There's Something In The Water! There, In The Distance! I can Just Make It Out! It's... It's GW3!

There were other things I had in mind for today's post, things I'm a lot more interested in and that I'd certainly enjoy writing about a lot more, but I suppose I have to write about this now. ArenaNet officially announced Guild Wars 3 at this year's Summer Games Fest. There was a pre-event puff that told us they were going to announce something and some people thought that might be GW3. I was not one of those people. 

Then again, I was also not one of those people who cared all that much what they were going to announce. I was mildly curious but I assumed it would be some new thing for one of the two existing Guild Wars games, neither of which I play and neither of which I plan on playing, either now or in the near or distant future. 

I find myself in a very uncomfortable relationship with the Guild Wars franchise these days, particularly GW2. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played both games together and had some good times over a number of years but, while I remember the original fondly enough, the sequel is problematic. 

We played the original Guild Wars for maybe less than two months, back when it was new. We started a few weeks after launch because at first, like a lot of people, we thought it was a pure PvP game. ArenaNet's soon to become familiar misleading marketing making its presence felt, probably, since that was how it was reported until it launched, when players found out there was a massive PvE component, too.

Six or eight weeks was long enough to complete the original campaign, after which there didn't seem much point staying so we left. I've returned to GW1 a few times since, finished another of the campaigns, seen something of the rest and generally disported myself in an increasingly desultory fashion until I finally lost interest altogether. Mrs Bhagpuss has never gone back.

When Guild Wars 2 was announced, name recognition was enough to have both of us sign up and participate in the beta weekends. The game turned out to be radically different from anything else around at the time and it suited us both very well. We ended up playing for about ten years without a break, from launch in 2012 until after the pandemic. It was Mrs. Bhagpuss's only MMORPG and my main one and it formed the bulk of the content here at Inventory Full for many years. There are more than seven hundred posts here labeled "GW2".

Until today, there was only one post labeled "GW3". Now, I suppose, there will be a lot more. And I'm not very happy about it.

 Mrs Bhagpuss stopped playing GW2 a few years a go. It was her last MMORPG. She still plays video games, just not that kind. I gave it a few more weeks but, as I suspected, the only reason I'd been playing GW2 at all by then was because she did. As a game, I'd been done with it for a while.

I come away from most MMORPGs I've played for any length of time with warm feelings and an occasional desire to pop back in, see my old characters and catch up with what's been happening in the game. Not so GW2. I'm not quite the cliche bitter burnout, who wants to badmouth the game they used to love at every opportunity. It's a good game and I had good times in it. I wish it well.

At least, that's my rational, objective reaction. Emotionally, if I think about my time in the game at all, which I rarely do unless prompted by something like yesterday's announcement, it's with the kind of feelings I imagine people who've escaped from cults experience. Relief at being out. Anger at all that time and emotion wasted. A sense of grievance at having been used. And a dread of being somehow sucked back in.

Okay, that's over-dramatizing it. A little. I feel a bit niggled at the way ArenaNet consistently faffed and fudged and promised far more than they could fulfill. The way for years there was always jam tomorrow but never jam today. The countless revamps and revisions to cadence. The endless promises made and broken. The history of the development of the game is a litany of lurches and swerves, a directionless leadership forever searching for a path that leads somewhere and rarely, if ever, finding one.

My biggest complaint is with the story. For a franchise that claims to be built on lore and narrative, the stories were always thin, sparse and fragmented. Delivery was unreliable and sporadic and when we did get something it was never anything much. Even at the time, because I played other MMORPGs, I knew how meager the pickings were but at the time I did at least believe there was some quality there. 

That was mostly ignorance. Being locked as I was inside the MMORPG ecosystem, all my judgments were necessarily relative. The writing in GW2 was pretty decent - for an MMORPG. Unfortunately, what I wasn't entirely aware of was how degraded the genre is compared to others when it comes to storytelling.

Shouldn't I have known? Well, maybe. The thing is, until around about the time of the pandemic or maybe a bit later, I actively disliked getting any story in my MMORPGs. My motivations for playing are very well described in this post of Yeebo's. Narrative is the least of my concerns. 

In fact, it's something I actively tried to avoid whenever possible. One of the early posts about GW2 here on this blog bemoans ANet's insistence of making everything about the story. Especially about my character's "Personal Story". I really didn't like that concept, not in GW2 or Star Wars: the Old Republic or in any MMORPG that tries it on. To this day, with thousands of hours played in GW2, I have only ever completed the Personal Story on one character and that only under duress. 

The Personal Story wasn't the only core aspect of GW2 that meant nothing to me. The whole Legendary system was something I always loathed, too as was 100% map completion. 

In fact, there were probably more things about GW2 that I disliked than that I liked for the whole time I was there. It's a fiddly, nitpicking, pettifogging, mean-spirited game in so many ways, with check-lists that do their damnedest to bleed all the spontaneity out of exploring and systems cynically designed around making things just awkward enough that players will pay for convenience but not quite so irritating that they'll stop playing altogether.

Many people who've bounced off the game make these kinds of accusations. It has a reputation in that regard. But it has always been able to get by on the things it does well; a huge, exciting, vibrant open world that demands and rewards exploration; superb art direction; free and flowing movement in three dimensions; best-in-genre hot-join group combat... 

Things like that make it an exceptionally easy and rewarding game for in-the-moment play. If you go with the flow and don't let the game dictate to you, you can log in and find yourself effortlessly entertained for hours. It's only when you start to look for direction that it all falls apart. GW2 has some of them most unappealing, linear progression I've trudged through and much of that is down to the turgid, tedious story and the way what little of interest there is in it has to be stretched to make it last as long as possible by way of an interminable series of pointless set-piece fights.

Several years of modern, open-world games with all of GW2's benefits and few if any of its disadvantages, boss fights that last a fun couple of minutes instead of a miserable half an hour chief among them, have painfully demonstrated to me just how limited my horizons were while I was playing ANet's game all those years. I neither deny nor regret the many good times I had there, particularly in World Vs World, an area of the game gloriously free of all narrative structure, but the payoff for the effort involved seems poor.

And so to Guild Wars 3, which is coming in about eighteen months. Or rather the beta is. You can sign up for it now. I have, of course. 

That it's beta they're trumpeting and a long time from now is interesting in itself. No pre-alpha sign-ups. No alpha. And, I'll bet, no Early Access, either. Just a good old-fashioned beta, followed, if precedent serves, by a few open beta weekends and then launch. That'll be refreshing, at least. You can wishlist it on Steam, too, which I've also done because if it's on Steam from the get-go, that's where I'm going to play it. 

And yes I suppose I will play it although I'm very far from keen. It would seem churlish not to at least take a look. I'd say unprofessional only no-one's paying me. 

