One Of These Things Is A Lot Like The Other

 Ah, good old Steam Next Fest. Here it is again. One of the three weeks every year, when I get to play a bunch of demos for games I would never have bothered with otherwise and will never think about again. And I get to write about them, too, for an audience that's no more interested in the damn things than I am. Time well-spent, I'm sure.

So unfair! That's not even how the event generally takes me. I always try to pick games I think I might enjoy and I've discovered plenty of good ones in past events, some of which I've gone on to buy and play. And writing about them is always fun. Still, if you found yourself playing two cutesy games about collecting tiny creatures, back to back, though, you might find yourself questioning your life choices, too.

The games in question are World of Slime and Never Wither. Both are tagged "MMORPG" on Steam. Both demos show the first playable region in its entirety, unaltered from the version in the full game as far as I'm aware. Both have gameplay that involves catching and collecting creatures, which you can then use to fight for you. Both games use a fixed view and have very small characters that are quite hard to see.

Although they're very similar on paper, I found the two games very different to play. I started with Never Wither, which I thought looked like the more interesting of the two but in my first session I didn't really get on with the controls. I spent more time trying to figure out how to so things than I spent doing them, which didn't make for a great first impression. It went better the second time.

That's who I'm playing? Cool!

World of Slime, which I played a couple of days later, felt immediately familiar. It looked and played like any number of games I remembered playing a decade or more ago. All the controls felt intuitive and automatic. I didn't have to think twice to figure out how to do anything.

Visually, both games look attractive and well-designed but Never Wither is the lusher of the two. That's not to say its portrayal of nature is more realistic. It isn't, particularly, but it is a little more subtle in its abstractions and richer in its colors and textures. On the other hand, it's far easier to see what you're doing in World of Slime.

Each game opens with a short cinematic. Really short, like maybe thirty seconds, tops. In Never Wither, there's a montage of partially-animated scenes in which some kind of undefined catastrophe overwhelms the world, while a melodramatic voiceover suggests you're the one who's going to have to do something about it. 

The scenes show all some impressive beast-people, all of them maybe a couple of metres tall and very imposing. Then, right at the end, your character appears: you're a small, yellow blob. It's bathetic in the extreme. I'd much rather have played one of the big guys but sadly that's not an option.

Bummer! Don't I even get a hat?

In World of Slime, the cinematic is even more of a slide-show but it's a lot more representative of the game itself and the story it tells is a lot more coherent and comprehensible. You're a small girl, traveling through a forest with your father, when you're both suddenly attacked by monsters. You, the girl, are knocked unconscious... and that's it.

The WoS introduction is wordless. No voiceover, no text. The pictures tell the story and they tell it clearly and efficiently. It does a much better job of setting up the game than the more ambitious but more confusing equivalent in Never Wither.

After the cinematics comes character creation. It's brief in both cases but choosing a hairstyle for a human character is a lot more engaging than picking the eye-shape for a blob. You can name your character in both games but Never Wither has a random name generator that I quite liked. After a few rolls of the dice, I selected Fox Flash for my blob. I called my little girl Flora. You can guess which one felt more like it could become a character I might care about.

With that out of the way, it's into the world and on with the tutorial. Since the demos are also the start of the games, it was pretty much all tutorial, at least for as long as I stuck with it. I played Never Wither for fifty-eight minutes, in two sessions, and World of Slime for forty-one minutes, in one go. That took me to Level 4 in both although what they mean by levels isn't necessarily comparable. 

Busted!

The gameplay is quite different in some respects. Never Wither is a Palworld-style survival/crafting game and World of Slime is a Pokemon-style creature-collector and battler. At least, I'm assuming it's a battler by the way you have to duel an NPC using creatures before you can leave the starting village.

Where they both converge is in the way you collect your creatures. Nintendo was very irked when Palworld chose to go with the throw-ball-at-creature method so you might have thought other developers would steer clear. Apparently not.

In Never Wither you pick up seeds from the ground and throw them using the Alt key. That sends out a targeting ring that you position over the mob before releasing the seed. I found it awkward and hard to get used to and visually it looks a bit different but it's fundementally the same mechanic.

In World of Slime you buy Cubes from a vendor, put them on your hot bar and throw them using whatever key corresponds to the slot you put them in. I found that a lot more natural to do, mostly because it looks and performs exactly like it did in Palworld back when I played. 

In both games you have to bash the mob you're trying to tame about a bit and then there's a few seconds while an animation plays to see if you've been successful in taming it. If you have, you can pick up the creature and add it to your collection. If not, carry on bashing because now it wants to kill you. 

This all sounds very familiar, I'm sure. So does everything else I found there was to do in both games. 

That seems like a lot... and also a very specific number.

In Never Wither, seeing as it's a survival/crafting game, you're just dumped out into the world with noting and you have to bootstrap your way to your destiny. You start by taming a couple of creatures, then you have to find a spot to place your mark so you can build a crafting station and start making things. You can put the creatures you've caught down there and they'll stay inside the bounds, wandering about. I'm pretty sure you can then set them to work, although I didn't get far enough into the tutorial to find out how.

You can also play as any of the creatures you catch, all of which have different abilities and all of which make looking at yourself feel a lot better than when you were a blob. That means picking the color of your blob's eyes at character creation was even more pointless than you thought, of course.

In World of Slime, seeing as it's a regular MMORPG, allegedly, although I was in a single-player world, you wake up in a village, having been rescued from the monster in the forest. You do remember who you are, for once, so that's nice. Even so, you still have to go around meeting everyone and doing things for them, either because they want you to prove you're trustworthy or because they're too damned lazy to do them for themselves. Looking at you, Allen!

Never Wither has no dialog that I could find. No quests, either. It has a panel of tasks that I was working my way through in traditional survival game fashion but that was all I saw. There might be some kind of plot or story later on but I saw no indication of it in the first hour.

World of Slime has a very acceptable and reasonable starting plot: you've lost your father and you don't know the way back home. You need the people in the village to help you with both. I can get behind that.

May I call you Bob?

