I Want To Ride My Bicycle

 I was in my late teens when I learned to ride a bicycle. I think I only ever owned one, a heavy, green Hercules with white plastic handlebars and a comfy, padded seat. When that fell apart, I never replaced it. I doubt I've been on a bike since the 90s.

They do say you never forget how to ride a bike, though, and that's certainly true for Neverness To Everness. I get myself into all kinds of trouble on the streets of Hethereau in anything on four wheels but motor-scooters and even motorbikes feel like a much safer way to get around.

When I saw that pushbikes were going to be added to the game with the last update, I knew I wanted one. Pedal power. That should suit me fine. Going too fast around corners is my downfall.

Not that I did anything much about it. Not at first, anyway. As soon as the update dropped, I forgot all about the bike in all the excitment. My only excuse is that there's always so much to do I just lose track. When I eventually remembered, I couldn't seem to find any way to get one other than through the Mystery Boxes, the drop rates for which are not great.

Fortunately, Mailvaltar mentioned in the comments yesterday that there's a bike shop somewhere in the north-east of the city where you can buy a bike for the bargain price of 800k Fons. That makes a bicycle eight times the price of the cheapest car! More than three times as expensive as a motorcycle! As Mailvaltar says, that's got to be one hell of a bike.

Even at such an outrageous mark-up, I bought one without a moment's hesitation. I must've really wanted one. 

 

I'd just finished the Breezy Ride event, in which you get to cart ten different characters about the city on the back of your bike. I loved this event. It might be my favorite in the game so far. It has a delicious disregard for logic that's like catnip to me. 

As I said, I didn't buy a bicycle until after I'd finished the whole thing but apparently Flora already had a bike and she's been riding it all around Hethereau without letting me know. 

Every step in the quest chain, if we can call it that, involves the Appraiser just happening to run into one of her friends or acquaintances, standing around on a street corner or siting in a bar somewhere in the city. Conversation ensues, as it would, and inevitably concludes with the Appraiser offering to give whoever it is a ride to wherever they're going. 

On her bike. That I had no idea she had.

What bike, Flora?! When did you get a bike? Why didn't you tell me? I guess there's a lot about our characters we don't know but this really brought home to me how they must all have their own lives, about which we know nothing.. 

Flora even seems to have given her bike a name. It's called Yesteryear. You can see the name next to it when it's parked in the street. 

Wherever, whenever and however she got it, it's hers, not mine. She can summon it when she needs it for a quest but if I want her to ride it to go somewhere I'd like her to go, forget it. For that she needs a different bike altogether. One I'll have to pay for. Albeit with her money. Sometimes I think you need a degree in Metaphysics to play these games.

 

The Breezy Rides themselves are wonderful. I loved all of them. Not just the bike-riding itself, although that was always fun, but the little stories and the conversations along the way. There's always a bit of chat at the start to set things up and then whoever's on the back of the bike carries on talking for the first few minutes before conversation eventually runs down. 

Then, when we get to wherever we're going, there's a little coda at the end of which we both, inevitably, decide we'll do something together again, soon. It's all just so nice. 

I would literally play a whole game based on this concept. Actually, come to think of it, I already have, kind of. It's basically Neo Cab but without the commercial interactions and on two wheels instead of four.

When I say this series of quests is "nice", I maybe ought to caveat that a little. Most of the encounters are really sweet but not exactly all of them. The really charming ones involve the younger characters. Linko and Iroi are positively childlike. Chiz is shy and a little bit lonely; Shinku is funny; Mint and Nanally are confident and effervescent as they always are...

Lacrimosa would probably have been the most bittersweet. She's an enigma. 

I did the quests in the order they came up and she was the last. I was really looking forward to seeing what she had to say but I was interrupted by real life just as she was about to get on the back of the bike and I had to log out briefly. I thought I'd be able to pick up where I left off but when I got back in, Yesteryear and the little vampire were nowhere to be seen. 

Luckily, most quests in NTE that involve travel can be completed just by teleporting to the end-point so I was able to finish it easily enough but I missed out on all of Lacrimosa's on-bike dialog. I just watched it on YouTube and it's possibly the weakest of the lot so I didn't miss much. All the best bits are before and after the actual ride. Her very best line comes just after she gets off, when she says

 

Lacrimosa really is not of this world. 

The other three characters aren't quite as "nice" as the rest, though. Not to say they're unfriendly in any way. It's just that there's something a little darker about all of them.

When the Appraiser meets Hotori she is, as you might expect, drunk. Very drunk. The woman has a problem, there's no hiding it. 

The main reason the Appraiser offers her boss a lift is because she's worried she's too out of it to get home safely on her own. Hotori warns the Appraiser to take it slowly because she wouldn't want to throw up over the bike but when they get back to Eibon she's sobered up enough to tell Flora she needs to be ready for work tomorrow, which even the easy-going Appraiser finds a tad awkward.

Jiuyuan, another business owner with one eye always on the account book,  has an ulterior motive for accepting the offer of a ride to a good place to watch the sun set. She cheerfully tells Flora, when they get there, that her main reason for going was to have another opportunity to make a psychological assessment of her. She's clearly still thinking about what use she can make of the Appraiser in future. Flora isn't entirely happy about that and Jiuyuan's promise never to use the intel she's gathered against her isn't as reassuring as it could be.

Finally, there's Fadia. Fadia is always scary. Flora comes across her drinking alone at a bar. Not, I believe, the first time that's happened. Fadia, as always, is flirtatious and that's being generous. She comes across as a borderline sexual predator sometimes. 

Again, as we've become used to from her, all her talk is drenched with subtext. She purrs about how everything feels so much freer under cover of darkness and suggests the two of them go "do something more fun". As she says, "The city has fallen asleep and no-one will ever know what we did together..."

 

Unsurprisingly, Flora is wary but it turns out Fadia just wants go to the Hethereau Sky Tower. When Flora expresses surprise that it's something so innocent, Fadia makes it very clear it could be something more "dangerous" - if the Appraiser's up for it. 

Which she is not. In the end, nothing untoward happens, despite a bleak aside about mortality from Fadia on the journey. But who knows what goes on ion Fadia's mind? As Flora says right at the end "Fadia, it's hard to get you, sometimes."

As with many of the character quests in NTE, there's a lot going on under the surface but one thing that's hard to miss is all the drinking and sexual tension. I just looked up the game's PEGI rating, which is 12 for "for moderate violence, simulated gambling, in-game purchases involving random items, and online user interaction." and I can't help feeling whoever did the assessment might not have gone deep enough.

It's also very noticeable where the divisions between the characters lie. All the potentially problematic behavior, the drinking, the sexual innuendo, the general louche moral attitudes, comes from the mature female characters. I think that means something but I haven't got a handle yet on what it might be.

It's always been very clear who the grown-ups are in NTE. While there's often some confusion over exactly how old the younger characters might be, it's always been clear which are children, which are young adults and who is fully mature. 

In that regard, there's no questioning the maturity of Hotori, Jiuyuan and Fadia. Allowing for the inevitable perfect skin and lack age lines peculiar to the graphical style, Hotori and Jiuyuan are most likely in their thirties or even forties. Fadia is at least in her late twenties. 

 

The mature male characters - Baicang, Chaos, Adler and Skia - are distinctly less prone to drinking and flirting than their female counterparts. In fact, they're mostly so stiff as to be made out of cardboard. Only Baicang really steps outside of his professional persona in any of storylines I've seen and he's a lot milder in his rebellion than any of the three women I just mentioned.

