the game, which is kind of a draw for me in EVE.  EVE is a game of continual learning, so familiarity means that you have a foundation from which to work.  But there is so much to know.  The wise quickly learn their limitations and fools like me rush in and get schooled.  There are 65 regions in known space in the game and after 15 years of playing I still run across region names I cannot place on the map in the MER… and if I’m listing them out from the MER that means a bunch of people live there.  So kind of a wash on familiarity, but that was why I wanted to get it out of the way and move on to the big one.

Then there is a sense of place.  I said in the last post that this felt like an item that could be a through line on all of these posts, and this one will support that idea.

EVE Online very much has a sense of place.  Not in the way that Middle-Earth in LOTRO or Norrath in EQ do.  Not really.  I mean, space in New Eden is as beautiful and varied as the landscapes in LOTRO, and the size of EQ is only matched by the size of EVE Online, something enhanced by the lack of instant travel and automated post box deliveries I mentioned above.  It feels like a place because it takes time to move through it.

But New Eden doesn’t have a lot of personal touches, places that are special because the devs designed them that way.  There are a few monuments scattered about space.  But a lot of the places that are special are because the players made them so.

My personal map of New Eden and the places I’ve been

Jita, the main trade hub of New Eden is an accident of design.  The Caldari Navy Assembly Plant at Jita planet 4 moon 4 was once the first mission hub for new Caldari players back when rolling up Caldari gave you an initial skill advantage for PvP.  So lots of new players are coming back from missions and selling their stuff and suddenly it because the place to sell.  Jita 4-4 is your space mall.

The graveyard in Molea was a player driven effort.  CCP has since made it a thing they shepherd, but it went for more than a decade of being a place made special by the players.  Other monuments in the game are there to remember things that players did.  There are plenty of systems made famous for events, like B-R5RB or M2-XFE, where titanic battles were fought.

And then there are the places that mean something to us individually.  Two years back I wrote a post about my homes in New Eden.  Anybody who has played the game for any length of time likely has a system or two or a station that they feel like they lived out of, that has memories for them.

The funny thing is that while space if pretty, it is also kind of generic.  It doesn’t change much as you travel through a region.  One system can look very much like another.  They only become special because of the things we experience.  It is our stories over layered on top of New Eden which makes one system memorable and another just another pair of gates on the way to some place.  New Eden has a sense of place because we make place there special.

And that leads me into another item which isn’t on either of my other two lists, and that is the player stories.

Every MMORPG has player stories.  I write here about the tale of the instance group and my time in other games, essentially retelling the stories of my time spent.  But those tales are often in the context of the lore and the larger tales of the game itself.  I wrote about Hellfire Ramparts yesterday not because we did something unique, but because we ran a piece of content.  Our experience was our own, but it was parallel to what many thousands of others have experienced.

EVE Online, being a good sandbox, lets players have stories that are not on the same rails that everybody else has experienced.  It can be small, personal events.  If you have decided to move to a new region in high sec, just finding a new home, hauling your stuff, and getting to know the new neighborhood is a story.  A lot of stories depend on interaction with other people.  There is a lot of PvP in New Eden.  Ships blow up.  Players pop up where you don’t expect them… or sometimes they land exactly where you do expect them.  It is a difficult game to find the fun in at times because the fun isn’t always dispensed in bite sized increments.  And the scripted stuff, missions and events and the like, are often a bit tedious after the first run or two.  PvE is content that can be mastered and, thus, made routine.  But player stories about them doing their own thing, that is what makes the game.

People often complain about sovereign null sec.  It is boring.  It is too safe.  Wormholes are more lucrative and low sec has better small gang fights.  I’ve heard it all over and over and have been called names because of where I live.  F1 monkey is always a favorite.  Gevlon said I was a slave, like I somehow couldn’t log off.