WoS does have dialog and lots of it. The game originates in South Korea (The developer is TEAM42, the people behind Mafia42, just in case you've heard of that one. I hadn't.) so the dialog will all have been translated. It's a decent translation. I noticed a few idiosyncrasies but by and large it reads naturally enough. It reminded me a lot of the writing in several less well-known imported MMORPGs I played in the noughties. Those all had a certain slightly earnest tone to them that I find quite endearing and so does this.

Both games have plenty of collections,  journals, recipe books and talent trees to fill and fiddle with but it would be silly of me to discuss any of them in any kind of detail after such a short time with them. Both games also played very smoothly while I was there. I didn't encounter any bugs or glitches.

I liked them both. They seemed well-made and polished, with a clear idea of what they were supposed to be, but I'd have to be a lot shorter of things to do than I am right now to want to invest much time in either of them. It's not just that I've done it all before. Heaven knows, familiarity and repetition have never put me off playing anything. No, my main reason for not really wanting to carry on much further with either of them is mostly visual.

I don't have any issues with the aesthetics. Of the two, I prefer the look of Never Wither but they're both nice enough to look at... if you can see them. I can't. 

That's the main strike against them for me. The characters are far too small and the camera far too inflexible. I couldn't see what I was looking at half the time and I couldn't zoom in for a better look. I have plenty of negative things to say about Palworld but at least I know what the Pals look like. 

Other than that, I thought they were both fine. I won't be wish-listing either of them but I wish them well. Maybe Steam needs a well-wishing list...

Tumbling Dice

 The second half of the current update landed today and it took me forty pulls to get Akane, which was the very first thing i did when I logged in this morning. It felt pretty good, let me tell you. 

It also made me feel, once again, that it might be worth reiterating my personal experience with gacha games, which is that I can mostly get the characters I want without having to get my credit card out. This bears repeating because it's not the narrative I hear when I'm reading about the genre in the gaming press.  

In the six months since the game started, there have been five characters released that I wanted and I've been able to get four of them right away - Hotori, Lacrimosa, Linko and now Akane. The one I missed out on was Iroi but there I have to say I really didn't try very hard. I could certainly have got her, and for free, if I'd been that bothered. I just didn't want her that much, apparently.

To go over it again, because I do like to repeat myself, the way it works in Neverness To Everness is that if you fail to get a banner character in your first 70 pulls, your chance increases to a minimum 20% (Okay, 19.59% if you want to be fussy.) and the number of tiles you can land on to win increases as well. If that doesn't do it in another twenty pulls, pull 90 is a guaranteed win.

From the outside, that might still sound rough. Seventy pulls? Ninety? That's a lot! Well, yes, you'd think so. But not really. It's generally reckoned to be one of the more generous versions of the system, particularly because there's no 50/50, meaning once you hit that hard pity cap, you will get the character, not just have a fifty-fifty chance. 

When I started rolling for Akane this morning, I had fifty Solid Dice in hand to try for her It's one for every pull, as you'd expect. I'd picked those fifty dice up without particularly trying. I got them from login rewards and just by playing. I also had some left over from previous banners, when I'd bought some with in-game currency and then hadn't needed to use them all.

I rolled my first ten and got nothing. I could just have kept rolling but my mind doesn't work that way. Since I'd started with fifty dice, I didn't want to finish with anything much less than that. I'm in this business because I like to see numbers go up, not down.

Solid Dice are easier to get than you might think, though. You can, of course, pay real money for them but why would you when you can buy them with a couple of in-game currencies. One of those currencies is called Anulith and you get Anulith for doing all kinds of things - achievements, events, mini-games. They hand it out as compensation for downtime, even. It's very common. 

The exchange rate between Anulith and Solid Dice is 160:1. A hundred and sixty Anulith gets you one Solid Dice. When I logged in this morning I had over 18,000 of the things. 

That's enough to buy well over a hundred Solid Dice. And I already had fifty. If I had the absolute, worst luck imaginable, so long as I kept rolling, I'd still be guaranteed to get Akane and I'd have almost enough dice left over to guarantee the next banner character, even if I had the worst possible luck twice in a row. 

By then, of course, I'd have acquired whole stack of the other currency you can use to buy Solid Dice with, because you get it by rolling on the gameboard. Not to mention all the extra Anulith I'd have saved up by the time the next banner arrived. Six weeks playing every day gets you plenty.

As it happens, when Akane suddenly burst onto the screen, I was still thirty pulls short of soft pity seventy. I closed out with forty Solid Dice in hand and about 16,000 Anulith still in my account. As I said, I was pretty happy about the way it turned out.

It would be a different story if I wanted every character. That would drain my resources, I'm sure. But as I discussed in the Linko post I linked above, I don't usually have much of a practical use for the characters I roll on. I just pick the ones I find particularly appealing from the way they appear in the storylines, which is unlikely to be all of them or even most of them. Ironically, the only one I didn't manage to pull, Iroi, was the also the only one I wanted mostly for practical purposes. It almost certainly explains why I didn't go on trying for her for long.

It would also be different if I cared about the weapons, I imagine. Those use a different currency and it's one I don't seem to generate easily through my playstyle. I'm not sure if that's something I could change by playing differently or if it's where Hotta try to make their money. If I was into weapons, I might well have to spend some actual cash to guarantee getting the ones I wanted. (Full disclosure - I barely begin to understand how the weapon system in NTE works...) 

And honestly, I'd be fine with spending some money on the game. I was talking to Mrs. Bhagpuss a couple of days about it. She's playing June's Journey and she was pissed that the Halloween event there seemed to have been specifically designed to fall just barely short of being doable without spending real money. 

Part of the entertainment value in the game for her is seeing how far she can get without spending anything at all and tactics like that are guaranteed to make her more determined than ever, never to give them anything. We both agreed that we wouldn't have the same reluctance to spend a few pounds here and there if the game seemed like it wasn't bothered either way.

NTE manages to give the impression it isn't bothered whether you spend money or not. I'm sure the developers are extremely bothered but they know better than to show it. And it's an excellent game. I've been playing it with considerable enjoyment since it launched. It's probably my main game right now, in so far as I have one. 

