6-5 - Mint To Serve...

 Summer's here! No, wait, that's not right... summer's nearly over. But not in Hethereau!

It does seem odd, dropping a summer-themed update in late August, but then a lot of games do it. It seems even odder when you consider that the big Summer Break in virtually all the regions where these games are played is just about to come to an end in a couple of weeks, whereas the beach-themed content is likely to be with us for a month and a half, well into the start of the new school year.

Of course, it's not only kids or even college students who play these games but given the kind of events and activities that feature in many of them, it's hard not to believe that's the target audience. If it was intended to appeal to an older demographic, there'd be a lot more alcohol involved.

The new update for Neverness To Everness brings a bunch of seaside fun, as I mentioned in a post a week or so ago. What I didn't mention then, because I didn't know, is that the seaside resort where it all takes place is in a new part of the city. 

The district is called Duskmoor, which doesn't sound remotely like anywhere you'd go to eat ice-cream and stroll along the promenade. It's described as "a vast mountainous region north of the Miguel District" and they are not kidding. It's gigantic, although I suspect a lot of it is open country.

I'd be a bit more authoritative but I've only taken a quick look so far and that was on the laptop, in bed the other night, so I don't even have the few screenshots I took, near to hand. (And I'm too lazy to go into the bedroom, power up the laptop and mail them to myself...)

 

I didn't do anything while I was there anyway, other than run all the way to the Wertheimer Tower to register the teleport and get the region opened on my map, which was when it became immediately obvious just how big the place is. It's damn near as big as all the rest of the districts put together. I'm very much looking forward to exploring the whole thing.

But first there's a story to get through. I started it this morning although that wasn't my plan. What I was going to do was try out some of the new summer events and I did, for a while, starting with the volleyball because when I logged in the intro quest for it, Jade Star, was already up on my tracker. 

I have no idea why it was there. I must have been looking at it when I was on the laptop, I imagine, although I can't remember doing it. Anyway, Flora was in Duskwood, next to the Anomaly Tower, and the blue quest marker was pointing towards the beach half a kilometer away, so I just went with it. I was curious, anyway, to see how this volleyball thing was going to work.

I did wonder if it might be player vs player. It's very easy to forget, but NTE is a an online co-op title and it seems a four-person sport like beach volleyball would be a perfect fit for four-person co-op. 

It might be yet, for all I know, but that's not how the event starts out.

Sidebar: By a synchronicitous co-incidence, a very odd thing happened as I was running through Duskwood today. A window popped up on screen, asking me if I wanted to accept a request from someone called Jana to join me in my world. This is the first time anything like that's happened since I started playing the game. I had no idea it was even possible. Jana was waiting for a Yes or No but the whole thing took me completely by surprise and I just stared at the pop-up, not responding, trying to figure out what was happening, until the timer ran down and it vanished. Sorry, Jana.

After it was gone I rummaged around in the settings until I found the section that tells you who else is playing and allows you to set parameters on invites. You can have Private, Friends or Confirmation Required. I had no idea any of that was there until this morning. I considered setting it to Private but in the end, considering I've only had one in several months, I figured I might as well leave it as it was. Next time, if there ever is one, I might even accept a request, just to see what happens. It might be someone wanting to play volleyball...

The volleyball event starts with a conversation with someone going by the highly unlikely name of Uncle Loong. I know, thanks to playing the MMORPG Loong many years ago, that a loong is some kind of traditional Chinese dragon. Any time I meet an NPC in a game and they have a name like that, it makes me suspicious. 

I don't think "Uncle" Loong is a dragon in human form but you can never be sure. As to whose uncle he might be, your guess is as good as Flora's. He looks about twenty-two, though, so that makes me even more suspicious...

Whoever or whatever he is, he sets you up for a warm-up match so you can learn how the game is played and show him how good you are. You need a partner but luckily Mint volunteers so fast you don't even have time to finish asking her. 

She's there in a nanosecond, dressed for the part. I had actually been wondering if Flora was going to have to play beach volleyball dressed in her pant-suit. She looked bad enough trotting along the sand dressed that way, weaving between all the beachgoers in their bikinis and cut-offs. Luckily, once the game starts, Flora magically re-appeared, dressed in some suitable beach-wear I had no idea she owned. It's absolutely hideous but that's by-the-by.

The game itself has quite a few controls to master. I haven't yet mastered any of them. By the time I'd played two matches, I just about knew how to serve and that was it. 

The Warm-Up is the lowest possible level of difficulty and I still only won one of the two maches. The first was a close-run thing that Mint and Flora eventually won 9-7. You need to get to seven and then be two points clear for a victory.

 

In the second match we were doing much better. We served to open and I seemed to have gotten the hang of that to the extent that we were 6-1 up by the time we lost serve. Unfortunately, I very much had not gotten the hang of returning serve, so we lost our massive lead and ended up losing 8-6. 

At that point I felt like I'd probably had enough beach volleyball for the time being. It seemed like something I'd probably be able to get to be at least passable at, with practice, but I wasn't convinced I had the motivation. It is fun and it's beautifully animated. I could do without Mint apologizing every time she misses a shot but other than that I enjoyed it a fair bit.

I was very surprised to find, when I spoke to Uncle Loong again, that we'd somehow met with his satisfaction, despite only winning one match. The quest completed and immediately another replaced it, telling Flora she needed to go to Eibon right away. So she did.

That turned out to be the start of the new Main Story Quest. I spent the next hour and a half on it and it was excellent. But that's a tale for another post. 

Rising From The Moonlit Fog... It's... It's... A Bicycle!

Rising From The Moonlit Fog is the next milestone update for Neverness To Everness. Don't you just love these titles? MassivelyOP had a compendium report on three upcoming gacha game content drops yesterday and they all had names that sound like Jon Anderson might have considered them a little too much, when he was drafting the lyrics for Tales From Topographic Oceans.

Alongside the title I just mentioned, there was Tower of Fantasy's relatively tame Dreamland Beyond The Void and Wuthering Waves' frankly bananas Lamplight in Mirage, Sword’s Resolve in Heart. What does it all mean? And what drugs are these people on?

