One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

Friday grab-bag on Friday! Amazing! It was going to be a music post, mostly because I checked my files and found nearly sixty tunes queued up in there but that's going to take a deal of winnowing and I don't have the time right now. 

Then again, if I leave it, it's only going to get worse...

Never mind. On with the motley.

Nice Hat!

Speaking of motley, I got my jester's hat for completing the new Bristlebane instance three times. That was easy. The hard part is going to be figuring out who's going to wear it. You have to have a certain kind of personality to get away with a look like that and it's not the kind I like to promote in my characters. Still, I imagine there'll be someone.

Sticking with EverQuest II, how about that Producer's Letter, eh? It doesn't add a huge amount of new information to the last one but boy, does it slap some hefty content on the table. 

I've been flipping through some of the threads on the beta forum for the upcoming Game Update 125 aka Darkpaw Rising and the vibe is positive. Someone's done a rough guide to the content, which I won't link to because I think the beta forums are supposed to be Members Only, and it sounds like there's a lot. Apparently there are a couple of dozen quests and they can't all be completed in a single run through the new instance. There are more than thirty named mobs in there with drops, too.

Interestingly, there's also a tradeskill questline and some of the aforementioned named mobs require crafted items just to reach the locations where they hang out. The whole thing is set in the Splitpaw dungeon from the eponymous adventure pack that came out in 2005. That place was always a nightmare to navigate but it was also very popular. It'll be fun to go back and do it all over again but differently.

The Big News, though, has to be the new Time Limited Server coming in May. It looks disconcertingly like EQII's own version of WoW Classic, if you squint. When you look closely, though, you'll notice it isn't taking us right back to the start of the game because, frankly, the game when it began was a mess. I was there and unlike some I do not want to relive that difficult, exhausting, distressing experience.

Luckily for me, the new server is skipping right over all that and settling on the recovery that took place a year or so later, after Scott Hartsman had been parachuted in to save the game. As I remember it, things were still have pretty tough even in 2006 but the most unforgivable of the short-sighted design decisions had been reversed by then, or at least had their vicious spikes blunted and the roughest of the rough edges sanded down, so it was possible to imagine you were engaged in something that was at least intended to be entertaining.

We'll see how it stands up to my memories, although I note that a careful reading of the announcement indicates that "gameplay will be reflective of the 2006 era" (My emphasis.) so anyone expecting a perfect, note for note recreation had better keep working on that time machine.

Either way, it sounds like an opportunity not to be missed. I'll be there for the event if nothing else. I can guarantee it will be packed at launch, both with bitter vets looking to pick holes and with rose-tinted nostalgists seeking to regain their lost youth. How long any of them will stick around is another matter but WoW Classic did alright so it might work...

I Keep On Knocking...

I spent much of this morning first trying to log into and then working through the introduction of the third beta test for Once Human. Although I had no trouble downloading the new client, I had a heck of a job getting the new Netease launcher to play nice. I really dislike these Publisher Portals. They're never any better than a straightforward , dedicated game launcher and all too often worse.

While I was looking up old passwords and trying to work out what email address I used last time, I did at least manage to solve the issue of why no-one had bothered to tell me, a registered player in the last test, when, or even that, another beta was coming. Simple answer? They did send an email but it went into my spam folder. Why that happens to some emails, when other emails from the exact same address, covering almost the exact same topic don't, I have no idea but it's very annoying.

Not as annoying, however, as having to spend the best part of half an hour fiddling with settings and trying everything from Google to Discord to get the launcher to accept my login. In the end I got in via Discord, which probably means I'm now on a new account. 

That wouldn't matter much in a beta except that I believe there are thank-you freebies waiting for anyone who played in the previous test. I might still get those - I do apparently have mail waiting for me in game -  but Once Human takes a very old school stance on in-game mail. You have to go to an actual mail-box to collect it. Since the first one I know of is in a town you don't see until you're about Level 10, it might be a while before I collect whatever's waiting for me.

Wary of the proposed cut-off for making characters (Midnight tonight or after the first 150,000, whichever comes first.) I rushed through character creation as soon as I was able to get in, figuring I could always come back later and make someone I was happier with, if the first didn't work out. OH's character creation is pretty good, though, so I was able to get someone I liked well enough in a matter of minutes. Well, a quarter of an hour, which is lightning-fast for me...

Having logged in, I couldn't stop myself from playing through the excellent introduction, which doesn't seem to have changed much since last time, although I'll have to go back and read my First Impressions pieces so I can compare. I do know I had no trouble at all finding a place to set up home this time, something I remember being a right pain back in December.

After about an hour and a half I had to drag myself away to make lunch. I was very impressed with Once Human last time around and I fully expect to be even more so this time. I think it's likely to be pretty successful come launch, unless they get too fancy and over-complicate things.

Tempting, but...

The two games that occupied most of the first quarter of this year for me, Palworld and Nightingale, both dropped updates this week but I can't see either of them enticing me back, at least for the moment. 