Since it's coming, like it or not, at this point I could go on to talk about the game itself, speculate what it might be like, start that conversation. But I won't, for a couple of reasons.

The first is we don't actually know anything yet. There's one video and some screenshots, all taken from that same video, which is apparently shot using the engine on which the game will run. There's also an extremely generic mission statement that makes it sound like they're making GW2 again only with modern action combat and a bit of parkour movement thrown in. 

This they call "a modern evolution of the genre that blends rich action-combat, character building, and skill collection." It sounds like the gacha games we're playing now, to me. 

How fresh that'll seem in 2028, probably the earliest GW3 will go live, remains to be seen. It will probably be a shock to many MMORPG players, those who've stayed inside the stockade these last few years, just like GW2 was a shock back in 2012. That game genuinely did feel so different back then that Anet had to jump in quick to fix it up to feel more familiar for the many curious WoW players that were bouncing off it within minutes of poking their heads in to see what this strange new MMO was all about.

The real reason I'm not going to go into speculation mode, though (You can probably sense me trying to stop myself doing it right now.) is that we've got a sodding year and a half of this ahead of us and I don't want to contribute to the feeding frenzy. All that arguing over things no-one knows. All the fantasies and wishes that turn into promises that were broken before they were even made. It's going to be exhausting.

And I'll be very nearly seventy when the damn game comes out! What if it turns out to be good? What If I end up playing it for as long as I played GW2 and then I find out it really wasn't all that good all along but I just didn't realize because playing it blurred my perspective? Then I'd be eighty and I'd have wasted another decade on a game that was pretty good at times but often not very good at all. 

That doesn't sound like the best use of whatever time I have left, now, does it? Do I really want GW3 to be my last chance at a good MMORPG? If so, the omens aren't good. Just look at the record.

But then, I don't imagine ANet is making games with the gray gaming market in mind. Millennials and GenZ are the target, I'd imagine, since GenAlpha famously doesn't play traditional video games at all. Grab your share of the shrinking market while it's there. It's never going to get any bigger.

And now I need to stop because I'm already slipping into the swamp of speculation. There's going to be a Guild Wars 3 but it's not until next Fall so let's all agree to forget about it until then.

Promise? 

Last Year's Movies Today! Superman (2025)

This was going to be a Grab Bag post but the first item ran away with me so now it's just a review of a movie that came out a year ago. And not even a proper review at that. 

It's the Superman movie I'm talking about. I posted about it several times in 2025 but I'm too lazy to go back and find the posts and link them. No-one would click through anyway, so what would be the point? I mean, hell, what are the Labels for, if not for anyone to find stuff, if they're interested? Not to mention the very efficient search function. Anyone ever use that? No. Thought  not.

Ahem. So, Superman...

I said before the movie came out last summer that I'd probably go see it at the cinema. I was hyped for it after the excellent trailers. Well, that didn't happen.

So then I said I'd put the DVD on my Birthday/Christmas wishlist. I did and I got it and I still didn't watch it because apparently owning a movie on DVD is exactly the same, psychologically at least, as watching it. 

Either before or after I got my own hard copy, the movie turned up on one of the streaming services I subscribe to and I didn't even watch it then. Often I do end up streaming things I own on DVD, sometimes things I've owned for years and never gotten around to watching, because it's just easier that way, isn't it? But I didn't stream Superman. 

We got to 2026 and I still hadn't seen it and all the Supergirl trailers started rolling up and they looked even better than the Superman ones and we got closer and closer to the release date (Which is June 26, I just checked. I knew it was this month.) and I made a "firm decision" to go see that one in the cinema, for real this time, which made me think I probably ought to get around to watching the first one, since they kind of fit together somehow.

And I probably still wouldn't have done anything about it, had Redbeard not felt the need to post about the rotunda at the Cincinnati Museum Center and to include in that post a clip of a scene from the Superman movie and that was what finally tipped me over the edge. 

Sidebar: Material to my decision to watch the movie, I should say that, following the  death of my mother earlier this year at the age of 93, we've acquired a very good 4K Sony TV. I was left "the chattels" in my mother's will, one of which this was. "Chattels" means literally everything in the house except the house itself, which has to be sold and the proceeds split 50/50 with my step-brother, although now we're getting into too much detail for a post about the Superman movie, I think. My mother came up with the chattels thing because a few years back, when her sister died at the age of, I think, 91, she left my mother her chattels, none of which my mother wanted or kept, except for a copper bedpan, which is now in our house but which I believe may have come from my aunt originally. Why we have it? That you'd need to ask Mrs Bhagpuss.

I seem to have drifted a long way from the Superman movie. I only mentioned the TV because the arrival of an actually good set in this house for the first time in at least twenty-five years has led directly to me going downstairs and sitting on the sofa for the specific purpose of watching things. (We live almost entirely upstairs for what are, I'm sure, perfectly good reasons, if I could remember them.). That's how I came to watch The Burroughs, the first seven episodes at least, and having watched the final episode on the laptop I can say with certainty that it does, in fact, make a big difference, watching it on a big screen, after all, something I never really believed before.

Not that I watched The Burroughs in in 4K. It was in HD on the TV and the laptop because you have to pay Netflix more money for 4K and I never have yet and don't have any plans to start. HD seems like more than enough detail to me, anyway, at least on a screen as good as this one. Probably on a better laptop than mine it would, too.

And that's eight paragraphs without a single word about the movie itself so here's my tl:dr for the rest of the post in case you're feeling like you've already put in the work:

It was great! I loved it! Four stars (Out of five). Maybe not a classic but definitely a must-see. As good as I was hoping and better than I expected. Best Superman movie I've seen and I haven't seen them all. 

Which is a bit surprising, really, even to me. Why haven't I seen them all?

Let me think. I saw the first, with Christopher Reeve, on release at the cinema. The best thing about it was that it was Superman! In the cinema! Hard to imagine what a total novelty that was at the time. 

I saw the second in the cinema too but the third and fourth only on TV. They went downhill a bit but they were not untrue to some of the comics. Just mostly not true to the good ones. 

Then there was a big gap until Superman Returns, which I'm pretty sure I've never seen anywhere, so I should probably do something about that, and next there was Man of Steel, for which I returned to the cinema to catch it on release although why I thought it was worth the effort escapes me now. Clearly I didn't think enough of it to bother with the follow-up, the awkwardly-titled Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice which I may or may not own on DVD ( I genuinely don't know if I do or not.) but have definitely never watched. Is it technically even  a Superman movie, though? I mean Batman's name comes first...

So, I've seen six of the eight Superman movies and the latest one is the best by a wide margin. Best for a DC fan, that is. Maybe not for a general audience. Probably can't beat the first one for that. 

