Next Fest - Lucky Seven

Picking half a dozen interesting-looking demos last night from the couple of thousand available in Next Fest seemed to go about the same as last time, when I said "It wasn't too difficult". There didn't seem to be quite as many obvious choices this round but there were enough.

There did seem to be an awful lot of cheap, amateurish-looking efforts, more than usual, several of which I rejected after watching the promotional videos. I do think that if you haven't been able to program your main character to walk in a straight line without looking like Mr Bean applying for an internship at the Ministry of Silly Walks, you'd probably be best served not making a video at all. 

There also seemed to be more outright pornography than usual. There's always some but this time several of the more heinous examples appeared quite high in the "Most Wishlisted" category, which is a tad disturbing.

I didn't pick any of those but I did manage to find seven demos that looked like they might be worth trying. I made a feeble attempt to find some balance in genres and gameplay but even though quite a few of the better-looking, more polished demos were for games of the kind I don't generally play, in the end I decided there wasn't much point picking them, even to have a better range to post about. I am never going to enjoy pretending to be a shopkeeper, no matter how well the profession is emulated and I'm too old to learn how to platform, even if the reward is some stunning scenery to jump through.

The games I picked break down roughly into two mystery adventures, a point & click, a sandbox, an open world rpg, a visual novel and an "AI rpg". Two of them might also be MMORPGs. Let's fill in some details. 

I'll take them in the order shown in the post header, reading left to right. It's a screen grab from my Steam Library and I can't say I'm impressed by the three that don't even have a thumbnail to show. Maybe there's a technical reason for that but it really isn't a good look if you're trying to stand out from the crowd.

Noiramore Academy - "On the cold planet of Noivesse lies a mysterious old school called Noiramore Academy. When one of the teachers is violently kidnapped during the night, and a student named Judith Hovern is the only witness, she must use her wit, powers, and puzzle-solving skills to save him."

Described variously as a "mystery adventure" and a "3D puzzle adventure", this is a demo for a game currently seeking a measly $40,000 on Kickstarter. Even with that low ask, things aren't looking great. So far they've only raised just over $8k in pledges. The Kickstarter does still have three and a half weeks to run though, so maybe Next Fest will draw some attention to it.

The promotional video for this one, using pre-alpha footage, actually looks really impressive. It's set in a school for young wizards except all the students seem to be some kind of unicorn or goat. It's probably the demo I'm most looking forward to playing. If it turns out to be anything like as good as it looks, I might even pledge, which would make it the first Kickstarter I've backed in quite a while.

Story Crafter - "Storycrafter is an AI-powered online RPG combining simplified TRPG rules with advanced AI. Enjoy AI-generated characters, dynamic storylines, and AI DM. Easy to start, it offers deep immersion and ultimate freedom. Customize characters and explore endless possibilities. Join for an epic adventure!"

I picked this for obvious reasons. AI is going to be in our games from now on, whether we like it or not, and I prefer to engage with that inevitability rather than hide from it. Whether this example will be any good is another question but the design looks quite slick at least. It's supposedly going into Early Access before the end of the year so if the demo is promising there's a chance I might pursue it further.

Or it might be total garbage. Could go either way.

 Au Revoir - "Use your investigative skills in this point-and-click adventure to retrieve human minds stored in synthetic brains in 2071. Immerse yourself in a retro-futuristic world with neon-noir graphics from the 90s, and uncover a conspiracy that will challenge everything you know."

I had to pick at least one cyberpunk title and this is the one I went with. I can see exactly the look it's going for and it doesn't do a lot for me. I'm not quite sure why graphics from thirty years ago are still so strongly associated with visions of the near future. It may have made sense then but it makes none now. 

Indeed,  a "retro-futuristic" setting that uses "graphics from the 90s" is verging on the paradoxical to begin with. I mean, are we in the future or the past or the past-future or the future-past or what?

These types of retro cyber-noir games tend to be quite bleak and depressing, too, which really isn't what I'm looking for these days. Still, I keep picking them so maybe I don't know what I want as well as I think I do. 

Ad Memoriam - "Ad Memoriam is a mystery game about a band with a curse: at every single one of their concerts, someone dies of an accident. Follow the band and the trail of bodies that they leave behind, reconstruct each accident from witness testimony, and unravel the truth behind Ad Memoriam and it's curse."

A mystery adventure with a rock band at the center and a couple of nosy Nancy Drews, who also happen to be superfans with their own podcast, on the case. What's not to like? 

I like mystery games but I'm not actually very good at them so I hope someone's done a walkthrough...

The Precinct - "Averno City, 1983. Gangs rule the streets and your father lies restless in his grave. Clean up the city, uncover the truth, and embark on thrilling vehicle chases through destructible environments in this neon-noir action sandbox police game."

At least this has its timeframe nailed down. 1983 is very specific. This one was very high on the Wishlist chart and it immediately appealed to me as someone who grew up watching cop shows on TV. I did think those had gone completely out of fashion now, with the police, particularly in America, being seen more often in the roles of villains than heroes but maybe that's swinging back around.

Or maybe they're bargaining on people just liking car chases where you can smash into things and not really caring who it is that's doing the smashing. 

Sentou Gakuen: Revival - "You are one of the students of Sentou Gakuen, a random school in Japan, filled with delinquents, rascals, and of course some good students. How will you spend your days in Sentou Gakuen? Forge your own path in this online interactive Visual Novel, make friends or foes, the choice is yours."

This one is really weird. It's a visual novel set in a Japanese high school (Ho hum...) but it's also an MMORPG: "The characters you interact with are not just NPCs—they are players with their own unique stories." How that's supposed to work I'm almost too scared to find out. It sounds like a complete nightmare.

Also, if that wasn't odd enough, although the game is set in a "random school in Japan", it doesn't come from a Japanese developer. It's made in Indonesia. It also uses AI "as a tool during the creative process to enhance the storytelling and dialogue" and is hoping to go into Early Access, once again before the end of the year.

Spire Horizon - "Discover a thrilling world of adventure in Spire Horizon, an RPG open world game, where you embody a skeleton protagonist, explore a visually stunning world, engage in battles against formidable enemies, and traveling in search of a beloved wife."

Steam told me this was an MMORPG but the developer doesn't seem to agree. It's also already on sale in a final version (i.e not Early Access or beta.) having launched in February 2024, although many of the reviews call it "unfinished", so make of that what you will. It has a Very Positive rating, anyway, albeit from only 174 reviews. What it's doing in Next Fest I'm not entirely sure.