And yet, so far, I haven't spent anything. I just keep playing it. Pretty much every day. And enjoying it hugely, too.

Compare that with EverQuest II. It's theoretically free to play and yet I pay an annual subscription of around £80, for which I get a few perks I use and a lot I don't. On top of that, I just paid another £30 or so for the annual expansion. 

I barely play EQII at all at the moment and even when I do it's sporadically, in short bursts. I'm paying over a hundred pounds a year for a game I don't play very much and nothing at all for one I play all the time. At this stage, it's more of a tradition than anything. 

Clearly, I need to take a long, hard look at my priorities. If I'm going to spend money at all, particularly on a game that claims to be free to play, wouldn't it make more sense to spend it on the one I'm actually playing? 

Except, as with Mrs Bhagpuss, I kind of get a buzz out of not paying. Getting something for nothing adds value in a weird way. I've written a post for each of the banner characters I've won because winning them was exciting. Would I write posts about characters I'd just bought in a store?

So why was it exciting? Apart from that great feeling when you think you're getting away with something? I think a lot of it is because it gives the illusion of gambling without the risk.

As I've laid it out above, getting the characters you want is guaranteed. There is no actual risk, provided you're selective and don't just want everything all the time. You can't really lose. It just might take you longer or cost you more but if it's not real money you're spending, that's not going to spoil your enjoyment too much.

Even so, getting them faster or more cheaply than the odds suggest you should is exciting. Gambling isn't only popular because of the winning. The gambling itself is a thrill. Not to mention that the way they've set it up, rolling on the game-board with all the animations and the feel of an actual board game, is entertaining in itself. It feels oddly... wholesome.

Here's a question to which I already know the answer. If I could just buy all the characters from the in-game store for a set amount, would I? If they just cost, let's say, $10 each. Something reasonable like that.

Most likely I wouldn't. I'd still want them but I'd immediately fall into "But do I want them that much?" mode. And from there it's a short trip to "Do I need them?" and the answer to that one is almost always no. I'm really, really good at going without things. Going without is often more satisfying than getting, for me. It's almost a problem, sometimes.

I'm not saying I wouldn't buy characters, ever. I'm saying it's less than likely. I'm also saying I'm almost certain that, if I did, I wouldn't get as much value from it as I do from winning them, even though I know the win is guaranteed. Every time I played a character I'd paid money for, or got them out for a screenshot, I wouldn't get that momentary glow of pleasure I do get now, at least occasionally, when I remember how I rolled for them and won. Instead, I'd be more likely to remember they cost me money and I doubt that would add any sparkle to my day.

But Hotta doesn't sell characters in the store. They sell packs of currency you can use to buy dice to roll for them. The convoluted system - paying real money for crystals to trade for Anulith to swap for Solid Dice so as to be able to roll for more characters - distances the whole financial transaction sufficiently that it would certainly work better for me, psychologically. 

But then we come back to the fact that I don't need the extra rolls. If I had more Solid Dice I'd end up rolling for characters I wasn't that crazy about. I'm already getting the ones I really want. For free.

I think if I was going to throw some money Hotta's way, which I'd be happy to do, since I'd like them to keep on adding content to this excellent game that I'm having such a good time playing, I'd probably have to look at buying some of the outfits. Cosmetic purchases somehow slot into a different receptor in my brain, as I think they may do for many gamers. Buying characters seems off, somehow. Buying dresses is fine!

As is often the case with post like this, I'm not so much addressing an audience here as I am having a conversation with myself. Last time I rambled on about this same topic, someone (It'll either have been Mailvaltar or Nimgimli, those being about the only two people who ever comment on NTE posts.) told me in the comments that you can buy stuff in the store with PayPal. That removes the only real concern I have about giving money to free to play publishers, namely giving my financial information to a somewhat unknown company. Situations like this are exactly why I made a PayPal account in the first place.

I have almost no cosmetics in NTE and I would like some. In today's update we all got an outfit for Akane, which was great, especially since I now have the character who can actually wear it. Regular readers may remember (They won't. Ed.) that when I was rolling for Iroi, I got her outfit but not her, so this is a big improvement. 

The problem with any of the outfits, though, is that 90% of the time, I'm only going to be playing Flora. So maybe I should buy her some new clothes... 

I'll have a think about it. I wish you could get NTE gift cards, like you can for some games. Then I could just put it on my birthday and Christmas wishlist. Problem solved!

And there we come to the end of another post in which I mostly talked to myself about things that ought to have stayed in my head. I guess the post I was planning to write, which was going to be about the update itself, including the latest chapter of the Whoots!!!! story, which I have already finished and which, once again, is excellent, and about which I have plenty to say, will have to wait until tomorrow.

Or even longer, since I have a ton of other ideas for posts just now. And to think I wasted a day on this one! Oh well, I guess I ought to leave the Whoots!!!! post a while longer anyway, so anyone who plays NTE will have had time to see it for themselves. Bound to be some spoilers. 

Yes, that's it! This post was a public service in that I didn't spoil anyone's game! 

No need to thank me! 

Next Fest Autumn 2026 - The Choosing

 As I expected, it took me an hour or so last night, flipping through the demos on Steam, to pick half a dozen from this Autumn's Next Fest to play and review  And as I also expected, it was a less intuitive and user-friendly experience than it could have been. It's not that the search and sort options aren't there, or that they don't work, so much as it's the way so many games are tagged with so many genres and styles it renders the process of sifting through them opaque.

I started by looking through the demos Steam had dumped into my Discover queue. There's a warning that says it takes Steam a couple of days to learn about the games before it can personalize the selection for individual users but if I waited until 18.00 on Wednesday for that to happen, I wouldn't have time to play the damn demos. 

Even without personalization, the Discovery queue seemed pretty well-tuned to my interests, although checking it again this morning, that seems to have been sheer good luck. I picked a couple from there, anyway. Or I think I did. I can't honestly remember. After you've looked at a few dozen demos it all becomes a bit of a blur...

