1639: Analysis Paralysis

One thing you'll almost inevitably have to deal with at some point if you play tabletop games is the matter of "analysis paralysis" — those moments where everything grinds to a standstill as one player takes ages over their turn, trying to determine what the best possible course of action will be.

It's a problem most evident in Eurogames, which tend to have the largest variety of different decisions to make each turn, as compared to more theme-focused titles where the emphasis is more on the ongoing narrative created by your play session. A typical Eurogame provides you with a wealth of options every single turn — and in many cases, those options get broader and broader as the game progresses. This means that as you get closer to the end of the game, turns slow to a crawl until, in some cases, you have to abandon the game altogether because it's getting too late — not a desirable outcome for anyone involved.

For the group I regularly play with, this is a particular issue with Uwe Rosenberg's Agricola, a worker-placement game that I don't like all that much, but which is enjoyed enthusiastically by two of our number and as such we break it out every so often according to our "different person picks each session" rota. For the uninitiated, Agricola is a game about building up a small medieval farm, and as the game progresses, more and more different action spaces become available to choose from, meaning the game gets increasingly complex as it progresses. This naturally leads to analysis paralysis, particularly as competition heats up for the more obviously useful spaces towards the end of the game.

So tonight we decided to try something different: timed turns, a la competitive chess. My friend Sam had acquired a funky little timer cube which had a different digital timer on each of its six faces, and we allocated ten minutes per player for the whole game, pausing the timer once a decision had been made so that players could move pieces and tokens around the board without being pressured by the clock.

It really, really worked! By the end of the game, the players most prone to analysis paralysis had nearly reached — but not exceeded — their ten-minute time limit, while the members of the group more inclined to take their turns quickly — usually by deciding what they were going to do during other players' turns rather than ignoring what was going on around them or getting distracted by phones, tablets or pieces of cake — had a couple of minutes left on the clock by the end of the game.

We all agreed that it made the game feel markedly different. One of the most traditionally analysis paralysis-prone players noted that he felt like he wished there was a little more time, but conceded that this was probably the point of the whole exercise. We also agreed that it wasn't necessarily desirable to play like this all the time, but that on occasions where it was necessary to get through games in a timely manner — playing on weeknights, say — it would be a good idea to implement in the future. More leisurely play sessions can still be had on those occasions where we have time for them — weekends away, holidays, that sort of thing.

I still didn't win Agricola, but I think I enjoyed the experience a little more than usual, which is saying something. And if I hadn't made a stupid mistake in the final turn, I would have probably done somewhat better than I ended up doing. Oh well! There's always next time.

1634: Pee Aitch Pee Bee Bee

Been digging around in the guts of PHPbb (or is it phpBB?) today to help get the Squadron of Shame's forum looking the way we want it to. And while there's still some work to do, things are coming together very nicely.

I haven't really explored a self-hosted forum solution before — I've set up forums for various people in the past, but have always made use of pre-made free services, since that was all we needed to fit our needs at the time. In the case of the Squadron of Shame, we're trying to make this place our permanent home on the Interwebs, since we've been flitting around from place to place every so often ever since the 1up forums imploded.

Mostly, I've been impressed with phpBB's (let's go with that spelling for the sake of argument) flexibility and customisability. There are a whole lot of options you can tweak, and in doing so you can make the forum function in plenty of different ways — you can adjust the way users can interact with it, assign various levels of permissions to users, allow or disallow various board features and extend the functionality with plugins and mods.

The only real downside to it all, so far as I can make out, is that installing the aforementioned plugins and mods looks like a bit of a pain in the arse, eschewing a handy-dandy automated install process a la off-the-peg CMS systems such as WordPress and instead in most cases demanding that you edit multiple HTML, CSS and script files, uploading new files to the server and generally doing a whole lot of things manually.

It's been relatively minor issue so far, though, since most of the things I've wanted to do with the board have so far been covered by phpBB's comprehensive administration panel — including uploading attachments such as images, which is something that appeared to be significantly more difficult to include in previous incarnations of phpBB (we're using version 3).

