Eight Steps On The Path To Sedition

 The pre-expansion event, Paths of Sedition, has started, over in EverQuest II. It turns out it was enough of a draw to bring me back to Norrath for the first time in quite a few weeks. 

EQII has had a rough go from me in the current expansion cycle. I got halfway through the storyline back when Rage of Cthurath came out at the end of 2025. I dropped it in the New Year for Baldur's Gate 3, then came back to finish it. After that I decided it had been too slow and grindy for me to want to take another character through it right away so I dropped it again.

Later in the year I was just starting to work on a plan for leveling another character to the cap, without it making me want to throw the monitor out the window, when my PC decided it hated playing games and began crashing after every session. With ChatGPT's assistance, I eventually got that fixed but by then I'd rediscovered GeForce Now and fallen in love with playing my games on someone else's machines. 

EQII, to no-one's surprise, I'm sure, isn't on GeForce Now so that put it at the back of the pack to begin with but worse than that, the second time I played again there was another crash on exit. That put me off. In any case, a bunch of newer, fancier, cooler games were jostling poor old EQII out of the way, so it wasn't likely it would have gotten much of a look in anyway, even if I hadn't been worried playing it would screw up my machine.

I do like to try and keep up with what's going on in Norrath, though, even if it isn't my main gaming home any more. And there have been a few pre-expansion "Preludes" worth playing. Not as many as there probably should have been but some. 

Creating Illustrations for Loading Screens - A Lost Art

I saw the write-up at EQ2 Traders and that got me interested but the tipping point was the mention of no fewer than eight new quests for adventurers. (There are also eight tradeskill quests but I was willing to bet at least half of those would just be standing at a crafting station, banging out hats and boots for some annoying NPC that could easily have done it themselves). 

I didn't think it would require a great time commitment. Naomi Denmother described both questlines as "short". From experience, I can only speak to the adventure option. I guess is short, if you consider it as something that's going to be with us for a couple of months. On the other hand, it took me about an hour and a half, which isn't as short as all that for a story quest. 

I guess what matters is whether it's fun, not how long it takes. And yes, I'd say it's fun. It kept me engaged and interested throughout, at least. And it had two genuine "Whoa!" moments, which is two more than most quests can manage.

I won't precis the storyline in any detail. Anyone reading this who plays EQII is going to do it anyway, if they haven't already, and they won't thank me for spoilers. Everyone else really isn't going to care.

This is one of the big differences between MMORPGs and almost every other kind of RPGish, narrative-driven game I write about. I find it very easy to write, entertainingly I hope, about the kind of storylines that crop up in Wuthering Waves or Neverness To Everness or Nivalis Nights because they tend to be novelistic or cinematic. Granted I might not always make a great job of it but as a journalistic exercise, a retelling of the story of a quest in one of those games ought to be at least as interesting to a general audience as if it were a movie or a TV show.

Who indeed? And more importantly, who cares?

That is very much not the case with MMORPGs. No-one who doesn't already know the politics of Norrath is likely to give a damn whether some troll shaman is claiming to be the new Grozmok or that Neriak has ambitions on Freeport.  And even all of that politics is more accessible than the usual litany of unpronounceable gods and demons and their world-threatening yet somehow still incredibly petty squabbles.

It's not just the subject matter that makes MMORPG quests hard to retell, either. The way they're written too often makes them seem stiff and awkward when taken out of context. It's not that they're badly written, necessarily. Mostly they're solid enough but many, probably most, follow conventions proper only to the games in which they appear. 

When you play those games regularly, you get so used to the way the quests are written, you hardly notice it but they all have a kind of local dialect or accent that's impossible to mistake. WOW, EQII, SW:tOR, ESO, LotRO, GW2, New World, FFXIV... the writing in all of them follows predictable patterns that seem to supercede individual authorship. 

In most, it also leans strongly towards literary tropes and speech patterns usually found mainly in either fantasy or historical, rather than contemporary, fiction. I think about the only MMORPG I can remember that wasn't written this way was The Secret World. It may well have been one of the reasons it was praised so highly for its writing at the time.

Must have the same scriptwriter as Theresa May

Of course, the writing in every game has a tone and a style of its own but for some reason it seems to be much more pronounced in MMORPGs. Or perhaps that's not it at all or at least not all of it. It occurs to me, looking at the list in the previous paragraph, that all of the games except TSW have some kind of fantasy or science-fantasy setting that doesn't much resemble the world in which we live - or any likely extrapolation of it. 

The Secret World, though, is set in this world, our world, with fantastical elements layered over the top. NTE and Nivalis Nights are both closer in conception to TSW than they are to any of the others except, perhaps, SW:tOR. Even Wuthering Waves, which is arguably more fantasy-oriented, is peopled with regular folk doing ordinary jobs in a quasi-contemporary setting. Perhaps it's the familiarity of the characters and the lives they lead that make retelling their stories seem likely to be more accessible to someone who doesn't play the games.

All of which could have been the biggest sidebar in this blog's history. To return to the original topic, there are eight quests in the pre-expansion event for adventurers and I had a good time with all of them. There's a fair amount of running around but for an All Access subscriber, fast map travel makes much of that trivial. 

Most of the quests take place in "new" instances, all of which are rather well-judged. These days, EQII players expect to see repurposed assets from earlier in the game whenever temporary content like this appears but in this case the choice of what to re-use has clearly been made with some thought.

Neck tattoos are in this year. Also, even a dwarf isn't short enough to walk under a pony.

It's always been a puzzlement, why the best-looking zones in the original game, back in 2004, were the catacombs and sewers under the two big cities. It was very noticeable at the time that once you pulled up a grating in the street to descend below Qeynos or Freeport, the fidelity of the graphics went up a notch. The textures always seemed to be more detailed and there'd clearly been a lot of work put into the decoration.

I vaguely remember reading that it was because those were the zones the art team worked on first. Whether it technical issues took over or just the time it took to make the zones look that good wasn't available any more, once they moved above ground, nothing looked quite as fine. With that in mind, I'm always happy to have a reason to revisit the tunnels and caverns beneath the cities and that's what happens here.

The other holdover from the original game that gets to put in a repeat performance in Paths of Sedition is the crafting instance. Back in 2004, if you wanted to craft at all, you had to open a hatch and go down some stairs into an underground workshop. One of the early improvements made to the game, in a desperate hope of keeping people from leaving to go to World of Warcraft, was to put crafting stations above ground so players could at least see what was going on around them as they ground out hundreds of worthless items for skill increases.

A few years later almost no-one was using the underground crafting rooms any more and there was a plan to remove them altogether. Predictably, it caused an outcry. No-one in any MMORPG ever wants to see anything taken away. Whether anyone's actually using it is beside the point. 

Put a bit of carpet down and it'll be lovely.

The tradeskill instances were saved and even now, if you go into one, there's a fair chance you'll find a die-hard veteran down there, hammering away on their own, enjoying the solitude. As far as I know, though, until this event there never was a trapdoor to one of those cellars round the back of the Block and Tackle, one of the overground crafting halls that stands next the docks in South Freeport. There is now.

About the only part of the quest I wasn't all that happy with was the bit where you have to go to a zone of your own level to kill spiders. And that would have been fine if the choice of zones you're given at the level cap didn't all happen to be in Ballads of Zimarra. And if the drop rate had been better. 

Still, it was only a mild irritation in an otherwise enjoyable hour and a half. And there's more to do, of course. Having completed the questline, I'm now free to work on the achievement and then the collection as well as to farm the event currency to spend in the event shop.

Yeah. I probably won't be doing much of any of that. The questline itself gets you a nice familiar that's an upgrade to the free one from the last expansion (And which will, no doubt, itself be replaced by the free familiar from the next expansion in December.) You also get some house items that I'll only use to get them out of my bags.

Hoods and Robes! Bah! I had Hats and Boots in the sweepstake.

