May The GeForce Be With You

Following on from yesterday's post (Which is still today's post as I'm writing this.) I thought I'd say something about GeForce Now. 

Eh? What? Was there something in that post about GFN? I don't remember anything...

No, there wasn't. But what there was was me saying I hadn't had to post anything "desperate" yet to keep up with my Blaugust schedule. Yes, well, that may be true but there have been a couple of posts that I definitely wouldn't have published (Or probably written.) if I hadn't been on this post-a-day kick. 

This is another of those.

It has to be because I'm working tomorrow and work and blog posts, especially solid, researched, well-thought-out, substantive blog posts that take three-to-five hours to write, don't mix. They might if Beryl didn't have a say in it but she does so there it is.

I am doing my best to keep the bonus, work-day posts to topics I would have posted about anyway, only without Blaugust they might well have been sections in a Grab Bag, rather than autonomous postings in their own right. Luckily, tomorrow is the last day in August I'm working so this should be the last time I have to scrub up something the day before. This is the third time this month I've had to write two posts in one day, or at least a post and a half, and I'll be very happy not to have to do it a fourth.

So, then: GeForce Now. It was a bit of a punt when I decided to pay for a year's subscription up front a couple of months back. I'm not much of an impulse buyer but I can be tempted by a good deal and the price they were offering certainly looked like one of those. Had I ended up not using it much, it'd have been a false economy, If I'd hardly used it at all it would have been a complete waste of money. I think I can say already that it won't be either.

I've used my GeForce Now subscription pretty much every day since I got it. I've played quite a few sessions that exceeded the free version's one hour limit (I think three hours was the longest.) and I've played all of them on the powerful subscriber-only machines at the highest graphic settings, with no lag or performance issues at all. 

 

The whole thing has been extremely smooth and efficient. Everything just works, first time, no questions. The UI is attractive and practical. I can easily see what games I can play, including a good percentage of my Steam games, now I've linked the two platforms. I have more choice than I need by a wide margin.

Mostly I've been playing on my desktop, which is working just fine again now I changed the drive the OS was on, but I've played a few sessions of Neverness To Everness on the laptop, where it runs perfectly. I even tried to play on the big TV downstairs, since it hosts GeForce Now natively, but it wasn't practical because the TV won't recognize a keyboard as a controller. Not GFN's fault and at least I have a wireless keyboard now. 

In fact, since I subbed to the cloud gaming service I have barely played anything on my own machines. I did play a session of Stars Reach on the desktop when it went into Early Access. It was okay but the PC crashed as soon as I logged out. I believe that's what started the problem I started having a few months ago and I don't want to repeat the same process and corrupt the new Windows installation, so I was thinking that would be my last run in Stars Reach for the foreseeable future.

And then Playable Worlds suddenly announced that due to "popular demand" Stars Reach would be available on GeForce Now. I was delighted but also astonished. How did that happen?

Firstly, what's all that about "popular demand"?  Stars Reach has been on Steam since it began. If there was any problem with that, as far as the testers were concerned, it must have passed me by. I'd have guessed the core audience for the game was pretty conservative. If anything, I'd have imagined they might have preferred a standalone client even to Steam. I mean, they seem to want everything else to be like it was in 2003.

I definitely wouldn't have bet on there being a significant faction that would prefer to play Stars Reach on a third-party, cloud gaming, streaming platform. Especially one for which they'd have to pay an additional fee if they wanted anything more than a bare-bones service.

 

So there's that. And then there's the question of numbers. Just how low is the bar to get your game onto GeForce Now, anyway? Even putting it in the most positive, favorable light, Stars Reach Early Access is a niche game. Steam pegs the EA peak at just under 700, and that's already fallen by 50%  in the first week.

I don't really know how GFN works but presumably they have to open a discrete client for each account that logs into any given game. I just asked Gemini and it tells me, via reddit, that "GeForce NOW assigns a completely separate, isolated virtual machine (VM) and a distinct game client instance for every single user session". So, yes they do. 

I suppose, on one level, a game that few people play puts very little demand on the system, so maybe they're happy to have any old thing on there. I know I could play Cloudpunk or NeoCab, for example. Cloudpunk currently has about the same number of people playing as Stars Reach. NeoCab has five.

I hope that is the case because I'm already starting to see GeForce Now in much the way I've come to see Steam, as my preferred portal for gaming. For a while now, if a game's on Steam I've been more likely to play it than if I had to sign up for some other platform and now I'm starting to feel I'm more likely to play something if I don't have to run it on my own hardware at all. 

It saves so much time and effort with updating, for a start. And it means I don't need even an entry-level gaming machine. Any device that can connect to the internet would do, although in practice, because of the games I play and how I like to play them, it does need to be something with a decent keyboard and mouse option. And once you start talking about connecting a bluetooth mouse and keyboard to your phone you probably need to get on your water-skis and have Ritchie aim the speedboat for the nearest shark.

There is, of course, the ever-present question of how long any of these services will last. I certainly wouldn't be paying any annual sub to play on Amazon's Luna. I'm beginning to think, though, that given the spiralling costs of consoles and gaming PCs, cloud gaming might actually be the future the companies behind it were trying to tell us it was going to be a few years ago. 

And frankly it's ridiculously cheap at the moment. My annual sub to GFN is less than what my my annual sub to Daybreak All Access will be next month, if I renew it. And I guess maybe I shouldn't because I've barely set foot in Norrath for months.

 

I'd be more inclined to keep the Daybreak sub if I could play EverQuest II and DCUO on GeForce Now. There are 4000 games you can play on the service but neither of those is on there. According to Gemini, that's down to " publisher Daybreak Games' virtual machine restrictions and policies." I think we can be certain more people are playing either of them than have ever played Stars Reach (And possibly ever will...) so it can't be that NVidia doesn't think they're popular enough to merit a slot.

It's all a bit confusing for me. At some point I'm going to have to decide whether to pay upwards of a thousand pounds for a moderately capable gaming PC just so I can play the kinds of games that don't make it onto GeForce Now, or I could choose to stick with what is on there, which is already orders of magnitude more titles than I'm ever going to play, and save myself all that money.

While there's no guarantee GFN's subscription charges will stay as low as they are now, they'd have to go up one hell of a lot before buying a PC or a console would start to look like the more economical deal. And prices for hardware are only going to increase, even in the short term. GFN could treble their prices and I'm still not sure it would cost more over five years than buying and upgrading a low-end gaming PC over the same period. If you're talking about a gaming PC that's the equivalent of the ones my games are running on at GFN then forget it. It'd take a decade to catch up with those costs. 