It's been interesting, though, since, as I said above, it's not something I've really poked around in before. I've been learning a lot about what phpBB is capable of, and how it provides a flexible solution for building an online community with relatively minimal fuss. Of course, I haven't been getting involved on the hardcore coding and styling side of things — I'm leaving that up to my friend Mark, fellow founding member of the Squad and someone who does this sort of thing for a living — but I have been doing things that I'm able to easily resolve through a bit of tinkering in the admin panel. (I'm less likely to break things that way, too; past experience with manually fiddling around with templates and CSS files has taught me that I'm good at breaking things.)

Plus there's always the possibility that this sort of knowledge might prove useful in future job hunts. You never know. And it's not as if I have anything better to do right now, is it?

1633: Newshound At Rest

Having stepped back from the games press — not entirely through choice, as previously noted — I've had the opportunity to reflect on the way I read games sites in 2014.

And the simple answer is that I, well, don't.

I had a feeling that this was the case. Being involved in the endless hype cycle for games that really don't need any more hyping up was starting to make me cynical even back in the GamePro days — hence my conscious decision to focus on unconventional, interesting and quirky stories rather than endless retreads of press releases from Activision, EA and Ubisoft. It was a decision that paid off in the short term — people started coming to GamePro to get away from the identikit coverage from other sites, and my stories contributed to a significant growth in traffic… right before the site folded, leaving us all out of a job. Bah.

On USgamer, aside from the news coverage — which I found increasingly hard to care about, particularly as we started having to refocus our efforts on covering the things that would definitely pull in traffic (i.e. the "big name" games of the moment: the aforementioned games that don't really need any more coverage and hype) rather than the interesting, unusual and underexplored areas of the business — I was fortunate enough to have a certain degree of leeway to write the sort of things that I'd want to read from a games site. Thus the JPgamer and BOARDgamer columns were born, providing specialist coverage on niche subjects — while neither of these would be likely to bring in readers by the millions, they were both the sort of things that would keep people coming back week after week, and judging by both the regular commenters and the disappointment expressed by readers when my departure was announced, they were successful in maintaining a solid, specialist audience.

Looking around at the other big sites, though, I'm seeing very little that makes me want to hang my hat on that community and call it my own. I'm seeing lots of very similar stories about how amazing No Man's Sky is supposedly going to be, or how awesome Destiny is supposedly going to be, or "everything we know" about Mass Effect 4/Dragon Age: Inquisition/Halo 5/whatever for the umpteenth time. I'm seeing very little stuff to read with any real meat on the bones, in other words — and with Polygon, the site that was supposed to reinvent games journalism, laying off the majority of its features team, it seems that interesting, long-form critiques and other, non-review, non-preview, non-news pieces are rapidly going out of the window.

And when sites do attempt to try something a bit different, it's inevitably on the increasingly tedious subject of sexism. This isn't to deny that there's plenty to talk about and criticise here, but the majority of articles on this subject are so blitheringly ill-informed with their GCSE Sociology-level critiquing of a subsection of the business as a whole — frequently completely ignoring parts that don't fit their ham-fisted, half-baked theories — that they're just painful to read, particularly when the author becomes so enormously defensive that they start insulting their readership rather than acknowledging the actually quite valid criticisms that come up in the comments section.

Or video. Fuck video. But that's a rant for another day.

Instead of professional games coverage, then, I instead tend to look to my friends. I discuss what I'm playing on Twitter, on Google Hangouts and on the new Squadron of Shame forums. Impassioned reports — positive or negative — from people I know and trust is infinitely more interesting than a carefully PR-orchestrated preview of a game that will inevitably be at least a little bit disappointing when it finally releases. I'd rather hear about something that's out now — that people have actually played, that I can track down a copy of and play should I like the sound of it — than something that, in many cases, is a year or more away. I'd rather hear about amazing discoveries that were released five or six years ago and sank without trace than something I can't install and play right now. And I'd rather share my stories and join the conversation than be preached to.

Essentially, then, I think I've come to the conclusion that I don't really give a shit about the modern games press in its current form. And I'm quite possibly not alone.

Which might explain why I'm in the situation I'm in now. Hmm.