The vendor who takes the currency has a huge stock of house items, some of them rather nice, but I already have two enormous homes in Norrath, both bursting at the borders with cruft trophies. Not to mention all the other, less-decorated houses my dozen or so characters own. There's barely a one of them that doesn't own at least a couple of places. There's only so much decorating even I can cope with.

There's also a ground mount. Does anyone use ground mounts any more? And some quite attractive appearance armor. Probably some other stuff. If you want it, you can have it. It won't be hard to raise the funds. I'll leave it, thanks.

I'll probably do the tradeskill questline with someone, just to see it, although I believe it's pretty much identical, as far as story beats and rewards go. Unusually, you can't do both lines on the same character but who in EQII has only one character? Everyone has a stable of alts and half of them would be doing all the quests on all of them anyway. Doesn't stop people moaning about it on the forums though.

While Mordita was running around Freeport, she noticed Nights of the Dead has also started. EQII Traders has an article up about that, too. I may or may not get around to doing at least the new stuff and if I do I may or may not get around to writing a post about it. 

The good news is that my PC didn't give me any problems playing today. If that carries on then I will certainly be visiting Norrath more often. 

Let's hope so. There's an expansion coming! 

The Streets Of Nivalis

 Remember those dog days of summer, when I was complaining I was barely playing any games at all? Yeah, well that's over. Now the problem is trying to fit them all in...

...and at here there used to be several paragraphs about time constraints and game rotations. But when I came to read them back, even I didn't want to hear it. So let's forget all that and get straight to a game, shall we? 

And that game is Nivalis Nights.

As I said in an earlier post, I haven't experienced any of the performance issues that caused the game to be poorly received in some quarters at launch. I put that mostly down to playing on GeForce Now, where I'm guessing the servers are better configured and maintained than the average home PC. Certainly better than any of mine ever have been, at least.

For players who may have had a less pleasurable experience, there's some good news. There have already  been three patches just in the first week, all of them correcting improving or fixing various issues that were slowing the game down or causing it to run poorly; all generally aimed at improving the shaky optimization seen at launch. 

There's also been a host of bug fixes for all kinds of reported issues, everything from serious gameplay setbacks, like NPC store managers not doing their jobs, to cosmetic oversights, like player footprints left in the snow not swapping between left foot and right. There have been so many fixes and tweaks, in fact, it does make me wonder why more of them weren't caught in the testing process. I know releasing a game does suddenly expose it to thousands of highly motivated, unpaid QA people but even so, I'd have thought some of the things that are only now getting attention would have been pretty obvious to anyone play-testing the game, long ago.

Still, as No Man's Sky proves, you can still just about get away with banging it out and fixing it up later if a) you have a really solid game underneath it all and b) you do actually fix it. And Nivalis Nights is a good game already. If  Ion Lands keep working on it the way Hello Games have stuck with NMS, it could one day be a great one.

At the moment, though, the reviews are mostly split between enthusiasts, who've been jonesing for a cyberpunk city they could really live in and professionals, who look at it as a game rather than a virtual city. The former are running around 9 out of 10, the latter closer to 7.5. 

And that's probably fair. As a virtual incarnation of a futuristic, dystopian city, it's superb but as as game, not only does it have those optimization issues and bugs but it's not entirely clear what sort of game it wants to be. I'm not wholly convinced that the really excellent world-building and depth of sociopolitical commentary fit entirely comfortably around the framework of a business sim, let alone one where the business in question is "hospitality".

I was speculating before about whether it would be possible to sidestep the entrepreneurial gameplay and just sink into the city and be there. At some point I definitely want to test that out to see if it can be done. For now, though, my impression is that the game wouldn't stand for it. And even if the game did, CorpSec wouldn't.

CorpSec is what passes for government in Nivalis. Government and law enforcement. The name is a portmanteau of Corporation and Security but don't run away with the idea the corporations are providing security for the citizens. It's the opposite. CorpSec makes sure the corporations remain secure in their dominant position. Everyone else is left to live in the cracks that leaves.

One of the ways stability and compliance is assured is through a law that says any owner of a business is legally required to try to make that business grow. It's the inevitable corollary of the infamous "line must go up" ethos that's wrecking the global economy today. Just giving good service or providing a useful product isn't enough. You have to grow and the unspoken coda is "or die."

In a society operating by that principle, running one small, successful noodle bar might be seen as a criminal offense. Ironically, failing to run one wouldn't. I had an enlightening conversation with a CorpSec official in which I asked what would happen if I failed to grow my business. He told me failure was fine. I was obligated to try but no-one cared whether I succeeded.

The implication is that owners of failing business would be swept away, lost in the undercurrents of Nivalis society. Someone else would take over my business and I'd be on the streets. Perhaps surprisingly, being homeless doesn't appear to be a crime in itself. Just a death sentence.

As yet, I don't know if it's even possible for a player character to become homeless. I got an eviction warning today but the landlord, when questioned, couldn't explain why. Nor did he seem to want to do anything about it. 

Next day, he sent me a memo (A memo!), asking me to come talk to him. When I did, he told me there was a new rule about pets in the building I wasn't compliant with. But I don't have any pets, I told him. No, he said, but the rule now is that you need to get one. 

I was quite excited by that. I didn't know there were pets in the game. Sadly, I don't believe there are. Ava, my Automata, tells me the landlord's a fantasist and I ought just to ignore him. She says he'll forget what he said by tomorrow and even if he doesn't, the last thing he wants is to have to actually do anything about it. 

On that basis, it seems my apartment is secure but even if I did get kicked out, there's a free flop-house in every district that you can use if you get caught out by the curfew. And if all else fails, I can sleep on my boat.

Given that this isn't a survival game and I don't have eat or drink, either, if I did run out of money, I'm not sure anything bad would happen. I do keep getting fines of 50 or 60 Lims for breaking curfew, so I guess there might be some consequences if I couldn't pay those and there's that massive debt I inherited from Thaddeus that I'm supposed to be paying off, from when he gave me the noodle bar but...

I guess what I'm saying is that at this stage, I don't know what a Game Over would look like for Nivalis Nights, or if there even is one. I'm pretty curious to find out, though. Almost curious enough to stop stocking my noodle bar and give up on paying my bills, just to see what happens.

The reason I keep getting fined for being out after curfew, by the way, is because when the lockdown comes I'm usually skulking in the bar down the street, waiting to steal their equipment and drag it back to my place. I was wondering in the last post , whether the way you can just steal furniture from other businesses was a bug or a feature. I can now confirm: it's a feature.

Not only can you do it, you're supposed to do it. Another business-person comes up to you at one point and clues you in on how to go about it and why you should. It's because of another CorpSec law I didn't mention: it's illegal for businesses to co-operate with each other in any way. Business must be competitive and if that includes sabotage and theft then it's all perfectly acceptable. Just don't get caught or they'll fine you about two hours wages.

I stole a coffee-maker the first night and sold it. The next night I stole a refrigerator. I needed one of those so I just put it in my noodle bar and now it's full of food. The bar I stole the fridge from replaced it immediately so the next night I stole that one as well. I didn't need three fridges so I sold it. 

Before I started my one-person crime-wave, I sold the treadmill from my apartment. I was broke when I did it but I got over 3k Lims for it and that kept me going for a few days. I think selling the furniture might be what got me the eviction notice but I just lied about it and it all seemed fine. 

Lying's another thing you're probably meant to do, at least if you want to get ahead. Several times, near the start of the game, various NPCs tell you you'll have to make a choice between being nice to people and clambering over them to get to the top. You can't do both, they tell you. I thought that was rhetoric at first but now I'm pretty sure it's game design. That's tutorial advice, right there.

I haven't made any hard decisions about it yet. I'm just taking each choice as it comes. How that's going to work out for me in the long run is going to be very interesting to see. I suspect it'll end with me going nowhere and the whole game stagnating as I run out of options by hedging my bets. I don't think the game is fond of stasis.

