We Need To Talk About Taygedo

Nimgimli and I have been having a conversation in the comment threads of our respective blogs about the merits or otherwise of a series of quests in Neverness To Everness involving a character called Taygedo. I covered a little of this in yesterday's post but to recap, Taygedo is a work colleague of the PC, he features heavily in the early game and a lot of players find him really annoying.

I think I'm going to need to break that down a little. Bear with me if you don't play NTE and maybe even if you do because I'm about to give some background detail to elements of the game I don't entirely understand yet. 

The set-up for the game is that there was some kind of global supernatural or paranormal incident a while back, which continues in the form of rolling reality breaches of varying significance and seriousness. The cause may be explained and I just didn't take it in or it may be unknown. Either way, I have no clear understanding of how it happened, how long ago or what the wider implications might be.

What I do know is that these incursions show no signs of stopping and regular, human society has had to learn to live with them. It's clearly been happening long enough that most people have adapted to accept and incorporate the new status quo. 

There are government departments and private organizations ready and willing to deal with any new incursion or threat. Responses vary from banishment to containment but there are also opportunities to be had so there's no real sense of imminent apocalypse, which makes a nice change.

There are rules and systems in place to allow and even encourage the integration of any useful artifacts or materials that enter the world via an Anomaly, which is only to be expected. More importantly, there are strict rules for handling the entities that arrive through anomalies (And, I think, for those that were already here, if they become in some way changed by them.)

Sentient creatures that meet certain criteria, mostly not being dangerous, are known as Oddities and these Oddities can be sponsored either by individuals or organizations. A sponsored Oddity has to be kept under close watch at all times by its Guarantor, making them roughly equivalent to a pet dog. They're not allowed to roam freely and their Guarantor is responsible for any accidents or mischief they may cause.

Particularly well-adapted Oddities, however, can apply for Citizenship. If granted, this gives them an official ID Card and the right to move around the city freely, without oversight by their Guarantor. They can also have paid jobs, own property and do many, if not all, of the things a human citizen can. The ID needs to be renewed annually. Renewal is not automatic, requiring a visit to the BAC offices and a repeat of the same tests that granted citizenship in the first place. Providing nothing has changed, though, renewal is pretty much a formality.

That, at least, is how I understand it, having finished several of Taygedo's quests, in which much is explained. A lot of what I just wrote might be wrong though because while there's an extraordinary amount of detail on the bureaucracy of the process there's little in the way of historical context. 

And my character knows very little more about it all than I do. The player-character is a newcomer to the city and with memory loss on top (So what's new?). It's confusing for her and me but for the NPCs we meet, it's all just everyday life. This is a society that's both familiar and comfortable with its situation. Crisis? What crisis?

Taygedo is a Citizen. Like most Oddities he has an ability (Superpower might be a reasonable analogy.) which in his case is some sort of affinity with and ability to affect mechanical devices. I'm still hazy on the details but it allows him to work as a mechanic at Eibon Antiques, under whose corporate Guarantorship he remains, even as a citizen. 

In appearance he's a short, plump, anthropomorphic otter wearing clothes, except for his head, which is an old-fashioned cathode ray television set displaying the cartoon face of an otter. He speaks in an incomprehensible dialect consisting largely of variations on his own name and he has the squeaky cartoon voice you'd expect a comedy cartoon otter to have.

By most reports, people either love him or loathe him. I like him, personally. Nimgimli is firmly in the other camp. What I think we both agree on, in common with many others on both sides of the argument, is that Taygedo and his storyline have no place in the opening chapters of the main quest.

There's a great summation of the problem in the opening post of this Reddit thread.  As the OP explains, the quest, which is called "Love That Begins With Lies", may work for players who "like Slice of Life anime" but "If you don't like those types of story, you will HATE it."

What's arguably worse than merely alienating what's probably the majority of your players with a poor aesthetic choice is misleading them about the nature of the game itself. As the OP (MutedCountry3708) points out, those players "may WRONGFULLY think that this is how the rest of MSQ is going to be: which is NOT the case". 

I'm going to have to take their word on that because I haven't seen any more of the MSQ yet. You need to get to Hunter Level 14 to open the next chapter, which is also a problem because what does the game suggest you do while you're waiting?

A whole bunch more of Taygedo's quests, that's what. The follow-on is seamless. I received a very urgent message from Taygedo almost immediately after the MSQ section ended, although I ought to clarify that all messages from Taygedo are "Very Urgent" because he's a hyper-excitable drama queen. I didn't realize until much later that it wasn't just a continuation of the same quest.

I'm going to give my considered opinion here that Taygedo's quests are actually pretty good. The MSQ one is arguably the weakest and certainly the silliest but it's not bad. The others I found very engaging, particularly the one where I had to accompany him to get his ID. 

All these quests supply a lot of interesting and helpful backstory without making it feel like you're getting infodumped. If you're interested in backstory and world-building, you'll likely get something out of them.

If you're not, though, and for many people I suspect even if you are, you're in for a long and tedious plod through a really extraordinary amount of surprisingly realistic legalese and bureaucratic red tape. There is a fair bit more to do than just click through dialog but effectively these are the short story equivalent of visual novels.

And here's the real problem, I think. Although I knew going in that Neverness To Everness was to some extent a life sim as well as an adventure game and an RPG, I wasn't really imagining this level of engagement with the minutiae of life in Hethereau. Taygedo's citizenship is just one example among many of the way the game is willing to let you experience the world at the same pace as its citizens, regardless of whether that makes it entertaining.

Here's another example, taken from my session this morning. To leave my fifth floor apartment I have to open the door into the hallway, walk along the hall to the elevator, call the lift with the button on the wall, wait for it to arrive, walk (The game enforces walking at this point.) into it, wait for the door to close, select the floor I want, press the button, wait for the elevator to descend, then finally walk out into the lobby. 

Every part of that operation takes roughly as long as it would if I was doing it in real life. The only other game I remember being that literal about things is Star Citizen. 