After I'd done that, I stopped to have a think about what sort of games I'd like to play and what I might like to write about. And guess what? It was all the same ones as usual. Sorry about that. I know these demo review posts are some of the least-read pages on the entire blog - even the music posts reliably outperform them - but I enjoy writing them, so...

The genres I looked at specifically this time were Point&Click, MMORPG, Visual Novel and Turn-Based Strategy. The only sub-genre I looked at was Tactical RPG. This time I didn't try parsing anything by Themes & Moods. Usually I at least throw Cyberpunk in there but I'm a bit cyberpunked out at the moment. 

Oh, wait, actually that's not quite true. I did search 1980s for some reason. Just to see what was there, really. And I ended up picking something, too.

There seemed to be plenty to choose from in all my selections, although too high a proportion in some categories seemed to me to have not all that much to do with the genre they claimed to be part of. I did notice there were a lot more MMORPGs than usual, which I found surprising. 

 

Checking it again, the search for MMORPG brings up twenty-six results, more than half of which are what I'd call true MMORPGs. The rest look more like MMORTS  or co-ops but they'd all broadly count as MMOs. It does seem like a lot more than usual and there are some familiar names among them - ArcheAge Chronicles, Loftia, Spirit Crossing, World of Slime... 

There were a couple of very unusual MMOs in the list, too. I'd almost call them original. There's a platforming MMO, certainly the first I've ever heard of, called Springtale. It's a roguelite, too, so god knows how that works in an MMO context. 

I'm very bad at platformers so I didn't even consider that one but I did have a long think about Band Stage, a music game where you play instruments and perform, either solo or with a band, which apparently you can form with other players, like a group in an MMO. Again, I'm very bad at music games, so that would just be embarrassing for me and infuriating for anyone I was playing alongside. Plus the music in the trailer isn't doing an awful lot for me...

I could easily have picked all MMORPGs this time. There were plenty that looked interesting. The problem with MMO demos, when it comes to playing them for a Next Fest review, is that they take too long. Hours rather than minutes and even then it's often only enough to see the very early stages. Not exactly practical for my purposes. 

In the end I chose three, two of which are creature collectors. I didn't actually realise that until after I'd chosen them and I might only have taken one if I had but it'll be interesting to compare them, I guess.

The third was ArcheAge Chronicles, which I'm not going to review for Next Fest. For a start, it's nearly 40gb and I'm not sure I want to download it just for a demo. More importantly, it's the sort of game I could perfectly well install and play outside of Next Fest and most likely will, whenever I have the time to give it a proper look. 

Eight demos is probably two too many, anyway. Especially if they're any good. I'll stick to the following seven and leave AAC for later. Probably.

The seven I'm going to try and get through in the next week are listed in a little more detail below. I have now officially retired, so I have all my time to myself, and the weather forecast for the rest of the week is very poor, so I'll be indoors most of the time. Should be ideal! 

 

 

The Other Side of the Wall - "Julian Reed is a 13-year old student at a New England all-boys Catholic boarding school in the early 1980s. When people begin disappearing and no one else seems to remember they ever existed, Julian investigates, with the help of a girl he has never seen, separated from him by a wall."

This is the one I found by searching "1980s". It's a Point & Click adventure and the promo video was what sold it for me. It starts with a shot of some dork in a baseball jacket dancing in the foreground while in the background another kid sits at a desk with his back to the action, writing a letter. A decent quality voice-over reads out what he's writing and I found it pretty funny, especially the bit about him having all the Police albums. After that it shows some classic point & click gameplay which made me feel right at home. I have high hopes for this one. The video is  on YouTube but weirdly it doesn't have the voiceover there. Watch it on Steam for the full effect.

World of Slime - "World of Slime is a casual MMORPG where you capture, collect, and grow with all kinds of slimes. Find new slimes through field capture, synthesis, and fishing, then take them with you into battles, exploration, and puzzles." 

I knew of this one from MassivelyOP so it got a quick grab on recognition value. I think I might be regretting that, now I look at it more closely. Also, what is it with slimes? They are not cute, no matter how often people say they are.

Never Wither - "Experience unprecedented creature collection gameplay—Transform into almost any creature you see! Collect and raise fantastical creatures, and command them to farm, build, and craft. In this open world survival crafting game, Establish your settlement, become the last hope against the Corruption."

This is the other creature collecting MMO I chose (Probably more properly categorised as open-world survival/crafting.) and it looks a lot more interesting. Graphically, it looks very attractive and the gameplay has survival elements including base-building. I'm getting Palworld vibes. Also, I like the name. It's just odd enough to be intriguing. The demo is the whole first zone of the full game and they estimate 3-5 hours gameplay, more if you try to see and do everything. Another I feel optimistic about. 

The Brilliant Detective Milo - "A narrative-driven cat detective game set some time during the 20th century in a city rattled by the resurgence of mysterious murders. As head detective of the Mew York Police Department, it is your duty to put a stop to these killings and exhume the secrets buried deep in the shadows of the city…"

Cartoon cats, bad cat puns, comic strips... I wonder why I picked it? It looks great but the problem with detective games is I always think I'm going to enjoy them more than I do. I don't get on with those evidence boards and I'm just hopeless at figuring out who the murderer is. It's always a murderer, too, isn't it? It's never an arsonist or a blackmailer or a sheep rustler. 

Hela: Of Mice and Magic - "See the world through the eyes of a brave little mouse in this enchanting 3D co-op adventure. Explore breathtaking landscapes inspired by Northern Sweden, solve puzzles, and be a force for good in a land where heartwarming storytelling and the beauty of nature intertwine."

First cats, now mice. It says it's co-op but it can be played solo. I checked. Visually, it looks fantastic, to the point where I'm doubting whether it will even run on my machine. Of course I didn't check the minimum specs for any of the demos. Didn't even think of it. I might have to try re-installing the graphics card. If nothing else, this Next Fest is going to be a good test of whether I can trust this machine for gaming or if I really should think about getting a new one.

Et le Grain Mourut -  "A visual novel set in 1920s Paris. As summer draws near, young students are revising their end-of-year exams. Olivier is one of them."