The NTE update comes out in exactly a week, on August 19th. I'm really looking forward to it. Inconveniently for me, since I'm currently attempting to play both of them, Wuthering Waves drops its new content the day after, on August 20th.

It would be a problem if I really was trying to stay up to date in both games but since I'm already about six months behind in WW, it's not going to make much practical difference. I'll be focusing on NTE and plugging away at the storyline I've missed in WW when I either want a change or if I run out of things to do in Hethereau.

Looking at the six-minute YouTube trailer for Rising From The Moonlit Fog, that doesn't seem too likely. There's a lot in there. Let me break it down a little.

First, here's the video. Take your time. I'll wait. 

And now I'll tell you what you would have seen if you'd watched it, which I'm betting hardly any of you did. Top Tip for Blaugust: if you find yourself short of original content, find something someone else has done and summarize it. 

We open with just over a minute of excerpts from the main storyline. I found it extremely confusing. There's some sort of game, arranged by that sociopathic woman from Daffodil's past, which looks like it takes place in some Anomalous Realm. Apparently we may "choose one thing in the Fogden as a reward" but we have to beat out all comers because "the Fog Coffin only allows one victor."

Is anyyone getting this? And if so, would they care to explain it to me? 

It looks like there are lot of people on the Appraiser's team. A whole gang. In one long shot I think I can count seven of them. Of us, I guess that should be. 

Two of them are the new draws, Zankou and Linko. They look like they've been selected to appeal to very different parts of the audience. Also, why do so many characters in NTE have names that make them sound like they used to be in the Marx Bros?

Honestly, you could start putting the characters into teams just by archetype, now. Zankou looks like one of the sultry, grown-up femme fatales in the mold of Hotori and Jiyuan while Linko is obviously Team Cute 'n' Crazy along with the likes of Chiz, Iroi and Haniel. 

Yet again, there are no new male characters. Hotta knows its audience. Looking at the wiki, including the two about to be added, the roster is now five male to fifteen female. A three to one ratio in favor of the girls, although you could subdivide that again into adults, adolescents and children. All we need now are a couple of robots and a few cuddly animals and we'll be all set.

 

Also looking at that wiki list, I see Zankou is supposedly a member of The Scarlet Letter, which makes her a baddie. Can she be one of the bad guys and a playable character? I guess we're about to find out.

So much for the story, about which I feel like I now know less than I did before I watched the video. On to the non-story content. There are a few very interesting additions to the game there.

Before I get to those, though, there's a whole racing "Expansion" to get through, if we're following along with the video. I don't think they mean expansion as in Wrath of the Lich King or Ruins of Kunark. I think what they mean is they've literally expanded the course. Made the race tracks longer. Or added more of them. Or both.

I wouldn't know. I don't race in Neverness To Everness. As I've said before, I find steering  four-wheeled vehicles in the game difficult to the point of being stressful and I do absolutely as little of it as possible. I am not the target market for any expansion of the racing side of the game. Although as we're about to find out, I'm not averse to more vehicular options.

After the video's done showcasing the new tracks and challenges it's on to the catwalk. There's almost a minute and a half of fresh fashion, beginning with outfits for the new characters. There's a clear explanation of how to get each of them, which is nice. It's good to be able to set goals. 

Unfortunately, few of those goals will be easily achievable or cheap and never both at the same time. You can roll for them or grind for them or pay real money. Them's your choices.

Fortunately for me, I don't much like any of the new clothes except for Linko's Couch Potato outfit, which is just a sweatshirt and shorts. I really would like some ordinary, unpretentious, casual clothes for my characters; things that don't make them look like they're cosplaying anime characters at an off-brand comic convention.

 

Then again, it could be worse. Much, much  worse. Until my recent return to the game, I'd forgotten - or more probably driven from my mind for the sake of my mental well-being - what the player-character is forced to wear as a default outfit in Wuthering Waves. It's hideous beyond belief. The default PC look in NTE is orders of magnitude more acceptable.

Still, I'd like that sweatshirt. Only there are two problems. No, three. First, I'd have to roll for and win Linko. Second, I'd have to grind to Bond Level 10 with her. And third, I'm guessing only Linko can wear it, so I'd have to be Linko. I don't imagine any of that is going to happen.

The second half of the fashion show is all beachwear. In my opinion, they could have more usefully introduced this with the last update. Summer will be nearly over by the time this one arrives. Not to mention the last update was actually set on a frigging holiday beach resort island! Does no-one think these things through?

The beachwear itself is okay, although it seems odd that it's character-specific. What's everyone else supposed to do? Stay at home? Or maybe sit at the beach cafe and watch while the lucky few have fun on the sand. 

For once, the boys get by far the best of it. The male Appraiser outfit is nicely ordinary but the best of the lot is Chaos's wetsuit, which really does look good. Other than that, I like Mint's big straw hat and that's about it. Oh, and the female Appraiser look is awful. She seems to have put her bra on over the rest of her clothes. Is that a thing, now?

After the outfits comes the first Very Interesting Addition: Beach Volleyball. I have no clue how this is going to work. Since NTE is primarily a single-player game, I assume it's something you play with NPCs but it would obviously make a great co-op game. I seem to remember playing soccer in an MMORPG before (Free Realms, I think...) but never volleyball. I'm extremely curious to try this one out.

 

If you thought volleyball was a left-field choice for a new activity, Hotta would like you to hold their beer. Next up is another mini-game. It's called Brick By Brick and from the video it would appear to involve driving a fork-lift in a warehouse. 

I know what you're going to ask... WHY!!!??? For the sake of all that's holy, why? Did someone fill in that box at the end of one of the surveys, saying "I really like the game but it's lacking one, vital element - repetitive manual labor, preferably warehouse work". Who wants to drive a fucking forklift truck when they could be doing literally anything else in the game?

I bet I end up loving it. 

But from here, I'm a lot more interested in the next section - new vehicles. Yes, I don't get on very well with cars in NTE but these aren't cars. 