1632: Defenders of Eorzea

Final Fantasy XIV patch day today, and I told myself that today was going to be a day off from stress, anxiety and worrying about things, and that I was just going to enjoy myself. So I did. I logged on at about 11:30 this morning — or yesterday morning, if we're being truly accurate — and now, at 2:52am, I am logging off, with only a few short breaks throughout the day for food and drink.

Suffice to say, patch 2.3 is excellent. I, along with many of my Free Company-mates, took today to work through the new episode of the main scenario quest, which included a spectacular battle against Ramuh, Lord of Levin (aka "the old man who flings lightning everywhere") as well as a ton of other story content. I also completed the new Hildibrand questline — a comedic questline that, for many, has proven a highlight of Final Fantasy XIV's ongoing updates — as well as trying out all three of the new 4-player dungeons.

And I've barely scratched the surface. I've bought a room in our Free Company's house for my character, but I'm yet to fill it with furniture — there's just a bed, a couple of chairs and a table in there for now. I haven't even touched the new 24-player Crystal Tower raid, which promises to be an enjoyable clusterfuck, just like the previous 24-player Crystal Tower raid. And there's a ton of other stuff I'm yet to fiddle around with, too — not to mention returning to the tasks I was already working on prior to the patch, which will now be somewhat easier thanks to improved rewards from a bunch of game content.

So far there have been numerous highlights. Although some disliked the amount of dialogue and cutscenes in the main scenario quest, I enjoyed what was offered, as if you stopped to read it and see what was going on, it proved to be a nice "here's what's been happening elsewhere in the realm since last you saw these people" affair. There was also some neat — if rather obvious — foreshadowing of who the next "big fight" is going to be against.

The new dungeons are great, too. Tam-Tara Hard is particularly fun — as one of the low-level dungeons that comes up most frequently in Low-Level Roulette, Tam-Tara is a dungeon that many people were growing sick of, but its Hard incarnation successfully reimagines it into one of the best — if not the best — dungeon in the game. Featuring a creepy atmosphere, some brilliant boss fights and a narrative twist that is sure to please those who were paying attention earlier in the game, Tam-Tara Hard was a real highlight of today's session.

Stone Vigil Hard has proven more divisive, but it's certainly an interesting, challenging experience. The regular enemies are more than a match for even a well-geared party, and the bosses all make use of interesting mechanics that require far more than a simple "tank and spank" approach. This is nothing unusual for Final Fantasy XIV, which features some very involved boss battles throughout, but Stone Vigil Hard features some particularly interesting mechanics.

Finally, the all-new dungeon Hullbreaker Isle was great. Unfolding mostly outdoors, the "dungeon" sees you attempting to track down the treasure of the pirate Mistbeard. Along the way, you have to contend with various groups of angry wildlife, some unpleasant traps left behind to deter unwanted visitors, and, at the end, a rather annoyed kraken who wants nothing more than to pick you up, fling you around and splatter you with ink.

Final Fantasy XIV continues to go from strength to strength. It remains, as it has done since it launched last August, one of my favourite games, and if the strength of this new content is anything to go by, it has a significant amount of life in it. I'm genuinely intrigued to see where the main story is going, and in the meantime I'm really enjoying the other tasks and challenges the game faces me with. And there's some stuff — like the super-challenging endgame raid The Binding Coil of Bahamut — that I'm still barely touching. There is so much to do, and I'm having an absolute blast doing it — not to mention making some good friends in the progress.

Now, my brain is fried, so I should probably go and get some sleep. It's back to the doldrums of hunting for work tomorrow, though I don't doubt I shall reward myself with an hour or two in Eorzea as the day progresses!

1631: GO GAMERS

The Squadron of Shame forums are coming along nicely — they're pretty much ready for the public to show up and start posting in now, so if you're at all interested in computer and video games and find that places like NeoGAF and its ilk aren't quite fitting your needs — in other words, you like to use paragraphs and write posts that include more than ten words at a time — then do feel free to come on over, sign up and start mingling with the rest of the community, who are slowly trickling over.

Forums are the spiritual home of the Squad, since it's where we, as a group, first came together. But they're also one of the most long-standing parts of the Internet — one aspect of the ever-changing digital world that has actually managed to remain reasonably constant over the course of the last 15-20 years or so.