All of which seems like a long way to go on a bike ride. It's another reason why I like this game so much. There's a depth to the triviality that makes an impact. And there's so much subtext, all the time.

A couple more examples before I go. Things that speak to the complexity of the world-building here. 

I'd forgotten all about Shinku, the "dragon" who we met in the fantasy land of 999 Nights. When Flora met her outside Little Sparrow, the maid cafe, I had to stop a moment to think who she was.

 There's a whole bit where the Appraiser teases Shinku for her interest in whatever the heck happens in Little Sparrow, an interest Shinku most unconvincingly denies, but more interestingly perhaps, as Flora gives Shinku a ride back to her home in the suburbs, Shinku talks about how her house isn't really all that messy and how she knows where everything in her collections is. It's a beautifully natural, organic conversation and it told me a lot I didn't know about the character.

After Shinku got off the bike and disappeared inside and Flora was standing outside the house, I noticed the door was open. I was curious to see if I could look at Shinku's place so I took Flora inside. It turns out you can go into her apartment and look around. It feels a tad transgressive because Shinku isn't there but it's highly revealing. The whole place is exactly as I imagined it from the conversation. 

 

It's quite untidy, with all kinds of things lying about all over the place, but it's clean and feels pleasantly lived-in. And there are a lot of collectibles. Shinku has display cabinets filled with figures and dioramas and there's a whole wall of board games stacked semi-neatly on shelves al the way to the ceiling. I didn't spend a long time there but the detail is impeccable. Someone's clearly taken a lot of trouble mirroring  Shinku's personality as it's written. I don't know if there's a storyline that supports that level of effort or if it's just someone having fun but either way it's powerfully immersive.

And finally, there's Linko and her Tamachi obsession. When you meet her, she's near the coast, talking to herself. It transpires she has a day off and she's going to spend it looking for rare water Tamachis.

I had never heard of Tamachis [Edit: I must have because apparently both Linko and Mint talk about them a lot but it obviously didn't stick in my mind.] but it quickly became clear from context that they're Hethereau's equivalent of Pokemon and Linko was playing the local equivalent of Pokemon Go. Flora gave Linko a ride around the bay and Linko caught several Tamachi. 

It was an entertaining insight into the hidden life of the characters who live in this world we, as players,only get to visit. In fact, the entire Breezy Ride event was like that. I'm very happy I spotted it be.

Now Flora has her bike and she can invite any of those ten characters to ride on the back of it, whenever she likes. As soon as I bought it, I had her ride around Hethereau for half an hour with the UI off. It's the most fun I've had just riding around in a game since I stopped playing Once Human. Next time I might ask Chiz to come with her. Or Linko. Or Mint. Just not Hotori or Jiuyuan. 

And definitely not Fadia...

800k well-spent, I'd say. 

 

Notes On AI Used In This Post

None. But I did look a few things up on Google and Gemini always gets its two cents in first, which almost caused an upset. I was googling to see if Tamachi is an actual game of some kind and it was pretty clear it wasn't but just to be absolutely sure I googled "tamachi neverness" and this is what Gemini told me:

In the supernatural urban open-world RPG Neverness to Everness (NTE), Tamachis are collectible virtual pets or digital creatures that players can hunt, collect, and raise throughout the city of Hethereau. Heavily inspired by real-world Tamagotchis, they function as a core slice-of-life minigame and collection system.

 The AI then went on to give me bullet points on how to play Tamachi in NTE.:

Key Features of Tamachis in NTE

The Tamachi Index: Players track their findings in an in-game Index. Finding every standard version and unlocking the elusive secret variants is required to fully complete it. 
Tamachi Hunting: These digital creatures emit signals across Hethereau. Players must explore the map—often climbing skyscrapers or navigating hidden urban spots—to track down rare variants.  
Linko's Specialization: The playable S-class character Linko is deeply connected to this mechanic. Known as one of the top "Tamachi pros" in Hethereau, he features unique outfits and abilities that make tracking and picking up rare Tamachi signals much easier.

Let me make it clear right away, almost none of this is true. 

Oh, it's true that Linko plays Tamachi. So does Mint. But I can't and neither can you. There is no "in-game index" where players track their findings. Players do not "explore the map—often climbing skyscrapers or navigating hidden urban spots—to track down rare variants" because there's no Tamachi game a player can play. I wish there was. Gemini makes it sound like it would be a lot of fun.

The sources that Gemini quotes to back up these claims are from in-character posts by Linko on Instagram, a beta video on YouTube and a reddit thread where a bunch of people talk about how cool it would be if the Tamachi game ever became playable. Which it would. So get on that, Hotta!

Honestly, it's a textbook example of why you should never trust an AI summary without carefully checking the sources it cites. I actually had half a paragraph written about how I must somehow have missed it when they added creature collecting to NTE, when I thought "hold on a minute..." 

I do find it very amusing that an AI, which is effectively a fictional entity, finds it difficult to tell the difference between the social media posts of real people and those of other fictional entities. I know it's fashionable to hate this sort of thing but it's getting to feel like the future I imagined living in, back when I was younger, and it's not that far from being the reality that's existed in my head all my life. 

Who can say what's really real, after all? 

Ask Not "For Whom The Verses Morn" Because I Have No Clue!

The next big content drop for Neverness To Everness is due in less than a week. It's called For Whom The Verses Morn because of course it is. I don't know which of the gacha games started this trend for incomprehensible, enigmatic chapter titles but hats off to whoever it was. To paraphrase Jeanette Winterson's mother, why be sensible when you can be weird?

The last update was called Rising From The Moonlit Fog and I did the preview post for that one on August 12. The pace is relentless. Is anyone playing an MMORPG that gets major content drops every six weeks? All year round? No, I didn't think so.

Perhaps a better question is would you want to be? And an even better question than that would be wouldn't it depend on what content it was?

I'm beginning to wonder if NTE might have an identity problem. The game's been out for five months now. This will be the fourth big update. They're running at around one every six weeks, which is par for the genre. So far we've had:

 

Dreamwalk Corridor (June) - The main storyline continues via the Corridor of Echoes episode, which expands on the Scarlet Letter plot and sees Nanally lose part of her soul. It also added a largely pointless and now forgotten resort island just off the coast of Hethereau. Has anyone been back there since? I know I haven't. Oh, and there was the Porsche collab, which was just weird.

999 Nights (July) - If you thought adding a resort island was a strange choice for the first update, the follow-up invites you to hold its beer. This one added a whole new game from a completely different genre. Not just some mini-game or holiday event, either - a complete fantasy RPG that could quite reasonably have been launched as a standalone title. It's now permanent content, so if you ever feel like playing a high-fantasy ARPG using NTE as the lobby for it, well now you can! As for the main plot, that had to wait until next time. Poor old Nanally.

Rising from the Moonlight Fog - (August): Back to the plot at last. In fact, not just back to it but through it and out the other side. The whole Scarlet Letter plotline concluded with what felt like unseemly haste, with the entire organization broken up and whatever threat it represented nullified. At this point it's unclear whether there even is a "main plotline" any more. We're left with some vague hints and sense of unease and that's about it. As for new territory, this one added a vast tract of largely empty countryside and... a resort beach. Are you sensing a theme here? If not, you should be.