But you do want to be able to play anything you want, don't you? It's a dilemma. I'd better just hope nothing really amazing comes out in the next few years that I have to play but which for some reason doesn't end up on a cloud gaming service. And also that cloud gaming doesn't go the way streaming movies and TV has, so you have to keep swapping from one to another to keep up with where your favorites have gone.

As for Stars Reach, I'm afraid to say that playing it at maximum graphical fidelity with no appreciable lag did not markedly improve the gameplay. In fact, with all of the friction removed, it was just easier to notice how dull it was to play. My first and so far only session with the Stars in the cloud lasted barely half an hour and I quit because I was really quite bored.

I'll put up with a lot of things to play a game - lag, stuttering, rubber-banding, bugs, glitches - but I won't put up with boredom. That's a game killer.

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

I asked Gemini two questions. The questions and the results are documented in the text.  

You Wait Years For A Cloud Gaming Platform And Then Three Come Along At Once

I was just thinking about posting an update about how my GeForce Now experience had been going, when this popped up in my rss feed. To save you clicking through, it's a news article at Games Industry.biz about Amazon Luna, which is now included with a Prime Gaming subscription.

Wait? Wasn't it already? Didn't they switch "Prime Gaming" over to Luna months ago, when they stopped handing out free games? I thought I wrote something about that at the time? 

Let me check a mo... Yes, I did. Kinda... I mentioned it in a Grab Bag, which is about all it deserved.

The whole thing seemed pretty chaotic back then. I have another post where I talk about being able to access my Good Old Games catalog through Luna, which meant I was able to play games I'd claimed through Prime, but which I redeemed on GOG, on Amazon's cloud gaming service. It was about as convoluted as that sounds. I did it a few times and then completely forgot about it until now, which is about par for the course for these things with me. Make logging in more than a single step and I'll probably bounce, after the novelty wears off.

So, what have they done this time? And is it an improvement?

Ehhh... kind of? I gave it a quick test this afternoon so I have a basic grasp of how it works and I have to say it's not exactly intuitive. Or user-friendly. Or anything like as easy as they seem to think it is. Not for me, anyway. 

Amazon believes Luna offers a low-effort, non-technical, crowd-pleasing way to play games. They see a huge number of people playing on mobile devices, people who own neither PCs nor consoles, and they'd like some of that business, thank you very much. 

Amazon has noticed Netflix getting plenty of traction with their gaming offer, now they've integrated it into their basic service. Take-up there has increased massively and as we all know, no-one gave a toss about Netflix games until recently. (Pretty sure no-one reading this gives a toss about them now, either, but people who read whacking great walls of text on gaming blogs are hardly their target audience.)

I know this because at the same time that news article appeared on GI.biz, so did this. It's an interview with Jeff Gattis, general manager for Amazon Luna and Amazon Game Studios, and he's keen to explain the rationale behind giving away the farm.

That is what they're doing, isn't it? Although Prime subscribers have had some limited free access to the platform for a while, the full Luna service used to require a subscription. Now it doesn't. Is that right?

Who knows how it used to work? Or cares, frankly. I'm not going to waste my time researching it because whatever it was, it's changed now. All these cloud gaming platforms have a free version of sorts, then one or more levels of paid subscription. I don't imagine Luna was much different.

As it stands today (And don't quote me on this because I'm guessing making it up quoting Gemini here.)  there are two levels: you can either get Luna free as part of your Prime subscription or you can pay $9.99 a month just for Luna. Which would seem like an exceptionally bad deal, considering all the other stuff Prime gets you...

Or it would if Prime got you the whole package but of course it doesn't. It gets you what they call the "Standard" package. Or it does if you live in the USA or the UK, which are the only two regions where it's being bundled in with Prime so far . It doesn't look as though Standard is available separately outside of Prime, either. A lot of caveats and conditions creeping in, aren't there?

If you want the Premium package, that definitely costs extra, even if you are a Prime subber. Why you'd want it, if you're in the UK or the US, beats me. The only difference I can see is that you get more games and I'm not even sure of that, as you'll see further in.

That's all already more confusing than Amazon would like to believe, something that I'm sure will surprise no-one reading this. Amazon does not have a reputation for clarity where gaming is concerned.

The whole interview with Gattis is very interesting, not to say revealing, as he talks about the various games divisions within Amazon historically not having known what each other was doing, some of the decisions they made being "weird" and how Amazon were after a big share of the PC/Console/AAA market until they realized Steam, Playstation, XBox and Epic were fighting over the same gamers like a bunch of dogs in a sack and decided not to bother with that nonsense any more. Casts some light on New World's demise, that perspective, doesn't it?

What they want to do now, apparently, is get their claws into the 2.5 Billion active gamers, who don't use any of those upscale platforms. And they think they can do it by making it easy to get in on a device you already have, through a subscription you're already paying. There are 200 million Prime subscribers already so that'd be a good start.

Except my experience suggests getting to the games on Luna isn't quite as smooth an experience as all that. As soon as I read the news, I logged straight into my Amazon account and looked for the games. There weren't any. 

There are thirteen tabs along the top of the page and none of them says "Games". Neither does any of them say "Luna". None of them even says "Prime" for that matter. The nearest I could get was "Prime Video", which goes exactly where you'd think it would. No games there.

Right up in the top, left corner there's the Amazon smiley logo and underneath it, in small, blue letters, it says "Prime". I clicked on that. No dice. Just a bunch of cut-price offers. So where are the damn games?

Finally, in the absence of anything better to try, I clicked on the three horizontal lines with "All" next to them. That gets you a drop-down menu and halfway down it you'll find "Amazon Luna - Cloud Gaming." Click on that and you get a sub-menu with four choices - All Games, Play With Prime, GameNight With Prime and Learn More. 

I went for All Games because why wouldn't I? That got me a page featuring a game I actually want to play, right at the top, as the splash image. Wow! Wasn't expecting that. That's it, up there in the header.

Scrolling down, there's a layout very similar to what you see on Prime Video or indeed Netflix. There's a top ten, the latest additions to the platform and some "Editor's Picks". And as I found out eventually, once you've played a game, you get a "Continue Playing" shelf, just like "Continue Watching" on regular Prime. 

If you scroll right to the very bottom you will finally see an "All Games" button. You can then filter that by Standard or Premium although honestly I could hardly tell the difference. The list of Premium titles also includes all the Standard ones so good luck figuring out what's been added. It certainly wasn't obvious where the extra $9.99 a month value was.

But the good news! There are games in the Standard offer I might at least want to take a look at. Dispatch, for a start. That's on my Steam wishlist. I've been waiting for a decent sale. Looks like I can save my money now.  There's also Death Stranding and both Alan Wake games and Hogwarts Legacy and Hollow Knight...

I might play any of those but I will play Dispatch so I started there. Things didn't go too well, at first. 

