Marvel's Midnight Suns - First Impressions

One of the more interesting psychological phenomena surrounding gaming is the way multiple options so often collapse into one. It's common to hear people, myself very much included, complaining of choice overload or even choice paralysis but when it comes to gaming, at least, I find the choices mostly make themselves.

For example, I've been droning on about the number of games I've picked up for free and cheap lately, side-eying the much larger collection of freebies I've claimed and never even installed, yet as soon as I got my claws on Marvel's Midnight Suns I knew I was going to play it right away.

Or that was my plan. It didn't quite come off because the download from Epic Games turned out to be  i  n  c  r  e  d  i  b  l  y  slow. Maybe I've been spoiled by Steam and all those F2P gacha games but ninety minutes for a 57Gb download? That's about three times longer than it normally takes me.

Consequently, by the time the thing had squeezed itself down the pipe and gotten itself settled in, it was time for Beryl's late-evening walk and then for bed. I put off playing until this morning and right after breakfast, there I was... stuck in Epic's super-irritating log-in process.

At this point you should have been enjoying a couple of paragraphs of quality ranting as I complained volubly about having to fill in all the same details I filled in twelve hours ago and complete a Captcha puzzle, just to get to the point where I could see the game in my Epic library. I'd written most of it, too, but before I finished, in a spirit of journalistic integrity I thought I'd better log in again to see if I'd remembered all the steps correctly. And stap me if this time it didn't skip the lot and take me straight into the game!

So I guess all the delay was a first-time log-in check and everything I did yesterday must have been a "We see you haven't been here for a while" security check. Or something. Whatever. I'll give them a grudging pass but if it turns out to be a daily identity check after all I'm gonna be pissed.

Moving on, what abut the game? 

Couldn't tell you. Haven't played it yet. I have, however, played through the Tutorial and the following pre-game introduction. It took me seventy-five minutes, give or take. More than enough for a First Impression post. 

Let's do it old school with sub-sections. 

Graphics And Design 

Hmm. Start with a tough one, why not? Good? Bad? Indifferent? As the wits on YouTube like to say in the comments: "Yes".

The character animations are mediocre at best. Some are downright bad. Iron Man (For it is he...) walks bow-legged, like his armor doesn't fit him properly. I had a more scatological phrase in mind to describe what it looks like but I'll spare you. It's unconvincing as articulation and unbecoming of a super-hero, anyway. None of the others are as bad but few, if any, are good. They all look stiff and awkward.

But then, I find myself having a generic problem with the western game animation Firaxis is offering. It looks clunky and old-fashioned compared to everything I've become used to in the anime-style games I mostly seem to have been playing of late. It falls heavily between cinematic realism and cartoon animation, having weight and solidity but precious little fluidity or grace. I mean, it's not terrible and after a while I found myself getting used to it but it's definitely not something you'd gosh-wow over, which is a bar very many games easily leap over nowadays.

The backgrounds are much better and the character designs are very solid, although given they're virtually all specific looks taken verbatim from licensed characters in a very well-known IP it would be more than a little embarrassing if they weren't.  

The overall design aesthetic I liked a lot more. The UI is absolutely minimal, leaving nearly the entire screen clear for the graphics, which makes it even more of a pity they aren't better, I guess, but which is very welcome all the same. Every time a new major character appears the game pauses and a flash card appears to tell you who they are, along with sarcastic or amusing comment. I found that rather more entertaining than it probably should have been but then I've known most of these characters a very long time.

Character And Plot

Since it's come up... In my long experience of Marvel comics, the writers only really have two settings: portentous and overblown or snarky and flip. Back in the days when I kept up, it was fairly simple to sort the entire roster of heroes - and most of their supporting casts - into one or other of those bins. Of course, one of the company's supposed USPs was always crossing those streams, often in the same story and sometimes with the same character, but almost everyone and everything reverted to one or other as a default.

The MCU, by and large, followed the same formula, back when I was paying attention, from the first Iron Man movie to Avengers: Endgame, which came out in 2019 (God... really? Seems like it was about six months ago...). Marvel's Midnight Suns (The prefix is part of the official name, by the way.) came out in 2022 but it feels like it's cut from the same spandex. If the tone of the movies has changed in the last few years, I wouldn't know but there's no sign of it here.

The movies were characterized by a never-ending torrent of one-liners and this game is the same. Tony Stark is particularly prone to bad dad jokes and Stephen Strange constantly sends himself up with a series of very pretentious pronouncements that neither the rest of the cast nor the player could possibly take at face value. It's all quite meta and post-modern in a way that I thought went out of fashion a decade or more ago but it plays to my sense of humor so I'm fine with it. I imagine it would drive some people to want to throw the monitor out the window, though.

The plot, what little I've seen of it so far, is one of those standard Some Bad Guys Just Summoned An Even Badder Guy And The World Will Come To An End Unless You Do Something About It affairs. In this case the bad guys are HYDRA, which has to be one of the most generic bad guy organizations in the history of comics; the badder guy is Lilith, who I think comes from Ghost Rider/Blade/Morbius continuity and is little more than a name to me. Other than that, not much of a storyline has developed yet, beyond needing to stop things getting worse.

 

The cast is interesting, to me anyway. As a long-time reader, I knew who most of them were immediately. Iron Man and Dr. Strange, obviously, but also The Scarlet Witch, Ms. Marvel, Blade, Magik; all characters I know either very well or well-enough. 