But Nivalis is big. Really big. There might easily be ten thousand stories in this naked city. I'll have time to hear quite a few of them before my indecision drags me under. I'm looking forward to it a lot.

Postcards From Pukaland

 In what seems like it might be an attempt to break the world record for widest range of content in a single drop, the same update that brought a harrowing version of the Salem Witch Trials to Neverness To Everness also saw the opening of Hethereau's candy-themed amusement park, the unfortunately but probably accurately-named Pukaland. 

As far as I can tell, Puka is Hethereau's answer to Haribo, not that that's a question anyone ever needed to ask. The theme park, named for the brand of tooth-destroying sweets sold all over the city, has been standing, empty and shuttered, on a promontory to the south-east of the city ever since the game began. Now, after a major redesign, it's finally open.

If the latest update took us on a tour from tragic to trivial with this latest update, it's not as if Hotta just bundled the two together without thinking about the friction. It's more as though they meant to rub up against each other to make some kind of abrasive point. At least, I found it hard to miss the subtext, when "The Witch" ended and a new storyline started right away, taking the Appraiser and Blackbird straight to the fairground.

At first I thought it was nothing more than a charming opportunity for the two of them to decompress after their traumatic experiences in the nested Anomalous Realms, and to a large extent that's indeed what it is, but as the short storyline developed, I couldn't help feeling there was a little more to it than that. 

I'd go into detail but unfortunately, I didn't document exactly what happened while I was playing and now, as is becoming annoyingly common with NTE, when I go online to refresh my memory, I find no-one else has posted a walkthrough I can crib from. 

I can't even find a video on YouTube where someone plays through it all, although there must be about a gazillion rating the rides and telling you how best to exploit them for the new currency. It's almost like no-one gives a damn about the story.

I'll just have to do the precis from memory. It oughtn't to be too hard. I played through some of it last night and the rest this morning. Even my memory's not that bad. Do feel free to correct any errors or add anything I've forgotten in the comments, though.

It's not like it's a lot to remember, anyway. The storyline part probably didn't take me more than fifteen or twenty minutes. The rest of the couple of hours in Pukaland, I spent gawping and taking pictures. And going on the rides, of course.

The whole thing begins with some story on Bagel about urban legends. Apparently, mysterious shadows, doors to other worlds and similar apparitions have been seen at Pukaland since it opened, often showing up after some specific trigger, like taking photos in a precise spot or staying on a ride for a particular number of times.

 

The Appraiser and Blackbird begin by visiting one of the people who posted about their experiences and having talked to her, agree to go check it out for themselves. The Appraiser, naturally, figures there may be some Anomaly behind it which, honestly, sounds like the Occam's Razor explanation for any odd, unexplained activity in the city.

Flora agrees to meet Blackbird at the gates but when she gets there Blackbird is already feeling a little overwhelmed, as well she might. Pukaland is busy. 

It looks like the park's off to a great start. The wide avenues are teeming with excited visitors. It's busy day and night, in fact. I stayed there all the way through a full day-night cycle and apart from the sun going down and the lights coming on, you'd hardly know the difference. Everything's open 24-7, in the way of video game worlds and, while I thought I noticed a slight reduction in numbers in the small hours, there's more than enough business to justify the added overhead in staffing costs.

Flora uses her Esper ability to sense anomalies but finds nothing. Blackbird has no more luck with her divination. The place seems to be no more than just what it looks like: a harmless entertainment complex.  

They explore the park, looking for anything out of place and trying to replicate the kinds of events they read about on Bagel. Flora takes a picture of Blackbird, waving to her from the supposed one of the supposed hot-spots but no strange shadows appear in the photograph. The two of them talk to some other customers, one of whom suggests inexplicable things often appear in the background of such images but after they all have another look, no-one can see anything.

One couple Flora and Blackbird interview makes the point that even though they live in a city famous for its Anomalies, they've never actually encountered one. That theme recurs in other conversations, reminding us that although all the characters we, the players, usually interact with have plenty of hands-on experience with these bizarre and sometimes terrifying entities, for many people living ordinary lives, all they know about them is what they see on social media.

They ride the big wheel thirteen times, another reported trigger, but nothing happens. They explore the hedge maze (Oddly called a "Flora Maze" in the game, which amused me and must have come as a surprise to Flora herself.) where strange things are supposed to occur quite reliably but again they see nothing out of the ordinary.

Eventually Blackbird and the Appraiser decide there's nothing to the rumors but as they're about to leave, they spot a couple of visitors acting strangely. Being the responsible citizens they are, they ask the two what they're up to. I mean, I wouldn't, I'd mind my own business, but then I'm not a Witch or a secret government agent...

It turns out the two suspicious strangers are influencers on Bagel. They've also heard about the urban legend rumors and, like our heroes, have come to see if they can find out what's going on. Unlike Flora and Blackbird, though, having struck out, they've decided to fake some evidence so they can give their followers something to get excited about.

Blackbird is very put out by this, being the innocent shut-in she is. Let's not forget, almost her only knowledge and understanding of the outside world over the past couple of hundred years has come from watching a screen. The Appraiser, more worldly, isn't shocked but she gently suggests to the two would-be deceivers that it might be better to let their fans know that what they're showing them isn't really real.

And that's about the end of it. It's a small, gentle story but it comes with a moral. The whole thing is undoubtedly a commentary on social media and the responsibility it brings to be truthful and transparent. It takes a position on conspiracy theories and it's agin' 'em. The more NTE I play, the more lessons it tries to teach me. 

Having tried and failed to find any public account of the storyline I just attempted to recreate from memory, I have to wonder who's listening. As far as I can tell, the main interest most people using social media have in Pukaland lies in telling others how to get in and out of it as fast as possible with the highest rewards for the lowest level of effort.

Which is a shame because Pukaland is amazing. It's a huge area, the size of a whole city district, and it's teeming with things to do and see. It's not only that there'ssomething to do around every corner, on every avenue and plaza, but there are hundreds of NPCs there with you, doing it too. The illusion of an actual place filled with real activity is more than impressive. 

As for the games and rides, there's plenty of variety, something for everyone. I played darts, which I very much enjoyed and shot at plushies, which was fun, too. I rode the Ferris Wheel and the Merry-Go-Round, got lost in the maze and hurtled around on the roller coaster and all that scarcely scraped the surface of what there is to do.

I wanted to go into the Fun House, which looked like it would be a hoot, but it was closed for renovations. The middle-aged man throwing up outside was likely the clue things weren't quite as they should be in there. I hear there's also a balloon ride that takes you higher above Hethereau even than the Skytower. I'd very much like to try that.

Trust me, I'll be back. I skimmed a reddit thread where redditors were being as cynical and dismissive about the rides and activities as you'd expect but for once I think their cynicism is misplaced. On first impressions, I'd say Pukaland is as good a collection of mini games as I've seen anywhere.

Sure, some of them might not be as polished as you'd get in a full game dedicated to such things but these are throwaway activities in a game that has a million other things going on. Granted, they'll presumably be permanent additions to the game but no-one's expecting any of this to become anyone's full-time gaming habit. It's an add-on and a very impressive one it is, too.

From what I've seen so far, many of the games and rides justify their existence purely in respect of the fun they offer in the moment but the rewards you get for doing them aren't at all bad, either. The entry fee in Fons for each activity is low, the number of Puka Tickets you can win is generous and the range of activities ought to have something to suit everyone. 

I went to one of the booths where you can redeem your tickets for prizes, just to see what was on offer, and I was quite impressed with what was on offer there. The prices aren't too high for a start. I already had enough for a few things but looking through the options I soon found something worth saving up for - a boat!

The boat, which from the description looks like it can be substantially upgraded, and the glider that looks like a biplane are both on my wishlist now. The former costs 10k tickets for the basic model, the latter just half of that. I'd already earned 1300 tickets in less than half an hour so both sound eminently doable.