Or maybe you even need to be a long-time fan for this one. I know the Snyder movies were fan favorites with some fans but then I believe there's a cadre with a much deeper belief in Zack Snyder's vision for the franchise than I've ever had. I bet every one of them is at least a couple of decades younger than me, too. 

Apart from having a coherent plot for a change and the acting being excellent throughout, neither of which can be said about all, or even most, of its predecessors, Superman (2025) is the one that feels most like the comics to me. It feels like it was made by a fan for other fans without ever resorting to actual fan service. 

One of the very best things about it is the way James Gunn gets all the backstory out of the way in a few lines of text over the opening sequence. As a lifelong superhero comics reader, I am so fed up of every superhero movie feeling it has to start by explaining who the leads are, how they got their powers, what their powers are - all that basic stuff that surely to God anyone who cared enough to buy a ticket already knows. I mean, if you watch a sports movie, they don't generally begin by telling you how the game got started and explaining all the rules...

If that's good, though, the way the movie pretty much never stops to explain who anyone is is even better. It's just so refreshing. All the nods and winks to the at least half a century of comics' history are there, in profusion, for anyone who wants them but if you don't know, you don't need to know and neither the writers nor the director is going to tell you.

As a longtime fan of the Daily Planet newsroom as much as I am of Superman, I was stoked to see not just Lois, Jimmy and Perry but also Steve Lombard and Cat Grant. And they were just working there, saying things people say when they work in an office together. Just so good to see and hear.

There was one more Planet staffer I didn't pick up on, too, although I thought maybe I remembered him from the Eliot S Maggin days. I just looked him up and it was Ron Troupe, a character who actually wasn't introduced until the early '90s, by when i think Maggin had moved on and just around when I was slowly drifting out of the fandom myself. But I do remember Ron now I'm reminded and I did know I knew him when I watched the movie, even if I couldn't quite remember who he was, so that's exactly the kind of rich textuality I'm talking about.

It's always interesting to watch the various interpretations of Lois and Jimmy. Lois Lane seems to be an almost indestructible character. I've seen more versions of her than I can remember and I can't think of a bad one. She's always well-cast, all the actors who play her look like the woman in the comics and she's almost always written as a competent, skilled, professional with a sharp wit and a fast mind. It must be a popular part to get, I'd think. This Lois, though, also felt likeable, which is by no means one of the character's core traits. Some Loises have been stinkers. I prefer a softer Lois to a harder one but I'd have to admit the hard ones are probably closer to the four-color archetype.

Speaking of colors, what is with it Jimmy's hair? Why is it almost never ginger in the movies the way it always is on the page? I mean, Lois and Clark never go blond, do they? So why does Jimmy so often have nondescript brownish hair on screen? Or at least that's what I was thinking this time, until that scene near the end, when they all run up to the roof of the Planet building so Lois can fly them away in Mr Terrific's ship (Don't ask...) and the sun hits Jimmy's hair and you can clearly see the auburn tint. So he is a redhead after all!

Jimmy doesn't have a big role but he still manages to give a really good impression of the kind of bumptious, chance-taking personality that got him his own comic all those years. He sees trouble and he runs straight at it. And in this case the trouble is Lex Luthor's girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher (A great call-back to the first run of movies.) who, impossibly and yet somehow inevitably, turns out to be seeing Jimmy on the side, something that would totally happen in Jimmy's comic, if nowhere else in the universe. 

Gunn appears to know these characters and their history so much better than most Hollywood people who've had the use of them in the past. They said he'd be a safe pair of hands and on this evidence, they were right.

Talking of Lex... this is probably the most evil version I've seen on screen. Usually he has at least one redeeming feature. Sometimes he's positively sympathetic. Not here. Here, he's a sociopathic, sadistic megalomanic with a very, very thin skin and absolutely no tolerance for personal criticism. Putting this Lex up there on screen is making a statement. He's code for... well, we all know what and who he's code for, I'm sure. When Krypto throws him around like a chew-toy at the end, I bet half the audience is cheering. I was laughing too hard or I would have been, too.

Obviously, Krypto is great. He steals every scene he's in. How much of it is dog acting and how much CGI is hard to say and also I could not care less. I just want more of his antics. Looking forward to much more Krypto in Supergirl. As she says in her cameo at the very end, he is her dog, after all. 

And finally, in what appears to have turned into a round-up of the characters rather than an actual review, there's The Justice Gang (Not their real name...) That was an unexpected pleasure, especially since it's three characters I either know little about or wish I didn't.

Hawkgirl is severely underused but she really makes the most of her few scenes. Her deadpan tone and expression are devastatingly effective. The bit where she demonstrates just exactly how much not like Superman she is was sheer joy, even if I knew it was coming from the moment the fool she was carrying opened his mouth to taunt her.

Mr Terrific, a character I've barely even noticed in the comics, was so central to the plot he could have demanded co-star billing. Again, he was deadpan as hell and it worked beautifully. The movie as a whole does a great job of balancing action, pathos and humor, which I guess is James Gunn's super-power. I know it's not going to work for everyone but it's right on the money for me.

And finally, Guy Gardner. I would have said it was impossible to put a version of that character on screen that would both be true to the original but wouldn't alienate most  of the audience - but they did it. Just about. 

They have softened him up some. The movie Guy is a lot less stupid, arrogant and abrasive than the one in the comics I read. He comes across as blunt and abrupt, a bit like Batman probably would if he wasn't so keen on presenting as cool and mysterious although, unlike Batman, he does have a noticeable sense of humor, albeit not a very sophisticated one. On the plus side, this Guy did seem like he was at least competent and willing to compromise, two things no-one ever accused the Guy Gardner in the comics of being.

Anyway, so, I liked it. A lot. And apparently I have nothing meaningful to say about it beyond that. So I'll stop. Let's come back in a few weeks and do this all over again. For Supergirl next time.

Here She Comes Now (Feat. Lacrimosa)

I'm almost embarrassed to post this after last time but if I'm going to be straight about it, I'm more embarrassed about how much I wanted to post about it yesterday evening, right after it happened. It's how they get you, isn't it? Hah! Well, Hotta! You may have got me but you didn't get my money! 

Not sure why I'm crowing about not having paid the company that's given me so much great entertainment this last month. It's not exactly putting it to the man, is it? More like stiffing the waitress on her tip. 