But here is the thing.  Out there in null sec I am a part of a much larger story.  We just saw a 13 month war that had 120K in game characters attack a group of less than 40K in a campaign that swept through a dozen regions and laid waste to at least half of them.  It was a struggle the size of which just doesn’t happen in other games, driven by politics, deals, grudges, and a desire for fame and a place in the history of New Eden.  Andrew Groen has written two large books on the history of the null sec empires in EVE Online, and there is certainly material enough for a third.

Even if we assume the character to player ratio is something around 5 to 1 (I make this call knowing that the current ratio in Goonswarm Federation is 4.2 to 1) that is still a lot of people involved.  That is maybe 30K real life individuals involved in a virtual space war that carried on around the clock for over a year and spawned host of narratives, intrigue, and propaganda that spilled out into the real world.

I had to come up with a new term just to try and find some way to capture the feeling of being involved in such an event.  I will call it “Meta Immersion,” the feeling of belonging to something that isn’t real yet becomes a real part of your life.  This is a special aspect of New Eden that just doesn’t happen at scale in other games that I have played.  Empires rise and fall, alliances are made and broken, leaders become famous for a season and maybe infamous come the next, it is all quite a big deal when you dig into it.

Okay, I am getting all breathless about story here, I know, and I am already three thousand words into this post.  Maybe it is time to try and sum up to some bullet points.  So let’s see…

Pro Immersion

• Sense of place
• No fast travel options makes the size of the game more tangible
• Scales up to “meta immersion”
• A vast canvas for story, from the smallest to those with a cast of thousands
• Lore that is compatible with player stories
• A company that sometimes cares a lot about player stories
• A lot of good complexity
• Most meaningful trade skills in any game ever
• Unique mechanics
• Skill and knowledge focused versus gear focused game play
• A sense of danger in the world

Against Immersion

• A UI that really struggles to tell you what you need to know (remembers everything, tells you nothing)
• Most info you need is outside of the game (tabbing out breaks immersion)
• A lot of bad complexity (try managing a corporation)
• No other game prepares you to play this one
• CCP can’t quite grasp its own game or the implications of some of its actions
• CCP goes through bouts of “you’re playing wrong” and breaks things
• Other players on voice coms (and in the forums and on /r/eve)
• Loss is very much part of the game, which is a tough hurdle for many people

That last one is a hurdle for so many people.  I still hate losing a ship.  If there is one thing that MUDs then MMORPGs have taught us as players is that gear is sacred.  I remember back in TorilMUD where a first offense for doing something considered cheating (which included a bunch of things that would be normal in WoW today) got you the choice of losing half your levels or all of your gear.  That was no choice at all.  With gear getting back your levels is no problem, but without gear a level cap character was useless.

In EVE Online ships are not like that.  Aside from a few very special items, ships are expendable, more like ammo than gear.  I’ve lost 334 ships in 15 years, which is a small number really.  That is almost twice a month.  If you lost your gear in WoW that often you’d quit.  But in New Eden you just go to Jita and buy a new ship.  There is enough competition that the market is usually good at finding the lowest acceptable price for producers and most anything can be had for ISK.

Anyway, I have rambled enough about EVE Online for now.  There are probably half a dozen things I meant to write that I forgot and no doubt a couple I went on at length about that could have been cut back.  But this is an exploration via writing on a blog where everything is a first draft.

So that is three games down.  Where should I go next?

The series so far:

• Down the Rabbit Hole of Immersion
• Immersion in Middle-Earth
• Immersion on the Bad Linoleum of Norrath

Quote of the Day – Retro MMO Ideals

As for the ‘give us an old version of LOTRO’ thing – my answer is the same as always: why unfix all those bugs? You think it was perfect back then, but I remember our bug queues at the time and I can assure you it was not. Thirteen years of bug-fixes just disappearing? Yikes!

-Master of Lions, LOTRO Dev team, LOTRO forums

There is in some of us, myself included, a longing for the “good old days” of a particular game.  That isn’t so hard to find when it comes to single player games.  I have enjoyed a return to Diablo II on its 20th anniversary.