More intriguing were the ones I thought I ought to know but couldn't quite place - Nico Minoru and Robbie Reyes in particular. I had to look them both up and it turns out I was fifty per cent right - I knew one of them, not the other. Nico is a graduate of The Runaways - not the band, sadly, but the teen supergroup, whose TV show I watched and several of whose comic collections I own. Should have been able to peg her.

The other turns out to be an incarnation of Ghost Rider. I have never been a fan of the skull-headed biker and I certainly don't know this alternate version. Even if I did, I might not have realized who he was because the original Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze, features prominently in the introductory sequence. Why (And indeed how.) the both of them are in the same reality is, I assume, a plot point yet to be revealed.

All of which tells you a good deal about who this game is meant to appeal to: people already steeped in the mythology and the backstory. Everything refers back to something else. It's all lore and history from the opening scene and I'm betting that won't stop until the closing credits. If you're not at least curious to figure out how it all fits together then I'm guessing it's not the game for you. Obviously, it works for me, even though I'm much more of a DC fan than Marvel.

Character Creation

I was surprised to find there was any. It hadn't even occurred to me I'd be asked to make a character. I assumed I'd be playing the regulars. And indeed I will - there are a dozen playable heroes plus another four in DLC - but you do get to do some minimal cosmetic work on a character I'd never heard of before - The Hunter. 

The rationale for that is quite clever. Dr Strange, The Caretaker (Another new one on me - I had to look her up and among other things she was Agatha Harkness's lover so she might even have been in Wandavision...) and Nico between them manage to resurrect Lilith's daughter (Stop me if you're lost...) but before they really get into the necromantic action The Caretaker suggests it might be a good idea to know what she looks like. 

That's when the game drops you into Character Creation. It was about forty minutes in for me. There's very little to it - Body Type, Skin Tone, Hair Color and Style and I think that's about all. I did manage to get someone I didn't mind looking at so that was fine. It's not as if I get to "play" her in any meaningful sense anyway. She's just another scripted character as far as I can tell, so far, anyway.

Gameplay: Combat

This is where it gets good. Not the rest of it is bad but what I was looking for was a compelling-yet-simple tactical RPG and that looks to be what I'm going to get. It's a card-based system. I keep seeing comparisons to Slay The Spire and similar titles, none of which I've played so I can't comment on whether those are valid. To me, it feels quite similar to Wizard 101 or maybe even more so to Pirate 101.

Everything is turn-based and represented by a bunch of three-dimensional characters, none of whom move or do anything until it's their go, which immediately removes all immersion and turns the whole thing into almost a virtual table-top game. Exactly what I was looking for. 

The tutorial is very good. How refreshing to be able to say that. The interface is intuitive, the controls are obvious and the necessary details on what each action does are there in front of you. It helps that I already know what most of these characters are good at but for those that I don't know, all the information needed is close to hand.

Since it's a superhero game, there needs must be lots of explosions, force rays and people punching other people through walls, all of which there certainly is. One of the generic problems with turn-based games is that you end up having to watch the same animations hundreds of times, so things that seemed spectacular at the start make you want to put your fist through the screen by the end. Where this stands on that spectrum it's far too early to say but I'd already seen more than enough of Iron Man's repulsor blasts by the end of the Tutorial.

Fortunately, with so many playable characters, it should at least be possible to take a break from the most annoying ones. I hope. I'm certainly looking forward to finding out because the combat is pretty much exactly what I was looking for.

Gameplay: Out Of Combat

Can't really say. This was apparently what scuppered the game on release, when a lot of people took quite strongly against whatever it is you have to do to get from one set-piece fight to the next. 

So far, I've watched a lot of cut scenes, most of which were okay but nothing special, and had to pick a handful of dialog options, all of which looked like flavor to me. There's also an element of not-very-open world play, where you walk from one part of a non-combat instance to another to find someone you have to talk to or to go through a portal to somewhere else. Again, that seemed fine, nothing special but nothing awful either.

There's a big castle where everyone either lives or is staying for the duration of the crisis. You can pick your missions there although so far I've had a selection of exactly one so choice didn't really come into it. I believe you can also wander around and do... something. No idea what, yet, although the Wikipedia entry mentions sparring, upgrading cards and other practicalities.

I'm guessing the problematic part comes at night, when "players can interact with other heroes, or participate in a "Hangout" or a "club meeting". Sounds good until you learn it involves finessing how much other characters like you by giving them gifts and talking morality with them. That was literally the mechanic that made me stop playing the original Dragon Age mid-story and never go back to the franchise, so I can see what the problem might be. 

But that's a problem for another day. Haven't even got through the first yet. I'll update my thoughts on the "social elements" when I get to see them. As for the fighting - which is what I came for - looking good so far!

#17= Magmia - Born 4 May 2003 - 101 Days 12 Hours

And so we come to Magmia. As should be obvious by her excessively long Played Time, she's one of my most important characters. Remember, too, that those numbers are actual hours logged into the game, which means that - if we say an average, full session in EverQuest takes about three hours - I must have played her, at a minimum, more than eight hundred times.

Of course, MMORPGs don't really work like that. Magmia's been around long enough that there would have been plenty of times when I spent all day with her and also long enough that she'll have been woken up for an hour here, an hour there before disappearing back into whatever quiet limbo game characters inhabit when they're not being played.