Sidebar: Do we still say "waitress" any more or is it like "actor" now, where the old, male-gendered version becomes the new, non-gendered preference? Although I have noticed "actress" coming back a little of late and doesn't universalizing the masculine to replace the feminine bring problems of its own, anyway? Then again, there's the way officers of all genders are addressed as "Sir" in the military and how Nanally calls Daffodil "Master" in the game... This stuff is just weird, sometimes. I can see why people try to use completely ungendered terms like "Chair", awkward though they sound.  I have seen "wait staff" used instead of waiter and waitress but that's clunky and awkward and anyway "staff" itself was superseded by "colleague" a good while back, at least where I work, although that never really stuck either. This is what you come here for, isn't it? This sort of acute social insight. Admit it!

Also

Sidebar: I really like these sidebars I've invented. I think there might be a lot more of them coming, at least until I get bored and lose interest.

Can we please get on with the post now?  

Ok, getting back to the point, yes, I rolled on Lacrimosa as soon as the opportunity arrived and yes, I won her with the handful of Solid Dice I had left. I was unfeasibly pleased with myself, too, considering I had no control over anything that happened. Still, they do say you make your own luck. Whoever "they" are.

Lacrimosa is the featured character in the new banner that came with the big update yesterday. It has a version number - 1.1 - but also a nice, catchy name: Dreamwalk Corridor. 

The full details are here but the highlights are a new playable character (Lacrimosa, of course.) plus associated glider skins and outfit ("Sold seperately", as it would say in tiny print at the end of the commercial if Lacrimosa was a Barbie, which, come on, let's face it, she is.) and a new chapter in the MSQ, which takes place in a new location, Sunward Island. And a ton of other stuff, which you can read for yourself at that link above.

The new storyline and location I'll get to in another post but I will say I just started it and it's very good so far. This post isn't about that, though. It's just me, gloating explaining how I came to add Lacrimosa to my team, what she brings to it and what the implications are.

First of all, the mechanics involved in rolling for a new character. I explained some of it last time but I'm learning as I go and they're peculiarly over-complicated compared to other gacha games I've played. What I've been used to until now is a fairly simple system, where you accumulate a specific currency then spend it on "pulls" that play a flashy animation and then reveal what you've won. You can suppress the animation when you're bored of seeing it and just spend the currency for an instant result if you prefer.

For some reason, Hotta decided to gamify that a little by replacing the animation with a full 3D representation of a board game and showing an actual six-sided die rolling for each pull. The currency itself is literally dice - Solid for the board where you win the good stuff in the Limited Banners (That's "Limited" as in "time-limited", meaning they come and go.) and Fabricated for the permanent banner, where the regular characters are. 

 When you roll a dice, your little figure moves along the board that number of spaces, exactly as if you were playing any traditional board game. Every space has something on it so you always get a reward. Most of them are just upgrade materials but there are some decent odds and ends there as well as the Big Ticket Prize you're after. There are no squares where anything bad happens so you can't actually lose. You just win a lot of things you probably don't really want. 

The huge difference between this system and all the ones I've seen in other gacha games is that you can see the S-Class character you're after, right there on the board. As far as I can tell, there's absolutely nothing you can do to influence the route you take towards them. There's no skill involved, purely the luck of the dice, but as in any board game, merely being able to see the layout adds a huge amount of interest to every roll, something that doesn't figure at all in the lucky dip pulls of other games.

The whole "it's a game" aspect is enhanced by things that happen on certain squares, like bridges that pop up and let you change direction or skip whole sections of the board. Again, there's no way you can control any of this. There's no tactic you can use to improve your chances, but neither is there in Snakes and Ladders and people still play it like there is. That's psychology for you.

Every roll costs, naturally. That's how Hotta makes its money. Well, one of the ways. But you can have a few rolls for nothing because it wouldn't be much of a Free To Play game if you couldn't.

You can get a small number of Solid Dice and large number of Fabricated Dice for free by playing the game. I noted in my post about winning Hotori that I had a dozen Solid Dice back then. It took me just five pulls to win her and I haven't used any since, so when I came to roll on Lacrimosa I had seven Solid Dice left. It took me around twenty pulls to win Lacrimosa and now I have one Solid Dice left.

Wait? What? That's not right! Does mathematics work differently in Hethereau or something? Nope. Let me explain because I had no idea about any of this until I did it, either. This is how it went:

I decided I'd roll five of my seven Solid Dice because five is my favorite number and I don't like to go down to zero. I threw my five dice with no luck so... no, wait, actually that's not entirely true. I got an S-Class... something. I took a screenshot:

That looks like I won a car, doesn't it? After everything else was over, I remembered I'd seen this come up so I searched my bags for whatever it was but I couldn't find anything. Vehicles are an actual token that sits in your inventory and there wasn't a new one. I went through every tab, item by item. Nothing. I have no clue what I'm supposed to have won, if anything. It also has nothing to do with the Porsche collab that's happening in the game right now as far as I can tell. If I hadn't taken the screenshot, I'd have assumed I imagined it.

That aside, I hadn't won anything and I had just two Solid Dice left. I was going to stop but then I noticed an option to buy ten rolls for just one Solid Dice and about 1400 of some other currency. Hmm. There are quite a few currencies in the game already (I'm sure there will be more soon, too. There always are.) and I haven't paid much attention to any of them. 

I didn't recognize this one but I had a look and I had about 10,000 of them. It's called "Analith", which Gemini tells me is "The game's free premium currency, which can be farmed through open-world gameplay, achievements, and City Tycoon modes, and can be converted into limited Solid Dice." I probably should have known that.

Ten rolls for not much more then 10% of my stash seemed like a good deal so I took it. I didn't win anything good. That left me with one Solid Die. Well, what can you do with just one? So I took another ten. The Analith charge went up a little but it left me with about 7k of the stuff so that seemed okay. 

And on the fourth or fifth roll I got her. Winning was unreasonably satisfying but the run-up to winning was even more unreasonably exciting. Thanks to the board game conceit, I could see my little character token getting closer and closer to the square where Lacrimosa was waiting. When I got within a single dice-roll of her it was exactly like rolling in an actual board game. You know how many you need and you're willing the dice to land right-side up. 

And it did. I forget what I needed to roll. I think it might have been four. Whatever it was, I got it and with it, Lacrimosa. I still had five or six rolls left from the ten I'd bought so I used them as well. I don't think there's a way to save them for later. 

How much it cost me to win Lacrimosa depends how you're counting. I had seven Solid Dice and I used all of them so she cost me seven Solid Dice. That's clear. She also cost me something like three thousand Analith on top of that. And it took about twenty rolls to land on her. I didn't keep an exact count. As for real money, it cost me none at all.

I also won another Adler, which is useful because duplicates let you do some upgrading of the original, and Edward, who I wanted. I like Edward as a character and he's a healer, which I didn't have on my team yet (And haven't figured out how to use, either.) 