For Whom The Verses Morn - (September) : And here we are again, anticipating what's coming next. According to the seven-minute promo video, we'll be starting a new storyline involving Blackbird, the witch from the Witch's House, who popped up at some point earlier as a consultant but now takes point for a tale involving a mysterious letter and a trip to a new location called St. Arbor. Does it have anything to do with anything else that's happened? I don't know but I very much doubt it. We're also getting a new district of Hethereau. Well, kind of. We're getting a theme park. And the bloody Porsche collab is back.

There's an hour-long "Preview Special" video that might make a bit more sense of all of that but I haven't watched it and I'm not about to. I have watched the seven-minute PV though and I'll watch again right now, to refresh my memory. Here, why don't you watch along with me? 

Yeah, well, that's seven minutes etc.

I didn't get the stopwatch out (I don't own a stopwatch, before you get any ideas...) but I'd estimate the story gets maybe thirty seconds of that seven minutes. About half the running time goes to showing off the new costumes. Pukaland, the unfortunately-named theme park, and the stupid racing cars get most of the rest.

It's becoming hard to ignore the priorities here. In four updates we've had three new open-world zones or areas, all of them focusing on leisure activities: two beach resorts and a theme park. Everything else is just open countryside. For a game originally predicated on life in the big city it seems like an odd choice.

Or should I say a series of odd choices. Two playgrounds might be counted a co-incidence but three makes a trend. 

And I'm not even mentioning the wealth of ancillary content that's been added since launch, the vast majority of which also revolves around mini-games, gambling and the kind of thing you might find yourself doing on vacation or at the weekend. As a working city, Hethereau sure takes its playtime seriously.

About this time in a post about an upcoming update to a game I'm playing, I'd normally start digging into the details to try and figure out where the story might be going. I'm not going to do that this time. It's increasingly obvious there's not much point in doing it for NTE. That's not how the game works.

It's taken me a while to figure it out. Coming from Wuthering Waves and before it Genshin Impact, I'd made an automatic, unconscious assumption that what would be driving player interest and retention would be the story. All the big gacha open-world games build a good deal of their reputation on the quality of the writing, which has frequently been exemplary. 

And the the writing in Neverness To Everness is excellent. There's no questioning the quality of the individual stories or the authenticity of the dialog. The voice actors bring the writers' words to life with flair and authority. All of that remains demonstrably superior to almost anything I've been used to seeing in a quarter of a century playing MMORPGs, where the standards are so much lower.

No, the thing that makes NTE quite different from all those other gacha games is the apparent lack of a through-line or even a structure designed to facilitate the telling of an epic tale. What, after all, is going on in Hethereau? Really, not all that much. 

In most games there's a crisis of some kind or at least we enter the world at some moment of decision. There's tension and threat. Not so in Hethereau. It's a peaceful city where everything seems to be trucking along nicely with no dark clouds looming on the horizon.

The crisis happened forty years ago. It's long over now. The Appraiser, who suffers from the inevitable amnesia trope, hasn't woken up to an ongoing conflict in which she plays a key part so much as she's been rounded up by social services. They've found her a place to live and given her a job to do. There are suggestions that there might be some government work to come later but so far, in nearly six months, all she's had to deal with is a series of minor family crises, most of which affect no-one much outside of Eibon Antiques.

I ought to make it clear I have no problem with a game having a central plot that never rises above the quotidian. On the contrary: it's very refreshing not to have to go out and save the world every goddam time. 

What I do find problematic is the randomness of it all. It's not as though there's even an episodic or picaresque storyline, where the pieces slowly start to fall into place and the bigger picture becomes clear.

Or not yet, at least. I did have the sense last time that there might be something brewing along those lines, with the Rules Anomalies starting to cause some existential issues for BAC and the rest of the authorities. I can only hope the Blackbird plotline ties in to that somehow but looking at the video I get the much stronger impression it's going to be something they've cooked up for Halloween. I mean, witches, bonfires, creepy, spooky, shadowy villages... in October?

 

And then the next update, six weeks after that, is going to be the Christmas one, isn't it? Are we going to go heavy on the storyline then, in the biggest of all holiday seasons? I doubt it. I'd put my money on some kind of winter sports resort opening up, somewhere off  in those snow-capped mountains we can see in the distance.

It seems so much more likely that way. NTE is all about the fun, not the drama. That's where it's pitched. Sure, there's a story for those that like that sort of thing but I don't get the sense that story is driving anything. If you look at the promo video, it's not even pushing the new characters' combat skills. It's far more interested in what they're wearing, most of which looks like it's meant for going clubbing or lounging around at home.

I didn't even mention the characters, did I? Obviously, as a gacha game, every update has to come with characters to roll on (And their weapons, but I'd have to say that weapons in NTE really are very much an afterthought. They barely get a mention in the promotional material.).

The two characters this time are Blackbird, of course, and Akane. I may be jumping the gun here because I have no foreknowledge of the plot for St. Arbor but I'd be very surprised if Akane plays much of a part in it. There's a major side-story in the update involving Nanally's band, The Whoots!!!. Akane will be in that and, I'd predict, only in that. 

If I'm right, it makes the whole team-building aspect of the game even more abstract than it already was. Last time I wondered how Zankou could be in the player's team when she's a) a baddie and b) in prison. Now we're adding Akane, a retired rock musician currently tending bar in a cellar club. What, exactly, does she know about combat?  Is she even an Esper?

It might sound like I'm complaining about all of this but I'm not. Not really. In a way, all of this chaos and confusion is a big part of what makes Neverness To Everness so appealing in the first place. You never know what's going to happen because none of it makes any sense. And I've always liked entertainments that don't make sense.

 

The entire set-up is fraught with inconsistencies, of course. Not only is all the action forty years in the past but there's the whole thing about how a government agency sends the player character to work for a drunk, who employs children to fight extra-dimensional entities, the logic of which remains as fuzzy as ever. I guess with that kind of background, having a guitar-playing bartender tag along for the fights isn't exactly going to break immersion.

In the end, perhaps the only problem is applying real-world logic and values to a fantasy world. We don't have any experience to go on so how can we judge? Who knows what it would be like if extra-dimensional entities popped up anywhere and everywhere and half the population mutated at puberty, grew tails and horns and started reading minds and throwing energy bolts. Who knows what might seem normal and logical after nearly half a century of that?

For all my apparent skepticism, I'm still very much looking forward to For Whom The Verses Morn. I'll be rolling for Akane, not that I'll have any idea what to do with her if I get her, other than that it would be cool if she could hang out with Flora. I'm also very much looking forward to seeing where The Whoots!!! go next, event though the music they make is really terrible and Flora can't play the drums to save her life. Which, I suppose, might be something she ends up having to do.

Blackbird isn't a character I've ever had much time for but maybe she'll show something more of her personality now she has the spotlight. And as for Pukaland, well, who doesn't love a trip to the fairground? 

I think as long as I can keep reminding myself the plot's almost certainly going nowhere, it'll all be fine. And then, if it actually turns out I'm wrong about that, it'll be a lovely surprise. 

[You See The Corner Of Something Under A Chest] - I Pick It Up...

I had an odd piece of luck yesterday. I was in the bedroom and I just happened to notice the corner of something, sticking out from under the blanket trunk I inherited from my great-grandfather, who died long before I was born. It used to sit on the landing of the house I grew up in and when I was about eight or nine I could still hide inside it with the lid closed, so it's pretty big.

