You're No Pal Of Mine!

As the title of yesterday's post made painfully clear, I blew all my saved-up ideas in one unnecessarily lengthy Grab Bag with the predictable consequence that today I have nothing to write about. 

Okay, "nothing" is a strong word. Also not remotely accurate. I have a whole slew of things I could write about but none of them is suitable for the hour or two I have available to put something together. 

So I'm not going to bother. I'm going to say one thing about a gaming event, get AI to make me a header image, stick a song on the tail-end and call it done. Pathetic, isn't it?

Let's start with the gaming thing. One of the games I'm theoretically but not actually still playing is Once Human. I went on and on about how much better it'd be if they'd just give us permanent servers where we could settle down like it was a regular MMORPG and then they did and I pretty much never logged in again.

I still have OH installed and, I think, updated, so I could go back at any moment. I just need a push. And now I have one. Or I will have, in about a month's time.

Once Human is hosting a collaboration with... Palworld. I know! It sounds nuts, doesn't it? Until you think about it.

Apart from one looking like it was designed by a sugared-up eight-year old and the other by a teenage techno-goth, the two games are really quite similar. They're both open world survival games with a large building component and most importantly they both rely very heavily on capturing creatures and putting them to work.

In Palworld it's Pals. In Once Human it's Deviants. Pals roam around your home. Deviants roam around your home. Pals come with you and fight stuff. Deviants come with you and fight stuff. Pals let you do things you couldn't otherwise do. Deviants...

You get the idea. The mechanics are really very similar indeed and so are the results. Luckily for Starry, the studio behind Once Human, they didn't make it so you have you catch Deviants by throwing small spheres at them from a distance. No, you walk up to the Deviant, which is already inside a sphere, and you catch it by holding up your hand, which is entirely different.

I'm not clear on whether the  event is a one-way deal, with Pals appearing in Once Human but not the other way around, or whether Deviants will also be popping up in Palworld. Even if it's the latter, I doubt very much it would be enough to induce me to go back, even for a visit. Palworld is the open world survival game I liked the least of all the ones I've played, although even then I liked it more than that suggests. It was fun. Just not as much fun as all the others. 

I also very much doubt a brief return to check out this event will get me to spend much time in Once Human. I seem to be finding it very hard to stick at any games just now. There does seem to be a lot going on in OH, though, what with this, a new scenario and some more Vision Wheel shenanigans, so who knows? With all of that, something might click.

Another game I'm eyeing up just now is Erenshor, the solo MMORPG. I played the demo and enjoyed it but I never followed it up. It's been in Early Access for a while and there's supposed to be a big patch today that changes a whole lot of systems and mechanics so this might be a good time to start. 

I'm wondering if I might do better with something like this than with an actual MMORPG right now. I'm assuming Erenshor, unlike an actual MMO, allows you to pause or stop at a moment's notice, which is one of the main things that puts me off playing most of the games I usually enjoy. I'm wary of starting anything that can't be easily interrupted these days. 

What I really should be doing, gaming-wise, is getting back to Wuthering Waves, of course. There's yet another content drop coming. I could have embedded that video too and the one before but I haven't watched either of them for fear of spoilers. I took all that trouble to catch up and the moment I got there, I stopped playing and fell behind again. I should probably prioritize that instead of starting anything new.

That's about all I have for today and it's more than I thought I had. 

Let's finish with a song. Not one of mine. Still pondering how best to present those. Ihave more than a hundred now, which is a problem all of its own. 

How about an old favorite I'm not sure we've had on the blog before.

Blurry Moon - Charlotte Gainsbourg

That's Charlotte Gainsbourg's first new song since 2018, which predates the appearance of regular music features on IF, explaining why she's not appeared here before. (Actually, I just checked and she kind of has but only as the featured artist on Jim Jarmusch's band SQÜRL's John Ashberry Takes A Walk, on which she speaks and doesn't sing.)

And also, of course, in that whole post I did about Merci La Vie.

 Pretentious? Moi?

Time to stop before I say something embarassing about post-structuralism.

 

AI used in this post.

Just the header image, which was generated at NightCafe using the very annoyingly-named HiDream |1 Dev. What is it with that vertical downstroke I always have to peer at my keyboard to find? 

The prompt, taken directly from the text, was ""you walk up to the Deviant, which is already inside a larger sphere, and you catch it by holding up your hand", line art, color, retro". Default settings. 

I then trimmed the top and bottom because I forgot to change the format to 4:3. And then I ran it through Dithermark just for the hell of it.

Close observers will have noticed the hand has six fingers. I thought the good image generators were past all that now but obviously not. Then again, it isn't clear the hand is human, so there's a get-out if needed. 

 

I Could Have Made Three Legit Posts Out Of This. When Will I Ever Learn?

Friday is the traditional Grab Bag day around here but I'm not convinced I'll have time for one tomorrow and I do have a few random thoughts I could do with clearing out of the bottom drawer of my mind, so Thursday it is. There's no theme and I don't have any plan so we'll see where we end up. 

Of course, if, as so often happens, some kind of structure emerges as I go along, I'll come back and edit this so it looks like it's what I meant to do all along. And no-one will ever know. [Evil laughter...]

Where shall we begin? Better not start with anything to do with AI or there'll be people who who'll never read any further. Probably shouldn't even have mentioned it.

 How about this?

Ananta

I'd never heard of Ananta until Nimgimli posted about it a couple of days ago. (Fake News!! I posted about it last December but I only realized it when I went to add a tag and found there was one there already.) MassivelyOP followed up with a news item about it the next day, by which time I'd already been to the official website to register my interest. Or "Pre-Register" as they put it. 

I mean, who wouldn't, after watching this?

That's seven minutes of action I find hard to believe is taken directly from the game. But it is, apparently. Obviously it's been edited but as far as I can tell everything you see is gameplay footage.

And so is this, which just landed on YouTube. 

That's ten minutes of "Official Extended Gameplay" that absolutely looks like a movie. Specifically, the center-piece car chase from a pretty good movie. A movie I would certainly watch. 

My question isn't "Is this game going to be any good?" or "Will it be Pay-to-Win?" or any of those obvious things gamers always ask. It's not even "Will it run on my aging PC?", although that's a valid concern. 

No, my question is "How the hell is that even possible?" Apart from the oddly stilted walking animations, the video looks like a bunch of clips from a movie. MOP described it as a "sizzle reel" and that's really what it is. 

After watching it, I found myself thinking back to something that happened more than thirty years ago, which I've never forgotten. I happened to go into large store in a nearby city and I was walking through the electronics department when I saw, on a large screen (For those days.), a video game playing. It was a castle in a fantasy forest and it looked like just a movie. 

I never found out what the game was or what it was running on and I can't even remember now how I knew it was a game not a film. I'm pretty sure if I could see it now it would look like something you'd see in a PS1game. It probably was a PS1 game. It would have been around that time. Whatever it was, it looked like the future. Well, it looked like the past, what with it being a fantasy castle and all, but the past seen through the lens of the future.

 

Technologically, we are all living in the future now and we take it for granted. Things we pay no attention to or even get anoyed by today would have seemed like literal, actual magic just thirty years ago. If I find it hard to believe something like Ananta can even be real today, imagine how I'd have felt if I could have watched that trailer in 1995!