It's cheap, too, at just £8.50 for the base game or a couple of pounds more if you want the "Expansion" that lets you have companions so you don't have to wander the world alone. (And there are a whole load more "expansions" for specific companions available separately as well, all for a couple of pounds or so each.)

It looks very cute and quirky and according to various reviews it was developed by one person, allegedly as a student project. I'm guessing it will never be finished but it could be fun to run around in for an hour or two.

And that's the lot. Now I just have to find the time to play them before the event ends. I guess I'd better go and get on with it.

Metaphor: ReFantazio: A Brief Review Of Half A Demo. Maybe Not Even Half. And Maybe Not All That Brief, Either.

Today sees the start of the latest Next Fest, an event generously arranged by Steam to give lazy bloggers like me something to write about. Seriously, the posts pretty much write themselves for this one as I rip through half a dozen demos, then review them in unecessary detail as though they were finished games. A whole week of posts right there for almost no effort at all!

I would normally begin by posting a list of the demos I've chosen. A brief description and a couple of lines about what I'm expecting for each of them. Easy money.

Unfortunately, the event doesn't go live until 10 AM Pacific, which is six o' clock in the evening here and I'm too impatient to wait. Luckily for me, I'm already in the middle of a demo that may or not feature and I've taken a whole load of screenshots so I'm going to post about that instead. If it turns out to be in the Next Fest running order then I'll be a post ahead before it even starts!

The game in question is one I'd never heard of until a few days ago, when it started appearing in huge banner promotions across the top of the screen every time I logged into Steam. The image I was seeing was so striking and the name of the game so peculiar and evocative that I did something I very rarely do: I clicked through.

The game itself hadn't quite launched yet (It has now and it's something of a hit, with a peak concurrency over 80k, a Top Seller tag and a Very Positive rating from just under three thousand reviews) but there was a demo available so I downloaded it. And then I played it. 

I'm still playing it, although obviously not at the moment, because at the moment I'm writing this post. It's a very substantial demo, given I'm already three hours in and it shows no signs of stopping. There's a trailer just for the demo (See below.) that I this minute watched and most of what's in it I haven't seen yet, so heaven knows how long the whole thing lasts. I did think of finishing it before I posted but I have more than enough to say about it already and it would be nice to get into print about something while its hot for once.

Oh, it occurs to me I haven't yet mentioned the name of the game I'm talking about. Silly me! It's called Metaphor: ReFantazio. I said it was peculiar. Also, that joke would have worked better if I hadn't put the name of the game in the title of the post but you gotta get those clicks...

It's also confusing, or rather the developer's description is, because the first thing I saw when I clicked on the banner was a load of guff about it being the "35th Digital Anniversary Edition". Naturally, this made me think I was looking at a revival of a game from the tail-end of the 1980s, which did not inspire me with enthusiasm. 

On the other hand, neither did it seem to fit, even remotely, with the images I was seeing. If this game came out in 1989 someone must have done one hell of a lot of updating to produce the "live" stream Steam was showing of someone playing the current build. 

I had to go look it up to be sure what was going on but it seems the anniversary in question refers to the studio that developed and publishes the game, Atlus, not the game itself. Atlus was a new name to me but they've made some games I've heard of, if not played, like the Persona series and... well, just that, really.

Once I'd reassured myself I wasn't going to be wasting my valuable time on some cronky old relic from the dawn of the digital age, I downloaded the demo, thinking that at more than 50GB it damn well better be worth it.

And it was. Very much so. It's really good. As in really good. I can see why all those reviews are so very positive. This one is going to be, too.

Since I'm just reviewing a demo and one I haven't even finished, I'm going to be brief and to the point. For me, that is. I'm just going to cover three aspects of the game as I've experienced it in my three hours thus far: Graphics, Story, Gameplay. Of course, those all sub-divide into things like Aesthetics and Design and Writing and Voice Acting and Music and Combat and UI so it might not be as brief as all that...

Graphics

This was what got me interested in the first place. At the top of the post you can see the image that introduced me to the game and to the left is the full image from which that scene was culled, as per the developer's website.

It's a striking picture with a huge amount of detail that instantly draws the eye and fires the imagination. There's a dynamic energy to it that fascinates. If it was a panel from a comic book or a still from an anime I'd be interested in reading or watching so since it's a game I ought to be interested in playing it, too. 

Except, as we all know from countless, disappointing experiences, concept art and promotional videos for games do not always accurately represent what you see when you play the games themselves. In this case that's broadly untrue. 

Sorry, that's not as clear as it could be. What I mean is that yes, the game by and large does look like that picture, which is a fair and accurate representation of both the aesthetic and the graphic quality, but it doesn't look exactly like it.

In some important ways it looks better. The designers do a great job moving between graphic modes in the game so the street and city scenes look like animated movies with all the depth and detail you'd hope for, while the combat and travel sequences are much flatter and less ornate. 

The illustrative quality is gorgeous and rich, with many scenes ressembling stills or panels from purely graphic media, whereas the design aesthetic in play for the UI and the interstitials is mannered and intense in the best way of magazine layouts. Whenever you find yourself at liberty to enjoy them, the visuals are there to be enjoyed. When you need them to do a job and get out of your face, that's what they do. Smart.

Character design is charming. Characters, playable and otherwise, seem to play a major role in the gameplay (You collect them for your team and engage with them to gain powers.) so it's vital they look appealing and original, which they do. 

Well, okay, when I say "original" I mean you can easily tell the players without a scorecard, not that they're "original" in some kind of authentic or literary fashion. They aren't. They're tropes. But we'll get to that in the Story section.

Are we done with Graphics yet? I guess we are. You can get some idea of the style and quality from the screenshots. They're stylish. They're modern. They're clever. That about covers it.

So, on to the Story then.

Story

It's good. Again, let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's good in context. Yes, it's the same damn story it always is - Threat to the Kingdom, Evil Mastermind, Secret Rebel Resistance, Only You Can Save The World (Because you're so special!) etc. etc.

Of course, that may all turn out to be a blind and there may be some big metatextual inversion of expectations turnabout deal coming, down the line. I wouldn't know. This is just a demo that starts at the tutorial and takes you through the prologue and I haven't even finished that. I'll just say that even if it doesn't turn out to be a hyper-aware, post-modern deconstruction of familiar tropes, I'll be perfectly satisified with the good, solid genre plot that's in evidence so far. Nothing wrong with a traditional tale told well.

