This is pretty good news if you happen to want to try out a massively fleshed-out MMORPG with huge freaking swathes of content, and sets the bar pretty high for future entrants into the f2p marketplace.  It should also be great for the population; right now the game is hopelessly top-heavy on most servers and I would be hesitant to recommend it to anyone starting from scratch.  F2P should mean lots of lower level people for new players to group with, and even if 9 in 10 of those quit before making it past 50, that’s still a influx of new blood that the game hasn’t seen in ages.

It’s less good for long-time players who are decrying the Impending Noob Apocalypse or doing the math on what it would cost to convert their accounts from month-to-month billing (what Sony calls “Gold” membership) to the pay-as-you-go “Silver” or “Free” plans.

For example, I have three characters and only one of them is a class/race combination that’s available for free.  I’d need to pay $5 to unlock all the races and $5 to unlock all the classes so I could log the other two characters in.  Fortunately, the Silver membership that I’m getting as a perk of being a current subscriber gives me three character slots, so I’m good there – nothing to buy!

Then, well, I’m kitted out in rather a lot of raid gear of the sort that you can’t equip as a free player, so I’d need to spend 30 cents per item for about 20 items.

So, after paying 16 bucks, I’d be able to use my current primary character for free from now on, and another few bucks would get Most Favored Alt up to speed, and after only a couple of months I’d actually start breaking even.

Now, if I wanted to switch main characters to Most Favored Alt, who just happens to be both a free race AND a free class, I’d only be out a few bucks to equip his few pieces of raid gear and then good to go from there.

I’m actually in a pretty good spot to consider this.  If I happened to have 7 characters all kitted out in high end gear… Well, but I don’t and that’s a good thing.  This plan definitely isn’t for those folks.

The other thing is that this is reminding me that I really ought to give DCUO a shot now that it’s F2P.  It’s got to be worth at least an evening’s mucking about.

Then of course Sony got hacked, and I discovered Rift which was great fun for a couple of months, and then I kind of had to put all MMOs aside in favor of actually getting settled in at a new job, and I was pretty MMO free for a while there.

Then the EQ2 team released a major content update that reduced the amount of treadmill time required for a bunch of things and this happened to coincide with me realizing that I could still claim the 45 days of free game time from the “We’re really sorry” package, and I wound up giving it another go.

They did a pretty good job with the patch, and I was having fun playing, and then they had a long double XP weekend over labor day that let me log in and finally max out my AA points.

AA points, by the way, are basically EQ’s way of differentiating between two characters of the same level; they allow you to take, say, a priest character and make him either a strong offensive character with lots of damage skills or a strong healer with limited damage ability but who can keep a group alive better.

It’s nowhere near as flexible as Rift’s soul system but I wound up a little disillusioned with that after a while.

Also, and more importantly: it’s different from the AA system in EQ1 because there’s actually a limit as to how many you can have and you cannot take all the abilities. In EQ1, the only limit to the number of AAs and number of AA abilities you can have is the amount of time you grind away gaining them, so the developers have to design content for people with thousands and thousands of AA points and somehow balance the same content for people with only a few.

Anyway, digression aside, I took advantage of the bonus XP weekend to finally get my character to the AA cap and felt pretty good about it.

Then Sony did something even more brilliant: they made a vast swath of the game easier.

See, there’s a truism in most MMOs, that the game doesn’t actually start until you’re max level. As a result, some games can be split into content you do to get you to the level cap and content you do at level cap.

With some games – and I will pick on Rift again here – the level 1 to level cap game is extremely linear. If you are level 30, the only place you can safely adventure is X, but when you get to level 35 it’s time to move on to Y but you had best not venture into Z anytime soon.

EQ2, on the other hand, is huge and sprawly, with dozens of expansions and content updates and little bits bolted on to the side. They’ve put IN a linear progression path you CAN follow, but you can usually sidestep the path and go find your own way.

Also, since EQ2 got to inherit an awful lot of lore from EQ1 and didn’t have to start from scratch, there’s a lot of story woven into the leveling, and going off the path means that you get to check out new quests and new stories.

It’s pretty neat, except that much of the story used to be gated behind needing 3 or 4 friends to finish a lot of the quests in the game. This is where the “the game begins at level cap” thing comes in – there’s plenty to do before level cap but good luck finding a group to do it with.

So they’ve addressed this in a pair of ways.