Anyway, what was poking out from under it turned out to be a Steam card. You may have read that they're not doing them any more, which is a total pain because it was only last year I realised you could buy them in our local supermarket. As soon as I realized that, I put "Steam Cards" on my wishlists, along with a note about where to get them, and I got about a hundred pounds-worth for Christmas. 

I added all of those to my account right after I got them and I've spent most of the money now. On games I haven't played, of course. I'm a traditionalist that way. 

I figured it was obviously one of the exhausted cards from back then, It must somehow have fallen on the floor and gotten kicked under the chest. That sort of thing happens all the time in our house. I picked it up but, as I was about to throw it in the bin, I happened to notice it the silvering on the back seemed to be intact.

I don't buy a lot of physical gift cards and I've never bought a scratch card in my life but lately I have been buying those virtual cards the cats sell at the Catzebo booths in Neverness To Everness. In fact, I've been buying some every day since they added them a few weeks back.  

At the time I wrote about those cards, I thought they were going to be a limited-time addition to the game that would go away when the next update dropped but that's not how it went. The booths are a permanent attraction on the streets of Hethereau now, which means I've had to become a lot more temperate with my purchases.

It was fine to go hard when they were only going to be there for short while. Even then, I only had the one crazy day, when I bought out the entire stock. Mostly I was pretty restrained. 

So anyone should be. The odds of winning, though, are very poor. I wrote in the post about how it looked very much to me as though the operation was designed to leech your wallet dry steadily and slowly and now, with a lot more data to go on, I'm still absolutely convinced that's true.

By far the most likely outcome, every time you play, is that you lose 10-20% of your stake. If you stick to the cheap cards (In the permanent version of the game there are only three types of card: 10k, 30k and 50k.) that doesn't matter much but if you buy all the cards every day, or even just all the 50k ones, you'll be broke in a week. 

Well, I would. Might take you longer but you'd get there.

 

Even with my relatively small spend, I wouldn't get ahead of my combined losses even if I won one of the big prizes. I must be well over a million in the hole by now. Most of that happened long ago, though, and I've written it off as part of the learning process. Also, it was fun. 

These days I mostly finish even or slightly ahead. As soon as I start losing, I stop. Well, soon after, anyway...

And it's not like you get nothing for your money, even if you lose. You get a bookmark.

For a long time I didn't really put much effort into bonding with the characters on my team but recently I've started to get into it. I have several at Affinity Level 5 and a couple at 6 and I'm working on getting all of those to ten, eventually. It'll be a long haul but I'm not in a hurry and the game's not going anywhere.

To that end, I'm doing stuff with them all as I run into them around town and I'm handing out all the gifts I'm allowed, every day. Every scratch card gives you a bookmark that's worth a hundred Bond points. That's what I'm mostly using.  

I do all the character side-quests as I come across them when I'm strolling down the wide avenues of Hethereau or whenever one of my imaginary friends sends me a message on Bagel, asking if I want to meet up. Those quests can be short and silly - I did one involving choosing hair-care products for Mint's tail the other day - or longer and weirder - like when Linko and the Appraiser went looking for aliens - but there are only so many of them and some are gated by specific affinity levels. 

Gifting has a daily restriction on how many gifts you can give but you can carry on giving gifts forever. No-one can have too many bookmarks, apparently. It's a guaranteed path to BFF status, if you have the patience for it. Which I do.

Getting back to the point, all these in-game scratch cards have attuned me to the process, so when I spotted that unblemished silver strip my fingers began to twitch. Could it be? 

Yes, it could. It seems that somehow, last Christmas, I'd managed to lose one of my precious Steam Cards under the blanket chest without even realizing it had gone missing. It's not that hard to imagine. There were a bunch of them, all separately wrapped. It's not like I was keeping a count of the number and value when I opened them. I'm not twelve years old!

I scratched the silver off and there was the code. I put the code into Steam and suddenly I was £20 richer. What to spend it on?

It was hardly a pressing decision. I hadn't spent all of what I added to the account last Christmas. I have a strong aversion to spending the last of anything. I always like to keep a little in reserve, just like Beryl always leaves that last piece of chicken for Mr. Manners.

But still. It's very rude to ignore such serendipitous good fortune. If you do, the universe starts to get the idea you don't want any favors and stops giving them to you. It's like anti-manifesting. And as it happened, I did have an idea of something I might want to play.

The same morning, yesterday morning, before I found the card, I'd had one of those emails from Steam, telling me something on my wishlist had gone on sale. I get a lot of those. I rarely pay them much attention. Half the games on my wishlist go on sale all the time.

As it happens, though, this wasn't just some old favorite having another 30% off moment. It was a game that only launched yesterday that had chosen, as many games do, to begin at 10% off for a brief period before going to full price. 

Usually I have no idea when any game on my wishlist is going to launch. Name any of them and I probably put it on years ago and forgot about it almost immediately. This one, though, is one of my picks for the Fantasy Critic League Wilhelm's running, so I'd been waiting for it. 

It's called Nighthawks and it's by Wadjet Eye, a developer many of whose previous games I've both played and reviewed here. I played the demo in a Next Fest last year and I said of it then

 "I had a great time with the demo. The full game is clearly going to be epic. It's likely to be one of the few games on my wishlist I buy at full price as soon as it becomes available."

I often say things like that. I rarely follow through. I believe it when I say it but once I've said it I forget it. I'm like that. It's annoying, isn't it?

This time, though, the astral forces were clearly coming together in a concerted effort to make me keep my word, for once. It would have been positively hubristic to have ignored the omens. So I bought it.

Obviously, I haven't played it. I've downloaded it, both to the desktop and the laptop, where I'm fairly confident it will run, since it's effectively a visual novel with mostly static images. Finding the time to play it is going to be the challenge. 

When I do, no doubt I'll review it here, but for now I'd very much like someone else to review it. Preferably someone the FCL considers a "Top Critic". It's become very clear in this, our second season, that picking a winner is only half the job. You also have to pick something that's not going to vanish into the great darkness cast by the shadow of the 20,000 or more games released every year.

I'm still waiting for a third Top Critic to review Beastro, a game I picked that came out back in June. It has six reviews so far, only two of which count. If it could get one more, it would almost certainly score me something. It has a "Very Positive" Steam rating from over 600 reviews but that counts for nothing where the League is concerned. Until one more Top Critic weighs in, it's worth a fat zero.

The same fate might befall Nighthawks although I'm hopeful it won't. Wadjet Eye is a reasonably well-known developer and much respected in the point&click adventure niche where it mostly operates. This is a slight departure for them but visual novels and P&Cs are almost interchangeable on many levels so I'm optimistic. Plus, the demo was excellent. [Edit: I've just seen it's got 89/100 from PC Gamer so if thay're interested, I'm sure others will be.]

Nighthawks also received some unexpected publicity just before launch, when Steam's algorithm mistakenly identified it as an "Adults Only" game. The team posted an amusing report on the store page explaining the panic that caused and what they had to do to get their game re-assessed and correctly labeled. 

As they say in that piece, they were lucky to have "the fanbase and the (relative) clout to make a bit of noise and get this handled quickly", which is why I also believe Nighthawks will eventually pick up enough reviews to register a score for my Fantasy Game Company, Pretty Blue Fox Games. Beastro, though, I suspect is a lost cause. 