Something I hear often these days is that improved graphics can only take the games industry so far and that the limit may already have been reached. And that's probably true, as far as it goes. But what's hard to believe about this trailer isn't so much the visual quality, impressive though it is; it's the world-building. 

That's what draws me in to all of these new games, all these new worlds, from Wuthering Waves to Neverness To Everness to Ananta: their cinematic, novelistic storytelling. I see clips and I want to know who the characters are, what their lives are like, what they're doing. It's not new but it seems like it's new. It's the new future of our long, storytelling past.

Also, someone's bound to be wearing bunny ears in one of these things and that's always a bonus. I'd say you don't see that in real life but I saw two people wearing bunny ears in the street only this week...

On MMORPGs And Why They're Kinda Done

As big, mass-market affairs, that is. Not as small to medium sized niche services servicing small to medium size niches. They're still good there.

It was something Redbeard said in response to Wilhelm's post about Ship of Heroes yesterday that started me thinking. For some reason, the conversation took a detour into Guild Wars 2 and how a big part of the revenue system there relies on persuading players to part with cash to remove the inconveniences the devs have added in, seemingly for that exact purpose. 

It's a well-known mechanic in many MMOs. The very unpopular version is to put up obvious pay-walls for in-game services and systems most players believe should be part of the core gameplay. Star Wars: the Old Republic used to be the leader in that awkward field, charging money for everything up to and including enough hot bars to fit your skills. 

They toned that down over time and recently they've cut it right back to something closer to what players expected in the first place. It still leaves a whole lot of less controversial money-making opportunities in place, though, one of which is always storage.

GW2 has always had a serious storage problem. The game isn't overly generous with inventory space to begin with but it does allow you to expand it in various ways, all of which are technically free. As Redbeard points out, though, its much, much easier to get out your credit card and pay.

I never did and that's because I played GW2 like an old-school MMORPG. I played for a decade, virtually every day, often for several hours at a time. Just playing normally and not spending any real money, I ended up with a huge amount of inventory space across multiple accounts and characters. On my most-played characters I had all the bag and bank slots you were allowed. I hit the point where even real money wouldn't have gotten me any more and I hadn't paid a dime. 

It still wasn't enough. I made bigger bags and that wasn't enough. Nothing was ever enough. GW2 doesn't just have a storage problem, it has a loot problem. There's far, far, far too much of it. 

Which is also the key to not spending any money on storage. You have the choice, as Wilhelm suggests, of just throwing everything away. That'll fix it for free and right away. Or you can sell all of the good stuff you find and use the gold to buy Gems, the cash shop currency, then use those Gems to buy more storage space, which is what I did.

People complain all the time about not being able to make enough gold in GW2. I made thousands, easily. I still have most of it because I made far more than I ever needed. I didn't make any special effort, either. I had just two tricks for making gold:

1. Never, ever make any Legendaries. Sell all the mats for them you find to to those who do.
2. Play every hour god sends

The first isn't a problem. It's just sensible. No-one needs Legendary items in GW2. They do nothing for gameplay. They're convenience items and cosmetics. Let others waste their time and pay you for the privilege.

The second is the reason MMORPGs are and always will be a niche interest. They absolutely do not respect your time. 

Redbeard has inventory problems he can only, rationally, solve by paying real money because he doesn't play GW2 several hours a day, every day, year in, year out. If he did, the problem would solve itself, at least until there were no more slots left to buy with all that gold.

All MMORPGs are designed to be played for several hours a day, every day, forever. That's the business model. The reason the genre is being lapped by open-world RPGs and survival games is that those offer the same level of intensity and immersion that made MMORPGs successful in the first place but they don't go on forever and ever and ever like an eternal treadmill. They don't necessarily come with a Game Over title card but they have clear end-points that feel like a satisfying place to stop. And they have clear on-ramps every time they add DLC or major updates, meaning you can dip in and out without worrying about falling far behind.

Or something. It's a theory. I haven't really thought it through. Feel free to elaborate and iterate on it.

AI Ruins Everything

That's made a lot of people happy, I bet. I don't mean that it does. I mean that I said it. Do I mean it, though? Depends what you mean by "AI", doesn't it?

Greg Morris, whose blog I picked up in Blaugust, has a good take on it. He, like me, isn't existentially opposed to AI. He sees some merits and uses, as do I. He's just not very impressed with what people are doing with it just now.

"Widespread usage of generative products, particularly ChatGPT, by many people I come in contact with is making my life more difficult" he says. 

Yes, mine too. All of ours, I bet.

Like Greg, I am not as sanguine as I could be about my doctor's surgery moving to an AI triage system. Neither am I convinced that having AI answer the phone when I call to try and buy something is the best way of handling a commercial transaction. Unlike Greg, I'm happy to say I don't encounter AI in my work although no doubt it's only a matter of time, but I have very low confidence in any of the current LLMs being able to send emails that wouldn't have gotten me into trouble if I'd written them.

What I do think, perhaps over-optimistically, is that the AIs will either have to get a lot better or most of the companies and services that have adopted them so quickly will have to drop them again pretty quickly too, probably as soon as they notice how much money they're losing and how many lawsuits they're picking up. Those No Win No Fee lawyers must just love AI.

This is all LLMs, though. They're the bad AIs. Generative AI as a whole may be morally and ethically bad but only some of it is practically bad, too. The real problem with the rest is that it's getting to be too good at what it does. 

 

I've been a fan of line art since I was a child. I've spent well over half a century developing a fairly well-trained eye and a reasonably informed, historical understanding of line art and illustration, particularly comics. I have a reliably-formatted emotional and aesthetic reaction to every such image I see that allows me to parse it and contextualize it by way of decades of exposure.

And I like some of the AI images I'm seeing these days as well as or better than many, many similar pictures I've seen that were drawn by humans. Humans draw a lot of really bad line art and a lot of them don't know how bad it is. 

It doesn't matter if I know an image is by AI, either. It doesn't put me off. The image is the image (cf. Intentional Fallacy, as always.) It's not like I'm being tricked into thinking a human did it. AI images of a certain kind stimulate the same level of endorphin production or synaptic snap or whatever it is that makes me look at a line drawing and get a warm, tingly feeling. 

Doubly so if it's one I've caused to be made myself.

If I was making my living by drawing pictures, that would piss me off. Or maybe it wouldn't. Maybe I'd just see AI as a new kind of pencil and start drawing with it. At the moment, there's resistance to commissioned AI art but will that attitude last? In the end, don't people mostly want the right image for the purpose they've commissioned it? Is the provenance of the picture that important? And if your primary (Or ancillary.) motivation is to give work to the artist, does that have anything at all to do with aesthetics?

To some people, yes, obviously. But to the mass market? I doubt it. And I was never going to commission anyone to draw anything anyway so it's a moot point as far as my money is concerned.

The same applies to generative AI and music, another field where I can claim a longstanding interest. Or at least it applies to music I've made with AI, which I currently prefer to listen to over almost anything else. 

I have to say that I have yet to hear anything made by anyone else using AI that has the same impact. Most of it is horrible. But I suspect that says more about the musical tastes of the people who are making it than the capacity and potential of the AIs. When people who like the kind of music I like start making music with AI, I'm pretty sure I'll find plenty to enjoy.