The first, which they did ages ago, was to alter a bunch of quests to be more easily soloable.

The second, which they did in the most recent content update, was to improve most of the low level gear. It means that an awful lot of the game is now trivial, but it also turns some of the remaining impossible-without-a-group lower level quests into simply very difficult.

I’ve actually started a new character as a result, something I don’t usually allow myself in MMOs, and am happily climbing the level ladder once again.

Well played, Sony, well played.

According to Firefox, there’s no such word as “completionist” but damnit if I don’t like the word and am going to stick with it.

Anyway.

I will admit that a big reason I wish this version of the game had come out for another system is that the Wii controls are just brutal.  Combat in particular, is a mess, even by Prince of Persia standards.  You control your character with the analog stick, which is all well and good, but the combat often has you trying to move with the analog stick AND shake the nunchuck and, well, it doesn’t always work out all that well.

The platforming controls are also pretty shaky at times, though thankfully not in the sense of, say, needing to shake the controller to jump.

See, most games of this ilk are pretty forgiving about camera angle changes.  In some PoP games, for example, if you need to hold the controller stick right to wall-run to a ring, and you keep holding the controller stick right after you hit the ring, you can press the action button again and it will wall run again to the next target, even if the camera angle changed during the initial wall run making “right” no longer the correct direction.

This game… not so much.  I have had far too many deaths caused by a camera angle change in the middle of a platforming sequence, and breaking myself of the control conventions I’ve grown used to has proven difficult.

So basically what I guess I’m getting to is that I really wish this had been ported somewhere where I could play it with a gamepad.

Putting PoP aside, I had a very surreal moment in D&D Online.

I was running around Stormreach, which seems to be the hub city for characters for quite a while, and it started raining, and then I just had to stand there and watch it and listen to it for a while.  Stormreach gets quite lovely in the rain, it’s full of all sorts of glowing lanterns that make for some fascinating patterns of light in the dark.

The first night I logged in to Everquest – and let’s put aside the fact that I probably shouldn’t be getting nostalgic about EQ again – it was dark, and raining, and I fell off the dock that I’d spawned on as a lowly level 1 cleric and nearly drowned before I got to safety.  Then, since I’d started my character on the western side of Antonica, I got to see a LOT of rain fall, especially while I was hiding in the guard towers in West Karana recuperating between fights.  It turned the world grey, and it reduced my already limited visibility to almost nothing, and it was in general a pain in the arse, but watching it rain in DDO made me realize that I’d missed MMOs with weather.

I can’t remember the last MMO I played that had rain.  Dark Age of Camelot did, I think, but that’s nearly as old as EQ1.  I’m pretty sure Rift didn’t bother with rain, and I don’t remember it in Everquest II either.  Some brief Googling turns up a forum post from 2007 on this very topic and it turns out that EQ2 DOES have rain, but only in a few zones and it’s pretty rare.  It also seems that Rift has rain and thunderstorms but I don’t remember ever being caught in one.

Regardless, it’s an awfully nice touch in DDO and makes me want to log in some more.

I don’t think it’s any shocker to anyone that my formative years revolved, in great part, around a bag full of polyhedral dice and a handful of friends with whom to roll them.

Dungeons and Dragons is something that I heard about at school in probably the 2nd or 3rd grade.  It was the latest in a list of things that adults thought were bad for me – other entries on this list were comic books and chocolate milk – so of course I was intensely curious about it.

I didn’t get my first taste until 1983, though, when TSR released their infamous “Red Box” D&D Basic Set.  A school chum got a copy and, needing someone else to play with, taught me how to roll up a character and how to play.

My first character had middling stats but got a lucky wisdom roll, so of course it became a cleric. This wasn’t a bad choice, in retrospect; D&D clerics at low levels are capable of hanging with the fighter classes in melee and add some spell power to the occasion.  It helped, of course, that we didn’t realize that you could only cast spells once per day, though since my friend was having me play through adventures by myself, it was probably a good thing that I was able to cast Cure Light Wounds as often as I wanted.

As an aside, the “Cleric” illustration in the D&D Basic Set looks like this, which was a source of endless amusement for my friend.  We were young lads in our “girls are yucky” years, after all.

Anyway, that basic set gave way to the expert set and so on, and then we eventually graduated to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and branched out into Gamma World and Twilight 2000 and, oh, all kinds of different games, and then we hit our mid teens and the whole thing sort of went by the wayside.