Hmm. I did French up to the first year of university but it was a loooong time ago. I think that means "And the grain died." Let me see if that's right. Ah, close! It's "And the dead grain." Which still tells me absolutely nothing. 

It's a slightly strange demo in that it covers the first two days of the story and includes about 15% of the total text in the game but it doesn't include any "big branching paths", which is kind of the main gameplay in a visual novel.  They do say you can still make some choices, though, which is just as well. Otherwise it would just be a cartoon.

Kat Domino: Agent of S.H.E.L.L. - "Kat Domino is an agent of SHELL, the organization ruling the world. A routine mission will lead her where she doesn't belong, uncover things she was never meant to see, and unravel a conspiracy that could change everything she thought she knew. With a little luck, her trainee agent will survive"

Oh, look! Another cartoon cat! Who ever would have guessed? 

This one has more lore on the store page than all the rest put together. Someone is really invested in the world-building here. And it sounds great. Which is more than I can say for the trailer. I recommend turning the sound down. I hope there's none of that in the game or the music will be going off right from the start. Other than that, hitting all the right notes!

And there we are. Now all I have to do is play them. And then write about them.

Off I go. 

Any Color You Want, So Long As It's Blue: Pre-Ordering Descent to Val'Zyroth

For today's post I'd planned to be listing the demos I'd picked for the latest Next Fest on Steam but I'd forgotten it doesn't begin until about five in the evening, my time. I'll be eating then and after that Beryl will be starting her evening routine of food-playtime-walk, which generally takes about an hour and a half and requires my full attention. Since it usually takes me over an hour to make my choices for Next Fest,  it looks unlikely I'll have time to post about them as well, so instead here's a real placeholder post about EverQuest II.

I don't have anything to say about the game itself, seeing as how I haven't even logged in since the last time I wrote about it, but I have pre-ordered the expansion. It might seem like a bit of an odd move, given I'm not really playing right now, but I have no doubts that I will jump into the expansion, when it arrives, so why wait?

The expansion is called... no, it's gone. I'll have to look it up. I know it's got one of the least-memorable titles I've ever seen, which explains why I can't remember it. 

Descent to Val'Zyroth. That's it. I mean, do they even have a marketing department? Don't they focus-group these things? You can tell no-one's expecting anyone to go into a store and ask for them any more. 

Imagine going into Game or GameStop or whatever your local video game outlet is (Or more likely used to be...) and asking "Have you got Descent to Val'Zyroth?" Just the prospect of trying to say it out loud would make most sensible people balk. They'd lose so many sales that way.

I just had to press a button on a website to get it, thankfully. I looked at all the options, which I'm going to include here to bulk this post out a little, and I did have to stop and think about which one to choose. 

 It would bulk out the post one whole hell of a lot more if I included the breakdown of what's in all of those different editions. There's a long tick-list on the website, two dozen items or features altogether, starting with the vanity pet everyone gets for pre-ordering and ending with the nine items that you only get if you stump up the full $250. Sorry, $249.99.

 That's the pre-order pet above. He's called Pibippi Mudpuppy although I'm guessing that's actually his species, not his name. You can name vanity pets, so you can call him anything you want. He's kinda cute, I guess. For an amphibian, anyway. Is that classist?

I could probably log in and claim him now. You usually can with pre-order items that have no gameplay implications. I wouldn't get a screenshot better than that one, though, so I'm not going to try.

I had a good think about whether I wanted to go up to the Collector's Edition. I go through that every year. It's not a bad deal. You get a mount, a mercenary, a prestige house and a teleport item you can put in it ,so you can go straight to the new expansion's starting zone. 

Those are all things worth having but I always come to the same conclusion: they're none of them things I need. You always get a new mount and merc with the expansion anyway. They won't be as good as the Collector's Edition ones but they've always been plenty good enough for me. Teleport items in houses are nice in theory but I never remember to use them and as for the houses themselves, I have so many already. 

So I bought the regular edition, same as usual. With the 10% discount for being an All Access member, it cost me 

 

which is £28.54 at today's exchange rate. I'll easily get that much value out of it so I'm happy. 

The one thing that did almost make me decide to trade up was the inclusion in the Collector's Edition of 

 Having the new Overseer Season at the start of the expansion cycle, rather than after about six months, which is when it gets added to the game for everyone, is verging on pay-to-win. Overseer gives full sets of armor and weapons at a higher resolve than the baseline starting level for the expansion.

On the other hand, by the time you've done another ten levels of Overseer so you have a chance of getting them and when you've been lucky enough with the rng to fill every slot, you'll long since have acquired better gear from questing and mob drops, so it's not as great a deal as it might seem. As with most of the game's vertical progression systems, the change-out rate is so fast it makes little sense to try and subvert it.

For anyone playing the solo, casual game, the base expansion pack is always plenty good enough. All you really need is access to the expansion. Everything else is overkill. 

It's also excellent value for anyone thinking of making a comeback because you get last year's expansion thrown in for free. And all the others, for that matter. Just as a tip, if you ever decide to upgrade from a free account, which is limited to Level 110, the Planes of Prophecy expansion, don't make the mistake of buying the first expansion after that. Buy the most recent one and you'll get the whole lot thrown in. 

Even better, should you be making a return to Norrath after a time away, you get a boost to the cap, which is currently Level 135. As I've been complaining, the recent expansions have re-introduced relatively slow leveling, making leveling alts a tedious affair again. It was such fun for a few years but no longer. At least it means a boost is a treat for regular players again. 

The Pre-order page gives some more detail about what the expansion's about.

For years, a tenuous pact between Freeport and Neriak has been reluctantly honored, but after sensing weakness within the surface city, Queen Cristanos is done biding her time. Soon, Freeport and the entire continent of D'Lere will fall to Neriak unless the skilled artisans and brave adventurers of Norrath can find a way to stop her!

Spelunk the twisting caves of Corathus Descent, a treacherous network of passages overrun with insatiable predators and crevasses that plunge into the unmapped worlds, far below, where the borders of Subtunaria and the Underfoot blur. This is Val'Zyroth Ness, an enormous cavern replete with menacing fauna and malignant flora, where the Teir'Dal city of Neriondalon has emerged from ruin!