I also rode the bus again today, to see where it went and how long it would take. The simulation was disturbingly realistic or perhaps i should say authentic. The bus moved at the speed of a city bus, obeyed every traffic regulation, gave all the right maneuvering signals and stopped at every stop, where it waited for NPCs to get on and off. Outside, all the other vehicles moved just as real vehicles would, always assuming they were being driven by people who obeyed the rules of the road. Pedestrians used the crossings, waited for the lights to change, broke into a jog if they were still on the crossing when the traffic began to move...

I'm having a great time in NTE precisely because it's the most convincing iteration of a fully-functioning city I've ever seen in a game-world. I thought the cities in Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves were impressive but this is better than either. Which is amazing, if what you're looking for is a life sim but not so much if you thought you were getting slam-bang supernatural action.

The promotional videos certainly did give the impression of a far more action-oriented experience and from what I can tell that experience is certainly in the game, somewhere. It's just not in the opening chapters of the MSQ. There's some of it in the Prolog but that doesn't last long. Taygedo's MSQ quest, even without all the subsidiaries, goes on for much longer. Or maybe it just feels like it.

The early stages of the MSQ feel a bit out of kilter even allowing for Taygedo and his love-life butting in and taking over. Even though I've been enjoying myself, I still have relatively little idea what my character is supposed to be doing. She seems to have been inducted into a quasi-military police force at one moment and then handed on to a bunch of eccentrics running a dubious back street junk shop the next. 

The BAC, which inducted her, is full of hyper-efficient workaholics operating from state of the art offices bursting with hi-tech equipment, whereas Eidon Antiques is a ramshackle operation in a back alley in the bad part of town, run by an alcoholic good-time girl, an otter and a bunch of bickering children. How these pieces fit together beats me.

The thing is, I like the shabby, fractious crew at Eidon whereas the slick, smart, secret-agent/super-hero gang that picked me up in the Prolog and passed me along to Eidon when they'd done with me made my teeth itch. I'd far rather hang out with otters and tweens pretending to be in the cosa nostra than a bunch of runway models cosplaying James Bond.

But that's just me. I'm the part of the audience this stuff is working for, although I'm one hundred per cent sure I don't fit the demographic description. I'd be more than happy to carry on with Taygedo's storyline and not get back to the serious stuff ever. 

Unfortunately, there has to be a real chance that a sizeable portion of the audience, the part that doesn't feel the same way, will already have voted with their uninstall buttons. Taygedo's trivial troubles might make a great series of side-quests but even I can see there's no place for them in the main storyline.

Except... there is this one thing...

Remember what that quest is called? "Love That Begins With Lies". That obviously means the lies Taygedo tells his love-interest, Tako, as he tries to impress her, right? 

Well, yes, but what if also meant the lies she's telling him?

I have no evidence for this, other than a nebulouis sense that there's something ironic about her dialog, but I just don't trust her. So much so that, at one point in the storyline, I literally told Taygedo  out loud, "I wouldn't trust her as far as I could kick her!"

Granted, it might have been in part because Taku reminds me of Sweet Sue from the Sooty Show, a character I've always found intensely irritating. Or it might have just been that Taku is BLOODY ANNOYING! Even so, I'm pretty sure she's up to something.

If she is and if it turns out to have some major storyline implications further down the line, it still won't justify the placement of the quest where it is. It's just "in the WRONG PLACE, at the WRONG TIME"
as MutedCountry3708 so aptly puts it.

I only hope it hasn't done too much damage to the game's prospects overall. I imagine most players will grit their teeth and get past it. I hope so, anyway. 

Me, though? I'm looking forward to more of Taygedo's antics. Who doesn't love a comedy otter?

Settling In or Just Another Day In Hethereau

Here's a first-world blogging problem if there ever was one: new games give you far too much to blog about. Such a terrible situation to find yourself in! Enough ideas for a dozen posts but how are you meant to choose? 

Maybe pick the most immediate, the one that's right there in front of you, shimmering with vitality and immediacy? Or should you let it rest a while to settle and prove? But if you do, will it join all those other, unwritten posts? Drift away into the void, never to be seen?

Should you stand back, take the broader view? Focus on the details?

What are you trying to achieve, anyway? Do you want to tell stories? Offer advice? Share information? Analyze and explain? Are you looking to give a show and tell with pictures? A critical essay on one specific aspect of the game? Half a dozen bullet-pointed paragraphs on several?

Or perhaps you find yourself so stunned by choice all you can do is write about how hard it is to choose at all.

Yeah, that really would be a waste of time, wouldn't it? So let's not do that. 

Lens Flare

When this blog was young, I'd have done a whole post about it. Just the sort of sidewise lean I loved back then. Mind you, that whole post would only have been the length of one section of this one. I valued concision more then, too.

Oh, but how I love lens flare! It hits me like a drug. When I say I like a game there's a non-trivial chance what I really mean is it gives good lens flare. Quite a lot of the imports I've been keen on the last few years answer to that.

On any given day you care to name, there's a strong possibility I'll have been staring into the sun, mesmerized by the glare, fascinated by the halo, seeing the eternal in the ephemeral. Again. 

And taking screenshots. 

Do you know how hard it is to not take screenshots of lens flare? Especially at sunset or sunrise. Games have golden hours just like Hollywood needs. I have to talk myself down, convince myself they aren't magical moments never to be repeated. Just coded performances, another show same time tomorrow. 

By The Clock

It should get easier now, I found the clock. I found it yesterday. 

Actually, I didn't. The game told me about it. Oh, wait, I didn't mention the name of the game yet, did I? Neverness To Everness. I guess you guessed that, though.

I was doing a quest. Not that they call them quests. Games with contemporary or futuristic settings tend to avoid giving that mystical gloss. Come to think of it, I'm not sure what they are called in NTE. Missions, maybe? Doesn't matter anyway, except that names always matter. But let's not go there just now.

It was one of those deals you get in games sometimes, where the NPC tells you to come back in a while. A few minutes, a few hours, tonight, tomorrow, after dark, when you've had time to think about it. Any time but not right now, ok?