Sidebar: Pretty Blue Fox, by the way, in case you don't recognize it, is the name of  the game-playing group in Philip K Dick's early-60s novel, The Game-Players of Titan. I've been using it in various contexts almost since I started gaming because heaven forfend I'd actually come up with an idea of my own. 

However well or badly the game does for me in the League, I'm certain it's going to be a lot of fun to play. In that respect, I'm equally confident about the other League pick I have, the  one that's due to launch in less than a week. That one's called Nivalis Nights and it's the sequel to the excellent Cloudpunk. 

Unlike Beastro and Nighthawks, Nivalis already has an Open Critic page set up even before it launches, which I'm taking as a good sign. There's every chance I'll also buy Nivalis Nights on release although if I'm going to be rational about it, I should probably wait until I actually have time to play it, by which time it will most likely be on sale.

But hey, where's the fun in being rational? 

Head In The Clouds

Gaming is weird, isn't it? At one and the same time it's too much and too little. Or maybe that's gamers.

In recent weeks, I've seen people complaining they have too many games to get through, that they're being offered too many games for free, that they've been tempted by deals on games that were too good to miss and now they have a backlog they'll never get through, that too many games are being released all at once, that too many games are being released, period, and that content drops for live service games come faster than they can keep up with them.

Over the same time-frame, I've seen people complaining there's nothing new worth playing, that all we ever get are retreads of old games, that nostalgia-driven retro-gaming is driving out creativity and innovation and that live-service games are stale and static thanks to content droughts.

Obviously, all of these things can be true at once but it's tiring to keep hearing about it. And feeling it. Because I'm suffering from the same mixed emotions about the hobby as everyone else. When the pipeline's flowing, I feel like I'm drowning; when it dries up I suffer from thirst.

All of it's self-imposed, of course. There's no excuse for any of it. Maybe Microsoft was simply acting out a duty of care when they announced XBox Live's new cloud gaming limits of 5, 10 and 15 hours a month. Perhaps they're trying to tell us we all play too many games already.

But, no. It won't be that. They'll be fine with us playing 'til our eyes bleed, provided we do it on our own machines and they don't have to pay for it. They don't care that we're addicted. They just don't want to be the ones running the crack house. 

The Ars Technica article article linked in the Aging Gamer post, which is weirdly the only place I've seen the news at all, it makes it quite clear that cloud gaming, like VR and AR before it, has signally failed to attract any kind of mass-market audience. As the piece points out, Google dropped their Stadia cloud gaming service a few years back and Amazon recently scaled down its Luna service significantly.

Luckily for me, NVidia's still in. My GeForce Now subscription that I took out a few months back has to be one of the best spending choices I've made. I use it every day and it works flawlessly. I hope NVidia don't decide it's too much trouble too because while it lasts, it's saving me a fortune and making my gaming life very much easier.

Backing out of the market for cloud gaming now might be a little premature, anyway. The concept could be on the cusp of fulfilling some of the promises made for it a few years ago, although the reasons why it could be beginning to take off are, ironically, the same as those making it less commercially attractive. 

Hardware costs aren't spiralling so much as sky-rocketing. The insatiable maws of the AI data centers scarf down every available chip, leaving nothing but scraps for everyone else. Running AAA games, at home or in the cloud, is getting expensive.

We could be there a while, too. I've seen estimates that it could take three years for enough new production facilities to come online to meet the unanticipated demand. Even that sounds... optimistic. Fanciful, even. Is there enough raw material available to feed the increased demand, always assuming the will to build these new factories was there?

Maybe it's the beginning of the end for gaming as we've grown up knowing it. Since the 1970s there's been an automatic assumption that kids want consoles in their homes to play their video games. Consoles became handhelds and PCs and all kinds of devices with odd and enigmatic names but no-one ever imagined the flow would end. All those kids grew up and had kids of their own and the family that plays together...

Sure, there've been times when commentators considered whether the latest console generation would be the last but only because they saw games migrating to different platforms and technologies, not because they thought the whole gaming carousel was going to grind to a halt. 

And of course it hasn't and it won't. Gaming's going nowhere. Or, rather, it's going somewhere. But where? And what's it going to look like, when it gets there?

Mobile gaming has been the big success of the last decade and more. It's still growing, too. But smartphones are just as vulnerable to the data center demand as consoles and PCs. It's nice to imagine that, when you can't afford a PC any more, you'll be able to hook your phone to your TV and carry on playing but chances are your phone won't be any cheaper to upgrade or replace than the rest of the tech you can no longer justify buying.

Of course, we all have to have a smartphone now, so if it comes to a choice, well it's no choice at all. But if the phones that can play the AAA games cost the same as the other devices that cost too much, will anyone outside of a self-elected elite be playing? And if AAA gaming becomes a luxury pastime, what kind of developers will that attract? Would you even want to play the games they made, if you could run them?

Oh, I do like a bit of wild, unsupported speculation, once in a while? Don't you? And since I don't do doom-scrolling, it's rare for me to get the opportunity.

I don't really imagine any of this is going to happen. Crappy old machines play most games pretty well and if there really comes a time when regular gamers are priced out of the new PC and Console market, there's going to be a huge boom in refurbished hardware. 

I mean, there's got to be a lot of it around, doesn't there? We're all hoarders when it comes to tech. 

From where I'm sitting I can see three no-longer-used PCs and an old laptop and there's another downstairs. That's after I took three more to the recycling center last year. And don't talk to me about graphics cards. I must have a dozen lying around, going all the way back to the early 2000s. 

I don't own any consoles but I just checked EBay and I could have a working PS4 for well under £100. Gemini tells me that would play Fortnite, Apex Legends and Minecraft as well as thousands of top-rated games from the twenty-teens. I could get by on that. If I had to.

So, yes, maybe a bit of belt-tightening might be in order for a while. And maybe game developers will have to scale down their ambitions and work inside some technical constraints if they want to keep hold of their mass-market appeal. But is that a bad thing? Aren't we always complaining about bloated budgets and broken deadlines and reach exceeding grasp?

Not that I want to go all misty-eyed about the good old days because god forbid but one thing that there was a lot of back in the 'eighties and nineties was innovation. Granted, it's always a lot easier to come up with something new when no-one's been there before you but even factoring that in, the things some people were able to do with a 48k memory, let alone half a gigabyte, were astonishing. 

We're not going back to measuring the footprints of our favorite games in kilobytes but does any game really need to take up hundreds of gigs on your SSD? Assuming you can still afford an SSD, of course. 

Let's take Valheim as an example. Kind of successful, Valheim. Okay, it had a great launch window, what with everyone being trapped at home back in 2021 but it's sold 12m-15m copies in five years, depending which source you believe. Not GTA6 numbers, sure, but solid.

Valheim is less than 5GB. Nearer 4GB in fact. It has low-quality graphics that somehow manage to look exactly right for what it needs. It's a good trick but quite a few games pull it off. Minecraft barely breaks 1GB in a standard installation and that one hasn't done too badly. Fortnite will run on a graphics card I could buy right now on EBay for under £25. 

Looks like we'll be able to carry on gaming after all, then. At least until all the old hardware dries up and breaks down. But that could take a while.

And maybe the games will get smarter and smaller and at least no worse than they are now. Might even be better. Who knows? 

Not to mention there might be fewer of them. Which could be a good thing. Over twenty thousand new games were released on Steam last year. We've almost passed that this year already. How many games can you play in a year? Maybe if there weren't so many, you wouldn't have that backlog...