Back with Cain and his tales again, basically unchanged in 20 years

But when it comes to MMORPGs, which are as much a service as a game, a service that must exist within a complex and changing ecosystem, and which host players in a shared world that is being constantly fixed and updated, it becomes problematic to reach a state where the “good old days” can be achieved.

SOE, and then Daybreak, have been playing the nostalgia card for well over a decade with EverQuest by rolling out servers where the content is restricted and unlock by expansion and where they have tinkered with the xp curve and mob difficulty.  But purists rightly argue that this doesn’t get you back to 1999 as so much has changed in the game since then.

LOTRO likewise experimented with that a couple of years back.

Even with WoW Classic, where Blizzard spent time and resources creating an experience very close to a point in 2006 gets criticism for some of the compromises they made in order to ship a product that would be viable in 2019.  It is very close to the 2006 experience, but it is not perfect.  Even I can spot a difference here and there.

Creating the exact early game experience, while maybe technically possible, does not seem practical and, in some ways, problematic.  As the quote at the top asks, do you re-introduce bugs, some of which can be quite annoying, merely to get that first day feel?  Does fixing those bugs invalidate the experience?  And how does all of that interact with current operating systems?  In the case of LOTRO I was running on Win XP when it launched, an OS that was already starting to get a bit long in the tooth and, even skipping Vista and Win 8, I am personally still two operating systems down the road.

And what is the experience true to in any case.  I’ll bring out another salty old quote:

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

–Heraclitus

The problem is two fold.  Due to changes in technology and the infrastructure around games, it isn’t likely you can set foot in exactly the same game you did back in 2007, or 2004, or 1999, or whenever.  Too much has changed.  If a company with all the resources that Blizzard has cannot get there without making compromises, small studios like Daybreak or Standing Stone don’t have much of a chance.

But you too have changed.  Even the forgetful, like myself, cannot be surprised anew at everything in a game.  There are too many memories of what happened before, too many blog posts, too much information on wikis and news sites to possibly be able to approach a game as you did back in the day.

The best you can hope for is a good time that in some way reminds you of how you felt back in the day, an experience that revives memories and makes you feel good.

Flying Home From Placid

The Liberty Squad deployment up to low sec in Placid wrapped up over the weekend.

The stated reason for heading home was that our two primary FCs have been busy with real life, which I am sure is true.  However, I suspect that if we had been been getting the “good fights” we had been hoping for, we wouldn’t be leaving.  Instead, after proving that Snuff and its local allies were set to simply out-escalate us in every fight they chose to take (See fights one, two, and three.) we started looking for other things to do.   But in the shade of those supers not much else grows.  So we packed up and headed back to Delve.

I managed to miss the move ops home.

I am certainly not one to claim “I have a life” or anything, but any Saturday night op comes behind my wife wanting to go out to dinner or something, so I was off doing that while the move op happened.

Late in the evening though I decided to see if I could just slip back home.  I didn’t have much to move, and the online count was under 18K, which makes for a lot of empty space.  I had a Guardian on my main, and a Harpy on my alt that could scout for him.  I undocked and headed back towards Delve.

Harpy occluding the sun

The fastest route home according to DOTLAN was a good 36 jumps.

From Placid back down to Delve

I’ve done longer trips alone through null sec, but that many gates does expose you to some risk, even if most of the trip is through friendly territory.

However, DOTLAN doesn’t know about the reconstituted Eye of Terror, the Ansiblex jump gate route that runs from Pure Blind down to Delve, Period Basis, and the boarder with Catch down in Querious.

The route home using space mass transit

I remain a bit mystified as to why CCP replaced POS jump bridges, which had jump fatigue associated with them… granted, a greatly reduced and and capped jump fatigue compare to what was introduced with the Phoebe update…, with the fatigue free Ansiblex.   I don’t think anybody in null sec was asking for that big of a pass.  We were good with the old jump bridge routine, fatigue and all.  But we use what we’re given.

So rather than 36 gates home, I had to take just five gates through low sec to get on the Eye of Terror system, after which it was just four Ansiblex gates, with a normal gate in between each.