They're annoying, aren't they? Does anyone actually enjoy being fobbed off by an NPC with a "Give me a day and I'll have finished making your boots."? Why do developers even bother? Is it just to piss people off?

Rhetorical question. Of course it is. Here's a tougher one. What might be going through a developer's mind when they add a quest like that, one with a hiatus, then pop in a hint telling you if you can't be bothered waiting you could just spin the hands on the clock and make it happen right away?

That's what NTE does. I met this woman who was selling her car for real cheap except you could tell she didn't really want to. She asked me to come watch her race so I could check out what a great bargain it was but the race didn't start until six in the evening and it was midday then. 

The car was a real steal and I wanted it plus there was obviously a backstory and I wanted that too. I thought I'd do something else for the afternoon and come back later. 

Only I didn't need to bother. It seems you can set the time to anything you want. The weather, too. Those sunrises and sunsets? Any goddam time you please! 

All of which is top quality of life and so very welcome. Only, if you're allowing that, why even suggest waiting?

I think it's for "realism".  It's not clear if the street races are even legal but they all happen after dark. Maybe the roads are just quieter then but I kinda doubt it. All the bad things happen at night, don't they?

I guess it would make even less sense if you could talk to an NPC any time of day and a race would magically begin right there and then, though. Oh, the compromises we make for authenticity.

Friends Would Be A Reality Show Here

You know that thing everyone mocks about Friends? Ok, ok! I'll be more specific. You know that one thing? How everyone always points out how unrealistic it is, to put it mildly, that a bunch of twentysomethings with crap jobs, if they even have any job  at all this week, could afford live in those apartments in New York? Or any apartment?

Yeah, well you ain't seen my pad in Hethereau! I got it yesterday and it is saaweeet! So sweet!

I was wondering when housing was going to appear, so I had a poke around and found you have to get to Tycoon Level 5 first. Tycoon Levels probably needs a post of their own but the tl:dr is that it's how you get all the casual/leisure options, like fishing and housing and runing a business, assuming you call that last a leisure activity, which I fricken' do not.

I was momentarily concerned it might be a grind to get to Level 5 to open the feature that most interested me but it wasn't. I'm sure there will be grinds in the game but I haven't hit any yet. 

It took me a couple of sessions to get to where I needed to be and by sessions I mean fragments. I did some Tycooning in-between exploring and questing and taking screenshots of atmospheric weather conditions. I suppose it might have taken me an hour, all added up.

So, getting on the housing ladder was quick and easy. It was also cheap. And like most things in the game it was quasi-realistic. I had to go to a real estate agency, where the realtor showed me what she had on her books. That part was convincing enough.

The illusion of reality started to break down when I saw that only one property was available at my level, the rest needing to be unlocked. Then it shattered completely when I found out how much it cost: 200,000 Fons. That's almost chump change!

What? It sounds like a lot? I suppose... I mean, 200,000 is a biggish number. But then, of course, if you don't play the game you have no idea what a "Fon" is so it might be a fortune or just a whole lot of nothing. 

I can't say I have a clear mental image of a Fon either. Bloody stupid name for a currency if you ask me. Every time I see it pluralized, it makes me think of Henry Winkler. Maybe they should have called it the Winkle. 

The important part is that, even though I've only just started playing, and even though I've spent most of my time goofing around, I still had enough cash on me to buy the apartment outright. And that was after I'd leased a cafe and bought a car!

I imagine there'll be a whole post on housing at some point, not to mention the truly bizarre entrepreneurial economy, but for now I'll just say that just the starter home is a fifth floor duplex with huge picture windows and stunning views. If this is what a part-time gig at a down-at-heel, back-street enterprise in a poor part of town, run by a drunk and staffed largely by children gets you, god knows what I'll be able to afford when I get a real job! 

I bet you wish you lived in Hethereau. I know I do.

Otterness To Notterness

Nimgimli posted yesterday, listing a few things that were harshing his mellow in NTE and one of them was Taygedo. 

Taygedo is an otter with a television for a head because what else would he be? He works for the Eibon Antique Shop, the struggling business the PC gets drafted into right at the start of the game for reasons that are still not as clear to me as they probably should be. 

Taygedo communicates almost entirely by the use of the word "Taygedo" or slight variations, a bit like Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy. He occasionally throws in a few grunts and squeals but conversations involving him mostly run along the lines of the old subtitled movie gag, where several sentences of dialog are rendered in the titles by just that single word. Only in reverse.

I feel relatively neutral about the gimmick but it's self-evidently as likely to infuriate as delight. It certainly annoyed Nimgimli. However endearing or otherwise you find him, though, I do think making Taygedo the central figure in a lengthy storyline close to the start of the game is a high risk strategy.  At best.

Add to that, the plotline doesn't just give you an otter with a televison set for a head repeating one word over and over ad infinitum. It also asks you to stop whatever you're doing so you can help him set up a date with another otter (No TV head for this one.). You have to take him shopping, buy him clothes and gifts and then to pretend he's your boss so he can impress his date, who he's given the impression he's much more important than he really is. 

Basic 1960s sitcom plot in other words. I was going to say "minus the mechanical animism" but then I remembered My Mother The Car.... I can see why Nimgimli was losing patience if that's waht he'd been doing.

I'm quite enjoying it myself. I've bought Taygedo the gear. I haven't yet been on the date yet. So that's something to look forward to... 

Setting Boundaries  

Finally, for this post that is, there's the issue of where to go next. Or rather where the game's going to let me go. 

I've been doing a lot of exploring and some of it has taken the form of seeing how far out of town I can get. It varies and it's not nearly as obvious as you'd imagine.

Hethereau is bounded on one side by the ocean and on the other by some lush green hills. I was fairly sure neither would be available to explore and I was mostly right but not entirely. 

The sea is just sea for the most part. The distant hills are out of reach but there is a substantial out-of-town wilderness area with campgrounds and a somewhat manicured stretch of woodland you can wander around in if you want. Not much to see there except trees but it's nice to get out of the city for a while.