Nightingale's was just a small patch with some bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements but one of those QoLs was pretty huge: 

"Removal of 'Death Chests': dying in 0.1.3 will now only cause loss of durability, food buffs and time. This should make death/respawning less frustrating for Realmwalkers"

Stripped of the jargon, that means no more corpse runs. Latterly, I haven't been dying much - or at all - so it's a moot point for me now but in earlier stages, getting my stuff back was a major pain. Not sure why any dev team ever imagines it's a mechanic players want. I think just about every game I've ever played that had it at the start either took it out pretty quickly or made it optional. They could save themselves a lot of grief by just leaving it out in the first place. And I say that as one of the minority that somewhat enjoys a good CR!

Palworld's update was a lot more substantive. I read the full patch notes yesterday and there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, from numerous bug fixes, graphic and audio improvements to significant  improvements to gameplay. The headline though is the introduction of the game's first Raid Boss.

Unless it was mandatory, non-consensual PvP, I find it hard to think of an addition to the game that would appeal to me less than a Raid Boss. For one thing, when I was playing I was playing solo on a private shard so who would I raid with? For another, I already find the combat the least interesting thing about Palworld. Why would I want more of it but harder?

Luckily, I don't have to log in and try it out for myself to report back on what I don't like about it. I can just link to Tipa instead. As she found out, a "Raid" in Palworld doesn't require any other real players. Just you and a small army of Pals. It sounds about as much fun as those really irritating "base raids" I turned off after the first week, only not that much fun. 

I won't be picking Palworld back up to try it but I am a little more inclined to imagine a return when Pocketpair drops the big one this summer. 

 "We are planning a larger, more content-packed update for summer 2024.
Enjoy never-before-seen scenery and thrilling adventures on a new island, home to many new pals.
In addition, we plan to add a large amount of new content including new buildings, weapons, and tower bosses."

That does sound tempting, providing I can overcome my moral discomfiture with the game in general. I was a little surprised to hear they  were going to leave it that long but I imagine the runaway success of the game took them by surprise and now they're scrambling to come up with a forward plan.

Talking of moral quandaries, that other supposedly cozy, non-combat game, Palia, where I spent most of my time shooting deer, looks like it might be in trouble. The sheer number of cozy/twee/crafting/survival games flooding onto the market right now makes it hard to stand out but Palia did have a lot of positive hype pre-launch so if it's under-performing it's most likely down to the less-than-compulsive gameplay. There's cozy and then there's stultifying.

Well, It's Artificial, I'll Give You That Much

Survival games do look like the exact sort of thing you could train an AI to produce, don't they? Even as made by humans they do all have a very similar look and feel. Before long, I suspect we might look back on this time of glut as a trough not a peak.

Wilhelm posted an excellent rant on the current state of AI, which then generated a mighty comment thread full of essays and personal statements. I imagine everyone who comes here has already seen it but if not, you have a treat in store.

I thought I was done writing about AI at least until something new turned up and I was... but now it has so here we go again. I like to finish up these portmanteau posts with a tune. This time I'm going to throw in a couple I wrote myself although I guess "wrote" should be in quotes there.

I've tried a bunch of AI music generators over the last year or so and they've all been disappointing. This one is not. It's called Suno and it's terrifying.

Here's the first song I made with Suno. It's called Lazy Sunday in Seaside Gray, which is a name Suno made up, not me. I typed in "Twee/C86 style song about a slow Sunday at a decaying seaside town" and in about thirty seconds, here's what came out. 

Firstly, I was impressed it even knew what I meant by "Twee/C86". I bet most people reading this blog don't, unless they learned it from reading this blog. If you're not familiar with the genre, it sounds pretty much exactly like that.

Secondly, I was a lot more impressed by how convincing the AI was. I'm pretty sure I could make a quick video for that song from some old camcorder holiday footage, come up with a likely band name (The Wood Anemones, perhaps, or The Closed Wednesdays.) and slip it into one of my music posts and no-one would be any the wiser.

By far the weakest element is the lyrics, although I've seen plenty worse written by supposed human beings. That part gets farmed out to ChatGPT and comes back exactly like you'd expect. I believe if you subscribe, you can upload your own lyrics and just have Suno do the music and the singing, which is a service I might even consider paying for.

I've played around with it a bit since then and the results are disturbingly consistent. I didn't rate the attempt at hyperpop all that highly but the sixties' girl group and seventies' funk numbers sounded unnervingly authentic. 

You get enough free credits to make several songs a day and each prompt returns two options, one of which always seemed obviously better. You also get a nice little AI illustration to use on your imaginary record sleeve. I did try to find out more about how it all works but the makers are keeping unsurprisingly quiet about the precise details.

What's clear is that a process like this could flood the existing streaming platforms with ersatz music of every genre to the point that no-one would ever be able to find anything real again. I imagine there are guards in place to stop that. 

There must be. Right?

Here's another I made earlier and then I'll get out of your hair.