Including that one parked right on the sun in Delve

That cut my total system transitions down to 14, which doesn’t even account for the safety factor.  They Ansiblex jump gates tend to be on grid with the gate they most likely server, so you drop into system on a perch over your next jump.  That and watching intel channels makes such a trip much less dangerous than it might otherwise be.

Of course, there is a cost.  You get charged for each jump.

Fuel tolls

I’ll pay that, even if INIT charges us more.

And the blackout?  Well, if nothing else, it does give you a false sense of security.  I did not see any hostiles on the way home.  Maybe there were some.  Maybe they were cloaked.  Maybe they just were not on grid.  I’ll never now.

The whole thing went smoothly enough that I clone jumped my alt back to Frarie and grabbed my last ship, a Sabre, and ran the route again.

Permaband SKIN online!

I try not to run the same route twice in a row right away, if only because it tends to court danger.  But space seemed empty enough, the intel channels were quiet, and what the hell.  The Sabre got home safely as well.

And so ends another deployment.  I probably won’t bother undocking again for the rest of the month.  CCP has thrown all the skill points at us already and there aren’t any wars or deployments going on, save for Black Ops, and I am not actually a member of Black Ops.  But mostly it will be due to WoW Classic going live later today.  I expect that will keep me busy for a bit.

SuperData sees League of Legends Slip and Fortnite Possibly Peak

With the end of August at hand SuperData Research has their digital revenue numbers out for July.

SuperData Research Top 10 – July 2018

For only the second time since I have been covering this monthly update League of Legends is not in first place on the PC side of the house.  The last time was back in March, when Dungeon Fighter Online overtook the dominant MOBA.  As happened then, I am not sure if LoL sagged a bit in July, DFO saw a surge, or if the two are just close enough in general that this should happen more often.  Certainly last year’s revenue summary from SuperData had LoL out in front by nearly half a billion dollars, but that could have changed.

Otherwise the usual top four remain secure again at the top of the list as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which disturbed the status quo by jumping into third place last month, fell back into sixth place behind its nemesis Fortnite.

World of Warcraft held onto seventh place overall and World of Tanks held eighth again while DOTA 2 and CS:GO swapped spots from last month, leaving no newcomers on the chart for July.

On the console chart Fornite held onto its top position, with FIFA 18 behind it in second again.  GTA V had a new update which helped the five year old title roll back into third position.  No Man’s Sky got some good press with its latest update as well as launching on XBox, helping it into an impressive sixth spot while Overwatch fell off the list for July.

When it comes to mobile Honor of Kings stayed in its usual top position while Pokemon Go held onto the third rank spot it achieved last month.  Candy Crush Saga, the perennial match three title on the list, stayed in eight position for the month.

Other items from the SuperData monthly report:

• Fortnite’s peak may be behind us. Fortnite revenue is up only 2% from June. Growth was modest despite Epic releasing Season 5 of the game’s battle pass midway through the month.
• No Man’s Sky has its best month since launch. No Man’s Sky generated an estimated $24 million across all platforms in July after releasing its much anticipated NEXT DLC and launching on Xbox One. Over two million players were active in July, a 10x increase from June.
• Overwatch revenue continues to slide despite consistent playerbase. Overwatch additional content sales across all platforms declined year-over-year and sequentially from June. On the other hand, monthly active users increased due to a free-to-play weekend and the release of a new playable Hero.
• Grand Theft Auto returns to form with “After Hours” update. We estimate GTA Online had its highest earning month of the year so far, and second only to December 2017 for highest month since launch.

Decentraland and the Fusion of Trends

I had to get in the car for a short drive last night, so I flipped on the radio to listen to along the way.  It was set to our local PBS station, KQED, and since it was between 9 and 10pm, the BBC News Service feed was playing.

I wasn’t really listening to what was being said until I was out of the driveway and headed down the street.  Then some very familiar words started flowing through my brain in charming English accents with precise BBC pronunciation.  It was something about a virtual world and selling virtual plots of land and maybe businesses setting up shop and people visiting friends and having a virtual cup of tea and all the nonsense that was being passed around about virtual worlds more than a decade back.