I'll probably have do what's needed to get the rest before the next content drop though. As 999 Nights proved, no matter how engaging, satisfying and enjoyable a new addition to the game can seem when it arrives, as soon as the next update comes, it's all but forgotten. 

How long Hotta can keep pumping out content at this rate and how long it will continue to engage players if they do is an unknown quantity but my worry is that they'll be caught in a Catch 22 whatever happens. If they fail to keep up the pace, players will call it a "Daed Game" and  move on but if they succeed, those same players will take the flood of new content for granted, expect it never to end. burn through it in no time and then complain it's not enough. As players, we often talk about the grind but it probably feels just as much like a treadmill on the other side of the screen.

That's about all I have to say for now but since every story in Hethereau comes with a moral, I'll add one for this post, too.

Enjoy it while you can. 

Help This Blackbird - The Witch's Tale

 This  morning I finished the latest instalment of the main story in Neverness To Everness. It's called, very simply, "The Witch" and it's one of the best I've seen in any game of its kind or, for that matter, any other sort of game I've played.

It does start with a significant advantage over most gacha game or MMORPG stories in that it's based on a familiar tale, one that's been very successfully adapted several times before. Still, building on sound foundations doesn't always mean that what you're building is going to stand. This is solid.

The narrative adapts the horrifying events of the Salem witch trials, particularly as they were presented by Arthur Miller in The Crucible. Like many people, I read the play at school, when I was in my teens, and I also went to see it performed. I found it disturbing enough, back then. I found this adaptation even more so. 

Miller wrote The Crucible as a response to the McCarthyite witch hunts and show trials of the fifties. None of his fears have been alleviated in the slightest over the years.The lessons he'd have wanted the audience to learn are as relevant now, as crucial as ever.

Games, like movies and television and pretty much every other medium, often take their ideas directly from pre-existing works. The results can range from travesty to transcendence. The Witch may not eclipse a classic like The Crucible but it more than justifies the decision to take on such difficult, challenging and disturbing subject matter. It succeeds on almost every level in both honoring and interpreting its source.

As must be obvious, I was very impressed. I'd say I loved it but the themes and implications hit too hard and probe too deeply to inspire affection. Respect and admiration feel like more appropriate responses. But I did love it, all the same.

The story begins when Blackbird, the mysterious Esper who lives at the Witch's House, contacts the Appraiser  to offer her a commission. Blackbird has received a letter from someone by the name of Merula, who says Blackbird is the only one who can help her.

At this point, I'd love to link to a full walk-through so anyone interested in finding out the full details of what happens next can go read the precis. I'd love to but I can't because as far as I can tell, there isn't one. I'd say that's an ill omen for the game but it also might just be because the quest, if we're comfortable with calling it that, is very long. Maybe no-one's gotten around to writing it all down yet.

There are several full-length videos of the whole thing on YouTube. I haven't watched any of them myself but I'll link to a couple in case anyone has a few hours to spare. I can't vouch for the presentation. Here's one with the male Appraiser. And one with the female version.

I played through the whole thing in two sessions. There are eight chapters. Thanks to GeForce Now giving me a summary every time I log out, I can say with accuracy that first session took me two hours and fifteen minutes and the second an hour. Allowing for a very small amount of housekeeping, from start to finish, "The Witch" takes about three hours.

Of those three hours, I'd estimate about two hours and forty-five minutes involve cut scenes and conversations. The whole thing feels like a long movie or a full season of a TV show. 

There's very little combat indeed, just a short and easy boss fight close to the start and another, only slightly harder, right at the end. A couple of times, a handful of ordinary mobs need to be dispatched but those fights are so trivial they amount to not much more than shouldering past someone blocking your path.

There aren't any puzzles. No objects to manipulate, devices to use, doors to unlock... nothing. There isn't even much running around. Most of the action takes place in St Arbor, a small village, where everyone you need to speak to lives right around the corner or just down the street - and you get a marker to show you exactly where they are.

Almost the entirety of the action involves either eavesdropping on townspeople talking then discussing what they've said and deciding what to do about it. There's a lot of talking. And it's rivetting. 

It wouldn't work if the writing wasn't so good. It's uniformly excellent, managing to find a tone that feels authentically appropriate to the time period and the setting, while never coming across as awkwardly archaic or forced. 

That's no small achievement. I've seen many games attempt to find this tone. "18th century New England witch trial" has been a very popular quest setting for as long as I've been playing online games. Few writers manage to catch the tone they're seeking. Usually it falls flat.

Here, it works particularly well, partly because The Appraiser and Blackbird both already have somewhat formal speech patterns, more so than many video game characters and certainly much more so than most of the other characters in NTE. I'm not sure how well Mint or Chiz would have fitted into the milieu.

Assuming the original writing wasn't in English, the translation is exemplary. There's still the occasional hint of that unmistakable "Translated from Korean" syntax but by now I hear that as a charming inflection, almost a dialect or an accent, never a flaw. 

Which isn't to say the writing is flawless. There are a couple of slips but they're barely noticeable. A word, pluralised in the text, when it's singular in the voice-over. Tiny things like that, easy to ignore.

The voice acting, as always, is solid-to-excellent. Blackbird is very charming and I really love the way the Appraiser sounds. I'm not sure now, whether it sounds like my character's voice would sound in my head or if her voice sounds that way in there because of the voice acting. Either way, it's perfect.

Blackbird, in whom I'd previously had very little interest, emerges as a fascinating, complex character. Apparently she's lived in the Witch House for hundreds of years, only very rarely stepping outside. She know little of modern life other than what she's gleaned from anime, to which she's addicted. 

Her affairs are managed by Lavinia, a severe and somewhat unnerving character, a kind of dark reflection of the more amenable Adler at Eibon. It's curious how almost every grouping in the game has these sorts of quasi-familial structures in place, flattened hierarchies in which authority is hard to define.

At the conclusion of the story, which I won't attempt to recount or spoil, Lavinia offers the Appraiser another commission: take Blackbird out and show her all the good things there are to see and do in Hethereau. As Blackbird puts it:

It's a bittersweet way to end what's most likely felt like a solid three hours watching an anime. You have to wonder how much irony was intended.

The story itself is as dark as the village of St Arbor, a place where the sun never seems to shine and where almost everything of consequence happens at night. Anyone who's seen or read The Crucible ought to be prepared for the psychological horror, although I must say my own inoculation against the sensation of existential threat had long worn off. And at least, when I saw the play, no-one actually got burned alive on stage. 

It's a hard watch at times. In deference to the game's PEGI 12 rating, the camera cuts away for what I found to be the most disturbing scene, the one where live animals are fed to the fire. When it's the humans' turn it's similarly over in a moment with a short scream and a flare of light. Towards the climax, though, there are some prolonged scenes of immolation that don't bear much thinking about if you want a good night's sleep afterwards.

Unlike the graphics, the dialog pulls no punches. There's no skipping lightly over the actions of the villagers or the impact of the choices they make. People die for no reason other than that someone bears them a grudge or wants their property or to save their own skin. 

And since it's a ll a pre-ordained story, nothing anyone can do, note even the Appraiser and Blackbird, can change a thing. It's not exactly what I'd call entertainment but The Witch absolutely earns its right to be taken seriously.

Even so, it's still an adventure story in a video game about extra-dimensional entities and psychic powers. It takes some doing to integrate something like that, successfully and convincingly, into a real-world historical setting, much less layer it with some heavy social commentary. The Witch not only manages to do that - it makes it seem almost easy. 

Perhaps the hardest disbelief to suspend is the repeated, confident assertion that the best way to nullify the Inquisitor, the anomaly behind the terrible events locked inside an anomalous realm, inside another anomalous realm, just to make it even harder, is to release it into Hethereau, where society has advanced to such a stage that no witch hunting anomaly could hope to gain enough traction to prosper. In other words, humanity has outgrown the kind of fear and hatred that feeds such a phenomenon. 