Recently, however, I’ve been back in a gaming group, in a campaign set in the Eberron setting, which is, as I understand it, the current Official Campaign Setting of Dungeons and Dragons.

Back in my tender years, the Big Trend in campaign settings was Realism, Realism, Realism – or, at least, a highly fantasized version of Realism which ignored the fact that most people lost all their teeth and died by the age of 30 and were considered to have lived to a Ripe Old Age.

Eberron, on the other hand, is Wizards of the Coast looking at Realistic Fantasy on one hand, and looking at how well the Final Fantasy games sell on the other hand, and deciding that setting D&D in a world with airships and magical Shinkansen trains might not be such a bad idea inasmuch as the kids of today want a little more Cloud and Tifa and a little less King Arthur and Guinevere.

Anyway, it’s taken a little getting used to as an Old Geezer gamer, which is why I recently signed up for Turbine’s free-to-play “Dungeons and Dragons Online”, set in Eberron and thus serving as a rather nice reference to all the back-story that the DM uses rather freely during our sessions but which I have very little clue about.

Eberron is full of that Deep Political Intrigue stuff, after all, with all kinds of Great Houses plotting and scheming against each other, all with Authentic Fantasy Names (which is to say, generally difficult to pronounce and impossible to remember) and it’s a little easier to keep track of when you can attach visual cues to things.

Anyway, so, uh, D&D Online is a game that, until recently, I knew only as “that game that couple was hooked on while their kids starved” which isn’t the best association to have with a game.  Also, it was one of the early high-profile examples of Pay-To-Play games converting to Free-To-Play-With-Cash-Shop, which is to say that it had sort of a stink of failure about it.

Since then, of course, plenty of top-shelf games have done the same and the stigma is somewhat lessened.

Anyway, I spent a couple of hours downloading it, was rather impressed that it asked me if I wanted to use DX11 graphics, was rather underwhelmed by the “DX11 graphics” once I finally got into game and was out-and-out astounded by how poor the character models were for a high-budget MMORPG, but I put that aside in favor of running around the starting area and getting some quests on.

Hey, I just last year subscribed to Dark Age of Camelot and played it for a couple of months, I’m obviously not THAT picky about graphics.

So far it’s, well, it’s not a very polished experience.  Quest givers are a little tricky to find and the first hub town you come to after the newbie area is pretty confusing so far.

That said, I’ve gotten to level 3 – which is not half bad, in D&D terms – and I’m looking forward to starting to tackle level 3 instances so I guess they’ve managed to get their hooks in a bit.  It helps that I got a Big Flaming Sword as an early quest reward.  If you want me to play a game centered around killing things to gather Shiny Objects – which is, after all, a pretty good way to describe any MMORPG – giving me a Big Flaming Sword is a pretty good way to start.

And, after all, the price is right.

So, if past years are anything to go by, there’s a Steam Summer Sale coming soon, and if you like cheap games, it’s like a little Christmas in June.

It’s also a reason to pause and reflect on the games I bought in the last Steam Summer Sale and to think about how many I haven’t beaten yet.

That’s quite a few.

Hmm.

At least I did take a few days and play one of those previously-neglected titles – Hidden Path Entertainment’s “Defense Grid: The Awakening” – so I feel like I’m not just shoveling money into Steam’s coffers with nothing to show for it.

Anyway, “Defense Grid” is a tower defense game with all that implies.  You have towers, see, and you have hordes of ravening aliens, and you need to place towers in strategic ways so that they can shoot at the hordes of ravening aliens, and you can upgrade towers and use them to shape the flow of the incoming aliens and that’s all well and good but it’s not the reason to buy the game.

The reason, as I see it, is that your computer partner is one of the more fleshed out characters I’ve seen in a video game lately, which is quite a feat for a disembodied voice.  He’s been dead for over a thousand years – preserved as an AI in case his skills were needed to beat back aforementioned aliens, he misses his son and he really misses raspberries.  He cheers you on when you’re doing well, he has a fairly good set of witty comments he uses infrequently enough that they’re still usually funny, and he doesn’t judge you too harshly when you lose, which I did a lot.

The game keeps track of your stats, you see, and looking at my stats revealed that, over the course of playing through the game’s story missions, I had 114 losses to 20 wins, which is not a good ratio at all.