For a start, one of them's a jet ski. Which, for some reason, the video doesn't call a jet ski. It just calls it "New Water Vehicle". It even has a name: Tide. Guys, we can see it's a jet ski! 

And it looks great. The big advantage the sea around Hethereau has over Hethereau itself, when it comes to driving a vehicle, is that there are no roads in the sea. And no walls, buildings, bushes, central reservation barriers, buses or zebra crossings. I'm not saying it'll be impossible to crash into anything but it's going to be a lot harder.

Jet skis are not uncommon in video games. I've ridden one or two before. I'll tell you what I've never ridden in any game though and that's a bicycle.

Which is odd, when you come to think of it. Loads of games have motorcycles but I can't think of a single game I've ever played that had pushbikes.The mechanics must be the same, mustn't they? Once you've done the work for the motorbike, it's just a different skin, isn't it?

Well, no, I guess there's the leg animation to consider. You have to pedal a bicycle. They're famous for it. Maybe that's why no-one bothers to add them. 

 

The animation looks excellent. Very convincing. And you can give someone a ride on the back, too. Can you have another NPC ride pillion on the motorbike? If so, I hadn't noticed the option. 

There's also a kind of dune buggy/quad bike deal called Sirocco that looks like it might be fun, especially if you like running people over. Seriously, that thing's going to be a menace, on and off the beach. 

The bikes (There's more than one model.) and the buggy can be bought with Fons but the jet ski comes from "Mystery Boxes", which I assume means loot boxes you buy. If these are a thing in the game already, I hadn't noticed. Since I would like the jet ski, I'm going to have to look into it. Maybe it's like the sports car event. I never even looked at that one.

After the vehicles comes housing. Normally, I'd be all over a new housing option but NTE is one of those rare games that's already too generous when it comes to setting up home. You can get five massive houses now and the only real obstacle is amassing enough in-game cash to buy them. I have two and even that feels like it's one too many.

Consequently, I wasn't very hyped to see we were getting a sixth... until I saw what it was. It's on a completely different scale to the others, by which I mean it's much smaller and more manageable. It's down to earth and best of all it's an actual house, not an apartment. 

Stillmeadow House has a garden and a car-port and a lovely, suburban setting and I want it. It's buyable with Fons so I can have it, too. I just have to stop going to the Catzebo every day.

Finally in the video we come to the "And also..." section, which is really pretty interesting. I had to freeze-frame this part because it all flips by too fast to take in and not all of it has been translated but when I was able to read the tiny English text along the bottom, I saw quite a few things I liked the look of.

Nanally gets optional glasses to go with her Popular Kid outfit. I don't have Nanally's Popular Kid outfit. In fact, I don't have Nanally. If and when I do, though, I will certainly have her wear them. Glasses are second only to hats as essential accessories in games.

 

There's a bonus to speed of city stamina consumption coming with Tycoon Level 16. Until very recently I had no interest in City Stamina and had no idea why people seemed so fussed about it. I still don't really understand how it works but I do know it's a way to make money and as of this update I'm going to need a lot more of that. Anything that makes it come faster is welcome.

Speaking of which, you'll be able to grow crops in your garden in the new house and sell those for Fons. And so farming comes to Hethereau. I am not a fan of farming, as a rule, but it does depend on the implementation. I reserve judgment until I try it.

Also on the money-making trail, Pink Paws Heist is getting a mini-map. That's very good news. I have no idea where I am in that damn bank. Not even with a walk-through. With a map, I might actually be able to grab some cash and get out in time. 

But then, there's an incomprehensible rules change to Pink Paws that now somehow ties it to a weekly volleyeball challenge match... What do beach volleyball and bank robbery have to do with each other? Will I ever get my one million Fons? I very much doubt it.

One coming feature that sounds half-baked at best is "Random Outfits". As of the update "Characters will automatically swap to a random outfit from their wardrobe whenever you log in or change scenes." 

Excuse me? So I spend either time or money or both getting the look I want and then the game randomly swaps it for something else? Is that good business sense? Did anyone ask for it?

It'll be fine if it's optional. It had better be optional! Although at the moment, since I only have two outfits, it's hardly going to be a pressing issue for me. But if I get more, the damn game had better let me wear the ones I want, whenever I want!

There are, of course, a whole raft of limited-time events, some tied to the new stuff I've been talking about. But then there always are. Let's not bother with any of those.

No, I've left the very best part of the entire update to last. Here it comes! Ready...?

 

"A button will be added to the main screen to hide the UI with a single tap"

OMG! That's exactly what I wanted! That one change will make a massive difference to my gameplay. I know that for absolute certain because Wuthering Waves has it and it's been transformative for me there.

The issue is that because I play both NTE and WW on GeForce Now, any screenshot I take with the in-game camera gets sent to Nvidia's servers not to my PC. In order to take screenshots I can use on the blog, I have to use Win+PrtScr, which works perfectly, but which captures the full screen as it appears on my monitor, UI and all.

To get clean screenshots in Wuthering Waves I just have to toggle the UI off using Alt-C but in NTE I have to hit Escape to get to the "Mobile Phone" menu, open Settings, click on the Video tab and push the UI Opacity slider back to zero. And then, when I'm done taking screenshots, I have to do it all again in to put the UI back.

Being able to click one button on the screen instead of doing all of that is going to be so much easier. Huge quality of life improvement.

I'm really looking forward to Rising From The Moonlit Fog just for that.

Okay, not just for that... 

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. 

What's My Motivation?

I'm having a slight problem just now, what with with this being, ostensibly at least, a gaming blog: I'm not playing any games. 

I haven't reached some kind of existential crisis, where I find I've outgrown or lost interest in what, for convenience, I'll call "The Hobby". I've noticed a few erstwhile games bloggers hitting that wall lately but I'm not one of them. I'm still enjoying my gaming. 

I'm not really even in a lull or slump, one of those times when interest wanes temporarily as you wait for some new game to grab your attention and pull you back in; a state of mind familiar, I'm sure, to plenty of people reading this.