And it is told well. The writing feels fluid and confident and crucially the translation is exemplary. In three hours I didn't notice a single syntactical infelicity but also and more unusually still there was little to no sign of the near-universal tell-tale signs that this was a translation of a Japanese original.

I would really like to do a whole post about this some day but I'm painfully aware I don't have the lingusitic understanding for it and I haven't done the necessary research to obviate that lack. I will just mention, though, that having now played very many games of south-Asian origin (Japanese, Korean and Chinese mainly.) one thing almost all of them have in common, in translation, is a much higher incidence of adverbial phrases than almost any native English speaker would be likely to employ in either in speech or in writing. A flurry of "recentlys" and "latelys" at the end of sentences or even sometimes in the middle is a dead giveaway.

There's none of that here. If the prose style doesn't always feel contemporary or naturalistic, that's just because it follows the more formal and flowery conventions of the fantasy genre as it's frequenly represented in video games. It's not going to win any literary awards but it's firmly within the parameters of "good writing" as those are understood within the genre.

I also saw not a single incident of deviance between the written and spoken word, except when the voice acting intentionally stops shadowing the text and devolves to an "I see" or "So then..." to indicate who's speaking, while the player is left to read what's been seen or concluded for themselves. I wish game designers wouldn't do that. It's annoying.

As for the voice acting itself, it varies from decent to very good. I was particularly impressed to hear a character with what sounded to me to be a genuine Scottish accent, an occurence so rare it deserves an award just for being there. There were a couple of moments where an accent or two veered dangerously close to those usually heard in Amateur Dramatic Society productions but there weren't many of those and they weren't that bad. I mean, it's not like we're talking Dick van Dyke...

Most of the characters were pleasant to listen to, which is the main thing. I very predictably enjoyed the perky American-accented fairy who accompanies the Protagonist (Who's actually called The Protagonist at one point and who very confusingly has to be given a different name to the name you give to what I thought was going to be the player-character but wasn't. I still don't know who I was naming when I did that...). The fairy, Gallica, gets all the best lines but the actor voicing the player-character has a deliciously subdued, resigned delivery that immediately endeared my own character to me, even though I'd had no choice in who I was playing, something that occasionally irks me. 

There's a lot of story to get through. (A bit like this post, then.) At times it can feel like a visual novel, although the frequent bursts of combat soon remind you you're playing a game. It fairly zips along, though, and I was always keen to see what happened next. I don't recall any longeurs although I did read ahead and cut the chatter from some of the minor characters. I often find voice acting, even when done well, can get a bit much after a while.

Perhaps the best part is the world-building, which I found fascinating. The part of the gameworld glimpsed in the demo is a quasi-nineteenth century monarchy with a monotheistic religion and access to both technology and magic. Outside the walls of the city-state the countryside is rife with monsters, making travel hazardous. Very curiously, the worst of these monsters are known as Humans, although when we get to see them, human is the very last thing they appear to be.

There's a great deal of play on the concept of bigotry and prejudice, a difficult theme here handled very adroitly. There are numerous tribes - nine I think it was - each with one or more distinctive features that make them easy to identify, although the protagonist's tribe, the least populous and most obscure of all, ironically has as its identifying feature the lack of any identifying features at all, something the other tribes find highly suspicious.

All the tribes stand in varying social relationships to each other, with a clear hierarchy marking some as superior, at least in their own estimation. Whether any of this has anything to do with the title of the game I couldn't say, although if so I'd say it's not so much a metaphor as an analogy. Whatever it might be, I found it very intriguing and I would like to learn more.

In summary, there's a solid if unoriginal story here that might or might not develop into something less predictable as it goes on. There's certainly more than adequate evidence to suggest the writers have the ability to pull some rugs. It's more a question of whether they have the will.

Gameplay

Often, when I'm demoing a game that looks good and reads well, it's how it plays that kills my interest. Very much not the case with this one. I was surprised, verging on astonished, by just how quickly I picked up the mechanics and how enjoyable they felt.

On the face of it, Metaphor seems like a mechanically complex game. Overly so, perhaps. The tutorial keeps introducing new elements and there are more and more screens to look at and tables to parse. The highly sylized typography, while striking, looks like it could make things harder to read than they need to be. 

Except they're not. Everything may be on a slant and fizzing with motion lines but I had absolutely no trouble seeing what I needed to see, when I needed to see it. Similarly, the combat options, so complex in the explanation, turned out to be intuitive and natural in context. 

Fights can be both real-time and turn-based. You can run up and hit the Space bar to launch a direct attack, then swivel to target another mob and do the same again in a frenzy of unprovoked violence or you can press "V" to go into a stately gavotte of mayhem, where you and your opponent take it in turns to try to set each other on fire or slice each other in two.

The game tells you it might be better to straight up charge into weak opponents and floor them before they have a chance to react, whereas tougher enemies could need a more sophisticated strategy. You can assess the threat levels of specific creatures as well as the general level of danger in the area by hitting "G" to see what Gallica sees. Fairies, apparently, know this sort of thing.

The fights, of which there are many, I found most enjoyable. I mentioned a couple of times that I was in the market for a tactical, turn-based game and this one admirably fits that bill. I can readily imagine spending many evenings battling my way through set-piece scenarios, figuring tactics on the fly. 

Should that later prove too difficult to be fun, as sometimes happens as games roll along, there are five difficulty settings to choose from, some of which can be changed and corrected as often as required, others which have to be set at the start and kept to throughout.

I played, as always, on the default "Normal" setting but for once that represents the dead center of the spectrum of difficulty. Below lie "Easy" and "Storyteller", above "Hard" and "Regicide". There really should be something in there to suit everyone.

Conclusion

All things considered, I'm quite impressed with Metaphor: ReFantazio. Or at least with the demo. Or at least with as much of the demo as I've seen. The website has a lot of media that give a good idea of what the game looks like and some text that tells you what it's about but since there's a demo, why not play that? Demos are great, aren't they?

Better than games, quite often, although I doubt that's true in this case. I'd happily carry on and play the whole thing if it wasn't for one factor: the price. The game retails at £59.99 for the Standard Digital Edition and £89.99 for the Deluxe version. While I appreciate that's the going rate for an AAA game, even the Standard comes in at roughly double what I'd be comfortable paying so I'll be waiting for a sale, something I imagine could take some time. I have wishlisted it on Steam, anyway.