I recall my first experience with forums fairly vividly. Our first Internet service provider was CompuServe, one of several providers that, at least initially, didn't offer "true" Internet access, instead opting to provide its users with a gated set of online services exclusively for subscribers. (Full Internet access eventually came later, initially in the form of the ability to send email messages to Internet addresses instead of just CompuServe IDs, and later full-on Web access.) As part of this "gated community", CompuServe offered a swathe of forums on a whole host of specialist subjects. Unsurprisingly, I quickly found an online home in the GAMERS forum — you clicked the "GO" button and typed "GAMERS" to get there — and had my first experience of mingling with the online community.

The term "online community" these days has a certain number of negative connotations, due in part to the perpetuation of the narrative that the majority of people who post things online are somehow "toxic", and the fact that indeed, some people who post things online are somehow "toxic". But back in its early days, it was a different matter. "Flaming" and "trolling" were established terms, but they tended to be seen fairly rarely. There were extensive glossaries of the then-new emoticons and acronyms that started to creep into everyday usage, and new terms like "netiquette" were coined to describe how you should interact with other people online.

I honestly can't remember a whole lot about the sort of things I posted and discussed on the Gamers' Forum on CompuServe, but I do remember one thing vividly: I was into Wolfenstein 3-D at the time, and had been experimenting with a variety of mod tools for it, at least partly because I'd been helping a local shareware dealer write his catalogues that included a selection of Wolfenstein add-ons and editors.

Anyway, yes; I was into Wolfenstein 3-D and had spent quite some time working on a selection of new levels — ten of them, in fact. I uploaded them to the Gamers' Forum's download area for others to have a go at, but didn't think anything more of it and certainly wasn't expecting any feedback or anything.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was contacted by a gentleman named Carlton, who claimed to represent Apogee, the publisher of Wolfenstein, and also claimed to be interested in including my levels in an official expansion pack for the game. I'd be paid, he promised, and appropriately credited.

Frankly, I was at a loss as to what to do at this stage, but after some deliberation and discussion I took a chance and got in touch with Carlton, who took my contact details and promised to be in touch in short order.

Not a lot happened for a while, but then one day a package showed up. Inside it was a cheque for $200 and three floppy disks — one containing a full, registered version of Wolfenstein 3-D, and two containing the official expansion pack, the Super Upgrades pack. I installed the disks, browsed through the directory containing the game — and sure enough, there were my levels, credited to me. I was a professional game designer.

And all because of a forum. Pretty neat, huh?

1629: Are Pee

I've long been an enthusiast of role-playing games — the pen-and-paper kind in this case, not just in the world of video games, though as regular readers will know they are also my favourite form of video game — but I've had one consistent problem over the years: I've barely had the chance to actually play any.

I've bought the Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks from Second Edition onwards and read them cover to cover; I used to have an extensive collection of Vampire: The Masquerade sourcebooks (which I kind of wish I still had); and, this week, toilet reading has been provided by the freely-downloadable Basic Rules for Dungeons and Dragons' Fifth Edition.

And yet, I've not played any of them, outside of a brief 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons campaign back in my school days, another brief campaign early in my university career, and a memorably "freeform" campaign run by a friend using his own simplified, custom system that had an enormous amount of flexibility.

This is a real shame, since as a creative type who greatly enjoys the act of creating a story, role-playing games are an ideal fit for me, combining, as they do, collective group improvisation and storytelling with a set of structured rules for satisfying, gradual progression over time. The exact form of those rules varies from game to game — Vampire: The Masquerade is very different from Dungeons and Dragons, for example — but the core is the same: it's a group of people getting together, led by a chief storyteller, Dungeon Master, Game Master, whatever you want to call them, and having journeys through their imaginations together. What could be more fun than that?