The first problem was my browser. There's an approved list and Firefox isn't on it. I can't really rag on Amazon for that. Firefox is increasingly not on anyone's list of approved browsers. I keep Chrome always ready in the background for all the services that won't have dealings with Mozilla any more. 

I swapped to Chrome and that worked. Kinda. Luna opens a full-screen window and my mouse pointer would only display in the top couple of inches. It worked on the whole screen - I just couldn't see it. I had to move the mouse about and wait 'til I saw a button light up. A mini-game all of its own!

After a little of that, I got the game started. Inside I found the same issue with the mouse but you don't really need the mouse in the introduction. It's all watching cut scenes and making choices with the keyboard. 

I gave it a few minutes just to check it worked, which it did, then the traffic noise through my open window drowned out the dialog so I opened the settings and switched the subtitles back on (I'd turned them off at the start.) and guess what? The mouse pointer magically appeared. Must be some glitch with the full window.

I tried to take a few screenshots for this post but the old reliable, Win+PrtScr didn't exactly work. It looked like it might have but there was nothing there when I checked the folder later. That'll have to be sorted or I won't be playing. Can't play a game and not be able to take screenshots. It's inhuman!

At that point I decided to stop and have a look at Netflix to see what games they had to offer. I've looked before and it's been a whole load of mobile games of little interest to me but that was a while ago. 

It still is, mostly. There are a lot of them, though. Can't argue with the amount of choice. And there are a handful of semi-interesting titles scattered here and there.

More importantly, the games are right there on the first page. No digging through drop-downs to find them. Much easier. If Amazon are hoping for the same kind of take-up Netflix is getting, they'd better get their UI guys on the job. But then, Prime Video is a chaotic shambles compared to Netflix, so I'm not convinced they have any UI guys, or not any that know what they're doing...

I did find one game on Netflix I'd be interested to try: Oxenfree. I remember reading about that one a long time ago on someone's blog, or at least I think I do, if I'm not mixing it up with something else. I thought I'd try it just to test the ease of access and Netflix faltered at the first fence.

Obviously it wouldn't work with Firefox but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that Netflix games only work on a mobile device. You can't play them on a PC. 

Officially, that is. By which I don't mean there's some back-door access you can hack your way into via some shady third party app. There's a beta for playing Netflix games on TVs and PCs running right now, albeit only in certain, selected territories, the UK being one of them. I tried it and it worked fine. 

I played Oxenfree for just long enough to make sure it was playable and then I logged out. It looks like an interesting game. I imagine I'll be back.

So now I have three options for playing games I don't own, on other peoples' computers. By far my preferred option is GeForce Now, for which I'm paying, and which I'm finding to be very much worth the money. I can play a huge range of games there that I actually want to play already, many of which my current hardware won't run, or not reliably. Since I subscribed, I've used it pretty much every day.

Amazon Luna places a fairly distant second. It is free, since I won't be bothering with the dubious benefits of the Premium version and it does have a few genuinely appealing titles. Given a choice between even this iteration of Luna and the "weird" Prime Gaming of a couple of years ago, though, I'd revert in a heartbeat. I liked collecting those games, even if I never played most of them. I guess that was too good to last. 

I'm also very skeptical that this latest attempt by Amazon to forge a presence in the gaming sector is likely to achieve much more than the last several ruses they tried. If they think what they've got here is going to feel natural and accessible to the huge, casual gamer market I suspect they're going to be disappointed. Again.

Last comes Netflix. Not because of any shortcomings in the platform itself but because it's clearly not designed for me. I don't have a great deal of interest in mobile games and if I did I'm not sure I'd need Netflix to curate them for me. Most of them are free anyway and I already have several options installed to play mobile games on my computers. And even if I didn't, I imagine that even when the Play On TV and Computer option comes out of beta, there still won't be many Netflix games I'll want to try.

Still, I'm not complaining about being given more options, even if I'm not likely to use them. Nor am I going to whinge about extra value being added to subscriptions I'm already paying, even if the value to me is limited.

And, what with the continuing issues with availability and pricing for computer components and the concomitant price rises, we might all be glad of some options in the years to come. Of course, it is herding us all into the walled gardens of various multinationals, where no doubt we'll be swiftly fleeced like the sheep we've become but as Mrs. Bhagpuss and I often comment, as we stroll the English countryside with Beryl, of all the farmyard animals, the sheep seem to have by far the best deal.

There are worse things you can be than a sheep.  

Dicing With Dragons In NTE

 It's not entirely my intention to turn Inventory Full into an "All Neverness To Everness, All The Time" kind of blog but I have to say the game just throws out ideas for posts like Beryl shaking off grass seeds after a walk in the country. I could very easily write four or five separate posts based on just what I've seen, done and thought about in the game over the last two or three days.

The temptation today is very much to weigh in on Version 1.2 which dropped this morning. Top line: it's very, very odd and so far quite wonderful. 

I patched up my own installation this morning - it was a 13GB download - but I didn't use it. Instead, I thought I'd give GeForce Now a real test run. I'm very happy to say it passed the test with the highest of marks.

I played two sessions, each about ninety minutes long. I only stopped the first time because someone came to the door and Beryl went nuts so I went down to show her we weren't being raided by pirates or bears, which is always her first assumption. 

Once I opened the door, she decided it would be a great time to sunbathe on the front lawn, despite it being just over 30c in the shade. Dogs aren't supposed to move about much in temperatures over 25c and we're assiduous about not taking her out in the heat and making sure she drinks plenty of water and stays in the cooler parts of the house but she does love to lie in the sun for as long as she can stand it. 

In the current heatwave that's about four minutes so I usually indulge her. I sat on the front step in the shade to keep an eye on her while she basked until she baked and then Mrs Bhagpuss decided it was cup-of-tea-time, a mid-afternoon ritual, so it was about three-quarters of an hour before I got back to the game.

I played all the way through the new storyline until I got to the first real boss, the Molten Dragon. Up to that point there'd been no problems with the combat, of which there's a fair amount, but the dragon handed each member of my team their individual ass in short order so I thought it might be a good place to stop.

Three hours and change is a long session for me these days, even with an intermission. It's very clear that GeForce Now's six hour session limit is never going to bring the curtain down early on any game I'm playing. I doubt I'll ever break the three hour session barrier again, probably in the rest of my life. 

For ease of access and quality of performance, I can't fault GFN at all. Now I'm subbed it's a single click to open the interface, another to start the game and in I go. No queues, no wait, no fuss. 

For a lot of games on the service, that would be the end of the story but there's a slight wrinkle where NTE's concerned. I used Play With Google when I set up the account back when the game began and my Perfect World/Hotta account is tied to a Google email address. 