Across the river and stretching along the coast is what looks like another part of town although it could be a separate conurbation entirely. I wanted to see what it was like. 

It would be an exaggeration to say I felt confident I could go there. That would imply some element of doubt. I had none. I didn't think about it at all.

I happened to be strolling along the beach opposite when I got the urge to go take a look so I took a right-turn to the ocean and ran straight into the red No Access barrier that materializes when you try to go somewhere you shouldn't. Because I can't take a hint, I tried a few other ways- gliding, crossing the bridges, swimming - no joy.

You can see the area is fully developed. There are even cars moving through the streets. You just can't go there. Ooh, I was cross! Why even put the thing there if it's just a tease?

I was crosser still, when I tried to go to PukaLand. PukaLand is an amusement park on an island just off the coast. Or maybe its on a peninsula. You can see it from anywhere on that side of the city, its fairground identity established by a huge ferris wheel and a Disneyesque castle. 

You can see it but you can't see it. You can go up to the gate but you can't go in. That damned red screen again.

I can't say whether these and other inaccessible locations are places not yet "in the game" or whether they open up at certain points in the storyline but either way it's frustrating. I guess the positive take is that it means there's more content ready and waiting to go, one way or the other but damn! I wanted to go there now!

And that's it for today. Just some random thoughts among many. Plenty more where those came from but I'll try to narrow it down to just the one next time. 

Maybe.

No promises. 

Stars Fell Like Rain or Two On A Tower

Want to know how many screenshots I've taken in Neverness To Everness so far? A tad shy of a hundred and fifty. I'd say I've been quite restrained. I thought it would be more than that but I just counted them and it's not, so pardon me while I give myself a cookie.

I've been out and about some, that's for sure. All over the place. Opened all the map now, by visiting each of those big, golden spikes that let you see what's around you. Lift the fog.

They do something else, as well, I think. Something much more important to the welfare of the city than just making it easier to get around. Mint explained it to me but I forgot what she said the moment she stopped talking. I kind of tune her out, sometimes. You have to, really.

Mint hardly ever stops talking. She's hyper-excitable. She loves her work, she loves to chat and she loves to eat, too. 

Don't they all? Not just in NTE. It's all the open-world gachas. It reminds me of how, in The Beano I read as I was growing up, when every character seemed to be obsessed by food. 

For readers who grew up deprived of the output of Dundee's unlikely publishing giant, D.C. Thompson, The Beano is a comic aimed at children aged from maybe five to ten or so, although plenty of readers stick with it for a lot longer than that. 

Then again, who isn't familiar with The Beano? I just learned - from Wikipedia so it must be true - that The Beano is "the best-selling comics magazine outside of Japan, having sold more than two billion copies to date. Wait, how did we get onto The Beano? I don't even like the fricken' Beano that much! 

Oh yes, I remember. Characters being obsessed with eating... 

It makes sense that child characters in a publication aimed at children would be crazy for candy. Children have a limited number of objects of desire and the subset deemed acceptable by parents is likely smaller still. Even with the fashions in parenting that roll relentlessly through the culture, kids always want sweets and savories, even if they're not always allowed to have them. It makes sense there'd be a craving fiction could exploit.

So, I get why all kids in all comics seem to have the appetites of cavemen, treating every taste of sugar and salt like a drug hit, but it makes a lot less sense to see the same behavior in self-directed, independent twenty-somethings in the games I'm playing. But it's there.

I've already been out for ice-cream with Mint and she ate so much she got stomach-ache from the cold, the cure for which was that we both went to a different cafe for hot chocolate! Mint and Flora are bonding over food. They might even be flirting. It's hard to tell.

Flora is my character's name, by the way. Does everyone find it as hard as I do to keep the names and pronouns straight in posts about what they've been doing in the games they play? 

I've long claimed I don't identify with my characters in that way people do when they try to make all of them look as much like they do as possible and on one level that's true but on another, quite possibly a deeper and more significant one, it's really not. My confusion of identity leeches out in posts, where I tell stories about what "I" have been doing, then have to stop myself and reframe it as what my characters have done.

It hasn't helped that until very recently I had a policy of never naming my characters in posts. That's because back when I started blogging, when I was much more sociable in games than I am now and MMORPGs were much more sociable places, and when people who played them occasionally read blogs, there were a couple of occasions where someone recognized one of my characters in game from reading the name in a post and sent me a /tell about it.

Being noticed made me feel a bit uncomfortable so I stopped outing my characters by name and took to referring to them by their classes or races or some similarly impersonal designate. Then, as time went on and the games I played became less and less social, often to the point of being single-player, or if not then feeling like they were, and as the number of people reading what I wrote drifted down and down, it started to feel like mentioning character names was probably going to be less of a problem than it had been, assuming it ever was one to begin with. 

Using proper names certainly made it easier to structure the sentences, so I slipped into doing it and now here I am, although as you can see from the rest of the post, I still have trouble separating myself from my characters.

So, Flora and Mint... 

I'm not a fan of dating in games. I've said that before. I mean, if it's a dating game, sure, fine, go for it. I just won't play it. 

I think of dating as a genre not a feature. Except that's just me, I guess, because it's clearly both, just like PvP. You can have a game where the whole point is to kill other players or you can have one where it's just one of the many things you can do. It's only when you can't play the game at all without engaging with it that it becomes a PvP game.

Until recently, dating hasn't really been a thing in the kinds of games I play, even as an option. I can't think of an MMORPG that has it although I'm sure there must be some. Mabinogi comes to mind for some reason...

It has been a thing in RPGs for a while, though. I think there was something of the sort in the first Dragon Age, which must also have been the first time I became aware the concept even existed. Not the concept of dating itself. I knew that existed. I wasn't raised in a monastery! Player-characters in video games simulating courtship rituals with NPCs, I mean. That sort of dating.

I found it very weird at the time, I remember. Creepy, really. I'm not sure I can articulate why but I suspect it's an analog of the uncanny valley idea, the way the appearance of something can be just slightly off in a way that triggers some lizard-brain warning. 