Breach the formidable walls of this resplendent city, revitalized by Hate, and hide amongst the downtrodden who serve their Teir’Dal and drachnid masters, such as the gnemlins forced to create and maintain an army of clockwork golems. Aid the wary race of molemen, known as tontu, as they fight for their survival within the nearby, ancient mines of Khor Boldir. Follow the Teir’Dal as they pierce the Plane of the Underfoot and invade Keramos Caverns, Brell’s mythical planar workshop, with vengeful intentions!

Be amongst the rare living souls to enter the infamous Duchy of the Dead. Navigate the sprawling labyrinth of impressive Teir’Dal crypts and mausoleums now devoted to the exploration and advancement of necromancy and other dark arcanum. Defeat the magical defenses and face the unnatural denizens that haunt the Duchy. Witness terrible wonders, unravel deific mysteries, and unlock unknown potential within yourself. Only then can you possibly stop Queen Cristanos in her own holy sanctum!

Quite a lot of detail, in fact. Too much, probably. All those unpronounceable names! 

It's a cavern expansion. The second, as far as I recall. I didn't think the last one, Terrors of Thalumbra, was all that well-received so I'm a little surprised they've done another. 

 The screenshots look very pretty, if also very dark. A lot of blue tones, especially indigo. Keramos Caverns, as seen in the image above, is the only exception. I imagine it'll be a relief to get there and be able to see what you're doing for a while, assuming it's not the opening zone.

Feature-wise, in addition to the always-expected new zones and quest-lines, there are Personas, "New and Improved" Untold Dungeons and an Epic mount you can apparently get by way of a scavenger hunt. 

I should know what Untold Dungeons are but I don't. I have a feeling they're only relevant if you group, which I never do any more, but I'm not even sure of that much. Whatever they are, I suppose it's good that they've been improved.

 

Personas I have read about and don't entirely understand but I think it's a way of playing a main character as if it was several alts. In the past, I wouldn't have been interested but if it ends up being a way to have  multiple classes at the cap without having to go through the same repetitive quests to level each of them, I might be persuaded. I bet it isn't that, though.

The Epic mount could be worth pursuing. I generally enjoy a scavenger hunt although Guild Wars 2 soured me on the "epic" variety. I'd expect to give it a go but whether I'll finish it is another matter.

And that's about it. Filled a post, anyway. Next time I write about Descent to Val'Zyroth will most likely be after I start playing it. Probably when it launches in December. 

Now I'm off to see what's what in Next Fest. There'll be a post about that tomorrow, I imagine. 

The Melancholy Of Akane Rin

I saw, on MassivelyOP last night, that there was a new Neverness To Everness trailer out, promoting the arrival of Akane in the next update. The piece, by the always-reliable Chris Neal, mentioned that it featured a cover of a song called God Knows.  

I didn't know it and it comes from an anime I'd never heard of either - The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya - but then there are a lot of songs and animes I don't know. Almost all of them, really.

It was late when I saw the post. Intrigued as I was, I didn't have time to watch it then. Now I have. Oh, boy...

Let me begin with the set-up. Akane is a twenty-something (I'm guessing.) woman, who used to be in a band. These days, she manages an underground club that puts on live music. She seems to be the only employee, although there's an owner who shows up sometimes.

Through some wily teenage manipulatory techniques, Haniel and Nanally, who have already persuaded the Appraiser to join them on drums, somehow manage to get Akane to agree to front their (Newly formed and barely competent.) band, The Whoots!!! They rehearse a couple of times and they don't get much better but Akane helps them by putting them on, bottom of the bill, at the club. Luckily for them, she comes on with them and basically carries them with her professionalism, experience and actual musical ability.

When the next update lands, on October 21, it will feature a storyline centering on Akane and the band and what happens after that. I have no idea what's going to happen but based on the trailer, it's going to involve a big step up from bottom of the bill.

Here's the trailer. It's over six minutes long but that's the same song twice, the first time with the female version of Zero behind the drums, the second time with her male counterpart in the seat.

I'm very glad Hotta chose to do it that way. I'm even gladder (Is that a word?) they did it in that order. Watching the male Appraiser didn't do much for me but watching the version I play...

I don't think I've ever had an experience quite as strange, while watching a game trailer, as seeing my own character performing an entire song, live on stage. I literally got chills down my spine at one point. It was weird.

As I've said in the past, I'm not one of those players who tries to make characters that look as much like them as possible. Neither do I see my character as a representation of myself. Even with that distancing, though, I do end up having a close relationship with any character I play for as many hours as I've played Flora. She might not be me but she also is me, in a way, whether I like it or not.

Of course, when you play any game where the central character isn't one you've been allowed to create for yourself, you're going to see them appear in promotional material, doing all sorts of things. Fighting, usually. But I don't fight much in real life, especially with monsters. It's not something I find kicks up a lot of memories for me. Well, not of anything other than playing video games.

I don't play the drums, either. But I have been in a band and I have played in front of an audience, albeit not one as enthusiastic as this. And I have sat behind that kit, in the game, as that character, and tried to play those drums. The way those experiences, memories and levels of realities overlap feels a little disturbing, psychologically. Or at least it does for me.

Luckily, the version of the Appraiser in the video is one hell of a lot better at playing the drums than I am, either in the game or in real life. Like probably everyone who's ever been in any kind of rock band, I did get our drummer to let me have a go on several occasions. It always looks so easy. It is not.

 

I kind of hope there isn't too much actual drumming in the story when it comes, although I bet there is. I'll just have to suspend disbelief, the way I had to about the speed at which Haniel and Nanally improved. Seriously, it was like three rehearsals...  

The song itself is excellent. Also incomprehensible, for me, since Akane sings it the original Japanese. It is Akane, too, or rather it's the Japanese voice actor who plays her, Ikumi Hasegawa. (The voice actor for the English dub is Cristina Vee. I don't know if she's going to sing in English in the game...) No word on who did Akane's impressive shredding, though. If that was Hasegawa, too, I can't imagine why she's still working as a voiceover artist.