That's absolutely fine on my own PC, where all the necessary details are safely stored. Unfortunately, because I'm playing on a remote server with GFN, Google wants me to confirm my identity every time I log in, which means entering my email address and password and also a security code they text to my phone because I have 2-factor authorization. And I even have to type the bloody phone number in every time, too, for extra security.

None of that is NVidia's fault and it only takes me about a minute but it's just the tiniest bit fucking annoying. Still, at least I'm going to learn my own phone number this way. 

Sidebar - I can tell you from my time as a bookseller, at least from back when I actually served customers, which seems like a long time ago now, since I got a nice back-of-house role not long after the pandemic, that almost no-one knows their own mobile number. I regularly used to have to wait while someone fiddled with their phone to find it in the settings when I asked for it for customer orders or to set up a loyalty card. At least I have mine written down in a book on my desk. I'm not going to need to look at that for much longer, the way this is going...

Once I was in the game, though, everything worked immaculately. In fact, noticeably better than on my own machine, even before it went wrong. At the subscription level I've taken, my sessions automatically take place on the RTX-equipped servers. I didn't think to check the setting but the graphics looked exceptionally sharp and detailed so I imagine the game must have defaulted to one of the higher options.

As for lag, there was absolutely none of any kind. None whatsoever for the whole three hours. Neither frame rate nor hitching nor internet lag. 

To prove it, at one point I came across a jumping puzzle. A real, honest-to-god, could easily have been from Guild Wars 2, jumping puzzle. I am neither great nor terrible at jumping puzzles and I neither like nor hate them. And yet I'm not neutral about them either. How's that, you ask?

I really like jumping puzzles that I can do. It's a lot of fun and very satisfying if I don't fall off. In fact, of all the kinds of content I can think of in games I've played, the two with the closest correlation to Goldilock's taste in porridge and feather beds are logic puzzles in adventure games and jumping puzzles in MMORPGs. The difficulty has to be just right.

This one was perfect for me. It looked very daunting indeed and I did fall off a couple of times but the developers had thoughtfully included staging points (Without flagging them up or making you click on them.) so even when I missed a jump, I didn't have to do much of the puzzle again.

What would have made the whole thing no fun at all, of course, would have been even the slightest hint of lag. A lot of the jumps were quite hairy. I wouldn't have made them if there'd been a hitch or a stutter let alone any rubber-banding. But there was absolutely nothing. Smooth as melted butter. 

Since I've mentioned the jumping puzzle, I will say a little about the new game-within-a-game. But not much. I'll save any full review for after I finish it, assuming I figure out how to get past the first boss. 

I'm waiting for the walk-through for that one or at least a few hints because there's obviously a trick to it. I suspect I should have bought some special item from the vendor that fortuitously popped up right before the boss room. Or maybe it's down to which of the three lying sheep mercenaries you pay to join you.

Ah, but there I go again, digging into the detail. Maybe I should leave that sort of thing for when I know what I'm talking about, assuming such a time ever comes. Let me draw a broader picture instead.

Here's the set-up. It's "several weeks" after the attack by the Scarlet Letter that left Nanally traumatized, and you get a call from Mint, inviting you over to hers to play games for a sort of games night, except it's in the afternoon, or it was when I got the call. 

She says to bring Nanally, who's still recovering, so you go to pick her up from Eibon. She's in the garden and she seems much better, back to her old self almost. She's keen to come but she says she'll have to sneak out because Adler is making her rest and recuperate. Adler turns up, unseen and silent like the creepy stalker he sometimes seems to be. He's overheard (Or rather eavesdropped on...) the whole conversation so Nanally's plan's a non-starter.

Nanally stays at Eibon (She's pretty good about it so she can't be back to her full stroppy self quite yet.)  and you go alone. At Mint's you meet two new BAC employees, now on Mint's team because she seems to have finally been promoted to team leader. She introduces them in typical Mint fashion by making up names for them that they'd rather not be called but you already know one of them - it's Iroi, the girl who showed you around the island last time. 

The other is Shinku, a young woman with an absolutely gigantic lizard-like tail. I don't believe we've met her before but I might be wrong, although you'd think it would be hard to forget a tail like that.

Mint then explains, again in typical Mint fashion, i.e. leaving most of the important stuff out, how the game works. It's basically a tabletop fantasy rpg with the extremely important proviso that it's GM'd not by any of the people in the room but by what seems to be a very powerful anomaly. 

The anomaly, whose name is Dice Lord, takes the form of a ten-sided die. It not only talks to all players both collectively and individually, as a GM naturally would but, unlike any GM I ever met, it can physically change the players into their characters and send them to another dimension to have their adventures in the flesh.

 

This is the game-within-a-game that's been added to NTE. It's called The Warren Continent (Or the land where it all happens is, anyway.) and it is quite literally a full ARPG complete with just about everything you might expect - quests, dungeons, loot, levels, NPCs and as I discovered jumping puzzles. Well, one of those, at least.

It's an astonishing conceit, especially so early in the life of the game. I don't know how much content there is but the main quest (Because of course it has an MSQ of its own.) is tripartite and the Molten Dragon is presumably the boss of part one. That took me three hours, so shall we say ten hours for the whole thing? 

And it has three difficulty levels, as ARPGs do, so you redo it twice for better loot. That'd be maybe thirty hours. You could very reasonably sell that as a standalone game and the quality would totally justify doing it, too.

But it's a lot more than just a clever maxi-game. It's one of the most metatextual experiences I've had in a game for a long while. The writing is really top class, extremely nuanced and complex. There's the game itself, which works perfectly as an ARPG but there's Mint's limited and partial understanding of it and her desire to make sure everyone has a good time, which leads to numerous, knowing side-comments about the nature of role-playing games, the mechanics they use and the way they seek to manipulate the people who play them.

That's very funny. I laughed out loud several times. But there's a lot more going on. For a start, the whole thing is being controlled by an Anomaly and as we've learned, anomalies always have an agenda. This one is clearly up to something. It's an unreliable narrator at best. Whether it's evil or just tricksy isn't yet clear but something's going on.

And then there's Shinku. Something is very clearly up with Shinku. She knows more about how these kinds of games work than she's saying and her Warren Continent character is substantively different from everyone else's. 

Mint, Iroi and Zero all have very recognizable classes - Barbarian, Mage and Swordsman - but Shinku is a Commoner. She levels more slowly and not a single piece of gear she could use dropped in my playthrough, where the other three received literally dozens of possible upgrades. She knows something is going on but she's not sharing.

The world is also populated by Fuzzies, a familiar kind of fairly harmless anomaly, here representing as sheep. They are also liars. Some of them are probably being voiced directly by the anomaly, which makes them exactly the kind of lying NPCs some GMs love to use. Others might just be confused.