As we'll hear later, there was a full year when all she did was Overseer dailies, which meant she was online for only about fifteen minutes every day and never left the Guild Lobby. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Magmia was the character I made to play on Stromm when it became obvious Magmus wasn't cutting it. Apparently that took me a day to decide. I made him on the third of May and Magmia on the fourth. 

I was hedging my bets, too, because as you'll have noticed, Magmia has an equals sign by her numeral in the title. That's because I made two characters on the second day Stromm was up, clearly not having figured out what class I wanted to play yet. 

The other character, who we'll meet next time, was a Druid (Still is, in fact...), which suggests I was looking for someone with both utility in a group and also strong solo potential, a description that fits both Magicians and Druids well. 

That makes perfect sense. Mrs. Bhagpuss and I got off to a flying start on Stromm, meeting a bunch of new people, starting a guild, running around in a gang having fun, so classes welcome in groups, especially at low levels, were ideal. Even in 2003, though, Stromm was very far from being my first new server rodeo and I would have been well aware of the likelihood that almost all the new people we were adding to our friends lists and inviting into the guild wouldn't be there in a few weeks' time.

Attrition on new servers was ferocious back then. Hordes of players descended on every launch like a flock of sightseeing locusts, most of them playing throwaway characters they had little intention of sticking with for longer than it took for the new server smell to wear off. I should know. I was one of them. Consequently, anyone planing on sticking around had probably better be ready either to join up with one of the guilds that was planning on making a name for itself or have a plan for going solo. 

The Stromm server itself was pretty successful, off the back of being a genuine, fresh start server, to which transfers were not permitted. It went on to have a long life before it was eventually rolled into Luclin. Lots of people did make it their permanent home but not many of them were the people we'd been cultivating. I can't remember how long we lasted on Stromm that first time around except that it was long enough for almost everyone we'd met to leave before us. 

Before then, though, we had a lot of fun. I remember doing a great deal in the Luclin early zones, particularly the infamous Paludal Caverns, which at one time had a much higher Zone Experience Modifier than most, leading to every possible grinding spot being camped 24/7. The trains were legendary and I can still hear those awful echoing screams - sound samples that looped constantly in the dark, dismal caves.

Oh, yes... we know how to make our own fun in those days!

Well, I did. And one one way I did it was running a one-gnome trading service. I figured out that there were tradable items you could buy from vendors in Katta Castellum that you couldn't get in Luclin's main city, Shadow Haven, so I started running out there to buy them and bring them back to sell in the Bazaar.

I can't remember what they were any more - probably either crafting mats or reagents I imagine - but I do remember the route; Paludal Caverns>Hollowshade Moor>Grimling Forest>Tenebrous Mountains>Katta Castellum. That took me through a whole series of dark, confusing, extremely dangerous zones and although Magmia could make herself invisible that didn't help much with all the vampires along the way.

It was the sort of thing I really loved to do back then, though. Long journeys alone through treacherous territory, always at the risk of sudden death and a difficult corpse recovery. I prided myself on my ability to get to places characters of my level shouldn't go and if I could use that to turn a profit I liked it even better.

In Magmia's case it all went so well I made a small fortune or what seemed like it at the time. She made enough money to buy herself a horse before anyone in her social group and indeed before most of the rest of the server. That was when even having a mount was still something of a status symbol and Magmia certainly made the most of it. She was never off that pony and she reveled in the attention it brought her. It was her one moment of fame.

But I already told that story (Rather better, too) back in 2014, when I was writing about the first time SOE gave away a Level 85 Booster. Free level-jumps were new and exciting then, not ho-hum like they are now, and I had a good, long think about who to give it to. Magmia was the one I chose and I have not regretted that decision, even once, since.

Backtracking a little, as I recall, we held out on Stromm until we were in the low thirties, not an
insignificant achievement back in EQ in 2003, but then we moved on to somewhere else. Looking at the timings on my list I think it must have been back to Antonius Bayle, where we did the core of our serious guild and group play for a couple of years.

Magmia went into semi-retirement after that, coming back now and then, whenever I felt like having some time on my own, away from the never-ending guild drama that dogged those social years. And that might have remained her fate, had Mrs Bhagpuss and I not then come back to Stromm much later for what turned out to be our swan-song as an EverQuest duo. 

That, though, is more Ratha's story than Magmia's. We haven't met Ratha yet. Don't worry. She'll be along soon enough.

On that return to Stromm we brought characters with us, so we didn't strictly need our old ones but Magmia got plenty of play anyway. According to that 2014 post, she was Level 69 when I boosted her and I can remember wrecking around with Mrs Bhagpuss's Necromancer through a whole load of Planes of Power, Gates of Discord and Omens of War zones, having enormous fun for a while. Two mildly over-levelled, highly over-geared (Thanks to expansion-led power creep.) pet classes with a healer mercenary apiece can do a whole lot in EverQuest and make great xp while they're doing it.

That was Magmia's second act and it was a good one but after Mrs Bhagpuss finally gave up on EverQuest for good in favor first of EverQuest II and later Guild Wars 2, I mostly dropped the game as well. It wasn't until much later - specifically 2014 and that level boost -  that I came back for the first of several moderately intensive stints in the elder game. 

Level 85 was higher than I'd ever been in EQ and it opened up the prospect of several expansions-worth of new content. Magmia's third act consisted of some quite serious solo play as I slowly and carefully edged my way up into the 90s, eventually topping out at 92, by when zones giving good xp had become too dangerous and difficult to be fun any more.