Nice to think so. But then, Hethereau is, self-evidently, a much nicer place to live than anywhere in this real world. I'd move there tomorrow, given the chance.

I've enjoyed all the stories in Neverness To Everness I've seen so far but this is without a doubt the most tightly constructed and the most successful in what it seems to want to achieve. Assuming, that is, that what the writers set out to do was give moral instruction. It seems hard to think any player of the game could come away from The Witch without a clearer idea of what fear of the other leads to and how moral courage is imperative in standing up against prejudice.

Unless, that is, that player opted to skip all the dialog. Which is an option although I can't say I understand why. It might make sense in other games that rely much more on combat and action but, given that the eight chapters are pretty much all dialog, hitting the "Skip" button wouldn't leave a lot left for anyone to do.

I didn't skip. I lapped up every last word. I watched all the cut scenes. I crouched behind bushes and listened to all the conversations I wasn't supposed to be listening to. And I never once wished anything would go faster or that anyone would just get to the point. I found both the pacing and the content entirely to my liking. I'm very much hoping for more of the same as the game goes on.

It's also becoming a little clearer to me that the way Neverness To Everness has been conceived gives the writers more leeway to tell the story of Hethereau in this episodic fashion. The city isn't under imminent threat in the way we're so familiar with from other games. The characters aren't fighting a war or for their very existence. There's no sense of pressure of time.

The Appraiser, as is frequently emphasized, has a job. All the characters have jobs. Each storyline so far has either been a day's work or a day off. If NTE was an anime, it'd be a hybrid between a detective show and a slice-of-life drama with the cast investigating anomalies by day and playing games or going to the movies after work. 

That a gamelike that  can also encompass such a difficult and dark tale as The Witch and make it seem like an integral part of the setting is a tribute to the skill of the writers. A tip of the witch's hat to all of them.  

Nivalis Nights - A Smattering Of Random First Impressions

Thanks to a suggestion by Nimgimli in the comments, I now know how to take screenshots in GeForce Now and have them save to my local drive rather than wherever NVIDIA keeps its data center. Also, I have only just this moment noticed NVIDIA styles itself in ALL CAPS. 

I have yet to figure out a good way to take screenshots in Nivalis Nights without the UI, though. If I have a pet peeve (Note to self: Name next vanity pet "Peeve".) it's the way most devs don't provide an easily-accessible option in the default settings for removing the UI and taking screenshots. It's like they don't want their games to look their best on social media.

No, that's can't be it. It's more likely the opposite. Social media's their main focus. Not archaic blogs like this. 

Most modern games include in-game cameras that have all kinds of filters and frames, specifically designed to produce images suitable for use on Instagram or Facebook. (I believe some people still use Facebook. Gemini keeps linking Facebook pages as authority for the misinformation it feeds me, anyway...)

I love those in-game cameras. They're ideal for posed shots. Nivalis Nights has a perfectly good one, too. The problem with them is that they're designed for photo shoots not journalism. They're impractically slow to access and set up if all you want to do is record what's there in front of you as you play. As for action shots - forget it!

What passes for an action shot in Nivalis Nights. By which I mean you can see my hands.

The old fashioned, basic screenshot-on-a-hotkey option is so much more convenient for reportage and in-combat captures. If you can bind Hide UI and Screenshot to the same key, so much the better. Where that's available, I like to hammer the key a few times mid-fight and pick out a good shot later. I don't want to be trying to set up a tripod while some baddie's ripping my arms off.

Playing on GeForce Now's remote servers adds another level of difficulty. Any in-game camera becomes functionally useless because every shot you take goes to someone else's hard drive. 

Sidebar: It's like in the old days before digital cameras, when I'd take scores of photos on holiday and then never get around to having the films developed. The images exist in a the same way that damn cat in the lead-lined box exists, neither one thing nor the other. 

When I was clearing out drawers this summer, not only did I throw away hundreds of hopeless holiday snaps, I also binned a couple of dozen undeveloped rolls of film. What was on them? We'll never know. Their liminal existence has been committed to landfill until entropy settles the matter once and for all.

As I begin to settle in to GeForce Now as my primary gaming platform, some of these issues are starting to resolve themselves. Workarounds are becoming habits. And that's fine. It's good not to have to think about how to take a shot before I take the shot. 

Cut scenes mean clean screens. 

I can take clean pictures of Neverness To Everness and Valheim and store them locally without much trouble but Nivalis Nights remains recalcitrant although it is very early days. NTE didn't get around to adding a simple option to hide the UI until it had been out for a few months. 

There's no such option in NN yet but there is a mod you can apply that will do the job because players are always much faster then developers when it comes to quality of life hacks. Unfortunately, you can't use mods on GeForce Now so it doesn't help me any. I'll have to keep using ugly shots that show the UI or crop them tightly to leave it out. Or I could get AI to remove the UI but that takes a while.

In my quest for cleaner screenshots, it was only late last night that I discovered how to hide the huge quest panel that dominates the right-hand side of the screen. While I'm playing, I like having it there. It's very helpful. For screenshots, though, it takes up a ridiculous amount of space and there's no obvious hotkey or command to close it.

That's because Nivalis Nights is one of the worst-documented games I've played in years. It's one thing to go all "in media res" and "learning by doing" - I'm fine with all of that - but you do need to tell people what the basic controls are. 

It's a reasonably popular game - just under 7,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch, although that's a bit of a poor return from the reported "one million wishlists". I imagine a lot of potential purchasers are waiting to hear the widely-reported performance issues have been fixed before committing. With that take-up, there's already a decent amount of information on the internet so a quick search finds answers to most of the questions that really should have been resolvable by a quick glance at the Settings.

It's fine. I didn't want to see anything on that side of the screen anyway...

Here's how you hide the Journal panel: Hold down the J key for about three-quarters of a second. Obviously that's something that was discovered by some fat-fingered, slow-handed player, who then probably spent a few frustrating minutes trying to find out where the hell their quest journal had gone. 

And even that option has its problems, it seems. There's a patch out already that purports to fix some of the performance issues and address a few of the more commonly reported bugs and at the end of the patch notes it warns 

"When hiding the quest log (holding the J Key), it can happen that the text becomes illegible after the quest log has been hidden for some time and then is unhidden again. This issue is already fixed, but we were not able to include it in this patch. Reloading your save will fix this issue if you do encounter it."

Speaking of saves, there is an auto-save but it's quite slow to trigger. My first session lasted nineteen minutes but when I logged in the next day, ready to carry on from where I left off, the Continue button was greyed out. I had to start over from scratch. Not too much of an imposition, given the short time it took me to catch up to where I'd finished, but it was still annoying.

I'm so used to playing online games that don't require manual saves it hadn't even occurred to me to save my game before logging out. I'm doing it now. I also now notice when the little "Saving Game..." icon pops up in the bottom-right. I haven't yet figured out if it's a time-based process or if it triggers when some specific type of event occurs. Either way, I won't be trusting it alone. Manual saves all the way from now on.

Can you handle my game saves for me please, AVA?

 And that's enough about the technical issues, important though they are to a first impression. If you really feel a game, though, you'll let all kinds of technical issues slide. Well, I will. 

So, am I feeling it for Nivalis Nights? Hmm. Mostly yes. A little bit no. It's complicated.

It's also extremely early to be making any criticisms or endorsements that I'll most likely end up having to take back later. I've played for just over three hours so far. If the game was better-documented I'd be able to tell you if that takes me past the tutorial. I'm inclined to think it doesn't but who knows for sure?

There's a great deal about the game I like very much indeed. I already mentioned in the Very First Impressions post how much I like the look of Nivalis and the more I see of the city, the better I like it. I tweaked the graphics up a little and now it looks better than ever. 