Simply put, I’m not at all surprised that the designers elected to have frequent autosaves and to let you step back through the autosave states by simply pressing “backspace”, because there were lots of times where I thought that I was doing great, that my towers were defending and so on and so forth and then I’d get curbstomped by a sudden invasion of something I wasn’t ready for.

The last level, in particular, was a test in perseverance.  It took me the better part of two hours to figure it out, and my final victory was, well, it relied on a completely unexpected quirk in alien pathing, where I accidentally added a tower and watched, gleefully, as the entire invading army switched to, basically, walking down one side of a row of towers, turning around, and walking down the other side of the row of towers before continuing on towards their goal.

It was pretty glorious.

With 114 losses, it took me 13 hours to finish the story mode, and – excepting certain frustration near the game’s end – I had fun the whole way.  There’s a certain joy in building up unassailable defenses and watching as your forces repel attack after attack, and there’s an equal near-adrenaline-rush feeling that comes on as you watch your defenses fail and need to figure out what you’re going to do next.

Oh, as noted, it features absolutely no unicorns whatsoever, so I get to salvage a few tattered shreds of the remnants of my masculinity.

And that’s always a good thing.

My excursion into casual gaming is in no way an indication of any sort of unicorn fixation.  It’s a curious coincidence and nothing more.

I do not have a unicorn problem.

Let’s proceed, shall we?

Popcap’s “Peggle” franchise was, before Angry Birds came along, the Most Hated Enemy of the Hardcore Gamer, or so I’ve gathered from lurking in various gaming forums over the years.  It’s a sort of pachinko-meets-Puzzle-Bobble sort of affair, where your goal is to, well, let’s have a picture for the audience:

As you can see, the screen is covered with an awful lot of little blue things, and a few little orange things, and your goal is to bounce pachinko balls off the assorted things and eventually hit all the little orange things.  You’re given a limited number of pachinko balls, though you can earn more during the course of a level, and there are assorted little green and purple things that give you power-ups or more points or what have you.

Basically, it’s the sort of thing anyone should be able to pick up and understand within about five minutes, which probably explains some of the ire thrown its direction.

Now, being the Hardcore Gamer that I am, I certainly wouldn’t pay for such nonsense.  There’s no shooting things in the head, there’s no world rendered in assorted shades of brown, and there’s certainly no World Changing Dramatic Storyline told through Carefully-Crafted Set Pieces.

On the other hand, if Valve decided to give me a ten level version of this fluff, tarted up with references to the games of the Orange Box, you couldn’t fault me for giving it a spin, right?

Well, they did, and it sat in my Steam library for a couple of years, and then I decided to give it a go – again, no unicorn fixations, honest – and it took me about half an hour to play through the ten sample levels.

After that I went back and started playing them again.

That’s a bad sign.

Deciding to see what happens if you clear every OTHER colored pin on a level before you clear the last orange pin, that’s another bad sign.

For the record, you get treated to the following two screens:

And:

Now, I of course am far too much of a Serious Gamer to be swayed by bright colors and cheery music and other such trivial kerfluffle, and I certainly will not be buying the full version.

…

…

…well, at least not until the Steam Summer Sale.

So I noticed something very odd when I booted my Windows box yesterday, specifically something very odd on my Steam friends list.

I had two friends on and actively in-game, and both of them were playing something called Secret of the Magic Crystals.

This turned out to have been the Steam Daily Deal, making a five dollar game about raising magical horses into, apparently, an irresistible deal at $2.50.

Browsing the Steam thread on the Penny Arcade forums – a wretched hive of classy gentlemen – reinforced this impression. Grown men, who by all rights ought to have been living out vicarious male fantasies in Duke Nukem Forever or similar were, instead, raising and training unicorns, pegasai, and fire-breathing horses.

Obviously I needed to investigate this for myself.

As part of my campaign to skew Steam’s OS usage statistics – and because it just seemed a more appropriate platform for magic horses – I switched back to my MacBook and laid my money down.

First impressions were positive. The first thing you see, after selecting a save slot and engendering your character, is an actually-rather-attractive farm, with weather effects and a day/night cycle. It’s basically a menu from which you choose activities – you don’t ever walk around your farm, as far as I can tell – but it’s a really pretty menu.

It’s not the main draw, of course, so I dutifully followed the tutorial advice and trotted off to the stable to meet my first horse.

See what I did there? Honestly it takes a force of will not to fill this entire post with horse jokes.