Some of that seven-level journey is told in sporadic posts here on the blog although you'd have to have more gumption than I do right now to go dig the details out. I do remember having a lot of fun in Secrets of Faydwer and Seeds of Destruction, though, which brought me up to Norrath circa 2009. And that's where she'd have stopped, either forever or at least until Daybreak saw fit to increase the level range on the boost program (Something they eventually got around to only last year.), had it not been for the Overseer feature.

In my opinion, Overseer for EverQuest (And to a lesser extent EQII.) ranks second in significance only to Mercenaries, when talking about game-changing innovations, for the simple reason that both allow a casual player access to far more of the content of the game than they otherwise might get. 

Mercenaries give you a healer or a tank on tap, letting you kill mobs that would otherwise wipe the floor with you. Overseer lets you level up without having to kill any mobs at all.

When the Overseer system was added just over five years ago it didn't immediately seem like anything very impressive or even useful. That's because it takes a good while to wind up before you let it go. Once you've got it primed, though, it can make you casual-rich and push you up the level ladder like nothing else outside of a decent group.

This isn't a post about Overseer so I'll leave it at that. The reason for bringing it up at all is that for about a year I "played" Magmia just about every day and she never moved off the spot where I logged her in. I set her Overseer dailies, concentrating on missions with xp rewards and in that way she went from 92 to the then level-cap of 115 in... well, not in no time but at a considerably faster rate than I would have been able to level her in the conventional manner, at no risk whatsoever, in a fraction of the session time.

The only problem was that it was so efficient it spoiled me for the real thing. I did actually take her out a few times to take a look at a few of the new zones her new levels had opened up but although she was able to hunt quite safely there, the xp-per-hour was so slow compared to staying home and doing the Overseer missions, it felt like a bit of a fool's move leaving the lobby.

In the end I just left her where she was, safe and comfy, and plugged away until she hit the cap. After that I kept on doing missions for quite a while, shifting my focus to those that gave rewards she could pass to my Bazaar trader to sell for good money to other players with less patience and business acumen. That made me a lot of platinum for a while, until I finally lost interest and stopped logging in.

And that's where Magmia stands now. The level cap moved on to 120 and then to 125 and will most likely go to 130 with this year's expansion. I keep thinking of starting up on Overseer again to catch her up but it's certainly not going to happen before I finish doing the same in EQII. I can't face setting two lots of missions every day for a year...

You might well ask what would be the point anyway? There's no realistic chance I'll ever play EverQuest with serious intent again. Not only has that ship sailed, it's come back to port, hung about for a while, gone back out and come in again. Several times. I've given the game a good go but time moves on. 

All of which doesn't mean I won't ever play again - I just won't play even slightly seriously. I might do some sightseeing, though. Another ten or fifteen levels would open up at least two more expansions, probably more, with zones I've never visited and content I've never seen, all of which would make for prime tourist opportunities. The last expansion I really know to any meaningful degree is probably 2013's Call of the Forsaken so the potential for seeing new things is huge.

And if anyone's going to realize that potential it's surely going to be Magmia. It was never planned and for a long time it wasn't even dreamed of but somehow she's ended up being my EverQuest "main". 

It couldn't have happened to a more deserving gnome! 

Get To The Back Of The Line, You Two!

This seems to be buying season. Or acquiring season, at least. Since I last posted about adding seven more games to my collection, just a few days ago, I've added a couple more. 

The first was a freebie from Amazon in celebration of Prime Day, a spurious self-generated "event" the megacorp has been trying to hype into something worth caring about for weeks now. All it is, of course, is a generally disappointing sale in which anything I'm vaguely interested in is never discounted enough to make me feel it's worth buying and anything I'm really interested in has barely any money off at all.

I wonder a lot about both the psychology and the commercial effectiveness of big sales like this. Everyone does them but I never see any feedback about how successful they are in terms of raising revenue. Do they really generate enough additional sales - purchases that otherwise would not have happened at all - to offset the money lost on purchases people were always going to make anyway and most likely would have made at a higher price? 

Sales are only ever really satisfying if you were already dead set on buying something pretty much right now and suddenly there it is at half price. That counts as a genuine saving in my book. It's less exciting but still quite nice when purchases you were definitely going to have to make at some point, just not necessarily right now, turn up at a discount. That also counts as a real saving, I 'd say.

Anything you otherwise might or might not have bought doesn't count as any kind of "saving", regardless of how much less you had to spend to get your hands on it compared to if you'd bought it at another time. That's extra money you've now spent that would otherwise still be in your pocket.

From the seller's perspective, it's the reverse, of course, although making you buy something now, even for less than you might have paid later, may be what they're after. In my limited experience, businesses are constantly trying to finesse when the money comes in as well as how much of it there is.

So far, Amazon has yet to persuade me to buy anything purely because of Prime Day. I may or may not have bought something during the event in previous years - I have no idea whether I have or not - but if I did it was entirely co-incidental. I buy stuff from Amazon all the time but only ever things I need or at least believe I need when I buy them, which admittedly isn't quite the same thing. 

I don't go trawling through the warehouse deals looking for bargains or anything like that but purely because they make such a huge deal of it, I do fall into the trap of browsing the Prime Day offer every year (Or however often it happens. I have no idea if it's more than once a year. It might well be because it sure isn't really a "Day".) It never takes long. It's always so dispiriting. I must remember not to bother next time.