As with many unfamiliar ideas and experiences, time and repeated exposure has normalized dating NPCs for me to the extent that I now mostly think of it as just something I could do but don't, as opposed to something I'd never do. 

Except I said yes to Mint's offer of ice-cream and I said nice things to her about the time we were spending together, so I guess that means it's just something I don't usually do now, not something I never do. Even when it's not necessary to the plot.  

But then, I've been doing a lot of things in Neverness To Everness that have very little to do with the plot. Assuming there is a plot. I think there's a plot? I'm not entirely sure.

If there is, I certainly haven't seen much of it. I've been far too busy, and not just out getting ice-cream with Mint (Hmm. That makes me think of King Krule's classic Out Getting Ribs...) or putting my palm on tower touch-plates. Just exploring, really. There's so much to see. And I've seen so many things. I've seen stars falling like rain...

No, really, that's a thing I saw! And an achievement I got. Stars Falling Like Rain (Witness a meteor shower.) Except when it happened I thought it was something else. And maybe it was.

I was up a tower at the time. Not one of those stubby golden ones that are really public art not architecture. No, this is the truly towering tower that rises into the clouds over Heathereau. It has a name but I can't remember it offhand and it doesn't come up in any of the forty screenshots I took while I was climbing.

I've climbed a lot of things in video games. I've written before about how climbing used to be a thing people did in MMORPGs before the developers even began adding climbing skills to the games. Back then, climbing was as much about breaking the game as it was seeing the sights.

With the coming of the current wave of whatever we're calling the genre that started with Genshin Impact, climbing has turned into something of a focus feature. I bet all the games have it now. Wuthering Waves certainly does. I've never had a climbing experience quite like this one, though.

The tower goes up and up and up. It feels like it's never going to stop. There are big observation platforms with telescopes (That you can't use - they missed a trick there.) then smaller railed rings clearly meant for maintenance workers and then nothing but the pure climb, up an ever-narrowing column studded with projecting spurs you can rest on if you're careful, until  one, final, tiny railed platform barely wide enough to walk around before the last stretch to the very top, where you can haul yourself up and stand on the beacon-light that shines over the city, the highest thing in the world. 

All of which would be too terrifying to contemplate, much less attempt, if it wasn't for being able to stick to sheer surfaces like Spider-Man and glide like the Falcon if you fall. But I didn't fall. I flew. 

At the end, when there was nowhere else to climb, I launched myself into space and glided all the way down to the second-highest tower in the city, far below me. And there was a story all its own when I got there, let me tell you! But It'll have to be a story for another day because I'm not finished with this one yet.

When Flora got to one of the higher platforms - not, I seem to remember, the last one - that achievement popped. I thought at the time it was for reaching a certain point in the climb and it may have been but if so it was also trigger for something much more spectacular. 

I'd started climbing in the late afternoon and now night had fallen and suddenly the sky was full of blue fire. A meteor shower, processing very slowly across an arc of the heavens, moving not at all like falling stars. Over the course of several minutes the sky lit up from side to side in a great, glowing arc, a rainbow made out of only indigo and blue.

It's one of the more memorable events I've seen in gaming, all the more so for being both unexpected and understated. It felt like it just happened and I just happened to be there. Perhaps it was linked to my climb (I just googled it and it seems you have to be up the tower when the meteor show happens to get the achievements but whether being there also causes it is unclear.) but even if it was, Flora doesn't know that. 

For her it's just a thing that happened. Lucky for her she had her camera. 

Badgers And Bears

As longtime readers will most likely have realized, I'm in the infatuation period with Neverness to Everness right now. Not so much the honeymoon period, although that too. 

The honeymoon period is where you want to spend all your time playing the game and everything about it seems amazing and wonderful. The infatuation period is worse because you also want to tell everyone about it.

And no-one wants to listen. Honestly, who wants to hear someone banging on and on about their new crush? Who wants them bringing it up in every conversation, at every opportunity, shoe-horning it in when it's not even remotely relevant? 

So, in an attempt to inject some much-needed variety into what would otherwise be a stream of posts about a game most people aren't remotely interested in, judging by the page views (Seriously, I was expecting a spike but what I got was a slump.) I'll see if I can't come up with something else, just for a day. God knows, we'll be back to Hethereau soon enough. Oh yes.

And guess what? Today just happens to be one of those very rare days I already had earmarked for a specific topic. I hardly ever do that. 

It's not that I marked Friday 1 May in my calendar or anything. It's that I was always planning to post something about the day I earned my next badge in NightCafe and today just happens to be that day.

Yes, I was a Horse and now I'm a Bear! 

Don't look at me that way. I didn't make these titles up. If I had, I sure as hell wouldn't have called anything a bear. I like most animals but I make an exception for bears. Bears are not nice at all. They just have inexplicably good PR.

MassivelyOP today has an Overthinking column on the pernicious nature of log-in rewards, dailies and similar schemes. I posted a comment that's mighty ironic when you consider what I'm about to say next, which is that not only do I do the NightCafe daily every day, without fail, but that I treat it like it's one of the most important things I do all day. 

If I even suspect I might be about to miss one I come out in a cold sweat. I did miss one - actually several - way back in last year and it still gives me the shivers thinking about it. 

Nightcafe has a lot of badges you can earn. Win. Get. Whatever you call it. I mean a lot.

When you get a badge it gets crossed off the list. As you can see, I don't have many. Which is fine. I don't want any of them except for the login streak ones. Those I do want.

Why? Beats me!

This is the thing with streaks, isn't it? You get stuck in one and you don't want to break it. For reasons.

I got started on the streak for an actual reason. One that made sense at the time. Every day you log in and do the log-in daily, you get credits. It used to be ten but now it's "at least five" because they halved the guarantee but they also added random bonuses. 

You can get as many as fifty credits if you're extremely lucky. I've only had that happen once. I often get more than five, though.

Credits are obviously what you need to use the service, so if you don't want to pay a subscription or buy credits directly, you'll want all the free ones you get.

Except you won't. Not really. Or I don't, anyway. 