Always assuming I even know, that is. If people don't say they used AI, who's going to know? 

There are some free apps around that purport to be able to tell if a song has been made by AI or not. I tried a couple. I'd give you the links but I forgot to bookmark them.

One is extremely accurate but that one works by analyzing the frequencies of the sample you submit rather than trying to make any aesthetic judgments. It's undeniable that AI has a particular sonic signature you can hear once your ear attunes to it and there's a technical accuracy to the timing that human musicians don't always achieve. I imagine that could be coded out if the people making AI wanted to hide it. 

That app, unsurprisingly, pegged everything I sent it as having been made by AI. Which it was. I should have dummied it with some human music but I was just dicking around, not running some kind of double-blind experiment.

The other app, which attempts something more along the lines of a critical analysis, looking at things like the structure and the lyrics as well as the music, was much less certain whether an AI was involved or not. It tended to think most of the songs I was sending it were mostly done by a human. 

And so they were. I wrote all the words. I came up with all the melodies. I gave the AI a guide vocal, which I made sure the AI followed very closely. In my opinion, those songs were indeed made by a human. A human using AI as an instrument.

I suspect most of the AI music being made doesn't have that degree of human input behind it, though. An astonishing amount of AI music is being uploaded to streaming sites every day. Millions of songs. Almost all of them made purely by AI from a short prompt. 

You can see why the platforms might want to filter it out. Except, if their customers are happily listening to it, why would they bother? 

Bad pushes out good is the old saw. But what if the bad gets good and the good isn't as good as all that?  

If We're All Sitting Comfortably... 

Gemini has a new trick. It'll make a picture-book for you. I was curious so I fed it the basic plot, such as it is, of a little series of vignettes I wrote in the 'nineties. It's the last of the fiction I'm turning into songs so it was in my thoughts at the time.

Gemini did an okay job. I've seen considerably worse published picture books in my time as a bookseller. I can definitely imagine using it to make picture books for small children, who'd absolutely love to see their pets or friends appearing in an illustrated story-book.

I think if I was going to produce an illustrated book of something I'd written, though, I'd keep my own prose and have one of the really good image generators produce the pictures. This is a bit gimmicky in my opinion.

If you want to take a look at the whole thing, here's the link. Don't expect too much. 

And here's a song I made from using the same source material. It's rather better, I hope you'll agree. 

 

Notes on AI Used in this post

Some of this is explained in the text but to be clear, the final image is from Gemini's newish storybook feature. The full prompt for the whole thing was an ad hoc precis of a whole series of fictional pieces I published in an APA back in the 90s. At some point I will be posting the originals, complete with the infinitely superior full text and collaged illustrations, so if you have any interest, you might want to wait for that:

 "Please make me a picture book for adults about a girl called Phoebe, aged about 12 or 13, who lives in a rambling old house with a walled garden. She shares the house and garden with a girl in her late teens called Cat, a young woman of indefinable age called Cathy and a woman in her early thirties called Rachel. Phoebe has never left the house and garden. She has no memories of ever being anywhere else. She thinks she had a brother but she doesn't really remember him. She reads, plays chess with Cat, and just generally gets through the day. She believes Cat and Cathy are ghosts. She believes she's a half-ghost. She believes Rachel is fully real. Cat is friendly and kind to her. Cathy is drifty and vague but unafraid of anything and protective of Phoebe. Rachel is often angry because she wants to leave to get back to her friends, about whom she often talks, but she doesn't know how to leave. Rachel, when she's in a good mood, creates firework displays and makes snow fall so she and Phoebe can build snow statues of Rachel's absent friends. One day, after this has been going on for a long time, two of Rachel's friends, Sally and Cado Babe, appear in the garden and soon after they and Rachel are gone. Phoebe is left on her own with Cat and Cathy. She wonders now if she, too, will ever leave. " 

The header image and the second one were both done with Google's Imagen 4.0 at NightCafe. For some reason, instead of taking a couple of screenshots from the Ananta videos, I thought it would be amusing to have an AI make them instead. The prompt for the top image was "An anime girl dressed in blue with bunny ears riding in an electric blue sports car along a freeway between the towering skyscrapers of a near-future city. Bright sunshine, blue sky. Anime line art, bright flat colors." For the second, I used the same prompt but added "A dark-haired young man wearing sunglasses is beside her in the passenger seat." All settings were left on whatever the defaults are.

The third image is one of the daily pictures I'm still producing to keep my NightCafe streak going. I'm still using the same prompt I posted about, "Walking through corn fields Covered in dust Lost in this dustbowl young female figure, old, worn clothing, line art, color, retro-futurism". This image was made with Qwen Image SD.

Welcome To Ship Of Heroes. Come Aboard. There's Plenty Of Room! No, Seriously. There Really Is...

It's always an exciting day when a new MMORPG launches, isn't it? People take time off work or call in sick just to be part of that launch-day crowd. No-one wants to miss out on an event that might be something people talk about for years.

Of course, there are risks. The servers often buckle under the load. Even when the devs have been diligent with stress testing and allowances have been made for the crush, they always somehow seem to underestimate the demand.

Even if the servers stay up, there are bound to be queues. We've all seen the screenshots - #6,427 in line: estimated waiting time two hours and counting.  

If only there was a way to ensure anyone who wanted to play could get into the game quickly and easily, without having to go through all those hassles...

Guess what? There is! Here's how you do it...

Charge $60 for the (Non-existent.) box and demand fifteen dollars a month to keep on playing after the first thirty days! That ought to do it!

Ah, but is it enough? If your game is really good and has fantastic word of mouth and the streamers are all plugging it like crazy and you've picked out a spot in the market where there's no direct competition, maybe you'll still find yourself overwhelmed by hordes of frantic players throwing money at you.

So, just to be safe, why not go head-to-head with the free-to-play game that inspired the one you just spent years on? And why not make sure your AAA-priced version of that familiar title looks like "a relic of a bygone era", specifically "the early 00's". Make sure it's "worse than games released 2 decades ago" and be sure it plays "like a student project or an alpha build with a bunch of placeholders for real icons, graphics, sound effects, systems, and so on".  

Not my words, just a few choice quotes from the Steam reviews, where Ship of Heroes (Aww - you guessed...) is currently enjoying a rating of Mostly Negative from forty-eight reviews. 

And since everyone really loves AI these days, especially gamers, why not use it instead of actual actors for your NPC voice acting? That last allegation appears to have been disputed by the developers but the general impression is that the voice acting is "awful" no matter whether humans or machines are doing it, so it probably doesn't matter much either way. 

With all of that in place (And a lot more besides.) it's safe to assume your players won't run into any of those all-too-familiar launch day issues. Your servers will almost certainly be able to withstand the strain of the teens of people willing to stump up the cost of Baldurs Gate 3 for a chance to play "a buggy mess" for a month before having to get their credit cards out once more for the right to carry on.

If nothing else, you'll certainly be able to claim you had no queues at launch and everyone was able to log straight in. 