I wouldn't be here, posting about the dumb sale at all if it wasn't for one thing: Prime Gaming also likes to get in on the action. I'm fairly sure they already gave away some extra games as some kind of pre-event but today they're handing out four more to celebrate the thing finally happening and for a miracle one of them is something I actually want!

The four games are Football Manager 2024 (No thanks.) Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (Bleh.) Amnesia (Much too scary.) and...

Marvel's Midnight Suns

That's the one! I remember it from when it came out and tanked. According to GameRant, the complaints at the time revolved around the "narrative elements that had players navigate an all-star lineup of Marvel heroes through some fairly mundane slice-of-life interactions." 

I've been droning on since at least the 1980s about how super-hero comics are primarily soap-operas and how the fights are largely incidental to the mundane slice-of-life interactions between the huge, sprawling casts, so that sounds much more like a recommendation than a caveat to me. I hope it turns out to be true.

As for the combat, the game was developed by Firaxis Games, the people who made the X-Com series among other well-known titles. I didn't get on with X-Com at all but that was because of the setting and the graphics, not the gameplay, which I otherwise liked well enough. I'm far more interested in a tactical RPG based on super-heroes than one centered on a bunch of far-right military types battling faceless aliens with xenophobic and genocidal tendencies to the fore on both sides, a scenario in which I'd just as soon leave them both to it and hope they wipe each other out.

Of course, Midnight Suns isn't a particularly generous gift from Prime. It's been on deep discount almost since it crashed and burned on launch back in December 2022. Currently you can pick it up in the Steam Sale for 85% off, which is a very good discount indeed. The only problem there is that it was a full-price game to begin with so even at that price it'll still cost you $10. 

I'd like to play Midnight Suns but based on my logic as outlined in the intro to the post, I wouldn't consider it a "bargain" at 85% off. For that to be true, I'd have had to have had a definite intent to buy and I certainly did not.  At a cost of absolutely nothing at all, though, a bargain it sure is!

Whether it's any good or not is another question. I'm optimistic but it's going to have to join the ever-growing line of games waiting to be played. As soon as I get around to playing it, I'll be sure to let everyone know.

The other fresh addition to my stable of games did cost me something. And I very much wasn't about to buy it anyway for the simple reason that until this morning I'd never heard of it. 

I was wondering when the Steam Sale was going to end, in case I decided to buy one of the titles on my wishlist (Most likely Sovereign Syndicate at 60% off...). While I was looking at that I thought I might as well check the Deep Discount section, in case they'd added anything interesting late in the day (The sale has two days left to run.) As it turned out, they had. Or quite possibly they hadn't but I'd missed it the last time I checked.

The game I didn't recall being on the list before and which I ended up buying was

Beyond: Two Souls

This one's "a unique psychological action thriller" originally produced for the Playstation 3 all the way back in 2013, although it didn't make it to PC until six years later. It was developer Quantic Dream's follow-up to the much-publicized Heavy Rain, a game even I remember. 

That was all back when the idea of video games turning into something that played like movies you could control was all over the mainstream media.  There was a lot of talk about new forms of storytelling and immersion and of course VR got in on the act and in the end... what happened? 

Nothing much, other than that games continued to become more filmic and everyone got used to it, so they stopped banging on about it like it was the beginning of a new age, I guess. Now we all just expect games to be like that at least some of the time and we only get excited when they do it particularly well. We're long past the dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs stage or I hope we are.

This particular, probably transitional, example features two big Hollywood names - Elliot Page (Viktor from Umbrella Academy) and Willem Defoe (Everything from Platoon to a whole bunch of arthouse films I really like.), which was the main thing that drew me to it. I like both of those actors so if they're in it all the time it's probably going to be worth a look.

Especially at a very attractive 90% off. And the game was only £16.99 to begin with, so that means I had to stump up just £1.69. (That's $2.29 to save you the trouble.) I had an ice-cream yesterday that cost more than that and it lasted me about two minutes. I'm pretty sure I'll get more for my money out of Beyond: Two Souls than that.

It's all relative, isn't it? At least, that's the rationalization.

 

Anyway, if nothing else, all these new games give me something to write about without having to... y'know... play any of them  Following on from yesterday's post, the forecast is for a lengthy spell of very hot, very sunny weather starting today so it might be a while before I get to any of them. Still, nice to know they're there, isn't it?

Well, "there" for a given value of "thereness" that is. I'm sure everyone's been following the progress of the Stop Killing Games campaign in Europe? I haven't. First I heard of it was when Tobold posted about it although Wilhelm might have mentioned it when he was talking about game preservation. Other than that I'd managed to avoid it until now.

My uninformed take on it is that it's entitled twaddle but I'm not going to elaborate because I don't care to give it even the one or two molecules of oxygen a personal blog can muster.  I mention it only because, when I bought Beyond: Two Souls on Steam, I had to acknowledge my acceptance of the EULA, the very first line of which read, all in capitals,

THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED. IT IS NOT SOLD.

That seems clear enough. I guess the courts would need to confirm the validity of EULAs with that provision at some point but once that's done, the entire problem - if we're going to call it a problem - goes away.

Doesn't it? 

Games For A Wet Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buy One, Get Six Free

So, finally, as if anyone cared, here are the five games I claimed from Amazon Prime gaming in June. Or was it July? And why are there six of them?