No, it's more of an enforced hiatus, just while I sort out a new gaming PC. The one I'm using to write this post seems entirely reliable so long as I don't ask it to play games but I've decided, rather than try to rehabilitate it for that purpose, it's going to be relegated to a media center role downstairs. I'm still looking into what will replace it. Until I make up my mind about that, I'm kind of off games for now, whether I like it or not.

I've found taking an enforced break from gaming these past few days has been quite useful in clarifying a couple of things for me. I've mentioned a few times that I don't play games as often these days as I used to, or for as long, when I do. It made me wonder if my interest in the hobby might be winding down. 

I'm happy to say I'm now reasonably sure that's not what's happening. I found myself getting quite twitchy, not being able to play my games, Neverness To Everness in particular. 

Not being able to play, I've been reading about them instead. Nimgimli posted about the upcoming 1.2 update, which looks amazing. I didn't find time for the full hour-long preview but I did watch the almost eight-minute trailer.

It's impressive. Not to say insane. So much packed in to what's going to be a six-weekly update cadence. How do they do it?

Raph Koster was reported by MassivelyOP the other day as saying the theme park model for MMORPGs was unsustainable because of the cost of producing content and the speed at which players get through it, which seems fair enough until you consider games like NTE, Wuthering Waves, Genshin Impact and the rest of the gacha gang. 

I left a comment wondering, among other things, what the difference was in terms of production costs, to which Raph replied with a terse two word answer: "Server costs". I'm not quite clear how that explains the way gacha games can pump out as much plotted, scripted, written, voice-acted content on a six-week cycle as the average Western MMORPG can manage in six months...

The second update for NTE adds an entire game-within-a-game, a fantasy RPG inside the magitech shell, the conceit of which is that the characters themselves will be playing it. I love that part. It even makes the medieval fantasy element palatable. It's permanent content, too, which is just as well for me since I may not have a machine capable of running it before the new update becomes the old update in a few weeks and we're on to the next thing.

My uninformed, outsider's take on how it's possible is that MMORPGs these days just aren't popular enough to generate the kind of income that supports this pace of content production. In that respect, Raph's quite right that the Western model isn't sustainable. 

We can see it, over and over, with every new attempt to break the market open. The locust swarm pitches up, strips a new game bare of content then flies away before the first update arrives. When it eventually comes, some come back for a fraction as long as the first visit and after that there's no getting them back at all. With ninety per cent of the customers gone, who can afford to keep making new content for the few that stay?

With the open world gacha titles, though, there's always another substantial content drop on the way. Even then, players still complain about not having enough to do or finishing everything too fast but instead of having to wait months for the next hit they're into the hype cycle almost immediately and the fix lands a week or two after the cravings begin.

Are theme park MMORPGs unsustainable or just inefficient? Is it inherently harder or more expensive to produce content for servers holding hundreds or thousands of players than for those serving solo or co-op play, even when the nature of the content is very similar? I have absolutely no idea but I'll take Raph's word for it that it is, somehow.

Even then, surely server costs can't directly affect the rate at which the content itself is produced, can they? Not even if it's orders of magnitude more expensive to get that content in front of the players. The issue of content drought, endemic in MMORPGs for many years, seems like it would be independent of the cost of keeping the servers up. 

And when, even in the glory days of World of Warcraft, did MMORPGs ever get content flow at this volume and speed? (I'll answer that one: First five years of EverQuest, that's when. And never since that I've seen.)

But what do I know? Or, frankly, care? My concern with Western theme park MMORPGs these days isn't so much whether they can provide me with content fast enough as whether they can produce content that interests me at any pace. If you remove nostalgia, loyalty and familiarity, the main factors that keep me playing some old favorites, I can't easily come up with many good reasons even to look at most of the MMORPGs I see being promoted or developed these days. They just don't look very... erm... modern.

All of which makes it quite ironic that my current darling, Neverness To Everness, a game a huge part of whose appeal for me is just how very modern it does feel, has chosen to add, for only its second update... a traditional, western medieval fantasy RPG. If they'd asked me what I wanted it wouldn't have been that.

Oh, wait! They did ask me! Several times. And what did I say? Like Mailvaltar, I said I wanted more city. 

Still, I'm not complaining. 999 Nights, which in a magnificently confident coup de theatre we're told should be read as ‘One Thousand Less One Nights’, looks very interesting. I'd love to give it a go.

Luckily for me, as is generally the case in games of this kind, most of the content won't go away when the next update arrives. The big FOMO push is always for the banner characters, none of which particularly interest me this time around, and the various mini-games and events. The substantive elements, scripted content, items, gameplay additions and innovations, those tend to hang around.

In this case there are a whole load of costumes I might be interested in, including some that have something I did ask for - customization. Okay, it's only colors and hiding some panels, not swapping whole pieces between outfits, but it's a start. And I really want that "Unassuming Warrior" outfit for Flora. Anything that looks like regular clothes is good with me.

There doesn't appear to be much, if any, new story content, which is fine with me, this once. It'll keep me from falling behind while I sort out my hardware problems, something I feel quite motivated to do now.

I'm not saying I'm going to buy a whole, new expensive computer just to play NTE but having a game I really want to play does clarify things a little. I was wondering if I needed to bother getting a gaming computer at all or if I couldn't just make do with this one and do without the gaming part altogether.

Yeah. Not happening! Bring on the One Thousand Less One Nights.

Facing Off With The Faceless

Yesterday evening and again this morning, I did something unusual. I played EverQuest II.

I don't mean I logged in, collected my completed Overseer missions, set my new ones for the day and logged out, like I do every day. Although, I did do all of that... except the logging out part.

I'd been getting a slight itch to play an MMORPG "properly" again for a couple of days. It started, weirdly, when I was on Steam and noticed there were some patch notes for Rift.   

It's a constant surprise to see dribbles of content still dripping into the game during Gamigo's maintenance-mode custodianship but guess perhaps the oddest thing is that I still have Rift installed. It's not like I'm going to play it again. 

Or is it?

It was when I found myself seriously considering doing just that, wondering whether I ought to pick up one of my old characters and carry on with them or if it mightn't be better to roll up a new one and start over, that I had a little talk with myself and decided I'd be better off doing something productive in one of the games I was supposedly still playing istead, not taking a wholly ill-advised trip back in time to one I'd abandoned years ago.