I was going to post something more high-minded about all this but Wilhelm got there before me so I took the low road. For a less snarky take on the situation I refer you to TAGN. I do have a few semi-serious observations of my own to make, though.

Ship of Heroes launched yesterday to a largely disinterested gaming public, most of whom had probably only heard of the game at all thanks to the recent flurry of (Negative.) press interest generated by open disbelief at the price point. If the plan was to raise the game's profile then I suppose they achieved it but I suspect they may be learning there is such a thing as bad publicity after all.

The game is available through Steam and only through Steam, so for once we have an MMORPG whose exact population is relatively easy to ascertain. The numbers are in and they are not pretty.

 The "All Time" (By which we mean two days.) peak stands at a tidy 100. As I type this, there are sixteen players online. 

Just for contrast, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, which entered Early Access on Steam last December at a box price of $39.99, has an all-time peak of just under 7,000 players with five hundred people playing right now. That sounds like it might be a viable business model. This does not.

Then again, who am I to say? I played both games, very briefly, in open testing and decided not to pay much more attention to either of them. I might have been the target market once but that seems a very long time ago now.

It would also be ridiculous of me to pretend to be surprised by how the Ship of Heroes launch is going. Apart from that irritating clique that seems to think everything is de facto better the more pointlessly exclusive you make it, there has been universal incomprehension at the business model Heroic Games has chosen. No-one expected it to pay off and it has exceeded even those expectations. Or fallen below them. However that goes.

I'm not even really surprised to hear the game is janky, buggy and crashes a lot, as many reviews on Steam complain. I reviewed one of the tests a couple of years ago and made many of the same observations then. It seems little has changed.

Perhaps surprisingly, I wasn't entirely negative back then. I ended my review by saying "For all its many flaws, I quite enjoyed it. If and when it reaches some kind of always-up, no-more-wipes state - open beta or Early Access, let's say - I might be willing to give it an extended run - if they fix the most egregious of the technical issues, that is." I was clearly not expecting to be asked to pay sixty dollars for what sounds like much the same build, let alone another fifteen a month in perpetuity. 

The thing is, I'd quite like a good super-hero game. I've been a fan of the genre since early childhood. I read the comics. I watch the TV shows and the movies. I even play one of the existing super-hero games, now and again. I ought to be an easy mark for something like this.

If Ship of Heroes had launched on Steam with an Early Access model with a modest buy-in I might have considered it. I considered Pantheon but thought the box price was a little steep. At $20 I'd have been there for launch. 

I still keep it in mind in case of a sale, though. It's on my Steam Wishlist for that very reason. I'd at least have done that much for SoH.

If SoH had arrived on Steam as a F2P title, instead of this you'd be reading my First Impressions piece by now. I'd certainly have been interested enough to download it and give it a session or two. 

Maybe I'd have been disappointed. Maybe I'd have made some negative comments. Still, I bet I'd have found a few good things to say, like I did with the tests. The goodwill would have been there.

No-one who isn't delusional is going to give much goodwill to a game that plays like a poorly-optimized, unpolished indie title but asks you to pay the price you'd expect to give for a triple-A critical darling. And then piles a monthly sub on top of that. If you're looking to create bad word of mouth, that's the way to go about it.

When you come in with a pricing structure like that, you have to expect to be compared to the  peer group that lives where you've gone: household names, famous I.P.s, celebrity game designers. You're competing with games that win awards and break sales records for their innovation and execution. You don't get your slack cut just because you're a plucky little indie everyone's rooting for. Not in that company.

Where Ship of Heroes goes from here is hard to guess. You'd think it would be game over, so to speak, but I can quote you the names of half a dozen MMORPGs that have been trundling along with single-figure populations for years. You wouldn't recognize any of the names because they're super-obscure but they're out there. 

Even some of the better-known ones have numbers similar to Ship of Heroes. Go check how Anarchy Online is doing on Steam these days. Or Rose Online. Although, both of those can be played outside the Steam infrastructure, so it may not be a fair comparison. Also, they've been around for decades. They didn't just launch yesterday.

It is possible Ship of Heroes will drift along the bottom of the genre, played by few and forgotten by all. I kind of hope so because as I said, there is potential there, somewhere. It's hard to imagine it will ever be realized but I guess it's possible.

Even if the bugs are squashed and the jank eliminated and the proposed DLC (Free with cost of purchase for two years, if that's all you were waiting to hear before slapping your cash on the table...) ever materialize, there's still the uncomfortable fact that this is a game no-one was really asking for. 

The whole point of Ship of Heroes and the other two would-be wearers of the City of Heroes cape was that they would be a new home for all those players who couldn't play the game they loved any more, thanks to NCSoft doing what NCSoft does and shutting it down. 

Except CoH resurfaced, the same as it ever was, and through some hitherto unsuspected super-power, managed to convince its former corporate overlords not only to let it stick around but to hand it its legal papers, allowing the Homecoming server to provide a genuine, enduring home for all those players who thought they'd never go home again.

And who needs a ship when you've got a home? Especially an overpriced cruise ship, sailing round in ever-decreasing circles.

 

[All screenshots from the Steam Store Page and I have to say they make the game look a lot better than the reviews suggest...] 

The Final Five... Er, Wait, No... There's Six Of Them

Not some super-villain troupe, although it would make a good name for one, if I could count. No, this is the final installment in my much-delayed series commemorating EverQuest's twenty-fifth anniversary. If the filings from the ongoing lawsuit against pirate server The Heroes' Journey are any indication, we may not get to the thirtieth so I guess I ought to get on with wrapping this up before it's too late.

And as I intimated last time, I'm going to bundle the remaining characters up into one post because I don't have an awful lot to say about any of them. We've reached the point where I'd pretty much stopped making new characters, or at any rate new characters I had any real intention of playing. I didn't stop playing EQ, I just mostly relied on the characters I already had and any new ones I made were mainly to try out various retro servers or to perform basic admin functions like banking.

In order of creation, the Final Five Six are: 

20 - Nikolaiovitch - (Level 18) - Born 6 January 2006 - Played 14 hours 45 minutes

21 - Lyrielle - (Level 35) - Born 29 June 2006 - Played 6 days 6 hours

22 - Woolhat - (Level 23) - Born 20 July 2008 - Played 8 hours 30 minutes

23 - Gladwaller - (Level 85) - Born 22 August 2008 - Played 1 day 17 hours

24 - Cofferstone (Level 2) - Born 7 March 2015 - Played 1 day 9 hours

25 - Telza - (Level 85) Born 17 March 2017 - Played  3 hours 23 minutes

Nikolaiovitch is the Gnome Necromancer I made to replicate my original Gnome Necromancer, Nickolai. I don't have any clear memory of exactly why I needed another Necro at the start of 2006 and with a played time of a little less than fifteen hours, I clearly never did much with him. 

Since he's currently on Luclin-Stromm, the home of the bulk of my most regularly-played characters over the last twenty years, I'm guessing I had some plan to level him up that never really went anywhere. I have the vaguest memory that I ended up not liking the way I'd made his name so similar to a much more established character and that it put me off playing him but I probably didn't need much of an excuse to leave him where he is now, in the Bazaar, hanging around the bank.