It's hard to be sure because it's hard to be sure about anything. You're in an anomalous realm that's pretending to be a role-playing game. Who knows what's real?

And that's where I'm at right now. Maybe it'll all make sense later but knowing Neverness To Everness, I wouldn't count on it. One of the big draws for me is the way the game rarely seems to feel the need to explain itself. 

Suffice to say, having been a little apprehensive about the idea of the lurch into high fantasy, I'm now completely sold. More when I know more. 

Local Games For Local People?

Following on from yesterday's post, it's now been brought home to me just how unnecessary my self-inflicted sabbatical from Neverness To Everness really was. Not only could I have been playing the game perfectly well on my machine's own integrated graphics, I could have been playing it on someone else's machine altogether. Specifically, I could have been playing it on GeForce Now.

Given there are posts here about playing other games on Nvidia's streaming service, you might have imagined I'd have thought of it before but it was only when I read Nimgimli's post at Dragonchasers this morning, where he talks about what he'd been playing over the long holiday weekend and mentions using GeForce Now to avoid dumping even more heat into the house from a local PC, that I remembered it existed. 

Okay, that's not strictly true. By complete co-incidence, I was fiddling around with some old drives yesterday and I happened to notice an installation of GeForce Now on one of them, so that was when I remembered it existed. Only then, what I thought was "Didn't GeForce Now close down ages ago? I wonder if I should uninstall it?"

Luckily, I didn't carry through with that plan. Far from closing down, GeForce Now seems to have expanded enormously. There are now a couple of thousand games to choose from - twice as many if you opt for the Install To Play feature. I'm not sure now why I thought the whole thing had fallen over. Must have been thinking of some other cloud gaming platform, I guess.

I found all that out when I went to look at the website. That's the link to the UK version. I don't know what anyone in the rest of the world will see or how localized the service is. 

And I don't much care, not from a personal perspective. After reading Nimgimli's post, all I wanted to know was whether I could use GeForce Now to play Neverness To Everness. Sure, I'd worked out how to play it on the machine next to me but I was looking ahead a little. What if this machine crapped out on me again before I'd replaced it? The big new update drops tomorrow. It would be annoying to be shut out again, even for a little while.

I thought I should at least give it a try but there were a few questions to answer first: Did I have my old login details? Was NTE on the service? If so, was it available at the free level or would I need to subscribe? And most importantly, would I be able to link the GeForce Now version with my existing account? I sure as heck wasn't going to start all over again.

A fall at any of those fences would probably have meant the end of my interest, at least for now, but GFN soared over them all with room to spare. Yes, I had my old details and yes they still worked. Yes, NTE is on the cloud platform and yes it's in the list of games you can play without a subscription. 

Most importantly of all, I was able to link GeForce Now with my Perfect World account with no trouble at all. Some of that surprised me a little but what surprised me most was how easy it all was. It only took me about ten minutes to get the whole thing installed, set up and linked. And then there I was, back in the game, with my character standing just where I left her yesterday.

I ran her around for a bit before it occurred to me I ought to check the graphic settings. I hadn't forgotten that part of the point of trying the service was to see if it would let me play at a higher visual quality. Except it looked to me as though I already was. The straight lines looked sharper, the trees looked leafier, the colors looked richer, the whole game looked like it had been washed and polished.

That would appear to have been all in my imagination or at least some sort of subjective bias. When I checked the settings, they were still on "Smooth", just as I'd left them. To see what would happen, I bumped them right to the highest grade - "Cinematic". That's higher than I used to play the game on my good GPU.

And everything seemed fine. The game ran well. It felt like there was occasionally some very slight lag but it was barely noticeable. Certainly no worse than how playing on my own machine had felt the day before and I'd had no problems there.

I roamed around the north of Hethereau for a while, exploring and chatting to the locals. Then I thought I'd try driving the long road that flirts with the edge of the map so I called my car. 

OMG, am I bad at driving in this game! I'd say I was bad at driving in every game but actually I was fine in Once Human. Quite good, even. Here, though, I'm an absolute menace. I shouldn't be allowed on the road. When drivers yell "Do you even know how to drive?!" at me out of their windows after I've rear-ended them or crashed into them from a side-road I want to yell back "No! I have no idea what I'm doing!" And I had the Comfort Mode on, too...

Having googled it, I see it's not just me. Apparently the driving controls are considered somewhat touchy. There are things you can do to alleviate the problem and I might try a few but more likely I'll just go back to my bike. I find it a lot easier to control.

My driving skill or lack of it aside, the game seemed fine at speed. No more lag, no hitching or glitching, everything looking great. There was one moment when I got a "low frame rate" warning but I hadn't noticed anything different. I did nothing about it and it went away.

When I'd had enough cruising around the back roads I thought I might carry on with an interesting side-quest I picked up yesterday, one involving a bookseller. It interested me for professional reasons. I ported back and did some more of that one until Mrs Bhagpuss informed me it was time to get Beryl ready for a trip into town. 

By then, I still hadn't had any warnings from GFN about how long I'd been playing. From memory, I seem to remember one popping up after half an hour, then another at fifteen minutes, after which there was an on-screen timer ticking down the minutes. It felt like I must have been playing for at least the half hour and I can see now from the report you get when you log out that it was in fact 34 minutes, so either I'm misremembering it or it's changed. 

As a free player, you're limited to a maximum session time of one hour although you can just log back in immediately to repeat that as often as you want, always depending how many other people are in front of you in the queue. When I logged in at about nine in the morning on a Tuesday, there were nine people ahead of me and it took maybe thirty seconds before I got my turn. More than acceptable.

So far so great, then. If that was a test, GFN definitely passed. There were a couple of trivial issues, foremost among them the annoying discovery I made after I logged out that any screenshots you take using the in-game camera or selfie function are saved on GeForce Now's servers, not on your own PC, and they're immediately deleted at the end of your session. That's why there's only one screenshot in this post from my session this morning. It's the only one I took with the Windows screenshot instead.

The one screenshot from today's session that survived. It tells us absolutely nothing.

That's easily fixed by using the GFN screenshot facility, though. That does store locally. I believe it's what I used to do when I played New World this way. Long time ago now. I wonder if they've allowed New World to stay on the service pending its final execution next year?

At the end of the session GFN gives you some stats about its performance. Everything was aces except for the game itself, which scored just 15%, putting it deep in the red warning zone. Apparently the servers free players get to play on aren't up to the task of running NTE at top graphic fidelity. If I want to play on Cinematic I'd need to subscribe to get the better machines.