The choice was pretty obvious. I clearly ought to patch up Wuthering Waves and try to get back up to date there yet again. There's another update coming and I haven't touched the last one yet. I'm already behind and soon I'll be too far behind to catch up.

So, I didn't do that.

Second choice would probably be Once Human. There's a lot going on there, too, and I haven't seen any of it. 

Didn't do that, either.

 

Also in the running, albeit as an outsider, there's New World. I realy like New World. It's my second most-played game on Steam, after Valheim. There's a major update - you could almost call it an expansion - coming to the game in less than two weeks and it looks very interesting, all vampires and werewolves and spooky castles. Just right for the season

It's a free update but you have to have New World Aeternum to get it and I don't. So I'd have to buy that, which would then give me even more new-to-me content. And contrary to what you might expect, that's actually a point against going back. I don't have the time or inclination to take on a big tranche of content in any game right now. I'm looking for something to fill the odd session, here and there, not some big commitment that could take weeks.

Something like, oh, I don't know, a new solo dungeon or an instance I haven't done. Even better, one that might have some drops I could use. I've always been a big advocate of the gameplay being its own reward but good drops are cake.

All of that led me back to EQII, where there have been two Game Updates this year that I haven't touched. 

Alright, that's not entirely true. I did set foot in the new, contested dungeon that came in GU128 back in April. It didn't go well.

That update is called Lure of Darkness and features a large dungeon by the name of Spiral of Vul. It's designed for multiple groups to explore at the same time, old-school style, but it does have a small, soloable area at the front, as has been the norm in EQII as far back as beta.

I can say from experience that the allocated area for solo players is soloable. I did a little bit of it back in April and I didn't die. I also didn't have much fun. The mobs were very tough and took ages to kill. If there are any soloable bosses, I never got far enough to try my luck with them. I did one quest, whch took about half an hour and gave up.

That was on my Berserker. Since then, I've upgraded all his gear using the Anniversary gift. He was mostly in 475-495 Resolve gear then and now he's wearing all 525. Resolve is a very sound indicator of performance, much like Gear Score in other games, and 30-50 points is enough to make a difference so I was hopeful I might get a little further this time.

I did not. I map-hopped over to the Sodden Archipelago and flew halfway across the zone to the entrance of the dungeon, went inside and immediately picked up a couple of shinies that completed a collection. That made the trip worthwhile, which was just as well because the trash mobs seemed no easier to kill than before. I tried a couple, decided it wasn't going to be any more fun than last time, so I  left.

The second of the annual updates arrived in August. It's called Fear of Eternity and consists of Fabled versions of the dungeons from the 2012 expansion, Chains of Eternity. Fabled dungeons are generally the same as the originals but with all the mobs revamped for the current level cap and all the loot similarly upgraded. They also come in all the regular flavors - Solo, Heroic I and Heroic II.

My experience with Fabled dungeons at the time they first appear has been patchy. There have been some I've been able to make progress in but mostly they're too tough for me. I usually give them a go, decide it's too much like hard work and leave them for later. Sometimes I do come back and finish them when I'm a bit tougher, sometimes I forget they exist.

I was fully expecting the first one I tried, Fabled Temple of the Faceless, to be at least as hard as Spiral of Vul. I mean, you'd think so, woudn't you? It's six months later, after all. What would be the point of adding something easier to the game at level cap?

It was easier. It was a lot easier. At least it was once I got myself sorted out.

The zone-in is much more conveniently placed, right on the dock where you zone in to Sodden Archipelago. No flying right across the map this time. That was nice. You can access all the available dungeons from the update from the same portal, too. Also nice.

I picked the first instance on the list, zoned in and pulled a mob to test the waters. They were warm. The mob, a three-up arrow spider, theoretically tough for trash, died in a reasonable time and didn't pose much of  threat. I worked my across the opening area towards the first boss, killing as I went and it felt comfortable. It wasn't a walkover but it wasn't a grind. I felt like I was moving through the zone at a reasonable pace.

I got in range of the boss and thought about looking him up for strats but I couldn't be bothered so I just pulled him to see what would happen. Nothing much. In fact, as far as he was concerned, nothing at all. His health stayed solidly at 100% no matter how hard and how often I hit him. Clearly there were unseen factors in play.

With my merc pumping out the healing and the Berserker having a pretty solid self-healing capacity of his own it was a stalemate, albeit one that was eventually only going to end one way, even if it was likely to take an hour to get there. I rummaged in my bags for a Totem of Escape to port myself to the zone entrance and couldn't find one so I just legged it to the zone-line with the boss beating on me all the way. He still didn't make much of a dent, even with my back turned.

Once I was safe outside, I looked at the wiki. It turns out there are two pillars, one in each of two side-temples, that have to be destroyed before the first boss can be damaged. I vaguely remembered that from whenever I did the dungeon when I was questing through the relevant expansion but that was years ago and I needed to be reminded.

I went back in, found the pillars, knocked them down, then had a second go at the boss. It went much better that time. 

I was curious to see what he'd drop. I was hoping it would be gear over 500 Resolve. In fact it was identical in quality to the Anniversary freebies - 525 Resolve. Since I was already fully kitted out in that, I was also hoping it wouldn't be Plate Armor. I could give that to my Inquisitor but she's not Level 130 yet so she'd have to do five more levels before she could wear it.

I was hoping for cloth so my Necro could have it and cloth was what I got. On the first boss, anyway.

It had been fun and profitable so far so I carried on. Temple of The Faceless is a fairly compact, to the point dungeon, without a lot of wandering about required. Exactly what I was looking for. I progressed through the next two bosses, checking strats just in case of any more surprises but having very little trouble with either.

That took me up to bedtime so I camped where I was and picked up again where I left off the next morning. There was only one more boss left but it was a dragon and they can be tricky. In the event, though, he went down as easily as the rest. 