All of the above is merely me, riffing on something I wasn't even planning to write about today. I was going to go over the latest video from Hotta about the upcoming content drop for Neverness to Everness and that got me started on how much content is too much and then the introduction turned into the post and here we are, or here I am, anyway, wondering if less really might not be more after all.

I'll get to that NTE video another time. It's... interesting. Interesting isn't always a compliment, is it? Meanwhile, I think I might play some video games. While I still can.

Valheim Forever?

Wilhelm is playing Valheim again. He says "So there I was, in Valheim again… for what, the fifth or sixth run?  How much appeal could the game have left for me?"

Tipa is playing Valheim again. She says "I’ve played Valheim a lot; I’m not really sure how much I can really say about it that I have not said before."

I'm playing Valheim again. It's my most-played game on Steam at nearly 400 hours, seven of them since the 1.0 official launch earlier this month.

Everything Wilhelm and Tipa say about Valheim, I'm going to say too. The early game is compelling. The low-rent graphics are magical. Going through the grind again does not appeal. Mods make the game better...

And really what is there to say, any more? Everyone who's even remotely interested has played already. Everyone in the blogosphere has read too many posts about it, all of them different and yet all of them still very much the same.

Valheim has the simplest gameplay loop. You start out almost naked in some pleasant countryside. If you're lucky the sun is still up. You figure out how to make tools and weapons and somewhere to live. Then you figure out how to do it better. Then you kill a boss and the whole cycle begins again. And you keep doing that until the credits roll except until this month there were no credits so you just stopped when you'd had enough.

Except, why? Why do any of that?  As Wilhelm also says "The whole thing can be so peaceful and engaging that I wonder why I feel I must do anything at all."

 

I've always wondered. Even right at the start. As an explorer, my curiosity kept me going, all the way to the end of the Plains on my initial run, but long before then I'd realised that, if that was really me there, I'd never have left the Meadows where I started.

I mean, why would you? Why would anyone? The first biome, Meadows, is all lush, green grass, twinkling streams, placid lakes, airy woodland, lovely beaches. There's food everywhere for the taking - berries, honey, mushrooms - and the killing - venison and boar. You don't even need to build your own home. You can just fix up one of the many abandoned villages or farms, plant carrots, raise boars, live the good life. 

And it's mostly safe. The boars can be a bit aggressive and the odd Greydwarf or skeleton wanders in from the Black Forest from time to time but nothing to worry about. Not once you've made yourself some leather gear to wear and an axe to defend yourself. Just be sure to be inside with the doors locked at night and you'll be fine.

So this time, that's what I thought I'd do. Instead of hauling myself laboriously up the tech ladder all over again, I thought I'd find out how long the game could hold my attention if I didn't do any of that. If I just lived there.

And since I wasn't planning on playing the game "properly", I also figured why should I have to deal with any more problems than I absolutely had to? So I went into the controls and dialled everything down to the lowest difficulty possible. Would it still be fun that way?

I set combat to Very Easy and mobs to passive. I wasn't going to fight anything I didn't have to and if I did have to I wanted it over as quickly as possible. I removed the death penalty so I wouldn't have to keep running back to get my stuff every time I died. Not that I was planning on dying much. And of course I switched off raids. I did that, after a while, even back  when I was playing normally. Raids get old fast.

I also allowed for items to be taken through portals although exactly what that means I'm not sure yet because at time of writing I don't have any portals. I'm sure it'll come in handy at some point.

 

As for Mods, I would have liked to add some of those as well but playing through GeForce Now and with 1.0 having broken most of the Mods I used to use, it seemed like more effort than I wanted to get into right away, especially not knowing how long I'd be sticking around. If I carry on much longer, though, I think I'll have to buckle down and get some. I'm sure as heck not going through the Mistlands without removing the mist.

But the Mistlands is a long way off. So far, after seven hours of searching, I can't even find the Swamp. 

I started out as usual, making a shack to huddle in out of the rain, killing a few boars for leather (One hit and they explode.) so I could make some clothes, gathering a few provisions for the trail and then setting out to see what I could find. 

One thing that seems a little different is that there are megalithic open tombs everywhere, many with piles of bones in them. I don't remember those. And bears. Bears are new.

I punched a bear. I don't recommend it. It was unnecessary and foolish. I died. My only death so far although I have nearly drowned several times. I've been poisoned by bees, too. More than once. Apparently the non-aggro mobs thing doesn't apply to bees. I hope it works for Deathsquitos.

After a few game-days of aimless wandering I decided I probably ought to map the coast. There's no way to know whether you're on an island or a continent or what biomes there are nearby, other than to go and look. Well, there is, but that's cheating. Not that I have anything against cheating, obviously.

I started out walking around the coast, going widdershins. It turned out not to be a coast at all. I was next to a huge inland lake. Good thing I didn't bother making a raft.

 

I found the real coast and walked around that instead. It took me several more days. Travel in Valheim is slow. Eventually I'd seen the whole place or near enough. I was on a very big island, all Meadows, Black Forest and Mountains.The first two were safe to explore but you can't make friends with the weather. Cold still kills. I'd need a Mod to stop that.

What I was hoping for was some Plains. I really like the Plains. It's always sunny there and the colors are really cheerful and uplifting. If nothing's going to attack you, the Plains is where you'd want to live. Preferably on a cute little island just off the coast. One with some nice beaches. 

I made a raft. I don't like rafts much. Who does? But they do a job. I made one and went where the wind took me (Another Mod I could do with...) which, luckily for me, was straight to the land I could vaguely see on the horizon. As I got close, some mist came down and obscured everything and I worried for a moment I was heading into those awful Mistlands but it was just some sea fog.

Where I ended up wasn't much more use to me than the Mistlands, though, even if it was a lot more pleasant. A small archipelago of tiny islands out in the ocean. Mostly Meadow. A little Black Forest. 

So now I'm stuck on a cold, rainy island far out at sea, no better off than I was before. I'm going to have to stock up on berries, wait for a good wind and set sail again. 

And the weird thing is, I know I will. This game is ridiculously easy to get back into, even when there's nothing new you want to do and nowhere new you want to see. (The only way I'll be seeing the Deep North is on a fly-by like I did for Ashlands.)

But I don't need to see the new biome to have fun in Valheim all over again. All survival games have an element of pure idling, where you just wander around, chopping down trees and picking up stones and enjoying the ambience but Valheim is the only one where that seems like it's enough to keep you coming back again and again for another visit. 

If Light No Fire turns out to be not much more than a very big Valheim, I'll be more than satisfied. 

Forever Games?

There are three potentially major additions coming soon (Or soonish...) to the established MMORPG ecosystem and I don't feel like I've said anything at all about any of them here. So let me address the herd of elephants trying to shoulder their way into the room.

First up and almost certainly furthest off is Light No Fire, the fantasy title announced by Hello Games, makers of No Man's Sky, back in 2023. LNF isn't specifically described as an MMO but it is multiplayer and these days there seems to be little agreement on how many simultaneous players a game needs to support before it qualifies as "massively multiple". 

No Man's Sky caps out at thirty-two players per instance of the game. Light No Fire will probably be much the same. Hello Games deny either of them are MMOs but if it walks like an orc...