All in all, a very successful Limited Banner for me. I'm now two-for-two. Can't beat that. And since there's always a few weeks between banners, I ought to have enough Solid Dice for a few more rolls next time. If I'm sensible, I'll save them all for when Akane arrives, which everyone assumes she will at some point. Everyone wants Akane. I don't think there's anyone I want more, now I have Hotori and Lacrimosa and I have the unopened box that would let me choose Sakiri.

All of which brings me to the issue of what to do with Lacrimosa now I have her. You can only have four characters in a team but you can set up multiple teams and swap between them out of combat whenever you like. I immediately made a team featuring my character, Flora The Appraiser, Lacrimosa, Edward and Aurelia, who I have but had never used.  Then I got into a fight with an anomaly my regular team could handle in their sleep and although we beat it we all ended up half health except for Aurelia, who was dead.

This is the problem. If you get new characters and want to use them, you have to level them up and Ascend them and get them the right weapons and all that nonsense. That's how you end up having no upgrade mats or money instead of having far more of both than you know what to do with. And then you might consider spending some real money to get out of that hole and once again, that's how they get you!

 

Except that in Neverness to Everness there are plenty of good reasons to have lots of characters even if they're all still Level 1. I might do a whole post about this because it certainly deserves one but the short version is that every character has at least one special ability that can be used out of combat. Hotori, as I mentioned in the previous post, can literally stop time. Nanally can run up walls. And Lacrimosa can fly.

Okay, she can't fly very well. She turns into a cute but rather pathetic bat and kind of bobbles about. It's not hugely practical. If she moves in bat form it uses stamina, too, so it's of limited value as a means of transport. If she doesn't move, though, she can hang in the air indefinitely, which is interesting and possibly useful. She can also shoot out the tires of vehicles with her other out-of-combat ability but I'll save any more details for that other post, if I ever get round to it. If anyone wants to get ahead on that, here's where I found out about it all..

After the disastrous fight, I took time out to get Lacrimosa up to the level of the rest of my regular team. I'm thinking about whether to level up Edward but until I know how to get his healing into play I'll hold back on that. As for Aurelia, I think she's going to stay on the bench, for now anyway.

Another question is whether I want to start schmoozing Lacrimosa so she can come live in my apartment. I haven't really done much with the Affection system yet but I'm mildly interested in it. There are some attractive perks to be had there. 

Before any of that, though, there's a mystery to investigate on Sunward Island. And let me just say right now, I did not trust that teddy bear from the moment I saw him. I literally said so, out loud. But all that's for another time and another post.

You have to pace yourself, don't you? 

The Owls Are In The Walls (IYKYK, Right?)

In a vain attempt to prevent this blog from turning into All Neverness To Everness! All Day! Every Day!, something it could so very easily become, seeing as how I have so many ideas for posts - posts about what I'm doing in the game, what I'm thinking about the game, what the hell is going on in the game (Big mystery there and I don't mean the plot because - erm - what plot?), I thought I'd post about a TV show I just watched instead.

And for once it's something current! Not an old show from the nineties I finally got around to catching up with or even something from five or ten years ago. No, I actually watched a new show on Netflix while it was in the Top Ten. It was at #1 for a short while in the UK so I guess at least a few people reading this might have seen it too.

If that's you, feel free to carry on. If not, you might want to know up front that the whole of the rest of this post is going to be 

SPOILER CITY!!

Ah, yes. Spoilers aaall the way down from here on. At least I didn't use that flashing gif for the warning this time. That can be really annoying.

Okay, that's probably given everyone who wants to leave enough time to skedaddle. On with the post...

Didn't mention the name of the show yet, did I? It's The Boroughs. 

Let's see if I can do a quick precis of the premis: 

A bunch of old, rich people settle down to enjoy their golden years in a full-service, luxury retirement village somewhere in the desert only to find creepy monsters are sneaking into their condos at night and sucking out their brain juice. Shenanigans ensue.

Yeah, that about covers it but I left out the immortality, the sociopaths and the sentiment. Stir those in and you're good.

So, what actually happens is grieving widower, Sam. (Alfred Molina. Excellent.) gets dropped off at his new condo that his dead wife insisted they get before she died. (I'd say "obviously" but actually it's not so obvious as all that, as it turns out, since she keeps turning up after she's dead. In dreams. On the TV. In the kitchen.) 

Sam does not want to be there but if he leaves he loses all the money he put into buying the place. Or renting it. Or however it works. It's never explained, just like nothing in the whole damn show is ever explained. 

All he wants to do is get out of the contract and leave but he'd lose all his money (Seems unlikely but there it is.) so he's stuck with it. Until he has the great good luck to be attacked in his own home and lightly stabbed by the previous occupant, Edward (Ed Begley Jr. Great as always but wasted in a such a small role.)

Despite being offered all his money back if he'll just keep quiet and leave, the grumpy old git has started to make friends so he decides to stay. Bad idea. The very next day he finds one of his friends (Bill Pullman, good but brief.) dead of a heart attack because a nightmarish creature has been visiting him in the night and sucking out his cerebral fluid. Unsurprisingly, no-one believes this. More fools them. They'll learn.

I won't rehash the entire plot, although I could because I can remember it all, something that suggests it was quite vivid. It was that, alright. It just wasn't coherent, believable, convincing or sane. None of those. It was fun, though, which is the most important one.

The whole show is fun. It's so high-concept you could sky-dive off it. If you did, it'd be a bad idea to stop and think about it on the way down because you'd be none the wiser when you hit bottom and you'd have missed the great view. If you're the kind of person who likes things to make sense or be explained then you might not have such a good time with it as I did.

I don't always mind if things don't make sense so long as I'm having a good time. It's like riding a roller-coaster (Not that I like those. I do not like those.). It doesn't matter how the car stays on the tracks so long as it does. A thrill ride is a thrill ride so long as you don't come off at the corners and The Boroughs always manages to make those tight turns, somehow.

A lot of that is down to the cast. It's an impressive line-up. If you wanted to get a bunch of old people together for a TV show, you could do a lot worse than this. As well as the aforementioned Molina and Begley and Pullman you get Geena Davis, who does not look even close to being old enough to be in a retirement village. (I just looked her up and she's two years older than me. She looks twenty years younger in this and I look good for my age, let me tell you!) You also get Alfre Woodard, Denis O'Hare, Clarke Peters and a bunch of other people you absolutely will know from big shows and successful movies. 

These people know what they're doing and watching them do it is probably enough reason in itself to go with it but the script is pretty good, too. It doesn't have a whole lot of zingy one-liners but it's frequently wryly amusing and rarely feels awkward, which is quite the achievement if you stop to think about some of the things these people are doing, which honestly you really should not, not if you want to stay in the story. Some good meta bits, too, like the whole Thelma and Louise riff the writers have going on for a while.