I didn't get any more cloth armor but my Bruiser is going to be happy. The rest was all leather. The two sessions were fun, the difficulty just about right for me, requiring a certain amount of attention and concentration but not so much I couldn't take a few screenshots during the fights.

There are several more Fabled instances in the update so I'll most likely take a look at those next. The deciding factor on whether I do or not will be how much fun I'm having. The upgraded loot is nice but I'm all too aware it will be made obsolete by the free handouts at the start of the coming expansion, let alone the quest rewards from the storyline.

Not to mention there's the stuff the pandas are handing out. Which reminds me. As of this week's reset, I must have a new panda quest to do...

It Changes Nothing : Phrolova Said So, So It Must Be True

Every post I write these days seems to begin with me talking about some "plan" or other that's either fallen apart or been abandoned or had to be changed to fit in with new circumstances. Once in a while I even open by saying I had a plan and now here it is, made real. When or why I started making all these plans escapes me, although I bet it had something to do with Blaugust...

And yes, I did have a plan for today. I mean, I didn't have it for long... Not that it's gone wrong, for once. No, it has come to fruition, which is something plans do according to convention, albeit not many of mine.

When I say I didn't have it for long, I don't mean I had it for a while then gave up on it. I'm back-projecting. I only came up with it a day and a half ago and now I'm done with it, so... I didn't have it for long. English is hard.

Although not as hard as biology. If you're a may-fly, I had that plan for a lifetime and then some. Any may-flies out there, reading this? No? Thought not.

So, what was this plan, then? I'm embarassed to tell you, now I've made all this fuss about it. It doesn't deserve to be dignified with the name "plan". It was just that I knew on Monday what I was going to post about on Wednesday, or at least what I wanted to post about then. Now. Whatever. Tenses are slippery.

Almost three weeks ago, I posted something about the latest update in Wuthering Waves. A week later I posted again to say I was finally, actually, for real this time, up to date with the storyline and ready for the next chapter. And now I'm posting to say I've done it. 

Well, I think I have. I got the "Quest Complete" screen for Rinascitta II: Act VIII, anyway. There's probably a coda or an afterword I haven't done yet and for all I know there might be a second installment coming before the next full update, like there was last time. But I've definitely finished the big storyline segment in the current update.

It took me over three hours, broken into three unequal session, and it was fricking amazing! Seriously, it was so good. Even though I kept getting interrupted by dogs and people at the door and Mrs Bhagpuss telling me lunch was ready and all kinds of real-world responsibilities, I was so deep into it it didn't break the spell. And what a spell it cast.

For once, I pretty nearly understood what was going on. Might be the first time since the original questline back in Jinzhou. I just about understand who everyone is now. I recognize all the factions and I have a general impression how each of them stands with the others.  I'm comfortable with the jargon and I get most of the lore references without having to look them up (Something you can do through in-game hyperlinks, an innovation I don't recall seeing anywhere else.)

Better yet, I'm finding I can follow the motivations of the characters, more often than not, which has certainly not always been the case. That's never been because their reasons for doing what they're doing are poorly explained. It's because most of them have secret agendas or multiple agendas, some of which they're keeping secret from some people but not others, or agendas they, the characters, do not fully understand or aren't even aware they have. Plus some of them are being mind-controlled, sometimes but not all the time, because of course they are.

To say there's some nuance involved would be like saying there's some vodka involved in a Russian wedding. (I don't know. I'm assuming? Anyone been to a Russian wedding? My first simile involved Ozzy Osbourne but I thought better of it. (It was complimentary so don't @ me!)) It's basically all nuance. Remember when we thought The Secret World had some elliptical writing? Bears and rats compared to this stuff.

After the current chapter, I think I do finally have some idea who The Fractsidus are. Is. Again, whatever. What they're up to still isn't entirely clear and neither do I know "who" they are as individuals yet, except for this episode's Guest Star - Phrolova.

Oh, I love Phrolova! It's not saying much because I love most of the characters in Wuthering Waves. Well, a lot of them. But Phrolova is especially wonderful because of her nihilistically monomaniacal dedication to a purely romantic cause. She's just... she'd burn down the world to have what she wants and all she wants is what she had when she had nothing. Nothing but love and a home, so, everything.

She gets some truly great lines and Rae Lim, the voice actor behind the English dub, delivers every one of them to absolute perfection. It's such a difficult read, too. Phrolova says things that on the page look to have "lack of affect" or "ennui" written all over them but which come freighted with a subtext of loss, defeat, depression and despair. 

Best I can figure it, Phrolova is a sociopathic empath. Or an empathic sociopath. She feels nothing except everything and none of it matters except at the core where it all matters too much. I screen-shotted some of her bleakest lines but I couldn't screenshot the delivery. 

Okay, I could have videoed it. But I didn't. I figured I'd steal a compilation of the best ones from YouTube. Only there aren't any. There are plenty of comps of her battle cries and lots of cut scenes and videos explaining why "JP VTubers can't stop crying during Phrolova's story" (Who can blame them?) and a ton of other stuff but nothing like I would have focused on. 

So you'll have to imagine the voicees for yourselves when you read her saying things like

or 

or maybe 

Or my absolute favorite

Phrolova stares into the void and the void won't make eye contact. Don't you just love it? 

Yes, well, maybe you don't. I'd have to admit it requires a certain sensibility. The whole game does.  One snarky YouTuber posted a nine-second video that sums up the WW gestalt very nicely:

And yes, there is an awful lot of that - the player-character standing very close to the guest star as they gaze meaningfully at - or more often past - each other. Also a very great deal of flirting on the part of the guest star, almost always received with complete incomprehension or just straight-up ignored by the PC. Except, to misquote Fcukers - Fuck, No. Phrolova Don't Flirt.

There's also a fair smattering of this:

The PC desperately and all too often unsuccessfully lunging towards the Guest Star as the Guest Star falls or sinks or vanishes into some portal.

And then there's the ever-popular 

Meaningful Hand-Clasp. 

Sometimes it's the Rassuring Hand on the Shoulder but the Clasp is More Meaningful.

I can see it might not be to everyone's taste but it is to mine, probably because, as Mrs Bhagpuss has so often informed me, I'm basically a teenage girl. Emotionally, anyway.