As it does in Neverness To Everness, the weather plays a huge role in defining and enhancing the mood. Unlike in NTE, you can't just set the weather to whatever you'd like it to be but you do get a very accurate weather forecast for the coming week. If it says there will be storms on Wednesday, there will be storms on Wednesday. Spectacular storms.

And if the sun comes out... oh, boy! Nivalis is a different city in the sunlight. All that moody noir? Stripped away. Everything that was dark now glows. It's an extraordinarily delightful transition.

It's a different world when the sun comes out.

 The city itself is an absolute masterpiece. Huge, rambling, chaotic and entirely convincing. This year has seen the two best cities I've ever visited in virtuality, Hethereau and Nivalis. With GTA6 to come, and Vice City doubling the size of Los Santos, this has to be the Year of the City in gaming.

I spend much of my time in NTE just wandering around Hethereau. I've been doing it for six months and I haven't had enough of it yet. I can easily imagine doing the same with Nivalis except for one thing: there's this slightly annoying game attached.

I did say "slightly annoying". From the little of it I've experienced so far, I'd say it's a pretty good game. It's just that at this stage I don't feel like any kind of game is really what I'm after. I'd like to spend a few hours just wandering around, getting my bearings, opening the fast transport points, seeing the sights and basically playing tourist.

The developers do not want me to do that. What they want me to do is run a noodle bar. It's literally the first thing. The introductory quest. You go meet this guy, talk to him and when you do, he gives you his noodle bar and says, it's yours, here you go, now you're in business. And then he leaves.

I have no interest whatsoever in running a noodle bar. Not a real one and not a fictional one. I for sure don't appreciate being lumbered with one before I've even figured out who and where I am. I like it even less when I find out that by taking ownership of the damn thing I've also lumbered myself with the previous owner's massive debt.

The depressing ending to each day's work.

Now, apparently, I have to work my ass off, setting up a stupid noodle bar, shopping for food, hiring staff, buying furniture, dealing with all the other restauranteurs in a half-kilometer radius, most of whom don't like the new competition, just to pay off this debt that isn't even mine!. All of this when all I want to do is goof off and see the city...

It's actually a very good set-up for a business sim, which is a significant part of what Nivalis Nights sets itself up to be. I knew that when I bought it so I can hardly complain of a bait and switch. What I thought was that I'd just pay lip service to the business part while I focused on all the other activities, things I'd find more to my taste.

And that's what I've been trying to do. I got the place started then left it running. I got my boat last night and went fishing instead, which was a lot of fun. I've also been speaking to all kinds of people all over the city, picking up quests left and right. I've even finished some of them. There are some great little stories in the interactions, some that pick things up from where we left them in Cloudpunk. Some of the same characters even make a re-appearance.

Nixxy liked my snappy comeback so much she might make me a regular!

 All of that I'm really enjoying. But now I'm nearly broke thanks to that damn noodle bar and AVA keeps giving me dire warnings about how my business is falling apart and the whole thing is becoming really stressful. I do not have any interest in playing games that deliberately try to trigger a stress response so that's not going down well with me at all.

As soon as I felt things starting to get on top of me, I went googling for a way to destress the situation. I was hoping maybe there was an opt-out for the noodle bar but there doesn't seem to be. There is, however, a very easy way to find yourself suddenly rich enough to hire a manager, add a bunch of tables and let the place run itself while you rake in the profits: just steal stuff. 

That's how you do it. Apparently all you have to do is ignore the nightly curfew warning and when all the other business owners have locked themselves safely away in their apartments, you go round to their establishments, help yourself to their tables and chairs and all the appliances in their kitchens. Then you put everything you can use in your noodle bar and sell the rest. 

And that's it. That's the meta. I read it on reddit and on the Steam Discussion thread and several professional game websites. It's not like I just believed some AI's hallucination. I haven't tried it myself but I'm sure it'll work.

Except for one thing: I don't like to steal in video games. Okay, I'm not saying I've never done it but I don't enjoy it. I avoid it as much as I can in any game that allows it. I especially avoid it in any game that encourages it. It just makes me uncomfortable to do it, so I don't.

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to do it in this game. I might have to. And I can rationalize doing it, to a degree.

Now that's a decent use-case for AI...

 I've seen Nivalis Nights described as an unusual entry in the cosy game genre, Stardew Valley with a quirky cyberpunk skin. It is not that. In Cloudpunk, Nivalis was conceived as a postcapitalist dystopia. It hasn't suddenly turned into a fluffy little My Little Hello Kitty liberal democracy in Nivalis Nights. If that's the kind of city you're looking for, let me direct you to Hethereau.

In those circumstances, I might be willing to start helping myself to anything that's not nailed down. Dog eat dog, every man for himself, survival of the fittest, insert Ayn Rand quote here. If I do, though, it sure as hell won't be because it makes sense. 

How can you just take furniture from the bar next door and set it up outside your own place without anyone noticing? I guess I haven't tried it yet so maybe there's a gloss that makes it seem reasonable but from what I've read everyone just carries on as if it hasn't happened. I have to say it sounds more like a bug than a feature to me but we'll see. If they don't patch it out, I guess they meant for us to do it that way.

Since this is a game where you can have multiple saves, what I think I'll probably do is give the old night-time thievery a try and see how it sits with me. If I can stomach it and if it works then I'll carry on with that as my main save. 

If it doesn't, or if I find it too weird, I'll start again and see what happens if I don't do that introductory quest. Never go see the guy. Don't talk to him. Ignore AVA when she keeps reminding me. Never own a noodle bar.

I know it's the start of the Main Story Quest but I'm curious to know: if you abandon the MSQ altogether and just focus on exploring the city and living in it, can you do all the other stuff that's not connected to the story? Or is a bunch of stuff gated behind how well your fast food outlet does?

Either way, it would be interesting to find out, so even if grand theft does turn out to be the fix for noodle bar stress, I might try it anyway. Just what I need. Two versions of the game running in parallel. Just when i already have too many games to play...

EverQuest And EverQuest II - To The Letter

For a while, I've been in the habit of putting a post together every time whoever happens to be holding down the Producer's chair at Darkpaw puts out a letter. That used to be Holly Longdale until she jumped ship to bring her deep knowledge of how best to milk an aging cash cow to Blizzard. Since then it's been Jenn Chan.

Jenn Chan is great. As a customer and a player, I've been very happy with her tenure. She's the epitome of a safe pair of hands. Just looking at her smiling face makes me feel the future of Norrath is secure. As a blogger, though, she doesn't give me much to work with.

It's been so long now since I last played EverQuest seriously, I can barely make sense of most of what she has to say in the letter for the elder game. There's something about making Hero's Journey quests more group-friendly. I don't know what Hero's Journey quests are. There's something else about improvements to the Resource Hunter system. I don't know what that is, either.

After that, there's a couple of paragraphs about bug fixes, class "tuning" and UI upgrades, all of which I can understand in theory but none of which have any meaning for me in practice. Then we get some notes about festivals, most of which I've never heard of (Fall Fun? Festival of Shadows?) and a brief mention of some changes to Account to Account transfers.

Account to Account transfers is a bit of a sore point with me. I would long ago have given SOE, and then Daybreak/Darkpaw, my money, if they'd been willing to let me transfer characters between the accounts Mrs Bhagpuss and I set up back in 2000. It would have been worth hundreds of dollars to us to get all of our characters on the right accounts, back in the days when we were both playing EQ.

Sadly, the Account to Account option exists solely and only for accounts registered to the same person. Both accounts have to  have the exact same name associated with them. There has never been any option to move characters between accounts owned by different people. 

It sounds very reasonable until you factor in the monthly subscription for those accounts. I always paid for both our accounts on my credit card, from the day they were created and ever afterwards. It seemed to me then, and still does now, that that the defining proof of ownership ought to be whose name is on the card that's being charged, especially when there's only ever been one source of payment, but that's not how they see it.