My first thought was that they were playing an old track, some sort of “Remember when this was a thing?” segment featuring Second Life and how people were buying into that.  I mean Reuters and CNN had “offices” there and people who got rich on speculation were making it to the covers of magazines.

But the whole thing sounded more recent.  They were talking about the funding by selling plots in the Genesis content section of this world.  We’ve certainly seen virtual real estate sold before.  Then there was mention of the in game currency, called MANA, which you had to buy in order to get any of the plots.  But we’ve been down that path before.

And then the surprising-yet-unsurprising twist hit, MANA was a cryptocurrency and used blockchain technology and I said aloud, “Nailed it!”

But it isn’t just the currency that uses blockchain, it is the whole world and all your virtual land deeds and whatever.  I was back in the driveway before I was the story was through… honestly, I was only driving out to get a PokeStop because it was day seven of my streak and I wanted the big payout… so I sat in the driveway until they finally said the name of the place.  Just to hit on the block chain theme in a big way it is called Decentraland.

Buzz words sell things

So I went back in the house and started looking the whole thing up.

It doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry yet, which I am sad to say is my current method of assessing notability.  If you aren’t there yet how can you make any claim to fame?  But it does have its own web site and blog with an introduction to things and a FAQ.

Naturally, because it is 2018 and this is how things are, even though the developers are selling plots of land via their cryptocurrency, you cannot log in and visit your purchase yet, so add crowdfunding to the list of trends it is riding on.

Not that there isn’t a lot going on with Decentraland.  Browsing through their site and reading articles about non-fungible tokens and what not indicates that much thought is going into the technology being used.  However, technology isn’t a product and I didn’t see a thing that made me think that they had anything beyond the most basic ideas as to what people would eventually do with the place.

That is likely my native skepticism kicking in I am sure.  As I said, I’ve heard a lot of their pitch before, and the fact that blockchain technology is part of the equation doesn’t sell me.  But we shall see.  I mostly wanted to write this to mark the point in time so I would come back and visit it again in a year and in five years and so on to see what develops.

Are you interested in some blockchain secured virtual real estate?

Fighting the Flight Sim Urge

Every so often I start feeling the urge to get into combat flight simulators.  Something triggers a wave of desire to go spend time trying to fly a plane in order to shoot down other people flying planes.

I’ve been feeling this lately due to the fact I started watching videos on YouTube by Bismark.  He does a variety of different videos, but many of them focus on the game IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad, one of the more recent entries in the long running IL-2 Sturmovik series of games.

I am pretty sure I have owned a couple of the titles from the series in the past.  I was never any good at them.

Rather, watching these videos fans the long quiet embers of a time when I played games like Air Warrior or Falcon or Hellcats over the Pacific, an era of my gaming that runs from the late 80s into the mid 90s… which is to say, a long time ago.

Spitfire Artwork from Air Warrior on the Mac, circa 1989

I was young, had the time, energy, and patience to get… if not good, at least past bad and into the range of somewhat competent… with these titles.  And then I sort of stopped focusing on that.  Things like TorilMUD and Diablo and various incarnations of Civilization became more my thing, and then EverQuest came along and we get to where I am today.

But I have never quite lost that flight sim urge.  Every so often I buy or try some flight sim title, realize I don’t really have the patience to get into it again, and move on.

Fortunately we live in the free to play age, so I no longer have to buy to douse that urge.  Since the urge is back, I have been back to tinkering around with War Thunder.  And since the urge was stoked by IL-2 Sturmovik, I have been playing the Russian tree and the ground attack portion thereof.

An early model IL-2 in War Thunder

Doing ground attack has less of a learning curve than air to air combat.  However, it also means you’re meat for the enemy if you’re caught alone, and since games like War Thunder tend to be chaos for the most part anyway, sticking with others or finding targets where fighter cover exists can be problematic.  Situations are fleeting and people will run off after any opportunity.