So much for the story and characters which are all A+ as usual. Plot, too, for a change. Also, for the record, my character made choices in this one that I wouldn't have made. And said things. Boy, she can be harsh, sometimes...

Gameplay continues to be all but non-existent although there were some good mini-games this time. All very easy but I found them entertaining. Less walking-and-talking than usual, more standing around and lots and lots of flashbacks, dream sequences, still images with voice-overs and various other engaging ways of presenting a passive narrative as if you had some say in the outcome.

As for combat, it genuinely does get less and less every time now. A handful of tiny fights with trash mobs, for which I always used the extremely OP Phrolova, so they lasted mere seconds. One final boss fight that came with a load of instructions about special abilities and how to counter them but which I aced on the first try, using nothing more skilled than some slightly enhanced button-mashing. I watched my cooldowns and swapped characters a few times to get some heals but other than that, no tactics used or required.

And that, I imagine, except for cleaning up whatever decompression and debriefing mini-quests may remain, will be it until the next, big content drop in a few weeks. I feel emotionally drained. I'll need that long to recover. 

As for the Gacha elements... there are none. Seriously, I don't even use the free draws. I did ding Union 40 today, which got me some message about having to do a quest before I can level up any more but I'm not convinced even that will be needed for the story. If it is, I'll handle it when I have to but no money will change hands.

I mean, I would pay for this game. It's totally worth paying for. But so far I haven't needed to and I'm sure Kuro can manage just fine without my contribution. In Phrolova's words (Or nearly...), Gacha rolls "aren't of concern to someone like me".

Wouldn't mind having her on my team, all the same. Maybe I'll at least have a few free pulls and see if I can get her...

Games For A Wet Weekend

I did a lot more gaming than usual this weekend. For one thing, I wasn't working and for another the sun wasn't out. 

It was raining, in fact, which literally put a dampener on my natural inclination to be outdoors in the summer when the sun is shining. I think it's inbred in English people of a certain age, those of us who were brought up at a time when children old enough tie their own shoelaces were ushered out of the house after breakfast and expected to entertain themselves until at least lunch, if not tea. 

Even now I get that nagging feeling that I ought not to be "wasting the sunshine". Of course, it doesn't help that we see so little of it most of the time. It takes a good few fine days in a row before it starts to feel okay to stay inside. This is what happens when you live in a temperate climate.

The games I chose to play were interesting to me. I've been posting a fair amount about all the choices available and yet when I do find myself with both the time and the inclination to settle in for a few longer sessions, my choices often surprise me.

The steady, reliable pick is almost always EverQuest II, which I have been playing for more than two decades now with barely a break. I did drop the game  between 2012 and 2014, something I can date quite accurately because the two expansions for those years, Chains of Eternity and Tears of Veeshan, are the only ones I didn't buy and play on release. That was because I was full-time in Guild Wars 2 around then.

I came back with 2014's Altar of Malice, after which I played GW2 as my main MMORPG and EQII as my secondary, quite consistently, until I eventually dropped GW2 three years ago, at which point my involvement with EQII largely carried on unchanged. Maybe I play a little more of it these days but it certainly hasn't filled the space left by GW2's departure from the schedule.

At the moment, all I'm doing in EQII is Overseer dailies, which I've now managed to work up to the point where I only need to log in once in the morning to set all ten, then once again in the evening to collect the rewards. 

The recent news that the summer update will come with yet another free set of at-cap gear to encourage lapsed players to jump back into the game has to some extent made my efforts to catch up with Overseer seem unnecessary but that's a trap I don't intend to fall into again. It's how I got into this mess in the first place. I might not need the drops from Overseer but I need to level it up so it's capped when the expansion comes out because there will be things I need from it then and I won't be getting them until they, too, have been superseded if I don't do the hard grind now.

That all only takes a few minutes, though. With plenty of time and enthusiasm to play this weekend, I took the opportunity to return to Once Human, which has just received an absolutely huge update. Starry deem it so significant they've labelled it Once Human 2.0.

And they're not exaggerating. It has genuinely game-changing implications, with the new scenario, Endless Dream, opening up the whole map, North and South, for free play from the start and the update adding a completely new Class System and a whole new feature, almost a game mode, called Dreamland Fantasia. 

 

Up to now the game has been classless, Now, you can still choose to be a "Freelancer", which means you carry on the same as always, but you also have the choice of three Classes - Beastmaster, Chef or Gardener. Because this is Starry, they can't do anything in a normal way, so the Class system is in "public testing", by which they mean they've added it to the live servers as a work-in-progress with the intention of  "refining" it based on player feedback. That always works so well, doesn't it?

My feedback so far is that they ought to move the feeding trough a lot further back towards the start of the crafting tree. I picked Beastmaster (Well, of course I did.) but I have nothing to say about it yet because before you can use your whistle to get your pet to obey you, you have to tame the creature and to tame it you have to feed it and I can't.

It says in the description that you can either put food and water in a feeding trough or throw it on the ground but my wolf ignored anything I dropped next to it. I did a bit of research and it appears that method of feeding had already been proved not to work in animal breeding, a feature of the game I've never bothered with and from which some aspects of Beastmaster play have clearly been derived. 

 

Unfortunately, to make a feeding trough requires steel ingots and steel is several stages into the smelting process, meaning I need not only to have upgraded my smelting to that stage but also my ability to craft pickaxes. Steel is made from iron and you need a bronze pickax for that. 

Progression in Once Human is very fast so I had no issues with gaining the points required to open all the necessary nodes on the crafting tree but even with that done, I still have to go out, find some iron, mine enough of it, bring it back and smelt it (Along with some sintered bricks, also a few stages into the process.)  before I can make a trough to feed and water my wolf. Plus I need some metal parts from scavenging, which means either a lot of exploring or fighting...

Consequently, I am still a Beastmaster in name only, not yet having tamed a beast. It reminds me very much of becoming a Beastlord in EverQuest, when the class was first introduced and you had to slog through the first nine levels on your own before you were deemed fit to partner up with a pet. 