In the meantime, I'll get back to finishing the demo (How much more can there be?) and then it's on to Next Fest.

#14 - Timblewoot - Born 20 November 2002 - 61 days 8 hours

November 2002 saw the beginning of a sea-change in the way I'd spend my time in Norrath. Until then, the overwhelming majority of my gameplay took place alone. Not for much longer.

I'd duoed a little with people I'd met along the way and Mrs Bhagpuss and I had made a few not very successful attempts to find characters we could play together, hampered by the fact that we rarely played on the same servers. I'd done as many pick-up groups as I could get with Rachel but those had mostly dried up with the coming of Velious.

Things were rolling along comfortably enough but I suspect now that, had Dark Age of Camelot not intervened, I would have drifted away from the game sooner rather than later, to return only occasionally over the years to come as a curious, if somewhat detached, tourist.

DAOC changed everything in that it introduced me to the dark, invasive, insidious and compelling power of playing with people you know instead of alone or with strangers. For a decade, from late 2001 to the first year or so of Guild Wars 2 in 2012, I spent at least as much time playing with friends and guildmates as I did alone. Quite probably more.

It was a mixed experience. The highs were intense but so was the drama. My god, the drama... I didn't mind it so much in the game itself but when it leached into offline life, as it regularly did, I found it draining. By the time the shift to the kind of alone-together play we take for granted today began, which for me was something I first experienced in Rift, I was more than ready for it.

That was still more than a decade away, when I made my first and so far only Ogre Shadowknight. I made him as a joke, in response to a character Mrs Bhagpuss was playing. At the time, I never imagined he'd become anything more than that.

That's the thing about these games. You make characters you never intend to play and then end up playing them for years. Four of my five most significant EverQuest characters fit that bill, the exception being Rachel and of the five, she made the least progress. 

EverQuest was very much in a growth phase when we left for DAOC. Just before we went, SOE added two servers based in Europe - Antonius Bayle and Kane Bayle. 

When we came back we began by picking up our existing characters on the various servers where we'd left them but for reasons I no longer remember (Maybe someone we knew had moved there? Maybe we were having connection issues with the US servers?) we chose to relocate to Ant Bayle, as everyone called it. 

I'd love to be more definitive but my memories of those times, while sometimes clear, are frequently fractured. I can remember many of the people we played with and a great deal about what we did together but as for the way we met them or why we made some of the choices we did, I can only guess.

I do know that not long after we moved to Ant Bayle, Mrs Bhagpuss made a character called Wimbletoot. She named him after a village in Ireland and he was a gnome. I can't remember his class. 

One afternoon, when I clearly had nothing better to do, it amused me to spoonerize Wimbletoot's name and blow him up to the largest size possible. I imagine I thought it would be funny to run around as an ogre/gnome duo with matching names. 

If that would ever have been funny, something I very much doubt, it certainly wouldn't have been funny for long. Luckily we never had to put it to the test because very soon after, Mrs Bhagpuss deleted Wimbletoot to make room for some other character she wanted to make.

I remember being a bit outraged by that. I almost never delete characters in any game. At the least level of affection I think of my characters as something akin to cuddly toys or household pets, not to be disposed of lightly, but if they gain any traction at all I think of them as people with rights. Virtual rights.

Wimble's demise left me with a joke with no punchline. I'd never intended to play another SK but since the record shows I didn't acquire any further characters (The significance of that verb will become clear in the next post.) until almost six months later, it would appear I must have been happy enough to take the challenge on. I'd like to say I remember my thinking there but I very much don't.

Rather than any organized plan, what I mostly remember are a number of significant incidents from Timblewoot's long and eventful career. He was a character I came to hold in considerable esteem and take quite seriously as I leveled him to the cap in something not far off real time. 

In those days, the level cap went up only infrequently. Reaching it involved some hard graft and felt like a big deal. The EverQuest Show has a handy timeline indicating the level cap only went up twice in the first five years, during which time there'd been no fewer than eight expansions, the link between expansions and level rises being far from established at that point.

Timble hit both 60 and 65 when each was as far as you could go. He did most of  the work in groups, which was how he came to be the character with whom I learned to tank. I was never a very good tank but I became good enough for most casual purposes. 

I was very lucky to be able to learn by example from some of the very best tanks on the server. Almost from the moment she started playing, Mrs Bhagpuss had become adept at both making friends and joining guilds, something that took me a lot longer to pick up, but by the time we came back from DAOC I was fair to middling at it too. 

Soon after our return, Mrs Bhagpuss quickly got invited to a middling-sized friends and family guild and I joined too. Then I somehow managed to make friends with a very skillful and even more sociable Enchanter and together we ended up starting a custom chat channel that somehow became the hangout of a number of raid guild players looking for somewhere fun and frivolous to hang out between raid nights.

Between the guild and the channel I suddenly had all the group offers I could handle. Thanks to the high-end company in the chat channel, I also got to spend a good deal of time with players who really knew how to play and I learned a lot. Eventually I even knew enough to be able to pass some of that on. It was an intense but often very fulfilling time to be playing EverQuest. I kind of miss it, sometimes, but I wouldn't have it back for the stress that sometimes came with it.

Most of that stress came from the aforementioned drama, which was never-ending, but I also found tanking pretty stressful in itself. Definitely a lot more stressful than healing, which turned out to be my metier. Nevertheless, I mustn't have been that bad at it - good enough to get asked to do it pretty often, anyway. 

Timble's class and race had something to do with that. At the time, Shadowknights were becoming a popular choice for Main Tank, having been very much also-rans to Warriors and Paladins for a while, and Ogre SKs were the most welcome of all since they enjoyed the considerable advantage of being immune to stuns while facing front. Even so, you still had to know how to play one and with some practice I became reasonably confident that I did.

The highlight of my tanking career came when a friend asked Timble to tank for him when he went to face the triggered version of the dragon Trakanon in Sebilis for his epic. I'd already tanked the Drolvarg Warlord earlier in the same extremely lengthy questline. I seem to remember that not going particularly well but it can't have been that bad or he wouldn't have asked me back for the much harder Trak fight. 

I also remember being there when he took on Phinagel Atropos in Kedge Keep for the same never-ending quest. It was an absolute nightmare of a zone and a horrible fight but at least I wasn't tanking for that one, thank Tunare.