I would really like the opportunity to get involved with a game of Dungeons and Dragons (or indeed any other role-playing game) at some point, but times I've attempted to raise the subject in the past with a friend whom I know plays a regular game seem to have fallen on deaf ears. (I'm not entirely surprised; campaigns that have been running for a while can be difficult to slot in new additions partway through, and certain groups prefer to limit their numbers to specific sizes to keep things manageable.) This leaves me with a somewhat more daunting prospect: planning and running my own game, and as someone who only has fairly limited experience of actually playing the game as a player character, the idea of putting together an epic, sprawling fantasy adventure for a group of players to potentially break with their own creativity is something that I'm not sure I'm up to just yet!

Or perhaps I am. The new 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons promises a "Starter Set" with an introductory adventure included, so when that becomes available I might just check it out. And even if I don't play it, it can join the Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition and GURPS rulebooks on my shelf, providing occasional entertaining reading material when I fancy perusing it — I like reading rulebooks, don't judge me — and hoping that one day they might actually get played.

Will they? I have no idea. I can dream, though. And if I can just roll a 20, perhaps I can make it reality.

1627: Further Enthusing on the Subject of Alchemy

Finally got around to finishing a playthrough of Atelier Rorona Plus today — thanks in part to picking up a copy of the Vita version, which allows you to transfer your save across from the PS3 version, and playing it in the coffee shop when I felt like a change of scenery during a fit of particularly bleak depression earlier in the day. My opinion of it hasn't changed, but I thought I would enthuse about it once again for those who haven't yet tasted of its joys.

Rorona Plus is an interesting game, and one with good pacing. Beginning with simple tasks for which the time limit you're given is ample — leaving you with plenty of time to take on other tasks to build up your relationships and reputation in the town — the game gradually progresses in such a way that what is the same amount of in-game time starts to feel more and more claustrophobic. The things you're tasked with making start taking longer to produce, and the journeys outside the workshop to gather ingredients and battle monsters take up longer stretches of time, too.

Fortunately, to counterbalance this, you have a number of additional systems open up as you progress — you're able to "wholesale" items to the shops around town, allowing you to simply purchase useful "intermediate step" ingredients for more complex recipes rather than having to make them every time, and Rorona gets an assistant who can either be sent out to gather ingredients or craft items independently or Rorona. I must confess I didn't make nearly enough use of these facilities in my first playthrough, but you live and learn; I now recognise that in order to get everything done to such a standard as to unlock the numerous alternative endings to the game, it's necessary to make heavy use of them.

Herein lies the interesting thing about Rorona Plus: despite having the trappings of a conventional Japanese role-playing game, the meat of the gameplay is actually more about management and strategy. In order to see the most success, you'll need to plan your time effectively, and set up systems in order to save time whenever possible. Some of these can be constructed yourself — a furnishing system added in the Plus version allows you to build various items that confer helpful benefits on Rorona and her party — while others, such as the aforementioned wholesale and assistant systems, unlock naturally as you progress in the game, though some can be unlocked sooner if you trigger certain events more quickly.

I'm looking forward to playing through the game again knowing what I know now — plus I believe some stuff can be carried over to another playthrough — and seeking out the other endings. Whether or not I'll go for all of them remains to be seen — I'm keen to play the rest of the series, after all! — but I've had a blast so far, and I'm happy that there's plenty more where that came from.

1626: Quest for the Animus

We're counting down the days until Final Fantasy XIV's third major patch, Defenders of Eorzea — and in the meantime, a lot of us are trying to get as much of the previous time-consuming stuff done as possible.

For a lot of people — those who have reached the endgame, anyway — this is the long and convoluted process of acquiring and subsequently upgrading your "Relic" weapon. It's a questline that was originally available in Final Fantasy XIV's 1.0 incarnation which was then rejigged, tweaked and revamped for when A Realm Reborn launched. Over the course of the last few patches, it's continued to expand — and in the process, it's created a highly memorable gaming experience, albeit one that will drive some people to madness.

Here's how it works. After beating the game's main scenario (as it existed in the base game when it launched), you can visit a smith named Gerolt in the North Shroud. Gerolt was once a master weaponsmith, but in the years since the Calamity it seems like he is now more frequently to be found at the bottom of a bottle than hammering out a masterwork. Until you show up, that is, having heard rumours of a legendary weapon.