I use NightCafe fairly regularly. Mostly it's when I need an illustration or two for a post that doesn't naturally generate its own in the form of screenshots, videos I can embed from YouTube or photos I can take myself, any and all of which I will use in preference to an AI illustration, now the novelty of AI has long worn off, along with the gilt, the glamor and the glitz.

I don't have too many posts like that and usually it only takes me a handful of prompts to get something suitable (Useable, anyway.) so I don't need a lot of credits. The first generation each day is free, anyway, and often one shot is all it takes.

I'd guess that in an average month I might get through twenty credits, tops. Some months I don't use any. I currently have 6,517

Earlier this year, there was a move to have free credits expire but the idea was received so badly the plan was canceled. Instead, some changes were made to reduce how many free credits you can get and how you can use them but I can't honestly see it's made much of a difference. I still get far more than I'm ever likely to need and I can still make as many AI images as I ever did and as fast as I ever could.

And yet I keep on doing the dailies, even though I don't need the credits. It's all because of the streak. And the titles. Badges. Whatever you want to call them. 

I was a Bee, then I was an Owl, then a Horse and now I'm a Bear. Why those particular animals? No idea. 

Next comes Eagle. I want to be an Eagle. I like Eagles more than I like Bears. Not that I especially like Eagles either but they're better than bears. Everything's better than bears. Well, nearly everything...

Getting to be an Eagle means logging in another 165 days without a single missed day. I'll be an Eagle in October or I'll be mightily pissed off because if I'm not, that'll mean I missed a day and I'll have to start all over again. It's a brutal system but then that's how streaks are. Streaks are pure evil.

For a while I was using the daily log-in to run an experiment. I posted about how I used the same prompt every day to see what variations I could get. After I got bored doing that, I started making up prompts on the fly but that soon got to feel like too much work so I slumped into just clicking on one of the suggested prompts each day.

The suggested prompts are weird. I've used today's and it won't reshow the window so I can't give a specific example but it's always much the same.

 There are maybe a dozen prompts, almost always revolving around the same themes and subjects, some combination of spacecraft, spacemen, dystopias, cities, dirigibles, noir, neon, art deco, badgers, foxes, aviators, explorers and detectives.  

For a while I thought it must be pulling ideas from the prompts I've submitted. I still think it probably is doing that but if it is, it's making a very odd selection and it's certainly nothing even close to random or even varied. It's broadly the same set of prompts every day with some mild variations, with the very occasional, extremely left-field entry, like last week's "vintage toaster aggressively ejecting a perfectly browned slice of toast, all rendered with the exaggerated colors and graphic intensity of 1970s pop art magazine illustrations"

There have to be more prompts in my back catalog that mention dust bowls, corn-fields, line art and retro-futurism just from the aforementioned experiment alone but none of that seems to come up at all. Nor do superheroes, hedgehogs or dogs, all of which I must have prompted for at least as often as badgers or foxes. Not to mention line art, which I prompt for almost every time.

The only input I have to the whole sad, sorry process is flipping through the options and picking whichever takes my fancy. I tend to take the fox option every time it presents itself and most of the badgers. 

In NightCafe's world, Badgers are all grizzled old P.Is or crusty academics. Foxes lean towards aviation and space travel and also sometimes present as animals rather than anthromorphs.

There is absolutely no point to me doing any of this, of course. It's even less a valid use of my time than the Overseer missions I do every day in EverQuest II. At least those occasionally give me some reward I can actually use, even most of it just takes up space. 

Arguably, running even a single AI image every day might even do harm to something more than just my sanity and self-respect, although I can't say I'm able to make myself feel all that guilty about the five or ten seconds of processing time it's taking.

The really sad part of all this is that I enjoy it. OK, maybe not "enjoy" but I do sort of look forward to it each day and I do sort of feel pleased with myself when I'm done.

It's part of my routine. I feel very slightly good about things when I remember to do it, as if I've done something I ought to be doing and someone is going to be pleased with me because of it. I haven't and they're not but that's not the point.

If I stopped doing it, though, I'd almost certainly not miss it. Well, not after a week or two. These are lightly ingrained habits, nothing etched deep. They fade fast Or I hope they do. Not that I'm about to test it.

Are they also harmless? Maybe. 

I do have a lot of pictures of badgers now, anyway, so that's something. I mean, you can't have too many pictures of badgers, can you? And now I've shared some of them in this post, you can have pictures of badgers too. Granted, they aren't very good pictures of badgers but then that's AI for you.

I bet you wish I'd posted something about Neverness To Everness now!

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

Nah. Not going there. I didn't write the prompts, I didn't choose the models, I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything, and anyway it was all the fault of those pesky NightCafe kids...

You Take The Train, I'll Take The Bus This Time: Transport Options In Neverness To Everness

Hethereau is without doubt the biggest video-game city I've ever visited. I've seen it compared to Grand Theft Auto's Los Santos but since I've never played GTA5, I can't say if there's any validity in the comparison or, if there is, which might be the larger.

It certainly feels a lot bigger than Genshin Impact's Mondstadt  or Liyue or Wuthering Waves' Jinzhou, anyway. And it also feels a lot more like a real city, by which I guess I mean a city you might find in the world in which we all live, something that makes it feel almost disturbingly convincing at times. 

I keep getting the feeling it's somewhere I might have been, once. Even though much of the architecture has a South-East Asian look to it, there are streets and plazas that remind me quite strongly of some Spanish cities I've visited.

With a city this big, there needs to be some way to get around. I haven't been playing remotely long enough to produce any kind of Travel Guide To Hethereau but I can offer a few anecdotal experiences. 

Walking, Running and Sprinting: 

The obvious way to start exploring any city is on foot. In the real world, that almost always means walking but in game-cities the default pace is usually a steady lope or a gentle jog. No-one walks when they can run.

In Neverness To Everness, you run unless the game decides you ought to walk. I was surprised, several times, to find my pace dropping to a stately stroll when I entered certain buildings, vehicles or specific outdoor areas. If there's an option to walk voluntarily, I haven't found it yet but I imagine there must be, assuming they have role-players in Hethereau.