Granted, triggered Trakanon isn't as tough as the full-fat version but at the time he was still a bona fide raid mob and we made a raid to kill him. I was flattered to be asked and excited to be there but I can't say I enjoyed it. Main tanking for a raid to get one of the final drops needed for someone's epic felt like a lot of responsibility at the time and if there's one thing I've never enjoyed it's responsibility.

In the event, everything went off about as well as could be expected. I still have flashes of the fight burned into my memory even now, like a series of still photographs glimpsed in a lightning storm. I never did anything like it again, nor wanted to. It was one of those things you're glad you've done for the experience but not until it's all safely behind you.

Everything was a learning experience back then, though. It was one of the best things about the game. Now, it takes a never-ending sequence of new games to provide that level of intellectual challenge but in the early years of the millennium just learning to play the one game adequately was more than enough challenge for me.

Playing Timble, I learned to do all the things a tank was supposed to do - taunt, hold aggro, peel, turn mobs - and I enjoyed all of that. One of the best things about combat in EverQuest in those days was how busy it felt. Unless you were playing a pure DPS class, of which there were very few, you had all kinds of things to do in a fight. It made combat feel much more tactical, more like a game of chess, sometimes, if you imagine trying to make your moves with someone beating you about the head and shoulders and yelling orders at the same time.

With Timble, when I wasn't tanking or off-tanking, a role I much preferred because of the diminished levels of responsibility, I was either leveling alone or working on his faction. Leveling speed was faster in groups but those were the days of hell levels and sometimes even grouping didn't make as much of a dent in the xp wall as you'd have liked so I spent much of my downtime from grouping fear-kiting solo to eke out a few more per cent.

As for faction, I'm still stupidly proud to remember how Timble was eventually able to stroll across North Freeport to do his banking. Not a lot of Ogres were welcome there but he was. He had to kill a lot of corrupt guards in the back alleys to gain the respect of the rest of the guards but it was a task both he and I were happy to take on. Getting to a safe spot in the city then locating, pulling and killing guards was one of the highlights of my time as an Ogre.

I carried on playing Timble all the way through until the next split in the timeline. That came a couple of years later, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I jumped ship once more, this time for EverQuest II. That proved to be a much more fundemental schism. A number of our friends made the transition but the only one who stayed for more than a few weeks after launch was the Bard I'd tanked Trak for. We played with him, on and off, for many years, all the way into GW2 until we finally lost track of him sometime in the twenty-teens. 

All the rest either went back to EQ or moved on to other games or stopped playing altogether. We never saw any of them again.

Looking back, I can see it had as much to do with with the infamous Gates of Discord expansion as it did with competition from new games like EQII or World of Warcraft. The infamously overtuned, unfinished and unforgiving GoD arrived in February 2004 and the damage it did, especially to morale, didn't begin to mend until the appearance of the following expansion, Omens of War, six months later, by which time it was too late for many who'd either already left or wished they could. 

For some of the latter, including Mrs Bhagpuss and myself, plus a few members of the guild we were in, the launch of OOW co-incided almost exactly with invitations to join the later stages of the EQII closed beta. The beta still had several months to run but once we got in and saw what was on offer I don't believe any of us came back to EQ, not even to say goodbye to those who remained.

Mrs Bhagpuss and I did return eventually but that's a story for another day. Suffice it to say that, when we did, we made yet another new start, leaving Timblewoot and all our old characters on both accounts beached on the sandrifts of the past. 

It seems fair. Timble had a great run. He's earned his peaceful retirement. He's probably just happy he doesn't have to tank any more. I know I am.

Rockin' Good News

I really feel like doing a music post. The only thing that's stopping me is the usual: too many tunes. Like the piles of books threatening to push me out of my house, though, that's a situation that's never going to improve if I don't do something about it, so not posting can't be the answer. 

I guess bookmarking fewer songs could but they're all so goddam good! Maybe I should start making YouTube playlists instead. Or as well. Those seem to be popular. A lot more popular than posting music videos on a gaming blog, that's for sure.

Oh well. You go with what you got. Let's get started.

That Sedative- Bad Waitress

I thought I might give everyone a break for once and open with some rock. Hard rock, even, as we used to say when I was young and ill-informed. I mean, not anything by anyone you ever heard of but it's a start, right?

This is one I can genuinely say I've been listening to lately. I've watched the video four or five times, had it on in the background a couple more and the chorus has been stuck in my head since I heard it. They remind me of one of my favorite nineties bands, the mostly forgotten and hugely under-rated even at the time Fluffy. 

Fluffy knew how to ride a chorus, too.

Legal Speed - Radium Dolls

Do they really have legal speed in Australia? I mean, not that it's of any practical use to me if they do. It's a long way away and anyway it wouldn't make up for having to grow a mustache and a mullet, which seems to be the law over there now, at least if the bands are anything to go by.

Sweetheart - Old Mervs

Case in point.

I actually thought that one was going to be heavier than it was. I guess there are only two of them. Only so much noise they can make.

After Party - Pot Is Drugs

I feel like we may have slipped into Alt Rock territory now or maybe even Pop Punk. Also, three out of the first four songs have drug references in either the title or the band's name, which is concerning. I worry I may not be fulfilling my responsibilities as a role model.

She Bangs Like A Fairy On Acid - Elita

Okay, that was just unnecessary. Drugs, sex and AI in the one package. Allll the bad things....

I hear you. You're not wrong, either. Just be glad I didn't go with this one instead. I actually like it better but I have standards to maintain here.

You're sorry you clicked on that link now, aren't you?

Don't Commit Suicide - I's

It's almost like I'm doing this on purpose now. I mean, it's good advice... can't fault it, really... but still.

This is Ano, by the way or Ano Chan as she's often known. She's a big deal in Japan, apparently, which just underlines what a different place it must be. From pretty much anywhere else on Earth. Then again, when I think of some of the people who've been a big deal where I live...

Bicycle - lil soft tennis & chelmico

That rock thing we had going for a while there didn't last long, did it? I don't even know what this is but at least it's wholesome. There's even a dog. 

Of course, I have no idea what they're singing about...

Forever Is A Charm - Princess Chelsea and the Dream Warriors

One of my favorite artists from the twenty-teens, who I hadn't heard much about for a while. I had a look to see what she'd been up to and it was this. Not what I was expecting but she picked up Best Alternative Artist at the Aotearoa Music Awards this year so it's clearly working for her. And for me.