If Nickolaiovitch is a bit of a mystery, Lyrielle is a giant enigma. I have no memory of her whatsoever and yet she's somehow managed to get to Level 35, with over six days played. That's a hundred and fifty hours of online time and looking at her skills I can see she's been played normally for pretty much all of that, which is at least fifty full-length sessions. 

Her casting skills are all close to maxed for her level, she's worked on tailoring some, she's almost maxed in Forage. Her bags have stacks of fish scales, suggesting she's done some fishing in her time. She's wearing a mish-mash of exactly the kind of gear I'd expect one of my characters to have if they'd been played properly or at least the way I usually play.

And yet I remember nothing about her at all. She's another Druid, so nothing about the gameplay would have been likely to have stuck in my memory. She's on Xegony/Druzil Ro, two servers I have never knowingly played on, although Xegony is where Mrs Bhagpuss and I ended up moving our Ant. Bayle crew, right before we stopped playing them altogether.

The only real clue is her birth month, June 2006. Thanks to the extremely useful EverQuest Servers list at Bonzz.com. I'm able to say that two new servers launched that month - The Combine and The Sleeper. As I write, a faint memory is coming back to me that I did indeed play on The Combine when it launched and Bonzz notes that The Combine was merged into Druzzil Ro three years later, which is pretty conclusive proof that Lyrielle was the character I played.

 

So, it appears that in the summer of 2006 I made a new druid to play on a new TLP/Classic/Level Restricted server and stuck it out long enough to get her to Level 35, which would have required some fairly serious commitment. A hundred and fifty hours' worth, in fact. That means I must have played Lyrielle for longer than nearly every game on my Steam account - and I still can't tell you a damn thing about her!

I can't even remember why she's called Lyrielle. Most of my characters are named for some other character in some book I read and this certainly sounds like one of those names but it's not ringing any bells at all.  

With Woolhat, on the other hand, I know exactly where the name comes from. He's an Iksar Monk and he used to be called Nesmith. Then there was some server merge or other and he ended up with an X on the end of his name so I renamed him Woolhat. 

I imagine most people reading this (People read this stuff?!) don't need any further explanation but for the few that may, Mike Nesmith was one of the Monkees and I thought it was clever to name a Monk after a Monkee. I bet no-one else ever thought of that! And his nickname in the TV show was Woolhat. Because he always wore a wool hat. So the renaming was even cleverer! 

(The Monkees were a pop group. They had a TV show in the sixties. Ask your grandparents.)

Nesmith/Woolhat did get played a little but for the longest time his main function has been as one of my Bazaar traders and bankers. He holds and sells a lot of stuff for other characters. These days, hold it is all he does because I haven't set him to trade for years. But he's happy enough.

Gladwaller, it will surprise no-one to know, has been boosted. I didn't level him to 85. He was played, though, for a while, before that happened. He's a Gnome Enchanter and I made him when I fancied playing the class and didn't have one to hand. I messed around with him for a bit and got him into the teens or twenties then dropped him, I think because we moved servers. 

I have no clue why I boosted him years later. The idea of jumping in at Level 85 and trying to play an Enchanter, either solo or in a group, is just fatuous. Maybe I wanted a buff-bot. I'm pretty sure he's never left Plane of Knowledge since he drank the potion.

His name would appear to be taken from J.D. Salinger, which would make him my most literary of steals. As a massive Salinger fan, I may well have chosen it deliberately because of that, although I don't recall doing it. More likely I just had the name in mind from reading some Salinger around the same time.

Cofferstone's name probably comes from Frances Hardinge's  Fly By Night or Twilight Robbery, two excellent novels from which I've borrowed several names for characters in various games. If he seems to have a lot of played hours for a Level 2, that's because he's my other Bazaar trader. I have one on each of the two accounts I (used to) play regularly. Cofferstone got a lot of use when I was leveling Magmia by doing Overseer missions every day. You can make very good money like that. And I did, for a few months, until all the swapping between accounts to hand the stuff across got on my nerves.

And finally we come to Telza, about whom there really is nothing to say. Another boosted character, this time a Shaman. I have never played a Shaman beyond the teens so, like Gladwaller, the idea of starting at 85 is fanciful. Then again, I have played a Beastlord, all the way to 84, and the skill sets are extremely similar, so maybe it's not such a crazy idea after all.  

Still never did it, though. Again, Telza has almost certainly never left PoK.  She's named for Telzey Amberdon, lead character in a series of novels by James H. Schmitz, all of which I have now read, although I'm not sure I had back in 2017, when I created her. 

In the first of the series, which I read in the 1970s, Telzey has an intelligent great cat as a companion, and I'm fairly sure my original plan was to use one of the free boosts to make a Beastlord, for whom the reference would have been highly appropriate. When the time came, though, I decided against it on the grounds that I already had a perfectly good Beastlord and I went for a Shaman instead, which is a less-good fit for the name. 

And then I never played her and made another Beastlord later and boosted her instead. So much for planning. Should have saved the name.

As that last sentence suggests, I didn't stop making characters after these twenty-five. I did slow down a lot but there are maybe half a dozen more out there, including a few I've actually played, like Shadbaggle (Yet another boosted Necro.), Clatterhorse (Who had a run on one of the TLE servers for a while.), Taffetty and Corella. All of whom I remember more clearly than poor old Lyrielle the Forgotten Druid.

Will I ever make another? I wouldn't bet against it. Every time I write one of these posts I start to feel the old itch.

For now, though, that's it, I think. No more characters to write about. Anniversary celebration complete.

I do have another idea for a series of ad hoc posts, where I wax nostalgic about the days when I actually played games instead of just wrote about them. Something about EverQuest II, this time. We'll see how that goes... 

Have You Done That Little Job I Gave You Yet?

A couple of days ago, I mentioned in passing that Panda Panda Panda was back. The event, which used to be known as Days of Summer, when it started a litle earlier in the year, is a series of weekly quests in EverQuest II that, at least on the face of it, offers a huge boost in power for casual players at the cost of very little effort indeed.

At least, that's how it appears until you take a closer look at the way it works. I had the opportunity to do just that yesterday, when I went to pick up the first of this year's quests and found I hadn't finished last year's yet. Or started them, either.

Technically, I had started the 2024 set of nine quests, but only in that I'd visited Bao Bao, the current Panda-in-Residence, and taken the first one. It was in my Journal but I hadn't actually done anything about it in twelve months. Bao Bao was not interested in giving me this year's quests until I finished the job I was already on.

I had thought you could skip the ones you hadn't done. You'd probably want to if you were a new or returning player because the event has been running since 2017, meaning there are now seventy-two quests in the full sequence, not counting the new ones this year. There are a lot of rewards from previous years that still have some currency, not least the huge number of house items, but the main thrust of the event has always been to gear up and who wants a load of outdated armor with inferior stats?

The wiki is somewhat confusing on whether you can skip the years you don't want to do: "Each of the quests must be completed in the order they were released, starting with the quests from 2017. You cannot skip ahead to later points in the quest series. *2023 can be completed without previous progress in this questline." (Emphasis theirs.) Why 2023 is different from the rest I couldn't tell you but it doesn't seem to have been the start of a new, more relaxed ruleset because this year's starter quest looked to be firmly gated behind completion of last year's.