Except, as I think I've made clear, I didn't notice the game was performing badly. It ran fine, looked great and I had no problems doing anything I wanted to do. I had no complaints. So much comes down to expectation. 

And taste. Because here's the strange thing: having played for weeks on my PC on High or Extreme and now having glimpsed Cinematic, I think I might actually prefer Smooth. Not for the increased frame rate or improved performance but because in some contexts it just looks better.

When I was playing on Smooth yesterday, I took a lot of screenshots of wet streets and buildings in the rain. The rain in Hethereau always looks picturesque and a lot more appealing than real rain ever could but on Smooth it looks positively painterly. It gives the whole city an impressionistic sheen that's just lovely to see. At the very least. I'd say the game looks no worse in Smooth than on the higher settings and when it rains, I'd say it looks considerably better.

All of this has given me something to think about.

Most of the visually-taxing games I'm likely to want to play are available on GeForce Now. Baldurs Gate 3 is. All the well-known gacha games are. You can bet any new hot title will be. 

The free service does have some limitations that make it less appealing as a long-term option but the mid-level, "Performance" subscription removes them all. The Performance subscription includes sessions that can last up to six hours and there's a queue time averaging less than a minute to get in again. You get access to the more powerful machines, able to run the games at high settings and you're eligible for the Install To Play option so you can add games you own that aren't part of the core offer. You can also link GFN to Steam to make it even easier.

Perhaps even more temptingly, I'd never even have to think about updates or patches while I was playing on NVidia's servers because they'd handle all that for me. I'd also be able to free up a whole lot of drive space on my own machine because I wouldn't need to keep the games installed locally. 

And best of all, I could play all my games on any device I own. Not just on this desktop but on my laptop, my Android tablet or even my phone. Not that I'd want to play on my phone...

And it's so cheap! An annual subscription costs just £65 in the summer sale (The offer ends tomorrow although who's to say there won't be another soon after?)  but it's only £99 at full price. Which means I could pay less than a hundred pounds and be able to play all my games as much as I realistically would ever want to with just the hardware I already own...

... or I could spend more then £2,500 on a new PC and a laptop that could do basically the same thing. And maybe throw in a good tablet to make it a round three thousand. Which would get me what, exactly?

Hmmm....

Yeebo has a great post up about media and ownership that I need to reply to with one of my own. I left a comment in his thread indicating how conflicted I am, not just about the necessity for owning entertainment but the desirability, too. Conflicts of interest like this really don't help me come down on one side or the other.

All my logic tells me I should just buy a subscription to GeForce Now and forget about buying new hardware altogether. If GeForce Now lets me down at some point, I can deal with it then. If it doesn't, I've saved a ton of money and I have all the access to games I need.

Logic tells me that but emotion still tells me I want my games running on my machines in my house. Which will win out isn't clear but I really can't see any good reason not to give Nvidia their £5 a month anyway. If nothing else, it's going to be a handy back-up. 

And who quibbles over a £5 monthly sub these days?  

GeForce Now And Then

When I said in yesterday's post "I have yet to try GeForce Now but I see no reason why that shouldn't also work perfectly.", I knew I was taking a big risk. I ought to have done my due diligence and at least checked Nvidia's cloud gaming service would run on my new laptop.

Well, now I have - and it does. It does not, however, "work perfectly". I've tried two games so far and if GeForce Now was baseball I'd be batting 0.500. Actually, it would have been a strike and a home run. (Help! I'm on an analogy and I don't know how to get off!)

Shorn of the the sporting metaphors, I got one game to run without any issues whatsoever but the other one wouldn't run at all. The good news is that the game that did work is one of my favorites. The bad news is that the one that didn't was the one I wanted to try.

First, though, a little bit about GeForce Now itself. It's been a while since I last used it. A couple of years ago, I was playing New World in the cloud because playing it locally was threatening to set my PC on fire but then two things happened: 

1. I bought a really good graphics card that could run New World comfortably.
   
2. I pretty much lost interest in playing New World, comfortably or otherwise.

That was in the summer of '23. Back then the free version of GeForce Now limited you to an hour per session and put you in a queue each time the hour ran out. You could play any game that GeForce had on their servers and that you owned. Of course, you had to prove you did, in fact, own the game, which meant syncing it with wherever you'd bought it.

In the autumn of '21, when I first engaged with GeForce Now, I had a heck of a job getting it to link up with my Steam account which, as I remember it, was the only option then available for proving ownership, apart, presumably, from buying it direct. Or maybe it was the only one I was interested in at the time. I really can't remember.

Now, there are several ways to tell GeForce Now you own a game. You can link to your Steam account but also to Ubisoft, Epic, XBox and Battlenet.

That's quite a selection. I have all of them, although I only really use Steam. I might branch out now I know I can play on Nvidia's servers, though.

For this experiment, I stuck with Steam, having completely forgotten the problems it gave me last time. Luckily for me, either I did all the set-up then or the information required has been trimed because it took just a few clicks and some confirmatory emails and it was all done.

I didn't have a particular title in mind so I took a look through the list. It was good to see Fortnite featured in numerous flavors because only a few days ago I uninstalled it to make some space. Now if I ever want to log in to watch a metaverse event I won't need to download the damn thing again.

There were several obvious possibilities, not least New World, but it was one of the "free" titles that caught my eye. Only a couple of days ago I read a piece by Tyler FM Edwards at MOP, where he described The First Descendant as a game "with very little genuinely challenging content". That sounded right up my street so I thought I'd start there.

Even though it was free, I still had to add it to my Steam Library before GeForce Now was happy. That lit up the Play button and I pressed it.

Other than the enhanced range of partners, about the only noticeable difference to the process is that now you get adverts while you sit in the queue. And if you skip them it sends you back to the start of the line. 

That sounds much worse than it is for a couple of reasons:

1. Watching ads beats staring at counter, which is all you used to get.
2. You can both mute the ads and tab out and do something else while they run without losing your place in the queue, so you don't need to see or hear them at all. 

There were only fourteen people ahead of me anyway, the perks of playing mid-week during work and school hours. There was barely time for an ad to run before I got in. 

Or rather didn't get in...

It would be nice now to go into a few First Impressions paragraphs, where I either confirm or refute Tyler's opinion. Unfortunately, the game repeatedly hung at login, offering me nothing but a black screen and the blue, spinning ouroboros that's replaced the good old hourglass. 

In the end I had to exit GeForce Now by right-clicking the icon in the toolbar, there being no option to quit on the screen itself. A form popped up asking me to rate my experience from one star to five. I gave it one but only because I couldn't give it zero.

Not a great start. I might have stopped there had I not also noticed, as I was checking the roster of available games, that one of them was Wuthering Waves.