Sprinting definitely does come under the direct control of the player. Just hold down Shift. As you'd imagine, it requires stamina, the amount of which you have left is shown in a tiny, unobtrusive, diminishing arc next to your character. So far I haven't run out of stamina before I chose to stop sprinting so it's a generous allocation compared to too many games, where you run out of puff before you reach the end of your front path.

Climbing: 

You can climb just about anything. Buildings, fences, vehicles, you name it. If it goes up, you can climb it like Spider-Man. This also use stamina but once again it seems unlikely you'll run out before you reach the top or at least some intermediary flat space, where you can rest a moment and refill your stamina bar.

Swimming:  

Also an option although the only time I've had to use it was when I fell off a parapet trying to snatch an Oracle Stone from a raven. (It's a thing. Don't ask. We'll get to it here, some day, I'm sure.) Swimming uses stamina too and again it gets you a lot further than it would in many other games I've played.

In other water-related travel news, there are boats in the harbor but whether or not sailing is going to be an option I couldn't say. We can but hope!

Gliding: 

Gliding is available almost from the start. There's a very brief moment where a tip pops up to tell you all you need to do is hold RMB but it passes so quickly you might miss it altogether. In fact, I might have imagined it. 

I think I discovered I could glide when I jumped off a roof and tried to turn in mid-air and found I was hanging from an anomaly that appeared to be keeping us both in the air by flapping its ears. I also think I'm meant to know who or what the anomaly is. I'm pretty sure we were introduced at one point. You can get different glider skins but the default is this little fellow and he's fine. 

Unlike sprinting, climbing and swimming, gliding doesn't use stamina so you can stay aloft as long as you can find more air below you. There's also no falling damage so it's 100% safe as far as I can tell. Don't sue me if it's not!

Driving:  

This is supposedly a big part of the game but after about three or four hours play the only motorized transport I've got is a scooter. It's a really smart, red one, though. Looks like a classic 1960s Lambretta to me. 

I'd love to tell you how I got it but I have absolutely no idea. I was just jogging through the city last night when I noticed an option of some sort had popped up. I didn't read it very carefully and I can't remember what it said but I do know that after I clicked it, I had a scooter and I still do.

Maybe it pops up the first time you go near enough to one. There are plenty parked on street corners around the city. Or maybe it comes after you've done some quest or entered some area or spoken to some NPC. It'd be lovely to explain how it happened but I can't. I guess I could look it up... ah, yes, it's part of the Prologue questline, apparently. 

The scooter is pretty easy to ride although cornering is... interesting. I found out about the prison system in NTE by crashing my bike into something when I missed a turn. The bike was fine but I picked up some Warrant points for damaging public property. Get enough of those and it's a spell in the pokey for you. Or, more importantly, for me!

Traveling By Train: 

In common with quite a few games I've enjoyed, Neverness To Everness lets you get around by train. Unlike almost every one I can think of, though, that doesn't mean clicking on something that looks like a train or a train station and being teleported to the next stop. 

It doesn't even mean entering a train, sitting down and being treated to a cut-scene of your journey. In NTE it really does mean getting on a train and sitting down (Or standing up, if you prefer.) while the train rattles along the tracks in real time.

I have played other games where that happens but the difference here is that the train is an actual, physical object in terms of the gameworld. You can climb up on top of the carriage and ride outside for the whole journey. I've done it. You can jump off anywhere along the way, too. And that!

The train comes complete with other passengers, opening and closing doors, realistically lengthy stops at every station and not at all helpful announcements. Just like the real thing except you don't have to pay and no-one asks to see your ticket. Well, if you don't have to pay, I guess you wouldn't need a ticket... 

Taking The Bus: 

This is the one that floored me. As you jog around the city, you'll see lots of bus stops, often with people waiting for a bus. Sometimes you'll hear an NPC complaining the bus is late or they've missed it. I thought this was flavor and it is but that doesn't mean there isn't a real bus service.

I only found out because I decided to sit down at a bus stop and take a screenshot. I thought it would look cool. As I was framing the shot, a bus pulled up at the stop. I looked at it, expecting it to pause and then move on. Maybe an NPC might even get off. But no, the doors opened and the bus stayed there.

So I got on. I mean, why wouldn't I? The bus, unlike the train carriage, is a bit of a tight fit. The camera didn't like me swinging it about so it was hard to get a decent angle but I was able to sit down inside and get a shot of me through the window, riding the bus. 

I think this is a first. I can't remember any game I've ever played, on or offline, single or multiplayer, that let me ride in a bus. Not that it's been my great ambition but still...

The bus isn't quite as realistic as the train. You can't get up and walk out the door when it stops or I couldn't, anyway, although that might have been the camera. Maybe it is possible and I just couldn't manage it. What I had to do instead was press "F", which deposits you on the sidewalk, just like it does when you want to get off your bike. 

I don't know if you can jump on top of the bus like you can the train and street-surf through town. I haven't tried it. Yet. I can't see why not, though.

Boothing It: 

And finally there's the Booth network, NTE's form of instant travel. Dotted all over the city are structures that look almost identical to the classic red K6 telephone box, as found all over Britain until mobile telephony rendered public telephones irrelevant. You have to visit these and activate them, after which you can 'port from one to another. 

Or so the game tells you. I've activated a few but I haven't used any yet. I'm having far too much fun exploring on foot, by bike, on the train and by bus. Why would I want to miss out on all of that, just to save a few minutes?

At the moment, in fact, I'm not even particularly interested in following the plot or developing my character. I just want to explore this fascinating city for myself, without any agenda or purpose other than the fun of seeing something new. Plenty of time to get on with the plot when it all starts to feel a bit too familiar.

That might take a while... 

Welcome To Hethereau. Very First Impressions Of Neverness To Everness

 

Big day today: Neverness To Everness goes live. 

Went live, actually. At 3am. I took the trouble to look up the exact time, just in case it was late afternoon in the UK or something. Didn't want to be sitting around all day, waiting for the doors to open.