Through a somewhat convoluted series of events that see you finally tracking down the relic — which is broken, naturally — and then defeating a series of increasingly ridiculous opponents in order to acquire the ingredients necessary to repair it, you find yourself with a new incarnation of one of the legendary weapons of yore.

But that's not where it ends. Acquire enough of the mysterious elixir Thavnairian Mist, and you can infuse your relic with additional power, turning it into its Zenith incarnation and giving it a rather fetching glowy effect in the process.

This used to be where the questline ended, leaving you with a level 90 weapon — one of the most powerful in the game at the time it launched. But then came the Zodiac Braves questline, during which you hear tell of the exploits of a band of legendary warriors and hope to use the information to upgrade your weapon further.

The first step in this process is to acquire twelve Atma, strange crystals that very rarely drop in all places around the realm of Eorzea. In gameplay terms, in order to acquire these, you'll need to complete the public quests (known as FATEs) in specific locations. Each FATE you complete with your Zenith relic equipped has a low chance of dropping the Atma for that location, and there are twelve in total. There are all manner of conspiracy theories about whether or not there's a way to game the system or if you really are at the mercy of the random number generator, but you'll get there eventually.

Once you've collected twelve Atma, they're infused into your Zenith weapon, turning it into an Atma. It loses its shiny glow, but changes appearance slightly in the process — in the case of my Black Mage's Stardust Rod, for example, the orb on the end which used to glow purple now glows in rainbow colours. It's not any more powerful, though — it's the next step in the process that makes the Atma weapon unique.

Continuing your research into the Zodiac Braves, it transpires that a number of books detailing the exploits of these legendary warriors are available, but the one who holds them isn't going to let them go cheap. Specifically, she's charging 1,500 Allagan Tomestones of Mythology — mysterious items left over by the 5,000-year old Allagan civilisation that are used as currency in certain parts of Eorzea — per book. And there are nine books to look into, each of which tasks you with a series of Trials of the Braves to follow in the footsteps of the legendary warriors. In gameplay terms, this means there are a number of tasks for you to complete, ranging from defeating specific monsters around the world to discovering and completing specific FATEs and other quests. Once one book is completed, your Atma weapon receives a small upgrade. When all are completed, the combined knowledge from the books turns your weapon into its Animus form.

This is what I'm working towards at the moment. It's a long and time-consuming process and, frankly, a massive pain in the arse — Mythology Tomestones are acquired at quite a slow rate, so don't expect to be blasting out all those books in a weekend, unless you weren't planning on sleeping at all.

But at the same time, it's really quite satisfying. The upgrades you receive from completing a book are small but noticeable, and the prospect of an even more powerful weapon at the end of the process is a strong incentive to continue. Plus it helps give a feeling of "attachment" to this weapon you've put so much work into — it's something special that you've worked on, and it's become "your" weapon rather than just another item. This feeling further continues during the next phase of the process — upgrading the Animus weapon into a Novus — during which you have a strong degree of customisation over how your finished (for now, anyway) weapon will end up.

And, importantly, it's optional. If you don't think you'll be able to deal with the grind, you don't have to. There are plenty of other means of acquiring powerful weapons in the game — though expect to be challenging some of the game's toughest encounters in order to do so. Many people, even knowing how much work goes in to one of these weapons, are still voluntarily starting down the long road, though — and, as painful as the process can seem at times, it's something which you and your friends can bond over and swap war stories about.

Despite its negative aspects, then, I rather like it; it gives a feeling of investment in your character's development even after the experience points and levels have stopped flowing. It gives you a feeling of attachment to your weapon, much like characters in fantasy epics, or indeed the Zodiac Braves whose trials you're pursuing. And when you finally reach one of the important milestones in the process, good Lord is it satisfying.

Will I reach Novus or even Animus before patch 2.3 arrives — possibly bringing with it another step in the upgrade process? I have no idea, but I'm working on it, with my in-game friends cheering me on every step of the way.

1623: Attack on Twintania, Part 1

Further to yesterday's post, I had the good fortune to spend a bit of time in Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut in Final Fantasy XIV this evening, courtesy of my good friends in my Free Company — the "guild" of other people I play with on a regular basis. Although Coil goes beyond Turn 5 now, there are still a number of people who are yet to clear it, and I'm one of them — so part of this evening was set aside as some training time to get to know the encounter a bit better. We didn't clear it, but we made some good progress.