The band is shit hot as the unfortunate expression has it and they kick ass, which really isn't much better. I don't know. Why can't we use nicer metaphors? There's a full live performance here and it's aces. "Aces" is nice, isn't it? Nothing suspect about that. 

I've Seen All Good People - Students at Eskilstuna Musikskola

Still clinging to the wreckage of my rock theme (And if you watched to the end of the Princess Chelsea video you'll know we haven't actually drifted as far away as it seems...), here's some Prog - as performed by a bunch of Swedish music students. 

I'd say I couldn't believe my eyes/ears when I happened across this but in fact I came to it by way of the same music teacher's upload of his charges tackling something even more unlikely - Gentle Giant . It's hard to believe anyone under fifty has even heard of Yes or Gentle Giant, much less wants to be seen on social media admitting to it but these aren't isolated incidents. This isn't even the only student cover of this specific Yes song!

 

I've Seen All Good People - 2018 School of Rock All-Stars Team 3

The weirdest thing about it all is that I can hear the words so much more clearly than I ever could when Jon Anderson was singing. These people really know how to enunciate. 

I have more but I'm saving them for a covers post. And if you thought those were some unlikely choices, may I direct you to this? And that's not even the only one of those, either!

What's wrong with people?

Dark Mystery Enigma Bird - Nap Eyes

It's hard to imagine drugs weren't involved...

My Beautiful Girl - Youth Lagoon

Oh yeah, we're gonna go long. Respect to those who've made it this far. I'd say that dates me but at least I didn't say props. What do the kids say now, when they want to big someone up? I don't imagine anyone here knows. They don't say "big someone up", though, I'll tell you that for nothing.

Just a couple more and they better be bangers or we're all going to nod right off. Those last two were great but they were kind of hypnotic, too, weren't they?

Fake Hangover - P!lot

And how is that one any better? Even I'm not taking any notice of me now or so it would appear.

Street Fighter - Pom Pom Squad

I guess that's close enough to banger territory. I mean, it's not Homie Don't Shake but what is? That's gonna be in my top five for the year when we get there, I'm telling you now.

Also, is it just me or does that chorus remind you of anything? I mean, like anything you might have heard recently? Earlier in this post, maybe? Do I got to spell it out?

One more...

e-m@il - Lilniina

Aaand... we're home! What a long, strange trip it's been.  There'll be more from Lilniina next time, most likely. Her catalog is considerable.

Until then...

Throne Alone

I'm forced to admit I'm having a lot more fun in Throne and Liberty than I expected. The reasons why are both complicated and contradictory. 

Looked at from the outside, it very much seems like a game that wouldn't do a lot for me. For a start, it's strongly biased towards grouping with a meta-game that's built for guilds. There's a clear expectation that you'll not only be willing to party up for dungeons but that you'll want to become part of a larger organization and engage in all kinds of competitive events so you can prove your worth both on the map and on a series of league tables

The whole game is designed to enforce both competition and co-operation in a way that appears to leave little room for individuals. Even open-world events, of which there are many, come not just with a running commentary like a sportscast but with scorecards throughout to let everyone know who's winning and who's won. 

Even if you don't make the top ten and have your name blasted all across the map, there's still no escaping the performance review: at the end you get a personal report telling you exactly where you placed in the table. I came 83rd in the event I did earlier today although it didn't say out of how many.

There's also a fairly heavy emphasis on non-consensual PvP. Outside of the safe areas like towns and villages, the world is divided into Peace and Conflict zones. In the former you can't be attacked by other players but in the latter anyone of any level can attack you without warning or penalty. 

Which area is under which condition changes all the time, so you can't just avoid certain locations. You have to pay attention to what state they're in as you travel to and through them.

The main story quest also does that annoying thing where it switches from solo to group as it goes along.  I currently have two quests that started solo but reached a point where the questgiver warned me I'd better gather some friends before carrying on. For one I'll need to go into a private instance, for the other a public dungeon.

The final stage of another longish questline that had up to that point been soloable ended with a demand that I kill world boss twice my level. Not on my own, obviously, but even so...

All of this is the exact kind of thing I always say I don't enjoy. So why am I still playing, let alone having a pretty good time?

I was wondering that, too. It seems odd, doesn't it? Counter-intuitive, for sure. Paradoxical, even. 

I had a think about it and I'm alarmed to say I suspect it might be down to intelligent design. No, not that kind. The kind where someone thought about how players might feel when they run up against these kinds of barriers and made an effort to mitigate the worst of the effects for those whose preferences might lie elsewhere.

Take that Level 40 world boss, for example. He's on a fixed schedule as are all the open world events. You can see the times of all of them on a drop-down menu attached to the mini-map. You can click on each entry to port to the nearest waypoint. 

It also tells you whether the event is Peace or Conflict and as far as I can see there's a non-PvP version of all of them. Interestingly, the reverse doesn't appear to be true so PvE players are actually better-served.

Unfortunately for me, the timings for the Peaceful versions of the boss I needed weren't ideal. I'd either have had to stay up to midnight or else wait until tomorrow morning. As I was pondering my options the three o'clock Conflict version popped very close to where I was standing, sending a massive column of red light into the sky. I thought why not? and morphed into my glide form to go give it a try.

And it was fine. I got ganked within seconds of landing and ganked again almost as soon as I got back but the respawn was barely ten seconds away and there was no penalty of any kind for getting killed so it was barely an inconvenience. 

On my second death I realised the event hadn't officially started yet. We were still in the five-minute "Come and get it" phase and the main reason I'd been killed was that everyone was standing around with nothing better to do than take pot-shots at late-comers.

I held off coming back a third time until the whistle went and this time everyone was too focused on the boss to bother with me. I found a nice spot at range and plinked arrows into him for a couple of minutes while his massive health pool slowly whittled away. Then I got in someone's way and got killed again.

As I respawned I saw I was part of a never-ending stream of resurrected players all throwing themselves off the cliff and turning into birds to fly back for another round. Dying and coming back was clearly all part of the process so I forgot about trying to avoid it and just let it happen. 

I got killed twice by the boss's massive AE and a few more times by other players. At the rate his health was dropping, it looked like the whole thing might take ten minutes or so. The event can run for almost an hour before he despawns so that seemed reasonable but around the fifty per cent mark another world event finished and a bunch of people from that one came across to join in on our guy, which just about doubled the speed we were killing him.

I died to some player with a lot of XXXs in their name when the boss was around 10% health so I just lay there and waited. By the forest of tombstones all around it looked like planty of other people had the same idea. 