Then the urge to take a fighter up and reply in kind comes through and how bad I am shines through.  My copy of Fighter Combat glowers at me from the bookshelf as I make all the rookie mistakes, even though I know as I do them that they are mistakes.

I tell myself that trying to do this with mouse and keyboard… and not even a mouse, but a trackball… is just wrong and that I really need a new flight stick because I got rid of my old one when it became so old that the company dropped driver support for it.

And then I spend some time looking at flight sticks… I think I would go with the Thrustmaster T.1600M at this point, based on what I have read… and I think some more, put something on my wish list, take it back off, then put it back on again as the urge fights with the more detached knowledge of myself.  I know, if I can step back from whatever passion there is, that I don’t really have the patience to get up to speed, much less good.

Meanwhile, the urge counters with the fact that I already own some games like Elite: Dangerous where the flight stick might be useful.  I could get use out of something I already own.  Looking in my Steam library, at some point I even bought IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946, during a sale no doubt.

Meanwhile the detached side starts going on about the sunk costs fallacy.

The likely end result is that I’ll just play War Thunder with my current setup until I get tired of being shot down constantly and go back to things that are now more my speed.  But there is always a battle within me.

Subscription Deals and Free Level Boosts and Bad Timing

Oh EverQuest II, you are forever off in your timing.

Daybreak is doing a big push this week to get players invested in the game.

The latest game update introduces a Fabled version of the Fallen Dynasty adventure pack from mid-2006.  There are some special, limited time public quests running.  Several zones have been added to the level agnostic list.  And the content of 2014’s Altar of Malice expansion has been been made available to all players, subscribed or not, leaving only last year’s Terrors of Thalumbra as content you must purchase. (I am not sure what happened to the Hunter S. Thompson inspired Rum Diary adventure pack that came out a while back, when they weren’t going to do expansions any more.)

More would be the Altar of Malice expansion I guess…

In addition to that, the insta-level program has been bumped up a notch, so when you buy a Heroic Character upgrade, it now boosts your character up to level 95.  To celebrate this, they are giving players a free Heroic Character upgrade, which you must collect before noon Pacific Time on Tuesday, September 6th. (Details at the link.)

Heroic dude is heroic… and sort of looks like Thor from the movie

And, just to top all that off like a sweet, glistening, unnaturally red maraschino cherry on top of a too large ice cream sundae, Daybreak is also offering a special deal on All Access subscriptions.

Good through August 29

$71.99 for a 12 month subscription is a decent deal.  That works out to, as the Daybreak copy reads, less than $6.00 a month, though only if you live in a world that allows transactions at 1/12th of a penny.  Still, minor quibble aside, that is less than half price over the month-by-month $15 rate, and $4.00 a month less that the usual discount for subscribing for 12 months at a stretch.

All of which would be awesome news… if it had come in August of 2015 when I was disaffected by World of Warcraft and garrisons in Draenor and there wasn’t even a war going on in New Eden and all that.

But now?  Daybreak is laying this offer down with just a few days left until the WoW Legion expansion hits?  I mean, I love you guys down in San Diego, but I’ve already sent a card to Gul’dan letting him know to expect us in the Broken Isles come August 30th.

You can’t always find hearts in fel green on cards

It does seem to be the fate of EverQuest II to forever be in the shadow of World of Warcraft.  They launched less than a month apart, leading to five years of “What if…” articles and posts wondering how Norrath would have fared had it not launched straight into the teeth of the Azerothian juggernaut.

So, while I don’t have a lot of WoW specific activities penciled in on my calendar for the weekend… my Tauren warrior is already level 58, so my goal to get him to 60 is nearly done… from Tuesday forward I look to be pretty well booked in Azeroth and the Broken Isles.

And by the time I want a little break from that content, Pokemon Sun & Moon will be out and I will be able to flop on the couch with my 3DS and play that as a break from Azeroth.

So Daybreak… maybe you could run this offer by me again in maybe 9-12 months?