NTE – Progression and Gacha mechanics

Last time I pretty much only talked about the extremely well-designed world I’d had the pleasure to explore in Neverness to Everness, so now let’s focus on what the game actually is, shall we?

At its core this is an anime-style open world RPG with gacha mechanics to acquire new characters and weapons. If you’ve played Genshin Impact, for instance, you’ll have a good idea of what to expect in terms of character- and account-progression, daily routines and gacha systems.

Actually, you’ll know exactly what to expect for the most part. Seriously, I’m still astonished by how extremely alike gacha games are mechanically (at least the ones I’ve played), even if the actual gameplay hails from completely different genres.

The similarities really are manifold, but I’ll give just one example.

To make a character stronger you can raise their own level, as well as that of their weapon and skills. Every ten or twenty levels you also have to “ascend” them before you can increase their level any further. Doing all of these things requires various materials in ever increasing quantities, which you have to farm by killing enemies in the open world and (mostly) by beating certain mini-dungeons or bosses and then spending Stamina to claim the rewards.

Stamina, called Character Pixels here, regenerates slowly over time and is the main tactic these games employ to make you log in and do stuff every day. Fortunately NTE lets us increase the cap to 36 hours’ worth of Pixels though, so there’s not quite as much pressure to go and spend some all the time.

So what I’m saying is, while the finer details may vary, the overall mechanics follow established gacha game standards to a T. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing you’ll have to decide for yourself.

As for differences, I really like the combat in this game. When I played Zenless Zone Zero, for example, I felt too restricted in terms of team-building, and the harder fights basically demanded to rotate my characters and execute their combos perfectly, which I’m neither good at nor really interested in.

NTE allows four characters in a team, not just three, and the interdependencies, while certainly there, aren’t so powerful that you absolutely have to stick specific units together. Unless you want to have a go at the hardest content in the game (which is a carbon copy of Genshin’s Spiral Abyss) you can totally just use the four characters you like the most.

Another strong point of NTE’s combat is how awesome it looks. The characters are beautifully animated, and I especially like that many of them (basically all of the S-Ranks, I believe) have two-colored effects for their attacks. I almost caved and rolled for Nanally, although I’d decided early on that I’d skip the first couple banners, just because I like her color scheme, a mix of red and teal, so much.

Enemy types are pretty rad, too. We’re so used to fighting some variation of goblins, dragons and other fantasy tropes – beating up trash cans, record players and other curiosities feels quite novel.

I prefer NTE’s artifact system over the competition’s, too.

For reference, in Genshin or ZZZ you usually have to look for very specific combinations of properties – Correct set, correct slot, desired main stat, desired sub-stats. Even if you do find such a unicorn you then need to pray that only the most important sub-stats get increased when you level the piece up. It’s RNG-hell with a frosting of even more RNG.

NTE is considerably more lenient, for which I’m very grateful, and it’s also much more fun mechanically.

First of all, which set-bonuses a character can get is determined by only one item, called Console. To activate these bonuses you then have to equip four specific shapes of “Tetris pieces”, called Modules. In my experience that’s not overly hard, as a) there’s usually enough space for six or seven of them, so you can easily make up for a couple bad ones early on, and b) modules don’t have a main stat except for some flat attack and flat defense, meaning that only their shape and sub-stats are relevant.

To me the most impactful difference however is that random increases to sub-stats aren’t a thing here. When a piece drops, whether it’s a console or a module, you can always see which four sub-stats it has, and also exactly how much of a bonus you’ll get to each of those stats when levelled up.

Now, I’m sure some folks prefer the other system, because it allows – at least in theory – for overall higher bonuses to, say, Crit Rate and Crit Damage. Me, I can absolutely do without the repeated disappointment of having a potentially great piece drop, only to see everything go to hell when levelling it up, thank you very much.

Now let’s have a look at the gacha systems.

I’m a bit hesitant to call NTE “generous” because…well…it is a gacha game, and you absolutely can spend hundreds, even thousands of bucks if you so desire. They do some things differently than their peers though, and it would be remiss not to mention those.

The most talked-about feature is the lack of a 50/50 – and rightly so.

In most gacha games, when you pull on a limited character banner and you hit an S-Rank, there’s only a 50/50 chance to actually get the limited character. If you lose that roll you randomly get one of the standard banner S-Ranks instead. Usually the next S-Rank is then guaranteed to be the limited unit, but at that point you may well have spent currency worth north of a hundred bucks already. So not having that 50/50 is obviously a pretty big deal.

The weapon banners are a different story, because you only have a 25% chance for an S-Rank to be the limited one, unless you go all the way to hard pity at, I believe, 70.

However, there’s quite a selection of S-Rank weapons that can be earned via gameplay to compensate, and they’re no sham. All six standard S-Rank units, as well as the main character and various A-Ranks, can use one of these weapons to great effect and won’t ever need an upgrade (as far as I can tell and at the time of writing).

Speaking of the main character – they’re really good! I know, this should be a given, right? Well, other gacha games beg to differ, so it was rather unexpected and all the more welcome here.

So, yeah, overall I’m pretty satisfied with things.

That being said, we might be in for the game’s first big controversy. Next week version 1.1 will arrive on global servers. As China is one week ahead of us we already know what’s coming, which is, among other things, a Porsche collab.

Now, we already knew that, and also that we’d be able to get a cosmetic outfit and a car (duh!) during that event. However, since it’s already live in China we also know that those shinies will only by available via another gacha system, and the rates…aren’t great. While it’s good to know that we can also spend Fons (an ingame-currency) instead of funny money, the cost for pulls combined with the extremely low chances are a pretty big downer.

If you don’t play the game this will mean nothing to you, but we’re talking about almost 13k Annulith or 20 million (!) Fons, worst case scenario, to get both car and outfit. For reference, with that amount of Annulith you can pull 81 times on any normal banner. At that price tag the fact that a total of 13 standard banner dice are among the rewards isn’t much of a solace.

I don’t think this will get changed at all over here, but I’m still curious how big of a pushback they’ll get from their western audience, if any.

Meanwhile I’ll just sit here and look forward to more of that awesome city to explore and enjoy.