Do. Not. Ask. I am beyond trying to make sense of the Prime Gaming offer now. The information in the "blog" that Amazon sends out each month, usually late, doesn't match what I see when I go to the website. 

The blog itself, which is in fact a press release, so why they call it a blog beats me - it's not like blogs are fashionable any more - is laid out so chaotically it's actively off-putting, with huge lists of games in various formats that repeat themselves and overlap. I can't be bothered trying to unpick it any more.

There's this whole, rolling release schedule that makes no sense, particularly since the whole supposed thrill of the new they seemed to be trying to inculcate, whereby we'd all rush to get the next batch of games each week, is completely undermined by most of the games then sitting there for a month or more, waiting to be picked like a bunch of schoolkids hoping for a spot in the team.

Add to that a whole new bunch of games they're throwing in just now in anticipation of Prime Day (Which actually lasts about a week so clearly the entire company shares the same lack of interest in calling anything by its proper name or acknowledging any kind of conventional calendar.) and it just all becomes so much more trouble to decode than it could possibly be worth.

Much easier just to check the website every couple of weeks and claim whatever's new that looks good. Who cares what offer its in or when it arrived or when it's leaving? Snapshot and be done with it, I say!

The games I claimed at the end of June were:

Stray Gods  

Not Stray Gods: Orpheus as it says above but let's not get into all that again. Already covered in a previous post. Naturally, I haven't played it yet. I haven't played any of the games I claimed. Let's be realistic - I don't claim them to play them. I claim them so I'll have them should I ever want to play them, which I most likely won't. I'd love to blame it on late-stage capitalism but actually I think it's more likely just me.

The Last Show of Mr. Chardish

75% off in the Steam Summer Sale with a "Very Positive" review rating, although since that's only from 71 reviews and the game came out five years ago, I'm not sure it has much authority. More like no-one's really tried it. It's a puzzle mystery game about an actress who goes back to an abandoned theater to recall her past history with the eponymous director. Mostly I took this one because the screenshots looked pretty. 

Fate: Undiscovered Realms

20% off in the sale with a Very Positive rating. The sequel to FATE, which I may or may not own on some platform or other. Certainly never played it. It's a dungeon crawler and I occasionally get the fleeting urge to play one of those so I guess it's good to have one on hand for those few minutes every decade or so. The screenshots are incredibly blurry for something that's supposed to encourage people to want to buy it. I hope the game doesn't actually look like that...

Dark Envoy

64% off in the sale with a Mostly Positive rating. Even the highlighted pro reviews they've chosen to promote it on the store page are lukewarm at best so I don't have a lot of hope for this but then it's often better to go in expecting nothing much and be mildly surprised to find its not as bad as you thought it would be than to anticipate greatness and get something that's merely very good. It's a "cRPG", which is a term though we'd gotten rid of around the turn of the millennium, when we stopped putting the word "computer" in front of everything we needed a computer for. Baldur's Gate on a budget is what they mean, anyway. A very small budget...

Wild Country

20% off and Mixed. Mixed is not good. It's a "cozy-competitive" card game, whatever the heck that means. I don't play many deck-builders, mostly because I find building decks about as engaging as picking talents from a talent tree. I thought these were exactly the kind of tedious, faux-administrative tasks computers were designed to do for us but apparently in some quarters they're considered to be too enjoyable to hand off to a machine. I picked this one despite the genre and mechanics because it has amusing-looking funny animals, some of whom wear hats.

All of those are probably from June's offer, if anyone cares. July's offer looks poor so far but I don't remember most of  the games I've just been talking about coming up in the conversation when June's slate was announced so I'm hopeful something better will turn up, unnanounced. 

Of the July games available so far, I've only taken one:

TOEM

This one has a massive 80% off in the Steam sale right now and and Overwhelmingly Positive rating. It's a hand-drawn, black-and-white photography adventure in which you wander about, chatting to a bunch of people and solving their problems by taking photographs. You'd think, given the crazy amount of screenshots I take, I'd be all over photo games but I've only ever played one or two. Should make a nice change of pace when I'm in the mood. When that's going to be is another question.

And since I've been plugging the Steam Sale all through this post, it's nice to be able to end with something I actually bought there! Yes, I paid money for a game, something that seems hard to justify given how many games I get for free and how many of those I haven't even looked at yet, but it was sooo cheap...

Steins;Gate

A whopping 90% off and Overwhelmingly Positive. Also the only game I've ever seen to use a semi-colon in the title in quite such an aggressive manner. It looks right in my wheelhouse, being "a time-travel, science fiction interactive visual novel". Can't really walk away from something like that.

Obviously, I haven't played it yet. The description on the Steam page gleefully claims "30-50 hours of reading time", which is something I've never seen offered as a positive feature of a video game before. I could read several full-length novels in thirty hours, let alone fifty, so the writing damn well better be good! 

And that's my list of acquisitions for June and the very beginning of July. I'm still wavering on a couple of wishlist purchases in the dying days of the sale. As I just suggested, it's increasingly hard to justify buying anything even at huge discounts unless I absolutely, positively need to play it right now. For a time it made sense to build up a cushion of games to fall back on should the need arise but I think I'm fully furnished with those now. 

I'll take a bet with myself that, when I post about the Steam Winter Sale, as I inevitably will, I won't have played Steins;Gate or any other games I might buy in the Summer Sale. 