Anyway, I met my first horse and it was a little disappointing. It didn’t have wings or breathe fire or anything, it was just a little colt sitting in a stable.

Again following the tutorial, I picked a brush off a nearby hook and commenced grooming.

Brush brush brush brush BAM.

My colt exploded into a full-grown unicorn.

Now, as far as mythical horses go, the unicorn is one of the duller ones. That’s a bit harsh, I suppose, but once you’ve gotten past “it has a horn and can detect virgins”, there’s not much to them.

Nonetheless, I had a unicorn. It was time to get to training.

Training takes place in the corral, and consists of mini games where I sent my unicorn jumping over gates, or walking down forest paths, or – and this was actually a little disturbing – dragging heavy loads along the ground, all of these while playing a little mini game involving pressing arrow keys at the right times.

This enhanced my unicorn’s stats, but also tired it out. After a couple of training sessions, he needed to go back to the barn for more brushing.

Brushing seems to really be at the core of the game. You have three different brushes – for body, head, and hoof grooming – and it seems like you really need to vary which you’re using; sticking to the body brush alone won’t get your horse back in the mood for more training.

A couple of rounds of training followed by grooming had most of my unicorn’s stats at or near the maximums, and it seemed like it was time to get to questing, which is how you earn money, which you use to buy more horses, or upgrade your buildings to hold more horses, or buy things from the in-game store to improve your horses, or well I didn’t really get too far into this; it seems pretty deep really.

Money, however, seemed like a good thing to have more of even if I didn’t quite have a handle on all the uses for it, so questing it was.

After the mini games in the training session, questing was a little disappointing. I opened my mailbox and the first quest was a simple request from a neighbor to go deliver a letter. Accepting this quest sent my unicorn prancing off-screen, leaving me with nothing to do but watch a clock tick away.

A minute or so later, he came back, a little tired, and I got a gift of 30… Well, 30 of whatever the in-game currency represents.

Since he wasn’t too worn out, and since I wanted to keep the money flowing in, I immediately opened and selected the next quest, from a neighbor who needed a horse to plough something.

Disaster struck.

A minute later, as my unicorn slunk dejectedly back on-screen, something was obviously wrong. He needed medical attention.
In the barn, I was able to do a checkup and determine that he needed medication – medication that was going to wipe out most of my earnings for the day, but essential medicine nonetheless. I dropped the 50 currency on the medicine, got a sparkly hypodermic, and then couldn’t figure out how to actually apply it.

It is an oddly helpless feeling to be staring at a sick unicorn, knowing you hold the key to its recovery, and yet unable to figure out how to make the two interact.

Worse still, when I closed the game to see if I could find any advice online, I apparently exposed a bug that resulted in the game not actually saving my progress, meaning that my unicorn simply poofed into the ether, lost for all time.

Now, this is clearly a game aimed at young girls, and I believe that this sort of bug is simply unconscionable.

Imagine, if you will, that you are the father of a young girl whose magical horse has just fallen ill and then – for all intents and purposes – died.

Imagine the Talk you are about to have with your daughter.

I don’t think the Dead Unicorn Talk is something anyone should have to endure.

That aside, there’s a lot of the game I haven’t seen yet, so it might be worth another go-round if they fix the save issue.

After all, those unicorns won’t brush themselves.

It is terribly tempting to continue talking about games that have few redeeming qualities other than cute girls with glasses, but I do occasionally break out of my rut and play something that, well, you could have out on the coffee table with your mum over and not feel too embarrassed about.

That’s not to say that the internet hasn’t done horrible horrible things to Valve’s creation.  It does, after all, feature a female lead, and a google image search of “portal 2 rule 34″ shows that some people have devoted significant time and thought to the more salacious possibilities of portals.

I did have to look up how to spell “salacious”, but it turned out that I’d gotten it right the first time.  Of course, the only reason I know the word at all is that it was the name, or part of the name, of Jabba’s pet in “Return of the Jedi”.  I don’t have a word of the day calendar or anything.

I do have a birthday coming up soon, but calendars aren’t traditional June gifts.

Where was I?

Oh, yes, Portal 2.  The original Portal was the second-best game of 2007, the top spot being occupied by Brave Story: New Traveler, an assertion which I make knowing full well that it will draw the ire of anyone who actually reads this, though of course I don’t really have many readers and thus I should be fairly safe.  It was, and here we’re back to Portal, almost an afterthought, stuck into the Orange Box with a sort of “look, you’re getting this free with the Half Lifes and the Team Fortress, don’t complain that it’s only 4 hours long”  attitude, and it of course destroyed the internet, becoming a memetic force strong enough to rival cats and cheeseburgers.