This piqued my curiosity. I currently play WW directly through publisher Kuro Games' portal . I wasn't aware it was available on any other platform so I wasn't sure how it would work in the cloud. 

I guessed that if I tried to play the game on GeforceNow, I'd be starting over as a new player. I didn't want to do that but I did want to see how it worked and also if the spinning PoV issue would recur so I clicked the button to say I owned it just to see what would happen.

To my considerable surprise I was offered a couple of options, one of which was the Epic Store, where I'd completely forgotten the game was also available. Much more exciting for me, there was also a link to the Kuro Games version. I couldn't believe it would take me to my existing account but that's just what it did.

In fact, it took me straight to the exact same login process I've been using ever since I started playing. It let me log in using Google, select my existing character and server and pick up playing from where I left off - except now I was somehow doing it on GeforceNow's servers in The Netherlands.

Honestly, it felt like magic. There I was, sitting all warm and cosy in an armchair in front of the gas fire, playing my familiar character just as though I was at my desktop, only in a great deal more comfort. 

Gameplay felt as smooth as it ever does. I had maybe ten seconds of lag in an hour but I often get more than that on a direct connection.

I worked my way through another full chapter of The Black Shores (Great story. Makes no sense but the feels are off the charts...) before I had to stop for lunch. There was no sign of the mysterious spinning problem. That's clearly down to Splashtop but now I don't need to think about how to fix it.

I mark my laptop trials of both Luna and GeForce Now resounding successes. There are all kinds of advantages to playing this way, not just the top-line benefit of turning a middling business laptop into a high-powered gaming machine but also in the savings in disk space and time sent keeping the games up to date. Let someone else handle all those huge downloads for once!

I might even push some of my gaming to the cloud when I'm back on the desktop. I'm struggling for disk space there and it might make sense to play new games remotely where possible, rather than try to free up space to download them.

Either way, the technology has clearly improved and it looks like remote gaming is here to stay. Now, if I can just get The First Descendant to join the party...

Temptation All Around

It's Friday! How about a few notes and queries? Okay, then. Here we go...

Gonna Make You An Offer...

Steam has a sale on. Steam always has a sale on, but this one is more interesting than most. It's a 2K Pubisher Sale and although I didn't immediately recognize the name, I certainly recognized the games: Civilization, Borderlands, Bio-Shock, X-Com...

So far, so impressive, but wait! Check out the discounts: 90%! 91%!! 93%!!! Apart from a couple of measly half-price offers on games that cost less than $5 full price, everything is two-thirds off or better. 

Cuts this big raise a couple of awkward questions:  

1. Just how big does a bargain  have to be before you feel you have to take it, even though you don't really want it?
2. If you call yourself a gamer but you've never played these classics, at these prices is there any excuse not to try them now?

I can answer the second quite easily. I don't call myself a gamer. I grudgingly accept "Gamer" as a useful if misleading shorthand term but I wouldn't self-identify as one. I certainly don't feel the need to have personally played every classic game, although I do believe I ought to recognize the names and know a little a bit about most of them. 

The first is a bit harder. I do like a bargain and these are some really good deals. A few of the games I can eliminate quite easily on the grounds of genre or subject. I'm never going to start playing 4X games or at least I can't see it happening. Others, though, are harder to turn down. Bio-Shock is right in my area of interest and I'm increasingly beginning to realise how much I like the tactical, turn-based gameplay that's often descibed as "X-Com style". It does seem strange to enjoy the copies but ignore the originals.

In the end, though, is a bargain really a bargain if, after you buy it, it just sits there, unused? These are all games I've thought about playing before and decided against. If they were sitting in my Steam library, would I be any more likely to play them? The scores of DVDs in this house, still with the shrink-wraps unbroken, suggest otherwise.

And then there's the sheer scale of the offers. The two X-Com Collections comprise 26 games! Who has time for that? Even the Bio-Shock Collection, with just three full games and some DLC, would probably take weeks to play through. 

The games are mosly available in the sale individually, some of them for absolute peanuts. I am very tempted to drop a few pounds just to have a few in my collection. But in the end, truism though it may be, money is money. A tenner for half a dozen games that could give me entertainment for months is an objective bargain but I already have a ton of games I haven't played that I got for nothing, which has to the best bargain of all. And am I playing those?

I'm still dithering. I might crack and buy a couple of titles. The sale is on for a couple of days. I'm working all weekend, luckily, which should give me something of a sanity buffer until the temptation disappears. 

Weirdly, the game in the sale that started me thinking about all this wasn't any of the big names I've mentioned. It's right down at the bottom of the list, among the flurry of after-thoughts and also-rans: Freedom Force, the first super-hero game I ever played. 

Freedom Force came out more than two decades ago, in 2002. It had a lengthy demo, which was included on a disc on the cover of some magazine I bought back then. I remember playing that demo and not thinking it was all that great. And yet I can still remember it with startling clarity.

I certainly didn't buy the full game when it was released although I have a vague idea I might have picked it up free from some service or offer at some point. It's entirely possible I already own it, somehow. And yet I can't quite shift the feeling it would be nice to have it on Steam, where I could not play it so much more easily than I'm not playing it wherever else I have it.

It's 75% off. They're asking £1.07 for it. It would be rude not to take them up on an offer like that. Wouldn't it? 

Always On The Internet (Slight Reprise)

And now a couple of updates on Nightingale. Just be thankful you're not getting a full post.

There were two announcements from Inflexion Games waiting when I logged into Steam this morning. One confirmed the arrival of Nightingale on GeForce Now. The other apologised for the game being always online and promised an offline version "as soon as feasible".

It made me think. I've been playing my games through an internet connection for so long now I'd all but forgotten it was even possible to play video games without one. When I log in to Prime Gaming or Steam and launch a game, I literally never even think about whether I'm playing on or offline. 

I haven't had any of the reported connectivity issues with Nightingale that others have. Well, that's not strictly true. I've had two disconnections, both of which were immediately resolvable by logging back in. That's so insignificant I wouldn't even class it as an inconvenience, let alone a problem.

It is true, however, that I'm playing entirely solo and that I have no plans to play Nightingale in multiplayer or co-op in the future.  I guess I don't need to be online for that, although I had been assuming the servers were doing some of the heavy lifting, not my PC. My question is, if a game like this moves offline, isn't the client PC on which it runs going to need to be more powerful? Or is that not how these things work?

Of course, if my PC wasn't up to running Nightingale, I could still play anyway, using GeForce Now. I was all over that for a while with New World, before I upgraded my RAM and video card last year. My then-set-up was able to run New World but after an hour or so it would grind to a halt and have to be re-booted. It also made some worrying noises and kept the room warm without my needing to use the wall heater.