Not that any of that makes a whole lot of sense but then what does? This post could so easily become one long litany of "Well, that wouldn't happen..." because even if you accept spider-like monsters that come out of your microwave oven at night to suck out your spinal-cerebral fluids through your open mouth as you sleep then go back to pump it into their mother-monster, who's being farmed by hundred year-old psychopaths for her blood because it makes them immortal, then The Boroughs is still hard to believe because of the way every single person deals with it when they find out. It's like they think they're in a TV show or something!

I mean, for one thing these people aren't prisoners. Okay, yes, eventually they are prisoners but not for most of the run of the show, they're not. They have cars and phones and families in the world beyond the gates. You're not telling me they don't go on vacation or on trips. They're clearly all pretty damn rich. They can leave if they want. We actually see one of them drive in and out and wave to the guard several times. It's only much later, when everything's already gone to hell, that they're trapped inside.

If you found out there were brain-sucking monsters in tunnels under your condo, monsters that were coming into your bedroom while you slept, sticking their feeder tentacles down your throat, making holes in you that can still be seen the next day if you just shine a light down there and look, would you stay another night to see if it happens again? I bloody wouldn't!

Of course, if anyone ever behaved rationally or logically in any supernatural horror show, there would be no supernatural horror shows. Just a lot of aerial shots of jammed roads as everyone tries to leave town at once. 

This is a supernatural horror show, in case that wasn't immediately obvious. It's from the same stable as Stranger Things. Well, the next stable along, maybe. The Duffer Brothers had something to do with it, anyway, although I suspect it may not have been that much. They're listed as "Executive Producers", which means nothing. Netflix is keen you should know the show bears their imprimatur all the same, obviously hoping that'll be enough to grab your interest. It works, too. That's how I came to start watching.   

But The Boroughs is nothing like Stranger Things. Except when it kind of is, which now I come to think about it, is quite often, really, what with all the tunnels and monsters and men in suits stepping out of big, black cars...

The pacing, though. That could not possibly be any more different. The Boroughs positively zips along. As soon as anyone has any kind of idea or plan they're on it the very next minute. No discussions. no arguments. No making diagrams or taking notes. Straight to the execution.

Events and even set pieces that would have filled a whole episode of Stranger Things barely manage a couple of scenes. Oddly, it doesn't make things feel rushed, probably because what's been left out is all that character stuff Stranger Things was so big on. Those countless hours when what we mostly got to see was people getting to know each other. Slowly. The Boroughs has none of that. It takes everyone two days, max, before they're best buds.

Partly it's crisis bonding but mostly it's because there's no time for anything longer. They're old! They don't have much time left! 

Everyone's painfully aware of their own mortality, evil immortals included, which is ironic, isn't it? As for our heroes, it's a bit rich considering how fit, healthy and good-looking they all are compared to actual old people but then the definition of "old" in the show is hazy anyway. Wally reveals he's only 62 at one point, not even state retirement age where I live, let alone where the show's set. 

That looks like it might be Nevada. Where the atom tests were, which might explain the monsters, although it could also just be me, trying to retrofit some kind of origin story onto the whole affair since the writers can't be bothered to come up with one. 

Wally does have terminal cancer though so, yeah, mortality is knocking harder for him than the rest, even if the years aren't. They all make friends fast because they have to get in there quick before one of them dies, I guess. They do go on about it a lot, that's for sure.

And they need to get on with it, too, whatever they're thinking, because friend-bonding is what this show is all about. That and romantic love, which apparently saves some people and damns others. You may remember me citing sentiment as a big factor in the show, up there at the top of the post. The entire motivation behind the insane enterprise that is The Boroughs can be summed up in five words: We Did It For Love. 

Well, one of the two big bads Did It For Love, anyway: Blaine. (Played by Seth Numrich. Numb, scary, nuanced, good.) He just wants to make everything perfect for his beloved wife. Forever. At any cost.

Sideabar: Blaine? Really? He was supposedly an adult in the 1950s. Who was called Blaine in the '30s? Did the name "Blaine" even exist before the 1980s, when it became Hollywood code for "slick, rich, guy who looks cool but everyone knows is hollow inside"? Which is what he is, I guess. So, fair. (Also, edit for truth, I looked it up and Blaine was popular in the 19th century. Peak year for babies called Blaine: 1884. My bad but don't say you never learn anything on this blog.)

His wife, Annelise, (Alice Kremelberg. Plays her like a robot, presumably intentionally but it's hard to be sure.) never gets enough lines for us to work out what the hell she's in it for. She gets to be really, disturbingly, Evil with a capital E. Cartoon evil, that is. 

She makes as much of the part as she can but she's never playing anything you could call a real person. She's like the wicked witch in a Disney movie. Her polio backstory that's presumably supposed to explain her fear and need is so under-sold you could miss it if you were eating popcorn when it's revealed, which you very well might be because this is a total popcorn show. And even if you're paying attention, it explains nothing about her pathological cruelty. 

Was she like that before? Did her pain turn her evil? Was it the alien blood? Who fucking knows? Not me. And not the writers, either, apparently.

Where The Boroughs is like Stranger Things is in the whole chosen family thing. Most of these people have an actual family outside the Boroughs - children and grandchildren that they occasionally mention - but we only ever get to see Sam's daughter (Jena Malone. Excellent and underused) and her annoying husband (And very briefly, at the end, their children, who don't get anything much to do or say.) There's occasionally some talk about family but as in Hawkins, in The Boroughs your family ends up being the people who'll fight monsters with you. If you're related to them by blood, great, but it's by no means obligatory.

There's a good deal of front-loaded irony, what with time running out for the good guys because they're doing the right thing ideal butting up against the immortals being really, really evil and possibly getting to live forever. Some people waver and try to fudge or even change sides but it's the kind of show where you always know who the good guys and the bad guys are. Sometimes they wobble on the line but they never fall over it. Not to mention the ever-popular "But who were the real monsters, anyway?"

It makes the whole thing kind of heart-warming. Everyone who isn't an out-and-out villain is kinda-sorta nice. There's a bit of the grumpy old geezer thing going on but under the crusty exterior or the selfish spend-it-while-you-still-got-it indulgence, you know there's always a good heart. 

The villains are far more underwritten but it makes some of them quite interesting for the space that leaves. I'd have liked to know more about the woman who shows new arrivals around the homes or the doctor who manages Mother. And especially the Police Chief, who looks confusingly like a fatter, slobbier David Harbour playing Stranger Things' Hopper's evil cousin. He gets a weird moment near the end that almost humanizes him, which is very odd. I could have done with a little more of that.