Portal 2, being a full-priced game, had to be a bit longer, and it is.  I spent about 10 hours playing through it, and it would have taken me much longer if my wife hadn’t been watching me play and pointing out bits that I’d missed, and I’m happy to report that it is, much like the original, bloody brilliant.  GlaDOS is wonderfully insane, the new characters are great fun, and the puzzling is usually just tricky enough to make you feel terribly satisfied with yourself for getting things right without making you pull your hair out.

That’s an expression, of course; I keep my hair cut with a #1 guide and therefore pulling it out would take tweezers and a great deal of tenacity.

But I digress, again.

I did find myself terribly, terribly frustrated at times during the middle act of the game, which was a combination of a Big Twist and a “hey, here’s a bunch of new mechanics you need to learn”, but that was also the part of the game that was full on fan-service and was somewhat redeemed as a consequence.

Oh, and the final portal of the game – and I will not spoil it here – was the single most “that cannot possibly be the solution, but I’ll try it anyway OH MY GOD” moment I’ve experienced in any game ever.

So, good stuff.

I haven’t played the co-op campaign yet, but I plan to abduct someone and force them to play it with me.  The single player mode sets up the rationale for it pretty nicely, and I’m looking forward to another few hours with GlaDOS.

Portal 2 did have a side nod to Half Life: Episode 2, which was almost cruel of Valve to throw in, and it did have one fleeting mention of cake, but I will forgive them those two things as long as Episode 3 comes out before I turn 40.

You’ve got some time, Valve.

Last night, I decided that I would pick it back up and finish the single player campaign, which took another two hours or so.

I was going to come here and rant further about the game, but then I read a few news articles about how THQ’s stock had lost nearly a quarter of it’s value in one day as soon as the metacritic score for Homefront hit, and I decided that I really didn’t need to slam it any more. They’ve suffered enough, really.

In fact, I will offer it a small compliment: very late in the game – nearly at the four hour mark, so mere minutes before the ending credits – your character is forced to make his way across the beams and girders of a bridge while being harassed by a helicopter.

You know, like that one cool bit in Half-Life 2?

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that you’ve been separated from the NPC allies you’ve been saddled with throughout most of the game up until that point, so for a few precious moments you don’t have them shouting at you to pick something up or go throw a switch or shoot the guy in the tower with the RPG or ANYTHING.

It’s just, you know, you get to play the game, and even if it only involves walking forward along a rigidly linear path shooting scripted enemies like popup targets in a shooting gallery, it’s still kind of – and this is a curious word to be associated with this title – it’s still kind of fun.

So there you go. I still quite regret having preordered it, but it did have that one good bit.

Trade skills – or professions, or crafts, or whatever the synonym is for a particular MMO – are often touted as an alternative means of advancing your character in an MMO without all the hassle of killing monsters to do so.

And they are, well, to a point.  In general, trade skills involve mass slaughter of monsters who are far too low level to fight back, because you need their body parts to advance your crafting or just because they’re standing between you and a resource node.  If you make the argument that crafting is vital to the role playing experience, than what you’re role playing is the medieval analog of the playground bully.

But I digress.

At any rate, trade skills tend to a) suck up your in-game currency  to an alarming extent and b) provide you with few benefits, if any, when you’re done.  You can, if you’re fast on the draw, make a bit of virtual currency from them in the early days of an MMO, but the profit potential drops off sharply as other people take up the same trade skill and as people discover that monsters tend to have much better loot than you can make for them.

This is not, however, why I don’t do them.  The real reason they are strictly verboten is TIME.  In most MMOs, making your character into a top-tier crafter takes months and months of beating up the aforementioned weakling monsters and picking up sticks off the ground, and this is time taken directly from the hours you are given for, oh, breathing.

Rift, however, seems to have streamlined everything else, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to see how it did trade skills.

It turns out that mastering a trade skill in Rift takes a couple of nights, at worst, and that mastering a gathering profession takes only slightly more time.

So, while all other complaints hold true – there’s very little demand for crafted goods, and it sucked up a fair amount of the money my character had carefully saved – at least it didn’t take too many of my remaining heartbeats away to accomplish.

So that’s something.