That was why, as soon as I had the components installed, the first game I fired up to test them with was New World. It ran smoothly, didn't bog down, and my PC purred along, quiet and cool as you like. The ironic thing was that once I could play New World locally, I didn't much want to. 

Playing on GeForce Now was efficient and effective but it was also just annoying enough to make me not want to bother after a while. There were a few extra steps every time you wanted to log in and because I was too mean to pay the subscription I was stuck with the free service, which made me queue for a server in the evenings and booted me out once an hour.

I could re-queue and start again an unlimited number of times but it just made me less interested in playing, overall. I would absolutely use the service to play a game I wanted to play that wouldn't run at all on my machine but in the case of Nightingale, I can't see the point.

...That You Can't Refuse

On the topic of how much of a bargain does something have to be before you buy, how much of a bribe does it take to get you to come back? 

We're all used to MMORPGs running campaigns to get people to log in again to games they used to play. I used to jump on those. Now I mostly ignore them.

I did acquire most of my ingrained gaming habits back in the days of EverQuest and its imitators, though. I do have certain triggers and one of them is xp. If I hear a game's giving big, bonus xp - double or treble, say - it does often  make me feel like taking them up on the offer. Even if its a game I haven't thought about playing in years. 

Enter Black Desert with its 800% XP Bonus. Eight. Hundred. Per Cent. I mean I can't even. 

There are some strings. It's a community event. The titular 800% is predicated on players working to gether to gather a total of 30,000,000 Seals of Sincerity. That sounds like a lot but who knows? 

The whole thing is Ostensibly on behalf of the game's eight anniversary although it t may also have something to do with Pearl Abyss's finances, which as Nosy Gamer reported, don't look that bright right now. I'm sure they'd love for a bunch of lapsed BD players to come back to the fold.

There are some titles and other goodies you can claim, too. I do like a title...

I definitely didn't have "Play Black Desert" on my spring schedule but damn! 800%! I wonder if I still have the game installed?

And finally.

Always End With A Song

Mrs Bhagpuss tipped me to this one. "She's got a candy-floss voice and it's about losing love or something. You'd like it". And she was right. She knows me so well...

Also, it has 50m views on YouTube and it was #1 in the UK last year so why the heck I needed Mrs Bhagpuss to tell me about it beats me. What do I have these damn music feeds for?

Strangers - Kenya Grace

I just love the way she stretches the vowels. And the skittering drum & bass production. And the shimmering whispers. It's weird how everything that used to be avant garde ends up going mainstream.

Weird and very wonderful.

Silver Linings And Lemonade

One of the major advantages of playing on North American servers from the United Kingdom is that, other than in times of truly exceptional hysteria, grown adults staying up all night to play video games, skipping work the next day, leaving their computers running when they sleep, if they even do, their characters still logged in, butting their heads against the walls to keep from giving up their place to one of the thousands hammering on their keyboards, I don't often have to worry about queues. 

Similarly, one of the major advantages of using a cloud streaming service to play games is that someone else does all the patching. The game is always up-to-date, always ready, always waiting. I'm convinced it's the future even if Google's not.

Yesterday, when I decided on a whim I wanted to see New World's Brimstone Sands, the latest miracle patch that's set to save the game from oblivion and bring ex-players thundering back in their tens of thousands, like the great herds of buffalo crossing the plains of the old west, all I had to do was remember my password for GeForce Now. 

Of course, GeForce Now comes with queues of its own, or it does when you're too mean to stump up for the paid version. That's where another major advantage enters play - the advantage of being semi-retired and able to play video games at times when most of the population is out at work. In the evenings and at weekends, non-paying users of Nvidia's excellent service can expect to wait anything from a few minutes to the best part of an hour as dozens or even hundreds of other spongers line up ahead of them for their free turn.

On a weekday morning, though, there's no-one waiting. It's a green flag and go right in. Even in the afternoons, wait times are measured in single minutes. Yesterday there were thirty or so people ahead of me. The line cleared in less time than it took me to make a coffee and then there I was, having fun.

I must have had a good time because the hour just flew by. When it was over, I throroughly enjoyed rehashing everything I'd done in a blog post, something that took me almost exactly four times as long as actually doing it had, but for once I did feel a little peeved that I was writing not playing. I would have preferred to carry on further with the storyline, which was beginning to get interesting, something I certainly wouldn't have said about the one it replaced.

Unfortunately, by the time I'd finished posting, had tea and walked the dog, it was dark outside. People would be home from work even on the US East Coast and queues on both sets of servers would be filling up and stretching out. I opted to leave New World for a new day, when all would be quiet and empty once more.

This morning I woke up late to a prospect of several hours of heavy rain (Which, in the event, never arrived. Thanks, Met Office.) There was a even a helpful comment left by Tyler Edwards on yesterday's post, letting me know about an opportunity in New World's Halloween event, Nightveil Hallow, I really ought not to miss. I had nothing special lined up and no particular place to be so it seemed like the ideal opportunity for a lengthy session, exploring the newly-revamped island of Aeternum and all it newly had to offer. 

I took Beryl the dog out for her necessary requirements, brought her home and let her go back to doing what she likes to do best in the mornings, namely sleep. Then I logged into GeForce Now and...

Game down for maintenance. Ah, yes. Giant update yesterday, should have expected nothing less, of course. Even the longest-established, most stable mmorpgs often take two or three bites to digest a major patch. New World could be hiccupping for a month after a blowout like Brimstone Sands.

GeForce Now was unhelpfully vague about the details, telling me only that the downtime would be "several hours" but not mentioning when the clock began ticking. Steam, luckily, was much more precise, saying the patch had begun at 3am Pacific and was expected to last four hours. 

Even after all these years I'm still never quite sure about doing time zone conversions in my head. I thought the US West Coast was nine hours behind me, but that would mean the update wouldn't even have started yet. Oh, well. It obviously had, so that was the morning out.

While I was there, Steam popped up a window reminding me The Sims 4 is now free to play. I'd read that somewhere but immediately forgotten about it. I've never played a Sims game but I've read an awful lot of very entertaining blog posts by people who have, so I thought I might as well grab that and give it a try, now I had the morning free.

 

It was a substantial download so for something to do while I waited I thought I'd get today's blog post written. With luck, by the time the new game was downloaded and installed, I'd have finished typing and be ready to give it a run.

Well, it has and I have and I am but also so has/is New World. I have no idea what or why or how but as we all know, time works differently in Aeternum. The green "Play" button is smiling at me and all mention of delays and downtime have disappeared, so I'm off to do what I wanted to do in the first place.

Better yet, I've finished my blogging for the day and I've got a new game to blog about another time - so that all worked out very nicely, didn't it?

Don't you just love serendipity?