Whatever they end up tagging it, Light No Fire is going to appeal to MMO players in much the same way Valheim or Skyrim did and any innovations it brings will affect the wider fantasy genre like those games have. It will be all the more so because HG has a huge amount of credibility, almost all of it acquired the hard way. 

NMS went through a classic redemption arc. Enormous promises were made in the promotional phase, broken in catastrophic fashion at launch, and restored over years of painstaking recovery. Hello Games took a reputational hit that would have sunk most companies and then went on to spend years making good on everything they originally said they'd do, winning back just about everyone they'd driven away. 

They also did it all for free and with such humility and consistency that they almost certainly gained more credibility for making good their mistakes than they ever would have received if they'd gotten everything right to begin with. As a consequence, not only do players trust them to do their best, they feel safe that, even if it should all go wrong again, it will still come right in the end. 

And since Light No Fire looks like it's going to be essentially the same game, reskinned, it feels reasonable to expect that, this time, the launch won't be such a disaster. If nothing else, Hello Games has demonstrated an admirable ability to learn from its mistakes. Maybe that'll be enough to stop them making so many this time.

All of which is fine as far as it goes. But what about the game itself? What, exactly, is it? 

Blessed if I know. The website is minimalist in the extreme. All it says there is that it's

"a game about adventure, building, survival and exploration together. Set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth, it brings the depth of a role playing game to the freedom of a survival sandbox."

There's a trailer, too. Just one after three years. It's a couple of minutes long and that's your lot. 

I just watched it again. The graphics looks plasticky. All the visible activity looks like exploration and survival gameplay, except for one short sequence, the one in which a load of rabbit-people kneel as the player walks up to a giant seated on a throne. That, conceivably, could be RPG-related. Nothing else looks remotely like it is.

There's not a hint of combat or questing or dialog or plot or character development. I think No Man's Sky has at least a smattering of most of those, from what I've read. I haven't played the game but I've read a lot of blog posts by people who have. I wouldn't really call it an RPG although, as with MMO/MMORPG, the days when it was possible to state with unambiguous clarity just what an RPG was are long, long behind us. It does have some RPG elements, though, and no doubt those will carry over to LNF.

Whatever kind of game it turns out to be, Light No Fire has the chance to change the entire game-space. If Hello Games can make good on their promises this time, we'll have a fantasy-based game with almost unlimited potential to suck in players from existing games and genres, survival and MMO and RPG alike. It's going to be a true, virtual world. Perhaps the first.

With that promise, it doesn't need to be an MMO to put enormous pressure on the genre, not least because what it could conceivably represent is the final fulfilment of the original promise of the genre, the chance to live a complete life as a citizen of... somewhere else. Chris Roberts wants to do that for space even though arguably it's already been done, several times, not least by No Man's Sky. No-one has done it yet for fantasy. Light No Fires might.

I wishlisted the game when it appeared on Steam and I'll be buying and playing it when it appears, assuming I'm still physically and mentally capable of playing video games by then, which is a non-trivial concern. There's absolutely no indication whether it will come out this year, next year, the year after that... Hello Games have said pretty much nothing for three years other than "It'll be done when it's done".  

That, at least, gives other players in the market a chance to make their own play for dominance before the rug gets pulled out from under them. Next in line with a big announcement comes ArenaNet.

Guild Wars 3 was officially announced back at the start of the summer. Everyone knew it was coming well before that because NCSoft let the news slip in their financials. Even so, it was still a surprise to find it was real.

Once again, whether it's actually an MMO is up for debate. The official description of the game calls it

"... an action-adventure MMORPG, a modern evolution of the genre that blends rich action-combat, character building, and skill collection." 

GW3 also has just the one trailer and it's even less indicative of gameplay than the Light No Fire one. It's mostly a lot of over-excitable, breathy voiceover work, some dodgy conceptual art and a few clips of of random exploration footage from the alpha that's running behind closed doors. 

Unlike the NMF trailer, though, it doesn't look in the least bit plasticky. It looks gorgeous. If there's one thing you can never say about ANet games it's that they don't look good. Their art department is second to none. I'm sure GW3 will be worth playing, at least for a while, just for the visuals alone.

Unlike NMF, it has a declared development timeline. It will enter beta testing a year from now, in "Fall 2027". Based on how GW2 progressed, I'd expect launch in first quarter 2028, although I suppose they might get it out for Christmas '27.

 ANet appear to be following almost exactly the same marketing strategy they used for GW2, namely to drip-feed lots of relatively detailed information about the game for 12-18 months before allowing people a hands-on with it. That approach worked very well for them back in 2010-2012, building up a huge head of steam for the game. There were open beta weekends towards the end of the process and the game really caught the attention of the MMORPG-playing public.

It was only after launch that things started to fall apart. It doesn't always seem to be remembered or acknowledged now but, despite the lengthy build-up and the solid testing program, the game was buggy throughout and barely playable in the higher level maps for months. And even with all the explanations and interviews ahead of time, a very significant proportion of the audience seemed confused by the paradigm-changing nature of the gameplay, which (As with Rift before it.) had to be quickly adapted to something much more familiar to meet player demands.

I'm in a difficult position when it comes to reporting on Guild Wars 3. I played GW2 solidly for a decade and by the end of that time my love-hate relationship with the game had shifted noticeably away from love. I never lost my affection for the world or the world-building but actually playing the game stopped being much fun for me several years before I finally walked away.

GW2 is an exceptionally repetitive, formulaic game, even by MMO standards. While you're inside the ecosystem, it's  all too easy to ignore the way you're doing the same things over and over again to no real purpose. Because there's little or no vertical progression, horizontal progression is stretched out to an insane length. Everything takes forever and requires vast quantities of whatever you need to increment the counter. Some people find that entertaining but I'm not one of them.

Consequently, having escaped the gravitational pull of the game, I feel extremely reluctant to allow myself to be drawn back into its orbit even by proxy. I haven't read anything about GW3 beyond the initial announcement. I've been actively avoiding it. Everything I know about it, which is almost nothing, has come from a few unintended glances at news items as I flip through my feeds or from occasional blog posts by others a lot more interested in the game than I am.

I know it's set in the past, before either Guild Wars or GW2, thereby avoiding new players feeling they ought to know the other two games first. I know it's an "action MMO". whatever that means these days. And I know one more thing...

In Guild Wars 3 you will only be able to take part in the "action" part of the MMO with a maximum of nineteen other players at any time. The tech will somehow limit combat and similar events to twenty players, while allowing a much larger number to see each other passing by in the open world or in cities.

 

This sounds a lot more like Guild Wars than GW2 and there has always been a heated debate over whether Guild Wars is a true MMO. I remember it from forums all the way back when the game began and at that time it was my feeling that it wasn't. 

Since then, as I've already observed, the definitions have blurred. More than blurred. They've almost rubbed away. Games that are clearly MMOs go out of their way to claim they're not because admitting your game's an MMO is seen as commercial suicide. Meanwhile, games that add four-player co-op as an afterthought blithely market themselves as "multiplayer" because it affords credibility, somehow.

Where GW3 is going to fit into the fractured mosaic is going to be hard to know until beta and most likely it won't be all that clear even then. ANet doesn't have the greatest record on judging what players want or expect. Guild Wars was intended to be a PvP game until they found, after launch, they'd somehow landed an audience that was more interested in PvE. GW2 was meant to break the mold until it became obvious many of the people who'd bought the game preferred to do things the way they'd always done them.