If I win that bet, will I also have lost it?

Trending Now...

For various unexpected reasons, I had to spend much of yesterday driving Mrs Bhagpuss around the Cotswolds (Not exactly a hardship on a beautiful summer's day but time-consuming all the same.) and much of today putting together a self-assembly chest of drawers (Chest finished, drawers still a work in progress.) Consequently, I no longer have time to write the post I was planning for today.

Luckily, I have a couple of game-related musical items that shouldn't take too long to stitch together into some kind of a patchwork. Plus I expect I might find something else to bulk things out a bit.

First up, Death Stranding 2, sequel to a critical darling I have never played. I could, though. The Director's Cut of the original game is currently available for free to Prime subscribers on Amazon's cloud gaming platform, Luna. I probably ought to try it. Everyone says it's a must-play.

That's not why I'm writing about it, although one of the two posts I was thinking about doing today was going to be about the Prime Gaming games I picked up earlier in the week. No, this is about the London leg of Kojima Productions "World Strand Tour",  a twelve-stop affair in which Hideo Kojima trucks around the globe promoting the new game with live events featuring various special guests.

For the London event the guests were Caroline Polachek and Chvrches, which is some double-bill alright. Caroline performed her song "On The Beach" from the new game and Chvrches did the title track to the first game, which they wrote. There is some shaky phone footage of both, which you can see at this link if you really want to, but I think we'd better have something a bit tidier, one of which is from a different event entirely...

I ought to say, I don't really much like either of those. The Chvrches one is a decent song but not really my kind of thing and other has very little in it of what I usually enjoy in Caroline Polachek's work, namely dance rhythms and beats. This is my problem with most game music in a nutshell, really. It exists for a very specific purpose and without that context it rarely makes much sense. Or not to me, anyway.

That problem doesn't really affect this next one because what Pickle Darling has done is take the music they've made and turned it into game music for a game they've also made. The result is good music, a good game and some game music that frankly I didn't really pay much attention to, although it was fine in the background while I was playing. I'm not a big 8-bit fan though.

Here's one of the songs in its original context.

Massive Everything - Pickle Darling

And here's a screenshot from the game, which you can play at itch.io here. No download required.

It's a pretty good game, too. It only takes about fifteen minutes to play and I laughed several times so that's a good ratio. Also the controls are comfortable, even though J seems like a really odd choice for Interact.

Let's have one more from Pickle before we go.

Human Bean Instruction Manual 

And finally, just because it seems to be badly-filmed, hard-to-listen-to video day, here's an absolute dream of a guest artist/cover that you can barely hear. Lana del Rey is on a stadium tour just now, which sounds like a fan-fic fantasy until you realise it's actually happening.

Last night she played Wembley Stadium and she brought out Addison Rae for couple of songs. They dueted on Lana's as-yet unreleased 57.5 and on Addison's brealthrough hit from last year, Diet Pepsi. 

There's really so much to say about that. As many of them have gone on to acknowledge, Lana changed the rules for female singers in pop music and her influence is absolutely everywhere now. When I fell in love with her songwriting, pretty much no-one sounded like her; now almost everyone does. 

Addison Rae certainly owes her a debt, which may have something to do with both the way her debut album Addison is stirring up a chorus of "Well, I wasn't expecting much but... it's really kinda good...?" reviews and with how big-sisterly Lana is with her. Not to mention why Lana rates Diet Pepsi so highly.

My favorite version of the song is still Blondshell's by a mile but I'd love to hear a studio take from Lana. Or a properly recorded and sound-balanced live version. Do people even do live albums any more?

Of course, bringing out your idols and/or accolytes to duet with you seems to be a big trend just now. It has to be a very special combination to get much attention any more.

Just Like Heaven 

 Olivia Rodrigo and Robert Smith

That'd do it. 

I'd just like to point out that Robert Smith is barely six months younger than me...

Heralding The Heralds

Jenn Chan, Darkpaw's "Head of Studio" dropped another Producer's Letter for EverQuest II yesterday. I imagine she posted one for the elder game, too, but I can't even pretend to be playing EverQuest any more so maybe I'll just skip that one. I wouldn't really understand what any of it was about, anyway.

Before I get started on the content, I have something to say about the nomenclature. Is Head of Studio" a new title? It's snappy. I like it. Although it kind of makes a nonsense of the whole "Producer's Letter" thing, doesn't it? Aren't they called that because the person writing them is the game's "Producer"? Shouldn't it be called the "Head's Letter" now? 

Except that sounds ridiculous. Like something your twelve year-old brings home from school to tell you the dates of the next school play and that the science block needs a new roof and would you like to help run a stall at the school fair to raise funds for repairs? 

Whatever she's calling it, Jenn Chan writes a good letter. She's affable, friendly, informative and she has a great line in what I think we're going to have to accept, much though we may not want to, are now generally known as "Dad Jokes". I'm minded to say she's the best Producer (Head of Studio.) the game's ever had although I'm not claiming I can remember all of them. She's certainly the least pretentious and most agreeable.

Her Producer's Letters are also very predictable, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. She's established a form and a structure and she's clearly happy to just keep going with it indefinitely. At least half of every letter is a recap of the previous one, detailing what she said was going to happen and confirming that it did or, if it didn't, which is rarely the case, why.