Mostly, though, everything wraps up very neatly in eight episodes, so long as you're happy to accept that absolutely nothing about any of it is ever going to be explained to anyone's satisfaction, yours or the cast's. (What are the monsters? Where did they come from? How did Blaine find out what they could do? What was that peach all about? And that weird goo bath? Why do old cathode ray TV sets have such a devastating effect on the immortals and why not the same effect on all of them? How could those tunnels have possibly been constructed without hundreds of people knowing? And on and on and on...) You'd think it was a mini-series, never intended to continue, except...

Oh, yes. Except. There's always that one hook, right at the end in every mini-series, isn't there? just in case it goes really well and they want to come back for an encore. In this one it happens just before the final credits, when Sam's image glitches in the mirror. And that final shot, too, the one where it looks like the stars go out. That's a door being left open.

I hope there is another season. And if there is, I hope it doesn't explain anything any more clearly more than the first. Mysteries are intriguing but solutions are often disappointing. Leave it all out there in the desert. With the dead crows.

Of Time And The Cities

When the promo videos for Neverness To Everness started popping up a year, two years ago, it looked like nothing I'd seen before. I couldn't entirely figure out what the game even was. I just knew it was cool and I wanted it.

Then it arrived and it was as amazing as I'd hoped it would, juste not exactly what I'd imagined. It felt a lot more relaxed, laid-back and less intense and it had the most remarkably detailed representation of an actual city I'd ever encountered in any video game.

Hethereau isn't just a few detailed areas amid some spectacular buildings for a backdrop. It's a completely convincing urban environment with districts and suburbs and parks and commercial residential districts and a full transport infrastructure that actually works. In many ways, in numerous locations, it reminds me quite specifically of actual cities I've visited and stayed in. 

I thought that would make it the benchmark for game cities for a good while to come, always excepting GTA6, as all video game discussions must, just now. If NTE made bank then, sure, I'd expect to see clones and copies cropping up all over but even at the highly accelerated production rates of the game mills in China and South Korea, it takes a while to build a city like Hethereau, let alone to fit a game around one. I certainly wasn't expecting to be writing about another this summer or even this year.

And then Nimgimli left a link in a comment on the last post here, pointing to a video on YouTube for a game called Moon Gaze, a name entirely new to me, either in that English version or under the original Mandarin title, Wang Yue.

I watched it immediately, of course. And here it is, so now you can, too.

It's an "Exploration" promo so it mostly shows movement around the city. There's not much in the way of gameplay per se. Or narrative. Or anything.

Looking for some context, I also watched a "Character and Scene" video and "Gameplay" trailer. The former doesn't give much away and the latter is both untranslated and also made before they completely redid the graphics, which they appear to have done to such an extent that it barely looks like the same game any more. That's why I'm only linking them, not embedding them. They may be misleading.

The new graphics do look extremely impressive. They're closer to photorealism than to the rather flat, cartoony look of the previous version or even the more polished, anime-inflected style of NTE.  

Tianyue City looks astonishingly convincing and immersive, visually at least. I certainly wouldn't say no to a few hours exploring it, when the game releases, which presumably won't be at least until next year. There's no date set and the game is still in closed testing, in China only.

Beyond that, I can't say I'm all that interested, let alone excited, by anything the developer, who goes by the unwieldy name of Guangzhou Shiyue Network Technology, has shown so far. Icy Veins seems more impressed, suggesting it might be "the most unusual gacha rpg" so far although how they figure that out beats me. Their bullet-point list of features is mostly a reiteration of what's already in NTE, except for the creature collecting, something I personally could do without, having had more than enough of it in other games by now.

There's also mention of "construction and building systems", which I admit does sound intriguing. It's apparently along the lines of what you can do in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, although that doesn't help me any, since I've never played. Still, building options are always welcome.

The problem is, regardless of the features, I don't get any sense of the vibrancy or zest that infuses everything that comes out of Hotta as they promote NTE. Everything they show just oozes individuality. 

For example, just take a look at this recent short, featuring Lacrimosa. It's a small work of art, hugely enjoyable even if you have no interest in playing the game.

The Moon Gaze material seems bland and generic by comparison, other than the character movement of course, which is breathtakingly well-done in places. I'd love to have a go on those roller skates. It doesn't help, of course, that the only narrative content on show hasn't been translated but I get no sense there's anything happening I'd be likely to care about, anyway. 

And if Moon Gaze doesn't come up to snuff against Neverness To Everness, imagine how it does when you put it up against this:

That's Ananta, another urban open-world RPG, developed by NetEase and Naked Rain. You may have heard of it. I didn't think I had but as usual I was wrong.

If you're getting a slight sense of deja vu, it'll probably be because I wrote about Ananta last September, in a post that included that same, seven-minute video along with another, even longer. 

If you don't remember, I forgive you. I didn't, either.

I make no apologies for embedding it again, partly because if nothing else the soundtrack is great but mostly because I've just had to re-write four paragraphs when I finally realised Ananta was not, after all, a brand new game to me that I'd just discovered. Not only had I posted about it eight months ago but at the time I had to remind myself it wasn't new to me then, either. 

That was the second time I'd written about it. This is the third. It's like Groundhog Day around here sometimes and I'm not Bill Murray. Tipa talks about having trouble remembering people. I can't even remember what I've posted, even when I've done it three times! Some of us need to be reminded about stuff as often as possible. I count this repetition as a public service.

More than just good taste in tuneage, Ananta would appear to have strong characters with distinct personalities capable of engaging in snappy repartee while carrying some kind of interesting plot. Not to mention an intriguing backstory. And then there's that stunning megalopolis to explore. You wait decades for a proper city and then three turn up at once!

Except not quite at once, I guess. NTE made it out the gate first and Ananta was supposed to be following close behind, with a projected release date of Summer 2026 but now that doesn't look like it's happening. If it was coming out in a a month or three, I'm pretty sure they'd be telling us all about it but there's been radio silence from the developer since I last wrote about the game. I pre-registered on the official website back then but I've heard not a single word since.

As this report by Gamesphere suggests, that release date may have slipped into next year. If so, it's a shame but at least it means not having to make a hard choice between Ananta and NTE just yet. Yes, obviously I could play both. At once, even, in theory. But I'm having a hard enough time right now, keeping up with just the one urban open world rpg. Two might be more fun than I could handle.

Also, in a more practical sense, a 2027 release date will give me time to upgrade my hardware to something capable of playing even the most demanding titles with ease. Not the best timing, perhaps, given the way the entire gaming hardware industry seems to be disappearing into the all-devouring maw of the AI leviathan but assuming there's still something left to buy later this year, I should be coming into a little money about then, so it could still be good timing for me.