Unlike Hello Games, ArenaNet does not have a reputation for learning from their mistakes or for correcting them. In the decade I played GW2, as I reported in many of the seven hundred plus posts here about the game, ANet repeatedly tried to come up with solutions to problems of their own making and frequently their fixes only made things worse. GW2 is and has always been a game that succeeds despite the best efforts of its developers, not because of them.

For this reason alone, I don't expect great things of GW3. I do expect it to get a lot of attention within the genre and because it's launching on Steam and on PlayStation 5, it ought to get some traction beyond the niche the two existing Guild Wars titles have carved out.

Once again, it's going to feel silly not to give it a go. I've wishlisted it on Steam. If it turns out to be good, it might be the game I play all through my seventies, which I'm sure is exactly the target audience they're aiming for...

And so to the present. The third elephant has long been rumored but its existence was only confirmed officially a few days ago. Launching almost as you read this (Okay, November, but that's only a few weeks away.), leaping ahead of the rivals I'm sure it hasn't even thought about comes World of Warcraft Forever:

"...an iconic world reimagined with new and expanded zones, new gameplay enhancements, upgraded graphics, and more."

Of course there's a trailer. It's a much better advert for the game than either of the others. That dwarf hunter and his bear could front a cartoon show of their own.

It'd be hard not to know about Forever. I've already read more about this one in three days than GW3 in three months or Light No Fire in three years. Everyone's talking about it. WoW is still, after more than twenty years, the MMORPG market leader, quite possibly the only game in the genre to have any kind of genuine recognition factor among the general public. A new World of Warcraft game isn't just news; it's an event.

And this is a new World of Warcraft game, not some kind of remake. We were expecting Classic Plus, if we were expecting anything. What we got was closer to WoW2.

It is, though, isn't it? I mean, what else would you call a game that stems from the old one but intends to add new content, incrementally, "forever"? It looks like an attempt to have cake and eat cake while also selling slices of that same cake, with no suggestion that the cake will ever run out.

Commercialism seems to be at the forefront, here. The game doesn't require a separate subscription (Like EverQuest Legends.) and there's no box to buy (Like EverQuest Legends.) but if you want the new race and its starting zone it's going to cost you $30. That sets the frame. There will be continuous updates, sure, but you will be paying for at least some of them. Oh, I'm sure there will be free content additions all the time too, but as an ever-evolving world, New Old Azeroth (That's what I'm calling it.) is infinitely amenable to monetization. 

They'll be able to sell you new zones, new races, new classes, new features. They'll be able to sell them a lot more often than the 24-30 month expansion cycle Retail WoW is stuck in, too. Although where Retail WoW (I think they're calling it Modern WoW now?) will be in a year or two if WoW Forever takes off is anyone's guess. Will there even be any more expansions?

It's a gamble but it looks like a solid bet. Blizzard started out with one MMORPG and that worked just fine for a decade and a half. Then they toed the water with a nostalgia-driven recreation of their own storied past and that could hardly have gone better.

WoW Forever brings them up to three. Or more, depending how you count them. There's Classic, Modern and Forever but Classic comes in so many different flavors now I've lost count. Blizzard only needs one of those to succeed and they're back where they were before they got into all of this. From their point of view, I guess it doesn't much matter which one it is. I doubt Jagex are bothered that the runaway success of Old School Runescape comes at the expense of Runescape itself. Or their accountants won't be, anyway.

If I was going to bet, I'd bet on Forever. They didn't come up with that name by chance. It's the follow-up MMORPG they've been threatening to make for a long time and they've finally come up with a way to make it without cannibalizing their own sales-base. Classic was a dry run for this. If it goes well, they'll invest in it heavily.

The chances look good. It's a new start in the old world, which we all know and love, but with an endlessly expanding frontier. They've also fixed the population problem by grading players by playstyle rather than server. An always-busy MMORPG is good for publicity and avoids all those difficult dead server stories.

How many times can they can peel the onion? Based on her experience with the EverQuest franchise, I imagine Holly Longdale thinks there are plenty more layers to go still. But Forever is the one that has the chance to turn into a whole new crop.

I'm still thinking about it but there's a very strong chance I'll resubscribe in November and buy the new race for the full experience. Like Classic back in 2019, it looks like one of those moments in MMORPG history you wouldn't want to miss out on, even if you're not the greatest WoW fan.

Whether I'll still be playing it by Christmas, let alone "forever", though, is another question entirely. 

Beryl On The Bill

I just got back from a couple of days by the sea. Well, a few miles from the sea to be more accurate. On a farm, in fact. Lots of geese, hens, sheep, cows, ducks...

We went to Portland Bill yesterday, which is one hell of a weird place, let me tell you. Much bigger than I expected. Very windy, unsurprisingly, since it sticks out into the Atlantic. It's an island but it's connected to the mainland by a bridge and a causeway.

You can't say a certain word there. It's like saying the name of the Scottish play in the theater. They had to change the name of a Wallace and Grommit movie when it played.  Like I said, weird place.

As you can see from the pictures, we had great weather. The sea was blue. Not used to seeing that in England. 

Beryl had a fine old time. She likes the seaside and the wind.

She's been under the doctor as the old joke used to go, with an embarrassing condition I don't think she'd want me to broadcast to the world. It's not serious in itself but it could become problematic and lead to an even more problematic operation if it did so let's hope that doesn't happen.

She's on antibiotics and they seem to have worked - fingers crossed, touch wood. She was pretty droopy just before we were due to leave, though, and we thought we might have to cancel but in the event she was much better on the morning we were traveling. We figured an adventure would take her mind off her problems and it did.

Beryl's an excellent traveler. She thinks the car is just another room in the house. Mostly she falls asleep as soon as she gets in. It was only about a two-hour drive anyway.  

She also loves new places and exploring so she's no problem to take on holiday. We were staying in a pretty large cabin in the orchard of a farm in the back of beyond beautiful Dorset countryside and about five minutes after we got there she was settled and ready to stay there forever. 

It did take her somewhat by surprise when half a dozen geese turned up to eat fallen apples just a few feet from the gate to our cabin but she's met a lot of animals in her time - pigs, hens, sheep, horses, alpacas - and she's always up for meeting a new one. At a safe distance, that is.

We did an inordinate amount  of walking, some of it along Chesil Beach, which is extraordinarily peculiar and really hard to walk on. Even harder for a dog. 

Beryl tried to run on the deep shingle which was pretty funny to see. She was a lot more impressed with the flat rocks around the lighthouse on Portland Bill. I had to stop her trying to drink seawater out of a rock pool there. She's mad enough already without that. 

I took a lot of photos and I was quite pleased with some of them and I just wanted to get something posted tonight so here we are. I might do a follow-up because this has been a real rush job but I expect other topics will quickly push their way to the front and this will be the last we'll hear of it.

By the way, Beryl is in that last picture with the lighthouse but not only is she tiny, I used the free version of SnapEdit to remove Mrs Bhagpuss, who would not be pleased to have herself included, and it slapped the watermark right on top of poor old Beryl. Still, you can gauge the scale from what little you can see of her, which was why I picked it over a lot of better shots of the lighthouse itself.

And I'm going to leave it at that because it's late and I'm tired. Normal service may very possibly be resumed tomorrow. Let's hope so.   

 Bonus picture of the geese. No Beryl in this one. They'd have made very short work of her!