What follows, then, is an account of how the fight went, written (hopefully) in a means through which a non-MMO player can understand what is going on. I found it an exciting experience — and if you've never tried it, you learn something about what high-level play in a massively multiplayer game like Final Fantasy XIV is all about.

Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut focuses entirely on one encounter: eight comrades-in-arms against an ancient dragon named Twintania, put there by the ancient Allagan civilisation to do their bidding. Actually, to be exact, it's eight comrades-in-arms against an ancient dragon named Twintania and her three friends, but said three friends aren't nearly as much of a threat.

The fight began with our de facto leader the paladin — a strong defensive fighter whose strengths lie not in doing a lot of damage, but instead in keeping the attention of enemies off the more fragile members of the party — charging in and provoking Twintania and her allies. The remainder of the group then followed — at a safe distance for those members such as myself, who were able to inflict damage from a distance — and concentrated on dealing with Twintania's three friends. Meanwhile, we were fending off attacks from Twintania and her companions — fiery rings that dropped on the floor and hurt a lot if you didn't get out of them as quickly as possible when they fell on you.

Once the three smaller dragons were down, the group turned its attention to Twintania proper, gathering around her with a strong defensive fighter at the front and another defensive fighter at the side, accompanied by our Scholar's fairy companion Eos. The group aggressively attacked Twintania until one of the three Neurolink devices around her neck dropped to the floor, at which point the real fun was about to begin.

A curious "blip-blip" sound — perhaps from the Neurolink? — heralded the imminent arrival of a fireball attack from Twintania on a member of the party. No-one knew who these attacks were going to target, but as soon as the telltale signs appeared, they ran to the defensive fighter and fairy standing to one side of Twintania and shared the damage with their two companions — a direct hit without the support of others would have meant instant death.

As the healers frantically worked to help those hit by the fireball recover, the rest of the group prepared for another troublesome ability Twintania had up her sleeve: the ability to summon a terrible conflagration and trap a combatant within. The telltale "blip-blip!" sound came again, but this time with a different marker; its appearance signalled that the victim was about to become caught in a fiery prison, and would need their companions to break them free before it exploded.

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, it was impossible to break through the Conflagration before the next fireball attack came, but here it was possible to take advantage of a curious property of the Conflagrations: while those caught within were completely immobilised, it was possible to break in from without, and despite the temporary incapacitation, a Conflagration provided surprisingly good shelter and respite from the relentless fireballs.

After successfully dealing with this tense situation for some time, Twintania took to the skies and flew off. Had we driven her away? Of course not; this was just the beginning.

A second Neurolink fell from Twintania's neck; the signal that we had to move into a recessed part of the platform upon which we were standing — actually the right hand of the dormant dragon god Bahamut, who wreaked havoc on the realm of Eorzea five years previously. Keeping a careful eye on the dragon revealed when she was likely to swoop across our battleground, attempting to kill us off with her "divebomb" attack. Fortunately, staying nimble on our feet meant it was eminently possible to stay out of the way of these deadly swoops, and instead focus our attention on some new friends: three snake-like creatures, one of which was known as Asclepius and the other two of which were known as Hygieia.

Although terrifying and against the principles of everything we'd trained for up until this point, the party stood firm directly in front of these three new opponents, eyes occasionally darting to the sky in case Twintania decided to swoop in once more. We weakened the two Hygieia without killing them, then set to work on the Asclepius — and then Twintania resumed her assault. Once again, some nimble footwork saw us dodge all but one of the deadly swoops — the last of which knocked me clean across Bahamut's palm, but thankfully didn't finish me off — and it was time to deal with two more Hygieia that had appeared to join the fray.

Muttering an incantation under my breath, I summoned all my willpower and unleashed my Limit Break skill, calling down a shower of meteorites to pelt Asclepius and its four children with devastating, fiery projectiles. The two weakened Hygieia fell to the assault, enfeebling Asclepius, the two remaining Hygieia and the brave frontline paladins in the process. It wasn't long before the other two Hygieia fell, weakening Asclepius further in the process, and shortly after the larger snake was also defeated.