When the final blow was struck a window popped up telling me I'd successfully participated in the event and my quest auto-completed too. I released and checked my inventory, where I found the rewards for the event, which were generous, given I'd done next to nothing. 

All things considered it was a productive and enjoyable experience. The fact that I'd been killed multiple times by other players seemed wholly immaterial. I've been killed far more frequently by mobs countless times, doing similar events in Guild Wars 2. Once you stop thinking of other players as anything different from mobs, it really makes no difference whether the event is flagged for PvP or not.

I'd been sitting on another quest for an open-world event, the wolf-killing one, for a few sessions and today I finished that, too. It was peaceful (Not for the wolves, obviously.) but highly competitive and it could have been a pain if it hadn't once again been for the thoughtful design. The event is scored by tallying the tails of wolves you've killed and miraculously every wolf has exactly as many tails as the number of people who helped to kill it. 

It's amazing how unstressful a competitive event becomes when the competition only relates to the final score not the contribution. If I'd wanted to make the cut to have my name up there on the leaderboard then I'd have had to make a very considerable effort but to notch up the required tails to finish the quest was simplicity itself. 

Similarly, those solo story quests that morph into "Group required"? There's a trick the game has to get around the problems and resentment that would normally cause. Every chapter comes with a flow-chart (Literally.) that shows you which sub-quest leads to which and the central narrative throughline, at least as far as I've gotten, remains solo throughout. 

Completing that gets you the achievement and reward for the chapter and marks it done. All the other sub-quests are listed as "Appendix" quests, making them optional in terms of the main storyline. To date, all the group quests have been appendices.

Inclusivity is all over Throne and Liberty, even when looks like the opposite. Take making a guild, for
example. One person can do it in about five seconds.

I usually try to make a solo guild in any game that allows it, which is by no means all of them. T&L does. I was quite surprised by that. I was expecting a game with such a focus on guild play to put some kind of protective fence around it but there's none. It could scarcely be easier.

There's no requirement whatsoever for making a guild other than having to reach Level 7, the same level you need to be to join one. No money changes hands, you don't need to have any members other than yourself, you don't even need to speak to an NPC. All you do is open the Guild window in the UI and click on Create Guild. That's it.

You are supposed to design your guild emblem at this point but I somehow managed to click straight through that part so my guild presumably has some random design or the default or no emblem at all. I don't know which because I haven't even worked out where you can see guild emblems yet.

Guild names are limited to fifteen characters, which is really short. One letter shorter than the name I usually go with, in fact. Luckily I have an even shorter version to fall back on in cases like this.

I was assuming that making the guild would be the end of my involvement with the feature. I mostly only do it to stop people sending me random invites, which is what happens if you have the temerity to run around unguilded in most games. It's rare for solo guilds to be able to do much in MMORPGs for obvious reasons. That turns out not to be the case here, or not exactly. 

It seems my one-person guild can attempt everything a larger guild can try. There don't seem to be any restrictions. It's just very unlikely I'd have the patience to make much progress. I should, however, be able to get the guild to Level 2, which is when we (That's the Guild Leader "We" I'm using there. It's very much like the royal "We" and entirely appropriate, as I'm sure you'll agree.) get our own "base" or Guild Hall as every other game would call it.

Level 2 seems extremely generous for such a sought-after prestige perk. Even more generous is the amount of effort required or rather the lack of it. There are a few ways to level the guild up but the basic option is Guild Contracts. These give Guild Xp and at Level 1 a guild only has access to one kind of contract - Territory.

Territory Contracts just ask you to kill regular overland mobs in a specific region, something that's very easily combined with questing or world events. I tested it this afternoon. Killing boars, spiders and goblins seemed to give something like one point of Guild XP for every two kills, although it wasn't quite as precise as that. There may be a random element or some sort of variation related to the level or difficulty of the mob.

Whatever the specific mechanics, it takes just 700 points to level the guild up, a target that feels very comfortably within the reach of a single player, playing normally. I've already notched up ten per cent of the requirement since I created the guild and that's in just a couple of hours of play.

Put all of this together and it forms a picture of a game where the intent is to allow players of all persuasions to play in the way they feel suits them best without having to feel they're missing out. Obviously everything is going to be far easier if you have (Or make.) friends - it always is in MMORPGs - but there seem to be refreshingly few hard locks on content to keep loners from making at least some progress on most fronts.

I'm sure this won't last forever. MMORPG endgames almost always cleave towards more formal, organized, structured group content. It also only affects the kind of activities a single player could reasonably expect to succeed at, like finishing the storyline. 

Other parts of the game are likely to remain forever locked to organized groups. I believe a big part of the game revolves around taking and holding territory.  No-one would expect a solo guild to do well at that. Or to do it at all, probably. I'm not sure if there are raids but if there are I don't imagine anyone's going to be soloing those, either.

It's also an unfortunate truth that almost all MMORPGs, regardless of whether they paint themselves as solo-friendly or not, very quickly turn into grindfests of one kind or another. That's certainly going to stop most solo or very small guilds from leveling up too far. The xp required ratchets quickly to make leveling a guild without the numbers expected untenable for most.

The key in that last sentence, though, is "for most". With no hard lock, if you're determined (Or delusional.) enough to want to try, there's nothing actually preventing you from trying. Good luck with that.

And indeed all of this may yet prove to be the provenance of the lower levels alone. It's entirely possible that as my character level goes up I'll find more and more of the game closed to me through requirements I can't or won't meet while playing alone. If so, it will just put Throne and Liberty into the same box as most of the other MMORPGs I've played. I nearly always hit a wall in the end.

The point is, I thought the wall would be present from the start and it's not, something I find very refreshing and not a little endearing. I still think I won't be staying with the game for long but I'm already thinking that, when I do move on, it will be with fond thoughts and good memories of the short time I spent there. 

I certainly didn't expect that a week ago.

Throne And Liberty Doesn't Have Housing. And Yet It Kinda Does...

It's a rare MMORPG that tries to get by without player housing these days. What was once seen as a niche feature most games could easily do without has become almost de rigeur for any game expecting to be taken seriously.

Guild Wars 2, one of the last major hold-outs, finally cracked and added housing this summer. World of Warcraft may be able to get away with going without after the dabacle that was Garrisons, but even the not-so-big gorilla looks increasingly out of touch, insisting players may think they want somewhere to hang their hats after a long day's adventuring but really they don't.