Naturally, the first thing I did after I watched the video was look up the anime. What I know about anime could fill about two sides of A5, if I wrote it in capitals with a felt pen, so it's not much of a surprise that something described as "one of the most iconic animes of the 2000s" was completely new to me. 

I skimmed the massive Wikipedia entry ("Contains an excessive amount of intricate detail."), trying not to pick up too many spoilers, and it looked very much like something I'd enjoy, so I ran one of those "Where can I watch...?" queries, to which the answer was, unsurprisingly, Crunchy Roll. I also checked out the DVD situation because who doesn't want physical these days? I might go that route but cost-wise an add-on sub for Crunchy Roll on Prime seems like the obvious choice.

Or maybe I could watch it for free on YouTube? 

It's not on YouTube. But guess what is? The original version of God Knows, as it appeared in the anime. Now I've watched it, I can see The Whoots!!! cover is very faithful, not just in the way it sounds but in the performance and how it's shot. Take a look.

I'm impressed with the dedication and attention to detail. They've even dressed the Appraiser in something that's a clear call-back to what the drummer wears in the anime. This has clearly been a labor of love for someone.

I think it makes for a great, positive example of the way pop culture doesn't so much feed on itself, as is often said, but reinforces and learns from itself. Back when I started this blog, we were still in the tail-spin of post-modernism. I loved post-modernism (Still do...) but it did sometimes carry an unfortunate taint of superiority - even disdain. I'm very happy to see that the modern version, maybe we could call it pan-modernism, has largely lost that brittle, critical tone and replaced it with warm joy.

Moving away from the metafictional influences, there's also a trailer shedding some light on Akane's back-story. It's called "Letters To Me" and even though it's purely musical, with no dialog at all, I warn you it's a bit of a tear-jerker.

I'm a bit vague on the provenance of that one, which once again is the same song, twice, one each for the female and male versions of the Appraiser. It's not on the official Global NTE channel but several fan channels have it.

Although it's supposedly about Akane, the video really leans into Aurelia's story. She used to play drums in Lines, the band they were in, before he esper powers manifested and she lost the use of her legs. Some of it is flashbacks but some is presumably part of the new storyline. If that's true, it looks like it's going to be an emotional one.

I hope it is. It's the kind of story these games do best, in my opinion, and why I currently find them so much more appealing and rewarding to play than the high fantasy titles I've played for decades. I'm really looking forward to it.

And I'm looking forward to watching The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya. Now all I need is for Hotta to announce there's going to be a Neverness To Everness anime and I'll be all set!

Sunrise Over The Stacks: Some More First Impressions Of Nivalis Nights

I've left it too late to write a proper post today. I spent too long playing games. First, I played Neverness To Everness, in which I didn't really do much and still managed to spend an hour and a half not doing it. Then I spent two hours playing Nivalis Nights, where I did a lot and didn't really get much done.

Add that to a couple of hours last night, when I played Valheim and did very little indeed and it's not hard to see some kind of pattern starting to form. I've always played my games in a fairly aimless, haphazard way but it used to seem like that was my own, idiosyncratic choice. These days, the games seem to be designed to encourage my kind of playstyle.

Nivalis Nights, as I can confirm with a certain amount of pique, has not been particularly well-received by the critics. I made the mistake of picking it for Wilhelm's Fantasy Critic League and as of this moment it's made me precisely no points at all. For a while it was sitting at a moderate and probably quite fair average of 75% on OpenCritic but some curmudgeon, who would have to be a "Top Critic" gave it a miserable 55% and tanked the few points I had.

The gist of most of the "meh" reviews is that the game looks good but gets boring after a while. It has a peculiar elevator pitch: "What if Rick Deckard ran a Noodle Bar?" - that already sounded like a hard sell before the game came out. The general consensus seems to be "nice try but you missed".

 

Having put ten hours into the game, I'm not going to say the reviewers that haven't been all that impressed don't have a point. The game does seem to have a bit of an identity crisis. It continually tries to push you towards expanding your hospitality empire, while constantly giving you quests to go do something entirely different - and more interesting. 

On the business side, it doesn't just want you to run a noodle bar, it wants you to rent a greenhouse to grow your own food and go out in a boat and catch your own fish because that keeps your costs down. It wants you to hire staff, set their hours, deal with their complaints, buy them better equipment and negotiate their pay rises.

You're supposed to buy the furniture and install it, put up decorations, talk to customers and restaurant critics and health inspectors and every other kind of grifter that wants a piece of you and your business, which in Nivalis is anyone who knows you and it exist. You're clearly meant to feel as though becoming a successful business-owner is the whole point - of both the game and life in the city.

Except the myriad of narrative quest-lines it keeps throwing at you have nothing to do with noodles. The streets are teeming with people and any damn one of them might suddenly pop a quest marker and invite you to get involved in their frequently incomprehensible problems.

 

The quests are complex and time-consuming and numerous. I have over thirty in my Journal. I spend most of my playtime trying to get some of them done. So far, I have finished seven. Out of a hundred and eighteen! 

I only know they're done because every time you finish one you get an Achievement Point and it shows up in your permanent record. Achievements are a lot more important in NN than in most games. Entry to different parts of the city is reliant on reaching certain AP thresholds. Some trains won't let you board if you don't have enough AP. Points are easy to get - you get one every time you speak to a new vendor, for example - but you only get one for anything. One point for clicking on a vendor you haven't met before. One point for finishing a quest that had a dozen stages and took you two days.

For me, this is fine. I like it. It suits me. I have always approached quests or missions in any game as though they were windfalls in an orchard. I go around gathering them all up just because they're there, without any real intention of doing anything with them. I love a big quest journal that lets me add every quest I find until I have far more than I can finish and that's just what's happening here.

It's especially to my taste when the quests are also interesting and well written, which most of these are. My main problem right now is that, because I'm in the middle of so many at once, I have trouble remembering who is doing what and why and to whom and what they expect me to do about it.

 

It doesn't really matter. The overall effect is a palimpsest of life in Nivalis and that's precisely what I want from the game.