Not that I care any more. Mrs Bhagpuss hasn't played either game in a decade and a half and never will again. I have all the login details to all the accounts (I think there are at least eight of them...) and I can play any of the characters on any account whenever I like, which in most cases will be never. Even if they did change the rules, I wouldn't bother now.

 

Checking the official site, though, it appears that Account transfers are currently unavailable. I don't know how long that's been the case but I do know that for EverQuest II the process is automated whereas for EQ, you had to submit a petition to Customer Service for the transfer to be performed manually. I'm guessing EQ is going to get the same automatic option EQII enjoys.

With that little piece of technical tomfoolery out of the way, we're down to the only part anyone's really interested, namely the upcoming expansion. It's called Favors of Fortune and it involves some gods falling out about something. It would. It's an EverQuest expansion.

It also involves the return of someone or something called Scorn. I have never heard of Scorn but his/her/their/its return is emphasized in heavy, bold type: Scorn has returned. Like that. Whatever impact that's meant to have is lost on me but the effects of Scorn's return do sound intriguing:

"Across the lesser planes, chance itself twists unnaturally. Simple gambles collapse into disaster. Once‑reliable odds warp into impossibility. Victories slip away as though guided by an unseen hand. The very fabric of luck feels poisoned, bent toward failure by a force both deliberate and unseen."

I wouldn't mind an expansion that turned all the expected results into a crap shoot but I bet most people would hate it. So I don't suppose it's that. Not that I'm ever likely to find out from personal experience. Chance would have to twist a very long way out of true for me to find myself back playing EQ at all, let alone in current content.

There's a very much higher chance of me playing the upcoming expansion for EQII, though. I'd put it no lower than 90%. I've played every EQII expansion on release since 2014's Altar of Malice and I have no particular intention to stop. 

The ten per cent wiggle room I'm giving myself comes from two things: firstly the ever-increasing number of games I'm trying to play (There might be a post about that soon.) and secondly the tendency of my PC to crash when I log out of EQII. It's doing it much less than it used to but it still happens and it puts me off playing because otherwise the machine is working perfectly and I don't want to screw that up.

 

It's harder to wring anything worth talking about out of Jenn Chan's Producer's Letter for EQII  than the one for EverQuest. It starts with a whole lot of detail about all the things they've added to or fixed in the game so far this year: exciting things like "cleaner spellbooks after changing factions or possessing pets, more transparent messaging when Cleric and Guardian abilities are stifled by debuffs".

Don't believe me? Go read it for yourself. It's chock-full of minutiae like that,. The sort of detail that makes perfect sense in a set of patch notes but isn't exactly what you'd imagine would make the cut for a Producer's Letter. 

I'll spare you the excruciating specifics but I will just mention the list of upcoming holiday events. Again, we all know these are coming. They're long-established annual holidays, after all. Not to mention there's an in-game calendar that has them all listed. 

Browsing the list, though, I did notice there was no mention of the event formerly known as Days of Summer, later rebranded as  Panda Panda Panda. That would normally have started in mid-September. I might not be playing at the moment but I still get the PR emails and I hadn't heard anything about so I did a bit of googling.

Gemini, once again, seems to be operating in an alternate timeline. I asked specifically if Panda Panda Panda was going to be happening in 2026 and the AI told me "Yes, new "Panda, Panda, Panda!" content and tasks are scheduled to run in EverQuest II in September 2026". Once again, the links it gave as sources for this confident assertion not only didn't support the claim, they didn't have anything to do with pandas at all!

I had to go to the official forums for the correct answer, which is that "We are doing alternate things in place of the panda content. The Splendid Celebration Crate content has taken its place." Angeliana said that. She is not an AI. She knows what she's talking about.

I'm quite pleased they've pensioned the event off. It was a great addition to the game back in 2017, when it first appeared but it's been a while since it made much sense. What with the big summer update in August and the Expansion in December, not to mention Overseer, there are plenty of ways to get much better gear than the pandas hand out these days. 

 

And so to the only thing anyone really cares about: this year's expansion. It's called Descent to Val’Zyroth, which may be nowhere near as good a name as Favors of Fortune but does make up for in accuracy what it loses in style. Well, it might. That's assuming Val'Zyroth is somewhere in the Underfoot, which is where we're going.

The Underfoot is Brell's realm below the surface of Norrath so this is another spelunking expansion, the first since 2015's Terrors of Thalumbra. I have mixed feelings about underground expansions. One of my favorite EQ expansions at the time was Depths of Darkhollow. I had some good times down there. I also quite liked Terrors of Thalumbra. 

They do get quite claustrophobic, though. And this one is full of Dark Elves. I am not a big dark elf fan.

In DTV, which really is not a very memorable acronym, we're set to  

plunge through the treacherous tunnels of Subtunaria into the glowing, magic-soaked reaches of the Underfoot. Infiltrate the resplendent Teir'Dal city of Neriondalon, battle alongside unique subterranean allies like the resilient Tontu molemen, and breach Brell Serilis’ legendary planar workshops before dark magics swallow the realm.

The infamous ruler of Neriak, Queen Cristanos, has spotted the absence of Lucan from Freeport and fancies her chances. Having played EQII pretty consistently since launch, that does actually mean something to me and I'm mildly invested in putting a stop to her territorial ambitions. Most of my characters come from Freeport after all. The last thing any of them want is to end up living in a Tier'Dal police state. Stick with with the police state you're used to, that's my advice.

There is, as usual, a pre-expansion event. This one's called Paths of Sedition and it begins on October 6. Generally, pre-expansion events aren't all that exciting but there have been a couple of notable exceptions. The Letter doesn't give much away about how this one's likely to go.

And that's about it. I'm not convinced the whole Producer's Letter tradition shouldn't go the way of Panda Panda Panda. It seems like most of what's in both of these letters either didn't need to be repeated yet again after the numerous previous times we'd been told about it or could have simply been handled by a regular News item on the websites.

Still, it's always nice to hear from Jenn Chan. And if she enjoys writing letters, who are we to stop her?

Nivalis Nights - Very First Impressions

 If I'd had to pick my top three games from my Steam wishlist, the ones I was most excited to see and which I'd be most likely to buy and play on release... well, Number One would have been Ananta for sure. But Ananta's not out until next year. The games in slots 2 and 3 both came out this week.

When did that last happen, I wonder? Two games I really want to play, arriving within days of each other? Actually, it's not as uncommon as all that, I guess. There are only so many launch windows developers and publishers consider worth having and unless GTA6 happens to be squatting on one of them, everyone pushes and shoves to get their game out the door at the right moment, which often ends up meaning the same time.

The first of this particular pair to appear was Wadjet Eye's Nighthawks -The Vampire RPG. It's been a long wait. Eight years in the making, following a successful Kickstarter back in 2018, when it barely scraped past its $125k ask to finish with $136,125. Hard to imagine that kept the lights on for the best part of a decade.

I bought that one on release day just over a week ago but I haven't played it yet. Honestly, where does the time go? I'll get to it soon, I promise. 

Yesterday, the other game at the top of my Must-Have list came out - Nivalis Nights. Like Nighthawks, I'd picked it for Wilhelm's Fantasy Critic League so I'd been following its progress very closely. So closely, in fact, I found myself ahead of the deadline when I went to Steam to see how it was doing and to ask them to take my money. I tried to buy it and got told I was six hours too early. How's that for commitment?

 

Because I'd picked it for the League, I was interested to know how the game was being received, not to mention reviewed. When I came back to check later in the day, after it had been officially released, I was disturbed to find it had a "Mixed" rating on Steam. Mixed might be good for a grill but it's not great for a Steam rating.

On closer examination, it became clear there was pretty much just one reason for the negative reviews - poor optimization. The game was running badly even on high-end rigs and nothing makes people angrier than seeing the expensive kit they painstakingly put together from carefully chosen components, chugging along like some casual gamer's off-the-shelf impulse purchase from Amazon

Everyone who was able to run the game, or who had the patience to realise the performance issues would be fixed soon enough, seemed more than happy with the game itself, something I thought boded well for my chances of a good score in the League. Professional reviewers rarely seem to struggle with performance issues in the games they review, to the extent that there are sometimes complaints that they can't have been plying the same build the public had to put up with.