With the feature now so well-established as a standard fit and especially with extensive and elaborate player housing in the form of base building forming part of the minimum viable product spec for Survival games, the upstart hybrid currently chowing down on the MMORPG genre's lunch, any new entrant to the increasingly blurred marketplace is taking a big risk ignoring house and home. 

Throne and Liberty is different. It was originally conceived as the third in the hugely successful Lineage series and is still referred to in some quarters as Lineage 3, even though the project was long ago "re-purposed" by NCSoft to be something else entirely. The Lineage games do not have player housing so perhaps it's no surprise that T&L doesn't, either.

Except, as I discovered last night, it kinda-sorta does...

There was a flurry of excitement earlier this year when the developers announced in a livestream that various "Life Skills" would be coming to the game. These turned out to be fishing and cooking, both of which are in the current version that's just launched in the West. 

I got my first bamboo fishing rod last night, when I reached a certain point in the storyline and I think I may also have been told something by some NPC about cooking but as yet I have neither cooked nor fished.

A few commentators, having watched that stream, also got very excited about what they thought was going to be the addition of player housing to the game. They were wrong, sadly. 

What was added to the Korean version back in the summer and which was included in the game at launch in the West, was Amitoi housing. Or, to be more specific, an Amitoi house.

I have to confess at this point that I'm somewhat vague on what an Amitoi actually is. From observation in game I can see they're fanciful creatures that both look and behave a little like Palworld's Pals or Once Human's Deviants. 

Like those, they're collectible and have different skills, powers or abilities. I'm less clear on how you acquire them. So far I've seen three and I own two.

The first, the appropriately named Helpie, appears in the introduction and stays for the Tutorial, before leaving in a dramatic and rather emotional clifftop scene. I was sorry to see Helpie go but almost immediately afterwards I realised I'd acquired a replacement in the shape of Forest Sapling Grover, who looks like a knitted treant. 

Grover heals me so long as I have piles of leaves that have to be purchesed from an NPC. At least, that's the only way I know how to get them so far. I probably need to do some research on that because the healing is significant.

I also have a corpulent penguin called Vagabond Percy. He was given to me by another, much bigger penguin called Pro Adventurer Percy, who stands about in the town of Kastleton as though three foot tall penguins wearing woolen armor were a completely normal sight there, which by all the available evidence they seem to be.

In common with most - conceivably all - Korean, Japanese and Chinese games I've played, the boundaries that would mark the dividing line in a Western game between content intended for adults and that meant for children are thin to non-existent. Why shouldn't a penguin be a professional adventure? 

Whether it's rational or reasonable it's a fact and I can prove it because last night I sent Vagabond Percy out on a mission. What was added in that summer update wasn't just housing for penguins and other plushes, it was a whole mission system whereby Amitoi could go adventuring on their own.

I've had the quest to set it up for a while but I'd been ignoring it because to begin I needed to go to "The Amitoi House" and I didn't know where it was. I tried looking on the map but I couldn't see it. There was no quest marker for it and no sign of it as an icon or a named location.

In the end I went to Google, where I learned I was far from alone in not being able to find the blasted place. It transpires that the Amitoi House is accessible only from the UI and in the most nit-pickingly hard-to-spot part of it at that.

If anyone's looking for the door to the Amitoi House here's where to find it: 

That little circle shows a picture of your current Amitoi and when you mouse over it an even tinier icon of a house appears in the top right corner. Okay, circles don't have corners but you get what I'm saying. I'd have used a screenshot that showed the icon itself but obviously it never shows up on a regular shot and the game is down for maintenance now, as it seems to be just about every morrning.

It would be helpful if something in the game told you about this extremely obscure means of access but as far as I can recall nothing ever does. I hadn't even noticed the circle let alone seen it was wearing a house for a hat.

Once I knew where to look it was all very straightforward. A click teleports you into what has to be one of the cosiest private rooms I've ever seen in any game. It's delightful. It makes that inn room you get in Final Fantasy XIV look like a dockland flophouse by comparison.

I spent a while wandering around looking at the fixtures and fittings and soaking up the considerable ambience. There's not a lot you can do there although the potential is immediately apparent. There's a collectible book to pick up and there's also a very impressive record of your exploits so far in the form of a journal you can open to watch replays of all the cutscenes in the chapters you've finished.

It also has a door that doesn't work. Only it's not just that it doesn't work - it tells you it doesn't work. That suggests that one day it might work, although where it might go if it did remains a mystery.

The main attraction, though, is the Amitoi Expedition Map. Click on that and a whole interface appears from which you can pick a selection of missions on which to send your various Amitoi. For rewards, naturally.

It was an easy choice for me. So far I have one mission and one amitoi to do it. You can't send the Amitoi you're partnered with so it was all down to Percy the Penguin. 

I did get to decide how long he was going to be off adventuring and since I was going to bed right after I gave him the full eight hours, the longest adventure on offer. Longer runs mean better rewards.

With that done, I sat by the fire and logged out. It felt much better than logging out in a city street or somewhere in the countryside as I'd been doing up to then. 

I have mentioned a few times before that I always try to leave my characters somewhere sheltered and safe when I log out. So far in Throne and Liberty that's meant sharing an awning or a hut with an NPC. I'm a lot happier now, knowing I can leave Califa comfortably tucked up in a cozy, book-lined room, settled on a soft cushion in front of a roaring fire. It would be a lot better still if I could move the furniture around and add a few things of my own but it's a big improvement over sleeping rough, that's for sure.

So, it's definitely not player housing but it's not nothing either. And there's more. As I was playing last night I happened to notice a guild vendor standing around in a village so I went to see what sort of things you can buy as a guild member. I'm probably going to post something specifically about guilds in the game so I won't pre-empt that but I'll just mention that, through something the vendor said, I now realize guilds get a "base" of some kind.

That piqued my curiosity so I opened the Guild window in the UI and there I found, to my considerable surprise, that guilds get access to a base at Guild Level 2. Even I ought to be able to get that far.

Once again, the base isn't proper housing. You can't even decorate it in the half-assed fashion GW2 uses for Guild Halls. Still, it is a personal instance with some functionality. I'll save any further commentary for when and if I get one of my own but for now I'll just say that I have a new goal and if I meet it, Califa will have a choice of places to spend her free time, when I'm not calling on her services.

Pretty sure she's going to live in the Amitoi House anyway, though. I mean, I would, if I could. Wouldn't you?