It doesn't help that, when I was playing yesterday, for some reason I still can't explain, I also picked two cooking specializations, which would very clearly have gone much better with the Chef class. It's all a bit of a mess and I'm wondering whether I might have to re-roll and start over. As I said, progress is really quick, so it wouldn't be very hard to catch up and at least I might have a better idea what I was doing this time.

The new scenario looks fun. It involves the dream plane invading reality and comes with a lot of hallucinogenic changes to the landscape, something Starry's artists seem to just love doing. It's one of the biggest attractions of the game for me because it means you barely have to touch the actual content itself to get the full impact of the spectacular visual changes. 

It's a very smart way of re-using the same zones over and over without either replacing them or removing the existing content. You're in the same place each time, with the same NPCs and quests and locations but there's a whole load of weird lighting effects or objects floating in the sky or bizarre weather and it freshens everything up no end.

It has a good deal to do with why I don't seem to mind having to start over all the time but I would still like to get settled on a permanent server so I didn't have to build a new house every time I come back. The 2.0 version of Once Human finally offers the combination I wanted all along - full map access and permanence - so hopefully this might be the endpoint for that journey.

There's an incredibly long and detailed set of patch notes covering the classes, the scenario and more that I won't even begin to try and summarize, let alone go through point by point. Once Human, always confusing structurally, now has so many twists and turns it's very hard to keep any of it straight.

It reminds me in a way of Fortnite, where the original concept was very simple and streamlined and then the developers just kept bolting more and more bits onto it until you couldn't tell what it was any more. I was put in mind of Epic's moneymaker when I clicked on a pop-up in Once Human yesterday, thinking it was going to take me to a dynamic event and it actually took me to the new Dreamland Wonder fairground, a large island instance filled with mini-games.

They're good games, too, some of them. I tried the jumping puzzle, which is visually spectacular and not impossibly difficult. I would have loved to take lots of pictures but I was pretty sure if I stopped to use the camera I'd have fallen off something so I only took a couple. Then I did a race, which was great fun and would have been better still if I'd realized it was a full-contact sport. I got knocked off my motorbike by another player not long after the start, which is my excuse for not finishing the course before the timer ran out.

What with all the scenarios running on separate servers and none of them ever going away and Eternaland and Dreamland and the seaside resort I forget the name of, Once Human is already starting to feel more like a game platform than a single, coherent game but I don't think that's a bad thing at all. 

Even though it sometimes seems it's been in spite of Starry's best efforts, I think Once Human is finally maturing into a very solid, entertaining, enjoyable experience. It has a large, stable population and a Very Positive rating from five thousand recent reviews on Steam, up from Mostly Positive from lifetime reviews. If you've wondered about trying it but have been concerned by the various, well-advertised issues, now might be a good time. 

When I wasn't playing Once Human this weekend, I was playing Crystal of Atlan. Why? Good question...

I suppose the obvious answer is "Because it's fun". And it is. It's cheerful, upbeat, colorful and fairly easy still, although not a complete cake-walk. Whatever the reason, it continues to be the icon my mouse pointer feels magnetically drawn towards every time I think I'd like to play something but don't quite know what.

Progress is trucking along comfortably. I dinged three times yesterday, finishing at Level 47. I now know there are sixty levels in total so a max level character doesn't feel out of the question. 

Not an awful lot happened while I was playing. The big news is I finally managed to get rid of the stupid maid outfit and replace it with something at least slightly less embarrassing. Now I look like I'm on a smoke break from the fortune-telling concession at the Renaissance Fayre but it's definitely an improvement. 

I bought the new outfit with one of the numerous in-game currencies. It was one of the most expensive items but I'd acquired enough coins without even trying so that's a positive for the way the game's been monetized.

Gameplay-wise, I finished Chapter Three of the MSQ and started Chapter Four. The storyline isn't very subtle or complex but it's entertaining enough to keep me engaged. 

I did get some laughs out of Conrad, a senior member of the Church, who I had pegged for a villain almost the moment he opened his mouth. His explanations for his experiments on an innocent bunny rabbit, which he was claiming were intended to heal the injuries said rabbit sustained while helping me in a dungeon (Don't ask...) were so obviously sociopathic I was literally shouting at the screen. I'd say the way no-one else saw through him beats me only it doesn't. I know exactly why that was - everyone is either gullible or innocent to the point of imbecility.

One odd thing that happened was that for some reason I started clicking my mouse pointer on the hotbar icons for my skills instead of using the keyboard as I had been doing. CoA is one of those equal-opportunity games that has action controls and tab-target hotkeys and doesn't care which you use. 

In the old days I'd always have clicked but it's an indication of just how many action games I've played that I didn't even think of playing that way until yesterday. When I got to doing it, clicking felt... I don't know... the same? Maybe better but not really? It wasn't a big difference either way, that's about the only thing I'm sure of.

I did a lot of dungeons and beat all the bosses, except one, without having to use a Revive potion, which is a very good result for me. The game is clearly designed to allow you to brute force your way through dungeons, using a potion to get up every time the boss kills you, putting you back at full health but leaving them still wherever they were. There doesn't seem to be a limit on how many times you can do it in a single fight, although I haven't tested it. Three times is the most I've needed in the game so far. Once has mostly been enough.

If I can beat the boss without a revive, I call it a clean win. All but one of my wins yesterday were clean, even if some were very close calls. My feeling is that I would have died a couple more times if I'd been using the keys instead of clicking because I think I was timing my attacks better with a click and on those close fights even one good combo that might not have landed otherwise could have made the difference. 

Hard to be sure but I think I'll stick with the clicks for a while. It's all still at least 80% button-mashing, however I do it, so let's not get any ideas I know what I'm doing.

How much gaming I'll be doing this week remains to be seen. The weather forecast is very different. Lots of sunshine and getting hotter and hotter. I suspect that will mean less time at the PC although it's possible it might even get too hot to want to be outside for a while so my preferences might all loop round and come back in on themselves. 

Whatever the weather, one game will still get its due time every day. Those Overseer dailies have to be done, rain or shine.