And then, of course, I woke up and forgot about it until after breakfast, by which time it Beryl was ready for her walk. And it's a lovely day, warm and sunny, so we made it a long one, meaning I didn't get to sit down with the game until after eleven. Now that wouldn't have happened a decade ago!

Luckily, I had at least remembered to pre-download the client yesterday. All 50 gigs of it, which isn't really as big as all that by modern standards. The download was very fast, too. Big pipe.

Even so, there was, inevitably, another patch to install before I could log in. And a replacement for the launcher to install before that. And finally the damn shaders had to compile...

Eventually I got in. After which it was all a bit of a whirlwind ...

I like media that don't waste time with introductions. I like books and movies that start in the middle of the story and leave you to figure out the plot. I like world-building where the building has all been done before you get there and all the characters act like you know as much about the world they live in as they do. 

I like to be overwhelmed with new ideas, concepts and jargon and to be left to figure out what it all means from context. If the writing is good, context should be more than enough to go on.

Neverness To Everness opens like that. Just like that. And then it goes on the same way, at least for the first hour, which is about as long as I've played because after that I had to stop for lunch and after lunch I started writing this, which I kind of wish I wasn't... 

I'd say I can't wait to get back to Hethereau but clearly I can because if I couldn't I wouldn't be typing now, would I? But you know what I mean...

Games don't often stick with the "throw them in the deep end" approach for long for the simple reason that you generally need to be told how to play a game in a way you don't have to be told how to read a book or watch a movie. You can only take a player so far with an opening movie and a cut scene. At some point you have to hand over the controls. And then explain what the controls do.

NTE does a pretty fair job of sliding out of that one. For a start, it avoids character creation almost completely. The entire thing consists of one click - do you want to look like a boy or a girl? Doesn't even ask you for a name. That comes later, when you sign what very much looks like your life away. 

No option on that, by the way. I might have opted out if there had been.

Then, for quite a while longer - fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe half an hour - the only instructions you get are to use WASD to move and Space to jump. Even when the fighting starts, you don't get any hints on what to do. The developers trust you to know. You've played games like this before, right? 

Yes, well, as it happens, I have. Even if I am ancient and the game did feel the need to query my age when I set up the account (And I knocked a couple of years off, too, because who gives their real birth date to any of these people?), even then I have played games before where all you really need to do is click LMB for your light attack and RMB for your heavy attack...

...which won't work here because RMB is Dodge. So, fine, I've played those too. Actually I prefer it that way. Much easier than having to hit Ctrl. And as for the Ultimates and Specials, you can see the keys on screen, just like you always can. Seriously, no-one needs to be told this stuff, right?

Yeah, sure. Until the second or third fight, when the game starts to let you into the secret of how complicated combat is going to get. All that stuff about timing dodges to get parry and how to work with the rest of your team for heals and buffs and how to set up Breaks and...

Heh. Important? Sure it is. I know enough to know that none of that is going to matter for a long time, if at all. Not to me. Not the way I play. And if it does, I'll play something else instead.

For now, just button mashing and hitting the specials when they light up looks like it's going to be plenty good enough. It took me through all the fights up to the one where the Boss is Level 9 while you're still Level 1, anyway. See, at this stage, the developers don't want you to lose these fights. Later on, when they're trying to sell you something, then maybe they'll want you to lose but not until they've gotten you good and hooked first.

Meanwhile, as the fights are going on and the game is giving you suggestions on how to win, the story is exploding around you. It's a kinetic introduction to what I'm kind of hoping will be quite a sedentary game, at least the way I plan on playing it. I'm more interested in the getting an apartment, driving a car and running a business side of things than the spinning 360 degrees upside down in mid air to kick some bad guy in the back of the head part.

But it's a good story. Or, rather, it's a good show. Something is happening all the time and most of what's happening is psychedelic or surreal or both at once. It's like a 1990s Grant Morrison comic, come to life. 

After about ten minutes I was pretty clear on what game I was playing. The elevator pitch for this one must have been "What if Once Human and Wuthering Waves had a baby?". 

And you know that's going to work for me. What are my two favorite new games of the last two or three years? Yep, those two. Not that I'm playing either of them anymore but that's on me, not the games. Harder and harder to hold my interest for long, these days. Still, those two together racked up a few hundred hours of my time. If this one can match either it'll be doing just fine for itself, the way I'm keeping score.

That's speculation but one positive thing I will say for NTE up front is that it feels like a very comfortable fit. I barely had to look anything up. All the controls do what I expect them to do. All the key binds are where they should be. I haven't had to change anything yet. Nothing at all. 

There was only one thing I even had to go into settings to check and that was whether there was a screenshot key and, if so, what it was. Alright, two things. Be like that! 

And there are two keys: F8 and F9. The first is for snapshots, the second for photographs. The only difference I can see is that there are a few more controls in the latter. Not many, though. Not yet. I'd expect that to change later.

What's there already is more than enough for me, in any case. I'd been using Win+PrtScr up to then anyway and that worked fine. I was only looking to see if I could get some shots without the UI. 

Speaking of the UI, it's delightfully minimal and you can make it transparent if you like. Can't get more minimal than invisible.

Enough of the technicalities. I'm sure I'll get into all of that later. This is just an extremely early first impressions piece and my extremely early first impressions are very favorable. The game looks great, it sounds great, the characters are engaging, the voice acting is easy on the ear, the writing is sharp, the translation is fluent...

What's not to like? Well, I'm sure there'll be something but whatever it is, I haven't run into it yet. I probably shouldn't be making any broad statements and assertions at this stage, anyway, good or bad. I've barely been in the game an hour. 

Perhaps the most positive thing I can say about the game so far is that I'm very eager to cut this short and get back to it. That I'd rather be playing NTE than writing about it is about the strongest recommendation I can offer right now.

So if it's all the same to everyone, I'm going to do just that. More commentary and analysis to follow, I'm sure, by which time we can only hope I may even know what I'm talking about. 

First time for everything!