I imagine the reason I thought you could skip was because in 2023 you really could. Maybe I did. I haven't checked. I vaguely remember deciding last year that, since I wasn't going to use any of the gear, I wouldn't bother doing the quests. Or maybe that's post hoc rationalization. It's entirely possible I just forgot.

There were nine quests in the 2024 set. There are nine every year. It takes us through the autumn to the arrival of the annual expansion, one quest dropping every week after the regular update, usually, on a Tuesday. It's a pleasant weekly ritual to get the new one, fly around for a few minutes ticking the necessary boxes, then come back to see what new stuff you can grab off the store-panda.

If you let yourself fall behind, however, it all feels a bit less amusing. Last night and this morning I did all nine quests. I did it the fastest way possible, using my All Access Membership for instant travel to and from the various zones, moving between the various locations within those zones on my very fast, max-level flying mount and using the detailed walkthrough, complete with copy-and-paste waypoints, from the Wiki.

Since I was on my Level 130 Berserker, all mobs in every required zone were grey to me and non-aggressive. All I had to do was port, fly, gather and return. It still took me two hours to finish all nine quests.

The quests themselves were exactly as they always are: gather some samples from various parts of Norrath so some lazy/greedy/cowardly panda can satisfy their curiosity/stuff themselves stupid. Bao Bao is quite an endearing panda as these things go and the quest dialog was amusing enough but the most interesting part to me is how long the dev team can keep the whole thing going. 

There's a whole gang of pandas standing around in Sundered Frontier now. I think there are three questgivers and two vendors at least. When the thing started in 2017 there was only Yun Zi handing out the quests and he did his own storekeeping.

Thanks to the wiki, I had very little trouble finding everything. Almost all of the items were there in profusion. Most of them sparkled and some were oversized. A couple were none of those things but the wiki warned me about that and told me where to look, with accompanying screenshots. 

The only part that gave me any real trouble was the quest that asked for some foliage from Lesser Feydark. Lesser Fey is and always has been a total pain to navigate. It has no portals at all accessible via map travel. The best you can do is map to either Butcherblock and take a griffin from the cliffs above the dock or port to Greater Feydark or Steamfont and fly to the zone-in.

I went via Butcherblock first, only to find that the BB entrance brings you in on the opposite side of the map to where you want to go. I figured it would be faster to map-travel to GFey and come back in from that side than to fly across the whole of LFey so I did that and it wasn't. 

I'd forgotten that you land in Kelethin and Kelethin has its own map and I got myself lost coming out of the dumb elf tree city and ended up wandering about for ages before I finally worked out where I was supposed to be going. 

Once in LFey it wasn't much better because the whole place is constructed from a bunch of separate valleys with invisible walls preventing you from flying between them. You have to follow rivers and go through tunnels and you can't fly through most of the connections so you have to go on foot. The whole place is a confusing, annoying mess and flying really doesn't make it any easier.

So that was fun. I got it done eventually, anyway.

With all of that out of the way, I was finally able to get the first of this year's quests, for which we will be collecting rocks, just for a change. It turns out Bao Bao, who demonstrated his lack of self-control when it comes to stuffing things in his mouth all through the 2024 questline, ate his way through his grandmother's entire vegetable garden and now he needs to give her some pretty rocks for her collection to get back on her good side.

Guess who'll be doing the hard work lugging those rocks about. Muggins, that's who.

And that brings me to the question, once again, of whether it will be worth it. I looked at the first set of rewards, which include a bunch of purple Augments, some weapons and the inevitable bags of decorating items and... that's it. 

Usually there are full sets of armor for all weights and dozens of Augments, along with a few other odds and ends, utilities and so on. I'm not sure if that means none of those things are going to be on the vendor this time or whether they'll only appear week-by-week. And if they aren't going to be there, does that mean there's going to be a substantial change to the way gear works in the new expansion?

Or does it just mean someone has finally admitted that handing out three full sets of gear in three months, each of which upgrades the one before, is taking generosity beyond the bounds of reason? If so, you can bet there will be howls of complaint.

Not that the dagger I took does upgrade the best one already available to me, anyway. I took it because it's an upgrade for the weapon I was using but I wasn't using the best weapon I own. I haven't claimed the weapon from the Anniversary crate yet. The panda dagger won't upgrade that and if there is panda armor this year and it has the same Resolve as the weapons, that won't upgrade the anniversary gear, either.

In fact, it will be much worse. The Anniversary stuff is 525 Resolve. The new panda weapons are 505. 

Even if we discount the Anniversary gear, which you only get for one character on the account, Resolve 505 isn't going to cut it for long. As a casual soloist I already have lots of 495 pieces so it's a minimal upgrade and it will be instantly rendered redundant the day the expansion arrives. I don't know what the Tishan's gear will come in at but you can bet it will be at minimum 505 and come with Augments that work in the new zones, which none of the old ones will.

Some of that is speculation. This is, or should be, a level cap increase year. Those are usually when things change the most so anything could happen when the expansion arrives. As must be plain from everything I ever write about EQII, the game is ferociously over-complicated, especially when it comes to gear and stats. The team have been trying to strip away some of the accrued cruft for a while now but every time they remove anything there's an outcry, not least from the crew that claims to play EQII specifically because it's complicated and difficult to understand.

I'll be doing the panda quests anyway. They're a fun little diversion and don't take too long (Lesser Feydark always excepted.) and they unlock the vendors for the whole account so it's a useful option for some of my sub-max-level characters. Most of all, though, I don't want to fall behind again. 

Who knows, next year the pandas might come up with something different. If they do, it'd be nice to be able to grab it right away instead of playing catch-up first.

Smokes And Mirrors

Somewhat to my surprise, I find it's been more than three weeks since the last What Have I Been Listening To Lately. That may be because pretty much all I have been listening to for months is the music I've been making myself with Suno. 

I listen to my own songs every day. On the desktop, on the laptop, in the car, at work. I listen to the new ones and the old ones and all the ones inbetween. I listen to them in preference to everything and anything else, including all the things I would have been listening to before. 

Even Lana doesn't get much of a look-in at the moment, although that would change pretty sharpish if she'd actually get on and release something. How long has the new album been delayed now? Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. came out in March 2023 and the follow-up, curently going by the idiosyncratic working title "Stove", is now scheduled for January 2026, having slipped several dates already.

That'll be the longest gap between full-length releases since the start of her career, even including the work she did before she became Lana del Rey. There haven't even been any teaser singles since Henry, Come On! back in April of this year. I guess that's what married life does for you.

When I can tear myself away from the mirror, I have at least been keeping up with some new music, here and there. It's all a little sporadic and random and I haven't been doing a lot of trawling for tunes on my own, mostly relying on news feeds to pop me hints, but I have collected a few good picks for the post I'm about to write. Am writing. Have written, as I do the final edit.

Where to start? Something fast and loud is usually indicated to get the party started. Let's see...

Ah, yes, this will do nicely.

 POSH - The Pill

I mean, where do you begin? They put so much work into the videos, The Pill, don't they? And the attitude! As they say, if you could bottle it...

That drumbeat is incredibly familiar, too. But then everything is, now. It's a blessing and a curse. 