More importantly, there was the issue of whether I'd be able to run it. Nighthawks, I bought with confidence because the demo ran perfectly well on my machine, as well it might. It's pretty much an illustrated text adventure, after all. 

 

Nivalis Nights, though, looked like it was more akin to Cyberpunk 2077, a game I could theoretically have run on this machine, back when I had the graphics card installed, although even then success wouldn't have been guaranteed. With the onboard graphics I'm using now, good as they are, I wouldn't even want to try it. Factor in those widely-reported optimization issues and there's obviously no chance I could run Nivalis Nights locally.

Luckily, I thought I might have another option. Nivalis Nights is a kind of sequel to Cloudpunk, the game I played and reviewed earlier this year.  Cloudpunk is on GeForce Now. Would Nivalis Nights be there as well?

Yes and no. As in yes, it would, but no, it wasn't there yet. I found that out after I ran a google search to see if there were plans to add it, saw there were, went and bought the game on the strength of that assurance and then couldn't find it on the platform. Back to Google again, where I learned it can take up to 24 hours from the launch of a game before NVidia adds it to the GeForce Now servers, checks it and authorizes it for customers to select.

Why can't we have everything NOWWWW!!!???

 

Ahem...

So, to go back a little, I bought the game. At full price it would be £21.99 but there's a 10% discount for the couple of weeks following launch, something I'm learning seems to be pretty standard for new releases. That ought to have brought it to £19.79, which seemed like a very fair price to me. 

I was about to buy it for that when i noticed there was an offer for both Cloudpunk and Nivalis Nights as a bundle with a slightly bizarre discount of 34% That should have been £23.16, a bargain, no doubt, but no use to me since I already own Cloudpunk. Except the price it was showing for the two games wasn't £23.16. It was £17.81. 

Eh?

That made buying the pack almost £2 cheaper than just buying the new game on its own. Does that make any sense? No, but who cares? I bought the pack. It was almost like I was getting extra credit just for owning the earlier game. 

How it was being calculated puzzled me. So I asked ChatGPT to explain it.

 

I'd cut and paste the explanation but it would make this post ridiculously long and anyway ChatGPT couldn't really figure it out either. The AI came up with a whole load of calculations and scenarios but it was mostly guessing. It did work out that £17.81 is exactly 10% off the price for Nivalis Nights after that, too, has been discounted by 10%, which has to be more than a co-incidence, but why Steam would apply the discount twice is anyone's guess. 

Maybe it's a glitch but whatever. I'll take it. I don't understand it but I'll take it.

It wasn't until this morning that I logged into GeForce Now again to see if Nivalis Nights had arrived. It had been about fifteen hours since launch. Was that long enough? 

There was no sign of the game in the GeForce Now version of my Steam library but Gemini had warned me that might happen. Apparently GeForce now sometimes needs a little push. I resynced the two of them and there it was. It's a lot just to get to play a game, isn't it? But that's modern life for you. The real question is - is the game any good?

I'll tell you when I've played it. What I can tell you so far is that it looks great. If you ever wanted to stroll around a slightly pixilated version of the city from the original Blade Runner, which seems to be the fantasy of about a gazillion people and has certainly been on my to-do list since I saw the original movie on release in 1982, then this might be your game. 

 

It's all there - the flying cars, the rain-filled streets, the clunky robot carts, the neon, the huge advertizing screens, the punks - every box ticked. The lack of any attempt at hyper-realism really sells it, too. The future looks so much better in this slightly shaky-cam version. 

Also, as a huge bonus for anyone who played Cloudpunk, it's really, obviously, unmistakably the same city. I was recognizing streets and locations as soon as I left the apartment. I couldn't tell you what they were called but they looked so familiar. 

That really sold it for me. but not everyone's as sold as I am. I love the look of the world but I've seen some complaints about NPCs looking like "plastic sex-dolls". I won't comment on the accuracy of that comparison but I have no problem with what they look like. Sure, they don't look realistic but then neither does anything else so why should the people?

I'm guessing my character looks like that too but theres' no way to know for sure. There's no character creation and no third-person option. You start the game looking out of the eyes of a pre-existing citizen of Nivalis and it goes from there. 

It's not an RPG so there's no paper-doll for gear that I saw and no associated little picture of yourself and what you're wearing. The game doesn't reveal your gender. It doesn't even tell you what your name is. It seems like a smart solution to some of the well-rehearsed problems but I wonder if such a degree of anonymity is going to wear thin over time? I do like to know who I am.

 

Just in case you hadn't gotten the message that you won't be admiring your looks, you can't even see your reflection in the mirror in the bathroom. I don't think the player-character's a vampire... then again, the game is called Nivalis Nights...

On a more practical level, I'm very pleased to say that, playing on GeForce Now, I saw no hint of any performance or optimization issues. Smooth as butter. I only played for twenty minutes, just to get a feel for the game, take some screenshots and make sure it worked, but in that time I checked out my apartment, wandered around the streets a little, spoke to a couple of NPCs, took a cab to the market and finished the first step of the tutorial quest, all without any hitches, glitches or issues.

And it felt great. I really liked Cloudpunk, which also used stylized, pixillated graphics to excellent effect and this feels like that but better. I'm slightly wary of the actual gameplay, which seems to lean a little too heavily towards the running-a-business end of the simulation spectrum for my tastes, but once you have your city and your engine, you can use it to tell all kinds of stories. I'm sure some of them will be more interesting than how many waffles did I sell this morning.

There's a hint towards better things to come in the very first scene, which has AVA, your digital personal assistant, telling you, with a disturbing degree of satisfaction, that the quadrant of the city where you live is on lockdown because a serial killer's on the loose. It wasn't the news itself that disturbed me, so much as the way AVA said she hoped the killer was safely trapped inside the locked down district. With us!

 

Following the Chekhov's Gun principle, I'd like to think the writers wouldn't mention a serial killer at the start of Act One if there wasn't going to be a series of killings by the end of the game. They wouldn't just be using it as an excuse to restrict players to the only district of Nivalis they've actually finished, would they? No, it couldn't be that...

As you can see, I took plenty of screen shots. As usual, one of the first things I looked for was a way to hide the HUD. I couldn't find one myself but Gemini gave me a convoluted explanation of how to do it. I haven't tried it yet so I don't know if it's a hallucination. I suspect it might be.

Sidebar: Have you ever said HUD out loud? I haven't. AVA says it and she sounds out each letter - H. U. D. Like that. I've always imagined it was pronounced Hud like the name of the Paul Newman movie. But then I always assumed FAQ was pronounced Fack.Why wouldn't it be? It was only years after I saw it written down that I first heard someone say Eff Ay Queue. Which I still think sounds wrong. But then, I also say Loll! for LOL, not Ell Oh Ell because I was saying Loll for Laugh Out Loud back in the '80s, long before social media claimed to have invented it. But don't get me started on how very much older all these abbreviations are than everyone seems to think...

There is a Photo option in the game that works very nicely but as usual the one real drawback of playing on GeForce Now is that any shots I "save" in game go to NVidia's servers, where they get deleted at the end of the session. I have to remember to use Windows to add any Photos I take to my Screenshots folder. It works but like all workarounds it's clunky.

And that's about as far as I've gotten so far. I'll just say that I've been rushing through this so I can get back and have another go. That's a pretty good recommendation right there but of course I haven't really done anything in the game yet. We'll see how I feel when I've had a chance to experience some of the actual gameplay.

As for my chances of a reasonable score for the League, I'm cautiously optimistic. The game had over a million wishlists on Steam so I'm confident it'll get reviewed by the right publications. Let's just hope the reviewers have as few technical issues with the game as I have...