The restaurant, I'm happy to say, seems to be looking after itself, at least for the moment. I hired a manager and she seems to be doing a good job. I no longer have to do my own marketing, most of the staff seem happy enough and every day we make a small profit. I've hardly had to steal anything from the cafe next door in days.

I suspect that won't last. Or, rather, the game keeps dropping hints that it won't. But then, the game keeps dropping hints that all kinds of terrible things are going to happen and so far none of them have. Then again, even ten hours in, I'm still getting quests that are very obviously Tutorials, so maybe I haven't even gotten to the real game yet.

I do have a few more constructively critical things to say about Nivalis Nights but they're going to have to wait a while. As I said at the start, I don't have time for a full-length post about it. I just thought I'd give a quick update to go along with the gorgeous snapshots I took today. 

The visuals are just wonderful. The game's worth playing for them alone. The stories are pretty good, too. It's just the noodles that let it down.

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

I used SnapEdit to remove the UI because if there's a way to take screenshots with the UI off in game, I haven't figured it out yet. As you can see, I forgot to remove the little circle in the middle of each shot. If it was really AI, it would have done it for me! 

Enter The Eagle

 Objectively, this scarcely deserves a paragraph in a Grab Bag but subjectively I've been waiting a whole year to post it, so indulge me!

I don't generally do streaks. (Cue Ray Stevens.) I'm opposed to the whole idea of them, psychologically speaking. In theory...

Of course, once you find yourself on a streak, it can be hard to stop. Even more so if there's some visible reward for keeping it going for a certain length of time. Every day you see that reward edging incrementally closer. It makes it hard to quit and walk away, even if the weight of expectation of success and responsibility for failure both get heavier by the day.

Oh boy, that's a lot of psycho-twaddle for a dumb badge on a stupid web site, isn't it? And for something that takes, at most, less than a couple of minutes every day. But as you get closer and closer to the finish, the fear that you might fumble gets more real all the time.

Especially when you've already flubbed it once. This was my second run at the damn thing. I muffed the first after not much more than a couple of months and I was pissed! Imagine if I'd done it again after most of a year!

I was determined not to make the same mistake the second time. I'm very happy - but even more relieved - to be able to say I didn't.

I'm talking about the completely pointless badges you can get for using NightCafe, specifically the ones they give you for making a new image every day. I posted about the way it all works back in May so I won't rehash the details. I'll just recap the relevant bit:

The specific badges I've been working on, if you can call it working, are Bee, Owl, Horse, Bear and Eagle. These animal-themed awards come from making a new image on your first day, then on the 30th, 100th, 200th and 365th days in that order. 

The ostensible purpose behind making a daily image is to earn the free credits you get for doing it but I had more credits than I was ever going to use long ago. What kept me at it was knowing one day I'd be an Eagle!

I mean, it's better than a Bear, isn't it? Let alone a Horse. Why they picked the animals they did is a total mystery. There's certainly no obvious progression there. 

Eagle, though, does seem like the winner. Would I have been as motivated to maintain the streak if they'd handed them out in reverse order and the end-point had been Bee? I don't think so.

The oddest thing is that Eagle is where it stops. Not the daily rewards. They carry on indefinitely. Not even the bonuses you get for reaching the same trigger points in the second year. No, what stops are the badges. 

Given the sheer number of badges you can get - there are well over two hundred and  fifty of them - it seems bizarre that they wouldn't have carried on with them for the second, third and every other year, as long as the streak continued. I'm very glad they didn't. If I knew I was going to become, say, a Condor after another year, I might have felt obligated to carry on with the streak, even if it meant going through Camel, Duck and Aardvark on the way.

As it is, though, I feel completely liberated now from any responsibility to myself or tradition to carry on. I don't need the credits (I have nearly eight and a half thousand stored up and, after a controversial rule-change was reverted, they never expire.) and as far as I know, I keep my Eagle badge either way.

I most likely will carry on, though. For a while, anyway. It's part of my routine now: first thing in the morning, open NightCafe, find the automated prompts, pick one, collect the rewards. 

As a result, I have a ridiculous number of completely useless images of anthropomorphic otters, owls, lions and badgers, most of them dressed as though they're headed to a Steampunk convention. 

The daily suggested prompts are very, very repetitive. As well as the aforementioned anthropomorphic animals, there are lots of nebulae, ancient libraries, private detectives, futuristic cities, the occasional fairy and, for some inexplicable reason, quite a lot of toasters.

For a while, I thought they were based on images I'd made. I did generate a few pictures of badgers a long while back. But I've made plenty of images for posts here in the past that don't feature any of these things, some of them a few times, and none of those prompts seem to have... erm... prompted any follow-ups. 

If I miss a day now, so be it. The streakwill reset to zero but I won't care. 

That'll be a relief. The tension as I came nearer and nearer  to the finish line this time, was intense. I'd authorised NightCafe to send me reminders every day but it isn't all that reliable. Sometimes I don't get any at all. The last few days, just to be sure, I wrote myself a reminder and propped it up in front of my monitor so it would be the first thing I saw, when I sat down at the PC every morning.

And now it's over. It's the longest intentional streak I've ever attempted. I have every hope it will be the last of its kind.   

 

Notes on AI used in this post

For completion's sake, I suppose I should document that one image of an otter.  The prompt, which I had nothing to do with, was

"An anthropomorphic otter scribe, hunched over a colossal desk overflowing with scrolls and ancient texts within a grand, abandoned gothic library. Towering shelves reach into the gloom, illuminated by a single ornate lamp casting dramatic cinematic lighting. The otter's focused expression and aged parchment textures are highlighted amidst the imposing architecture, evoking a sense of quiet study in a storybook illustration style, with atmospheric backlighting and rich, muted colors inspired by the works of Arthur Rackham and the atmospheric lighting of a film noir scene."

It's a lot, isn't it? The otter isn't even all that anthropomorphic, really. It's just a regular otter in an odd position. You'd have thought the AI could at least have given him a waistcoat or something. 

The model was Flux 2 Klein 9B Fast. I didn't choose that, either.