It's the deadpan that sells it, I think. All their songs have it and it just levels the whole thing up. Apparently irony hasn't entirely gone out of fashion after all. 

They remind me of a band I really hoped would go somewhere but didn't, Ice Cold Slush, although now I watch the Slushies again, maybe not so much. Perhaps I'm thinking of someone else. There are a lot of female duos. It's hard to keep them straight.

 Every Ounce Of Me - Jenny On Holiday

Ooh! Ooh! Thematic segue! This is Jenny Hollingworth, one half of Let's Eat Grandma, probably the best female duo of the last several years (I'm including Wet Leg in that, although really I think they should be considered a full, five-piece band, even though they never are.) 

Lets Eat Grandma is another favorite of mine now well overdue for a new album. The truly excellent Two Ribbons came out in April 2022 and there's been pretty much nothing since. Well, they did the soundtrack to that TV show I liked, the one that changed its name half-way through, The Bastard Sone and The Devil Himself, aka Half Bad, which was the title of the source material, an excellent YA trilogy by Sally Green.  

LEG (Never noticed how that acronyms until now.) have not, I'm very happy to say, broken up. They're just doing that annoying thing all groups do at some point, namely putting the band on hold while they "pursue solo projects". They're childhood best friends who became critical darlings while they were still extremely young (Late teens.) and then suffered some personal tragedies and had a big falling out, the reconciliation from which led to the last album. Hardly surprising they both want some time out from each other. It's just good to hear from them again. Either of them.

 Blue Velvet - Princess Nokia

But then, as Princess Nokia so wisely points out, girlhood is a spectrum. 

I know sod all about rap and not much more about hip-hop, even though I've been listening to it on and off since the late 'eighties and I own a very good book on the history of the genres, which I have even read. That book, like most writing on hip-hop, talks about "flow" a lot. I'm not convinced I know what flow is but I'm pretty sure Princess Nokia's is exemplary.

I also don't exactly know what a "drop" is but again, whatever the hell the bass is doing in this one is probably it. Does something to the insides, doesn't it?

 Tip Toe - Tierra Whack

Copy-Paste last two paragraphs. Find"Princess Nokia". Replace with "Tierra Whack". 

 went to bum a cigarette - april june

Why is it that even though I don't smoke and haven't in a very, very long time, I still get triggered by the word in lyrics and titles? And when I say "triggered" I don't mean, as I immediately realized would be the natural interpretation, "triggered to want a cigarette again", something that never, ever happens, but "triggered" as in "immediately pay attention to"?

I might very well have clicked through this when I happened upon it, even if it had been called something else, because "april june", no capitalization, is a an attention-getter. But it was the word "cigarette" that did it. Also the phrase, "bum a cigarette", which I used to hear a lot but haven't for a while. 

I've commented on this before but given the precipitous drop-off in tobacco smoking, (Down to an historic low of just under 12% of the adult population in the UK, as of 2023.) it seems odd that so many songs and music videos feature people lighting up, drawing in, blowing out and rolling up. It is true that the age demographic with the highest incidence of smoking is the 25-34 range, which is bang on for the artists making the music and acting in the videos I tend to feature here, but even there it's not even 15% that smoke. You'd think it would be off-putting to the rest of the target audience, especially with the youngest group, 18-24 year-olds, showing the fastest-falling tobacco use of all. 

And it's almost always actual cigarettes, too. Hardly ever vaping, which has an even smaller take-up, just in case you were thinking that's what all the kids do nowadays. I guess it's just that smoking does still make you look cool, just like your parents always said it wouldn't. Even now hardly anyone's really doing it. Or possibly because.

 Temptation Inside Of Your Heart 

Thurston Moore (Velvet Underground cover)

Let's switch tracks. I've been reading a lot of interviews Lou Reed did with various music journalists over about forty years recently and also reviews of all his albums, so he's fresh in my mind again. First time that's happened for a while.

Lou was my first, great musical crush. I got into the Velvet Underground at a fairly early age, just a few months before Lou's solo career finally took off with Walk on the Wild Side in 1972. I bought every one of his solo albums on release, from Transformer through to New Sensations, twelve years later. I dropped off the Lou train after that but I've picked over the stuff I missed and filled out some gaps since then, so I feel I'm pretty much up to speed on his long career.

This particular number never got a studio release while the Velvets were around but it turned up on the excellent VU compilation, where it was one of the stand-outs. This, in my opinion, is not a great cover. It starts out well but wanders off half-way through. Sonic Youth have always been one of those bands I feel I ought to like more than I actually do and this kind of demonstrates why. Still, nice to be reminded of the song again, although I suggest going and listening to the original.

Lou Reed Was My Babysitter - Jeff Tweedy

Jeff Tweedy and his band Wilco I also feel I should like more than I do. I didn't much like this, the first time I heard it, but it's a bit of a grower. He's clearly doing Lou although he sounds more like Jonathan Richman at times. But Jonathan was doing Lou, too, for a long time anyway, so it's much the same thing.

I strongly empathize with the sentiment behind the song, which in Jeff's words is that "I was babysat by fucking Lou Reed, literally, in my bedroom as a 10-year-old, 12-year-old kid. His music was a more legitimate mentor to me than most of my teachers." That was me, too, although I can't match jeff's impressive 10-12 age profile. I'd have to add a couple of years on the front end of that.

 Aston Martin - Liv de Toma

Enough with the rock. Time for some pop. Also, I just found out how to email a whole bunch of videos  and have them all turn up as little thumbnails you click on and they open in full screen inside the email client. Isn't that neat?

There are a lot of singers doing this kind of thing. Most of them I glaze over after a few lines and some of them stick and it's hard to be sure why. Then a fraction of the stickers go on to break out, like Addison Rae, while most of them just thrash around for a while, going nowhere much. Then they vanish. Or turn into something else.

I'm guessing this will be the only time we get to see Liv de Toma here but who knows? 

She's A Director 

 Mechatok (feat. Isabella Lovestory)

I probably ought to have known who Mechatok was but I didn't. I had to look him up. He's a producer based in London and Berlin (Like they all are if they're not in New York or L.A. I guess...) who's worked with a bunch of people that feature here regularly - Charli XCX, Bladee, Yung Lean...

And now Isabella Lovestory, whose involvement explains why I clicked through. It sounds a bit synthwave to my ears. I do like a bit of synthwave now and again.

 Sad Dog - Madi Gaines

So much for the pure pop part of the post. I'm not sure what Madi Gaines would call what she's doing but not "pop", I imagine. The internet as a whole is pretty convinced it's "queer indie rock/shoegaze". 

A weird thing that's happening now is that I keep hearing songs by other people that sound not unlike the songs I'm making myself. This is one. It's there in the rhythms and the phrasing and the intonation. Maybe I'm making indie rock/shoegaze, too, although I'm not about to appropriate the qualifying tag. Then again, the characters in the songs, they would. Some of them.

My late-blooming songwriting is very, very different from the stuff I was doing back in the eighties. Better, I think, but then I would, or I wouldn't keep doing it. What I'm less sure about is whether that's a direct consequence of my method, re-purposing prose, or if it's that I've developed a different ear, listening to a lot of contemporary artists. If I was one of those old guys who only ever listens to stuff they liked when they were young, would everything I'm doing now sound like it did when I was doing it forty years ago? 