At this point I do have to wonder what the substantive difference is between a Producer's Letter and a Roadmap, other than that a Roadmap looks much flashier. In terms of content, they seem very similar. I don't in the least mind getting both but there does seem to be a deal of overlap.

According to the July letter, everything that was promised did indeed come to pass. There's an overview and a month-by-month breakdown of events since April, all with hyperlinks to the relevant press release or explanatory article on the official website. It really is about as well-documented a piece of reportage as you could hope to see. I would guess either Jenn is an excellent administrator herself or else she has one in her employ.

Following the studio's uninterrupted support for Pride Month this year, it perhaps shouldn't be a surprise to see the second paragraph of the letter celebrating Darkpaw's latest donation - $5,000 to the San Diego LGBT Community Center - but in the light of certain less admirable decisions made by other gaming companies (*cough* Jagex *cough*) it's more than usually heartening. 

I did manage to remember to pick up red pandas for all my characters on my main account although I'm not sure now if I got them on any of the others. Too late to worry about it now! Speaking of things you can have for (a given value of) nothing on every character, there's an odd promotion going on right now that gives you a Fabled Mount: Zhufeng, Harbinger of Mirth for every Krono you buy. 

Why they're specifically promoting the purchase of the "in-game objects that can be redeemed for 30 days of membership time" and also traded for Platinum within the game I'm not sure. They do cost $3 more than a regular monthly sub though, so I guess that would explain it. Presumably no-one actually uses Krono to pay for their subscription, only as a way to get the vast amounts of in-game currency needed to buy anything much on the broker in the age of hyper-inflation caused by people trading Krono...

You get one of those mounts for every Krono you buy, too, and twenty-five of them if you buy a twenty-five pack of Krono, which I did not even know was a thing you could do until I read the press release. Why anyone would want to buy 25 Krono at once is beyond me but apparently you can if you want. As to what you'd then do with 25 ugly flying fire-dragons... invade Freeport, maybe?

After recapping everything that's happened since the last time she wrote and reminding us of the current cash shop campaign, Jenn Chann goes on to tell us what to expect over the summer, which pretty much means recapping the roadmap and re-iterating what we can see in the handy in-game Events Calendar. I doubt anyone playing the game needs to told that after Tinker Fest comes Scorched Sky and Oceansfull any more than they need to know that after Thanksgiving comes Christmas and then New Year.

After all of that, we eventually come to something we didn't already know. Or that I didn't know, at least. 

Firstly, there's going to be "a Content Creator program" established later this year. What exactly that means we'll have to wait for the official announcement to find out but I'm assuming it means streamers. Not that I'd bother applying even if old-school blogs counted. I'm technically a "Content Creator" for Stars Reach and all that's done is make me feel uncomfortable posting about the game at all so I'd rather remain independent.

Next, we get to the really interesting part - some information about the upcoming expansion. Well, actually about the pre-expansion event, which has a name of its own - Heralds of Oblivion. We don't know what the expansion itself is called but that at least sets the tone.

In my experience, pre-expansion events, or "Preludes" as Jen calls this one, for any MMORPG fall into one of two categories - low-key and trivial or hyperactive and essential. There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground. Either you're doing some busy work for a bunch of tedious NPCs who hand out rewards barely worth the bag space or the entire server is howling around in a huge gang, descending on every event like a swarm of locusts, desperate to hoover up the insane XP and/or huge upgrades.

As Jenn halfway acknowledges in the letter, we haven't had one of the good ones since 2018, when I described the rewards as "fantastic". Here's hoping this one at least matches it. It certainly seems to have some depth with "5 tradeskill quests, 5 adventure quests, 2 public quests, 2 collections". Pre-expansion PQs tend to be very popular and profitable in the first couple of weeks, until everyone has what they want, so I'm going to try and make sure I get in on the action early this year instead of leaving it to the end with all the other lazy bums.

As for what the expansion itself migh be about or where it might take us... no clue, really.  Jenn often ends with a pun that's supposed to offer a clue but this time there's just a picture of her standing in some kind of crater or hole and the tagline "No Bones about it, this is going to be good!", which I'm not even sure refers to the expansion.

It might just as easily refer to Game Update 129, also discussed in the letter and due to arrive in August. That one's called Fear of Eternity and includes Solo and Heroic versions of some of the dungeons or instances from the Chains of Eternity expansion from 2012.

I would have said I wouldn't be doing any of that, since I can't do very much of the instance that came with GU128 yet. That, however, should be fixed with the new one because it comes with a "Gear Catch-up Crate" designed to "get you straight into the GU action".

I'm probably going to do a separate post on this, for which I'll wait until I've been able to see the gear and the stats, but welcome though all this free stuff is, I can't help thinking the whole gear-ladder-catch-up thing in EQII is getting out of hand. It looks like we're going to get three complete new sets of upgrades to all our gear given to us for free in just four months - the GU Catch-Up crate in August, the Panda gear in September and then the Tishan's Box with the expansion in November. Is that overkill? Certainly starting to look like it.

The Herald's of Oblivion Catch-Up Crate is, however, only available to All Access members and the Tishan's only for those who buy the expansion, while anyone at all can get the panda gear just for the trouble of doing some very quick and easy quests, so there is an argument for all three, I guess. Best not to be inspecting the dental records of any gift horses too closely.

And that's about it. Another letter sent, received, read and discussed. Let's all meet back here in three months and we'll do it all over again.