By this point, Twintania was obviously furious and preparing for some sort of last-ditch "ultimate" attack. We had but moments to dart for the safety of the fallen Neurolinks on the ground — and then to hope and pray as the room was filled with the brilliant white light of an aetheric explosion.

Not all of us survived the blast, and it wasn't long after this that Twintania's summoning of deadly whirlwinds finished the rest of us off. We collapsed to the ground — beaten for now, but determined to return once we had gathered our strength and prepared once again for the deadly conflict — and Twintania lived to fight another day.

1622: Another Turn in the Coil

The Binding Coil of Bahamut is — or at least was — the most daunting challenge in Final Fantasy XIV. Originally designed as an 8-player multi-part raid to challenge the very best of the best players, Coil, as it tends to be known by the denizens of Eorzea, is now something of a shadow of its former self, with the toughest challenge now being posed by the imaginatively named The Second Coil of Bahamut.

The reason why it's a shadow of its former self is twofold: firstly, the average equipment level of most endgame players in Final Fantasy XIV is now considerably higher than it was when it first launched and Coil was the hardest thing in the game; secondly, you're now provided with a buff called "The Echo" upon entering, which boosts your HP, damage, healing and a few other bits and pieces by 15%. Second Coil has no such buff, but it will have one in the future, when Third Coil, or whatever comes next, is released — and so on as the game gradually ups the stakes time and time again.

This is a clever and sensible move on the part of producer Naoki Yoshida and his team. The Binding Coil of Bahamut, despite still being a very challenging set of mini-dungeons and boss fights even with the Echo buff, is part of Final Fantasy XIV's overarching story. Working your way through it provides you with information about the ancient Allagan civilisation, whom you keep discovering artifacts of throughout your travels, and also what the main recurring villains of the piece — the Ascians — are up to. It also provides a tantalising glimpse at what really happened to the dragon-like god Bahamut as part of the Calamity — the in-game, in-lore justification for the shutdown of Final Fantasy XIV's version 1.0 incarnation in 2012 — and what the artificial moon Dalamud was actually hiding inside itself besides Bahamut.

All interesting stuff, I'm sure you'll agree — well, you might not, but humour me. To put it another way, it's all stuff that people who are interested in the detailed lore and worldbuilding of Final Fantasy XIV will probably want to experience. And through the gradual "nerfing" of it as new content arrives, eventually everyone will be able to make it through Coil and see what's what — just some people will do it sooner than others.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up tonight is that I've been doing a bit of Coil myself this evening. This is something of a big step for me, as I've previously only ever set foot inside that place in the company of my comrades from my Free Company. With a lot of high-level content in any MMO — not just Final Fantasy XIV — it's assumed that you know what you're doing when you step inside, and that you won't mess things up, because in many cases one mistake can bring an entire eight-person team crashing to its knees.

This is, I'm sure you'll appreciate, an enormously daunting prospect, particularly for someone like me, who sometimes lacks confidence in himself. But tonight I not only voluntarily went into Coil "solo" (to be automatically matched up with seven other random players), I also did so on White Mage, a healer class, rather than my "comfort zone" (and main) class Black Mage. And while there were a couple of aborted attempts — largely due to poor party makeup rather than anyone making any horrendous mistakes — there was none of the rage, none of the aggression, none of the elitism that can make playing through difficult content even more daunting than it already is. On the whole, it was actually quite a pleasant experience, despite being challenging — and I was rewarded for my efforts, too, with a new ring for my Paladin and some new boots for my White Mage. Score!

I'm always secretly pleased with myself when I overcome a fear like that. Because although Final Fantasy XIV is just a game, and I understand that, the anxiety and fear I feel from social situations is as real online as it is when I'm getting tongue-tied trying to make small talk with someone I don't really know. My ticking that box in Duty Finder, queueing up and then repeatedly going back into Coil this evening might not sound like much, but believe me when I say it was actually quite a big step for me in terms of self-confidence.

And who says games can't do any good?