I guess I don't need to care. I'm not one of those guys. Thank god. I pray I never will be.

OK, it seems I had quite a few more tunes stacked up than I thought. This is going to run long unless I watch myself. I think we'll have three more and save the rest for later. But which three?

Maybe not the same people that were in the last one. So no bar italia or Goldie Boutier this time round, good though the songs are. You can always click through if you're interested.

Paris - Mikayla Geier

Here's someone new. Gen Z can't get enough of the jazz, so I hear. I can, quite easily, but I do like a bit of bossa once in a while.

 me, myself and god - Faerybabyy

Don't think we've had Faerybabyy for a bit, have we? Well, we're having her again now, whether we have or not. If I had to give this a one-word review, that word would be "insistent". I suspect you might choose another.

 Make Time/Waste Time - Snowmen

Hah! Saved a noisy one for last, for once. That's a real set-closer they've got there.

I'm having some trouble remembering when I last saw a less likely-looking lead singer. If this was one of those seventies movies that follow the rise of some imaginary rock group from the back rooms of working men's clubs all the way to drugs, dissolution and super-stardom, you know there'd be a scene about half an hour in, when the big record company that just signed them takes the out-of-his-depth manager aside and tells him the singer has to go.

I'm not sure it works that way nowadays but I still have trouble seeing this guy on the late-night chat show circuit. Of course, that's not going to be a problem much longer...

Ooh. Politics. Probably time I stopped. 

Out Of The Fog They Came

EverQuest II is a very busy game for one that's been plodding along for more than twenty years, largely catering to the same, ever-diminishing group of players. I've mentioned the plethora of holiday events many times. Since all of them tend to get one or two additions every year, the dense crust of content surrounding each gets thicker all the time. But the holidays are just one of the numerous content streams that keep bubbling up, over and over again.

Panda Panda Panda, for example. That's back. It's not exactly a holiday, in that there's no specific event being celebrated. It's just some agarophobic pandas with a warehouse of extremely powerful items they keep trying to give away for information they could very easily google. Assuming Norrath has the internet, of course.

I'm not going to say any more about Panda Panda Panda today because although I read that the event had started, I haven't been to see what the reclusive bears want this time. I'll get a separate post out of that soon enough, I'm sure.

I'm also not going to talk about the new(ish) Fabled dungeon that only arrived in the game a short time ago, with the summer update. It does have a solo mode I could try out but until yesterday I hadn't bothered to find out didn't know where the zone-in was. I do now but it's going to have to wait until I'm both in the mood and have the time for a proper session.

No, today I'm going to reveal a very few facts about this year's expansion prequel event, Heralds of Oblivion. Every year we get one of these, whether we want it or not. Sometimes they can be really good. I can remember a couple that kept me occupied for weeks, putting several characters through them for the experience or the loot. 

 

Mostly though, and especially recently, they've been a bit thin. Usually a very quick quest to introduce us to the next, previously unheard-of, Norrathian secret society and a bunch of repeatable quests so we can ingratiate ourselves with them for no very obvious reason. There seem to be an unlimited number of these groups, most of them self-appointed guardians of something or other, roaming around the world like a bunch of Boy Scouts looking for old ladies to help across the street or planar incursions to repel.

This yeare's bunch are called The Flamebearers and they differ from the usual run of do-gooders by being associated with Lady Najena, who I could have sworn was a Medium-Sized Bad last time I met her. She's organizing this year's bunfight all the same so maybe it's one of those enemy-of-my-enemy things or perhaps she's had a bang on the head. I imagine we'll meet her at some point and she'll monologue all about it.

Angeliana on the forums claims "Heralds of Oblivion is shaping up to be the biggest prelude event to rock Norrath since 2018’s Against the Elements event that preceded Chaos Descending." If I could remember what that one was like I might be able to benchmark against it. I bet I posted something... ah! Here we are...

"I spent more than two hours helping Freeport’s Academy of Arcane Science this morning. The introduction to the event was even more perfunctory than usual and the quest itself took less than ten minutes, half of which was finding the main questgiver... "

Hmm. That doesn't sound like it was much to write home about, does it? But wait...  "None of that mattered a jot when I got stuck into the gameplay. It's exactly what I want from an MMO."

Aha! That's more like it! And I remember something about it now. It was a big, open world affair, where you could fight waves of mobs and close rifts, just as if you were... playing Rift, I guess. I also noted "the rewards are fantastic", suggesting it wasn't just fun but profitable, too.  

It's too soon to say if this year's prequel matches up but the signs are promising. I ran through the first several quests last night and those were more substantial than usual. They took a while and involved some travel and some combat that was easy but not a complete walkover, thanks to mostly taking place in endgame zones, where I had a lot more trouble from random, wandering mobs than the ones I was there to kill. (There are also tradeskill quests for the non-combattants among us. I took those but haven't done them yet.)

 I can immediately see the similarity between 2025 and 2018 - it's another bunch of rifts that spawn waves of mobs you have to dispatch before firing up your doohickey and closing the portal. I did that the required number of times to progress the quests, along with a few other menial tasks, acquiring a bunch of event tokens along the way. Who takes those and what they give you for them I do not yet know.

I also don't know where the next questgivers are, the ones that hand out what I'm guessing are the repeatable quests. The event neatly sends you to whatever the highest-available open world zones for your character level might be, so in my case the NPCs will be somewhere in the two endgame open world zones, Sodden Archipelago and Western Wastes, but I couldn't find them and it was getting late so I decided to wait until someone posts their exact locations on the wiki or, better yet, adds the POIs to EQ2Maps.

I can say that the rifts I've had to close so far are not random. They appear in the same spots and have a fairly short cooldown, of the order of five or ten minutes I'd guess, meaning you can just pick one and stay there as long as you need. Or you can fly around like a dumb-ass like I did, looking for new ones, until you finally realize you just keep coming back to the same two.

At max level, I'd recommend the ones in Western Wastes for the simple reason that zone is much less cluttered with foliage, as the name suggests. A lot of it is flat ice floes, which makes spotting the rifts as you fly around much easier. Sodden Archipelago is a jungle and a bunch of ravines, so not ideal for aerial reconnaissance.

The storyline is interesting. Well, it is if you play EQII. Not, I imagine, for anyone else. The rifts are planar but don't appear to come from (Or, presumably, go to...) any planes we already know. The creatures coming out of them are vaguely elemental but of that odd order of elements that includes things like fog and mist. Dragon magic seems to be involved but there's no obvious draconic connection.

 

At one point a treant of some sort turns up and starts throwing threats and accusations about. Everyone denies having any intent to invade the plane of wood or wherever the hell the thing comes from but it pays no attention and keeps on ranting. 

I have to say I was intrigued. It made me wonder what the expansion might involve and where we might be headed, which is clearly the main point of an expansion prequel, so job done there, I'd say. I'll definitely follow the questline to the point when it becomes certain there's nothing more but repeatables for token or faction left. I might be at that point alread or I might not.

After that, I guess it depends how much fun closing the rifts is and how good the rewards are. I'll get back to you when I know more. 

All in all, though, a very solid start to this year's expansion cycle.