If not, it shouldn't matter too much. Looking at all these games, you would think you'd have to have state of the art equipment to run any of them but no, apparently not. Leaving aside my recent technical issues, which I now think may have been initiated by running NTE from an external SDD via USB, it seems even a mediocre rig can cope. 

How that's even possible, when you look at the graphics and the gameplay, beats me. But then, I don't need to understand it. I just need to enjoy it.

And I plan to. 

Making Sense Of Neverness To Everness - or - The Genshin Impact

I've been having an interesting conversation with Mailvaltar in the comments to his recent post on Neverness To Everness. I had too much I wanted to say to fit into a comment thread so I told him I'd probably spin it up into a post of my own. And then he pointed out he'd already posted something very much along the same lines five years ago, back when Genshin Impact first came out.

I had a look through my back pages and it turned out so had I. It's quite hard to remember what an... er... impact that game had when it arrived. How strange and unfamiliar it seemed. In my own First Impressions piece, I said "just about everything in the game I've seen so far, is confusing". I'd never played a game quite like it although apparently millions of players, who'd made their way through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, saw things a little differently. 

Breath of the Wild wasn't an MMO, of course, but then again, neither is Genshin Impact. Probably. There seem to be varying opinions on that. It was one of the things I was confused about. I'm not sure it's much clearer now. 

All of these games seem to live in a nebulous, undefined hinterland, somewhere in the liminal spaces of a Venn Diagram overlapping MMOs, RPGs, Visual Novels, Life Sims, Co-Op, Single Player, Open World and a bunch of other genres and playstyles. I'd say it's indisputably a genre but if it has a name anyone's agreed on, I don't know what it is.

Oh, wait... yes I do! We call them Gacha Games. That's the catch-all, isn't it? 

Except all that's gacha about them is their main source of revenue. As a descriptor, it's about as helpful as Subscription or Free To Play. It tells you how the company stays in business but it doesn't give you much of a clue about the type of game you're going to be playing.

Except it sort of does. As Mailvaltar observes, gacha games are "extremely alike mechanically...even if the actual gameplay hails from completely different genres." 

And that's especially true of the way they handle character progression. His almost six year-old post linked above, my own from a month before and the post by Tobold that provoked it, all deal with the way Genshin Impact requires a huge amount of grinding to sustain the progress needed to keep the combat as easy as it was when you were starting out. Without that, combat can eventually get too tough for casuals like me and Tobold.

As a general rule, this seems to be approximately how all the games that followed Genshin's huge commercial success roll. They also follow what's looking like a genre convention of odd, quirky, enigmatic names - Zenless Zone Zero, Honkai Star Rail, Noah's Heart, Wuthering Waves, Neverness To Everness.

The shorthand in use for all of those is "Gacha Games", so I suppose, by default, that is what the genre's called now. It might have made more sense to follow the gaming naming convention that gave us Roguelikes and Metroidvanias. We could have called them Genshinlikes. But we didn't. So gacha games it will have to be.

And as Mailvaltar explained in very helpful detail in yesterday's post, there's a very specific way to play a gacha game if you want your characters to be capable and your progress smooth as you work your way through the storyline. You'll have to get to grips with a number of quite complex systems and then, when you've figured out what you need and how to get it, you'll have to grind your finger-tips off, killing the right mobs and doing the right quests to get the gear you want. Just as though it was EverQuest in 1999.

That was enough to do for Tobold back in 2020. As he said " I'll be farming elite monsters for weeks. And I don't want to." And who can blame him? I don't think he's played a Gacha Game since. 

I also noped out of Genshin Impact the moment it got hard but unlike Tobold it didn't put me off trying again. And it's as well I did because subsequent entries in the genre have been far less demanding. There have been a few barriers to progress in some of them that I've had to make some effort to clamber over but nothing like the harsh, early roadblocks of Genshin Impact. 

I was stuck for a while in both Noah's Heart and Wuthering Waves before I did some work to improve both my teams and my tactics but in both cases, though, it happened much later than in Genshin. It was easier to fix, too. And as Mailvaltar suggests in his most recent post, that easing continues. Neverness To Everness may be the least-demanding gacha game yet.

The thing about Gacha games that I really wanted to  dig into a little, though, is the apparent disconnect between content and delivery. It's a dissonance that echoes what Jack Emmert was saying about the importance of knowing your audience and the dangers of feature creep. The Gacha game studios, hearing Jack talk, must be muttering "Hold our beer..."

One of the strongest drivers to engagement gacha games have is story. Right from the beginning, with Genshin Impact, the bar for storytelling was pushed through the roof. Back in 2020 I said "Genshin Impact is one of the best-written video games I've played.", something  I put down to "the tone, the very thing so few video games get right." 

I said at the time I might put a whole post together about why the writing was so good but then I stopped playing because getting to see any more of it got so hard and that post never got written. The story was great but the way it was delivered sucked. Who the hell wants to grind and grind and practice and practice just sot hey can see the next episode of their favorite show?

Since Genshin, that's never been quite the same problem but the underlying issue persists. The content gets ever better, which makes the hoops you need to jump through to get to it feel more and more inappropriate. 

And it is getting better and better. The writing in Wuthering Waves is better than I remember it being in Genshin and so is the voice acting. The animated sequences are more frequent, longer and approach cinematic quality. It's like watching high-quality anime with some awkward interruptions.

My impression of Neverness To Everness so far suggests the evolution of Gacha game story content into some kind of mass media entertainment format isn't over yet. In the four chapters of the main story the game shipped with, there's barely any combat at all. What little is there presents little challenge and doesn't appear to increase in difficulty as the story moves on. Instead, there are a variety of interesting non-combat mechanics that enhance the storytelling instead of getting in its way.

The "cut scenes" are longer and more sophisticated, too. It feels like playing a complex visual novel, complete with that same sense of watching a movie play out around you that sometimes leads people who like a bit more action to dismiss those games as "walking simulators". Not to say they don't have a point. I've seen more than a few comments on reddit and YouTube from NTE fans who'd like Hotta to go the whole way and make an actual anime based on the game and I have to say that it does often seem like that might be a better use of the material. 

In the case of Neverness To Everness it's not only the quality of the writing, acting and storyline that's competing for attention with the Gacha revenue stream. There's also that whole Life Sim thing they have going on. It's something that hasn't been nearly as well-developed in other gacha titles I've played.

Genshin had none of it that I can recall from back when I played but that was five years ago so maybe it does now. Noah's Heart had housing and affection bonds with your team but the whole game was a bit clunky and under-cooked so none of it had much impact outside of a dedicated few loyalists, of whom I was one. I don't know how common these features are in other gacha games because I haven't stuck with any long enough to find out but I can't say I remember any from the ones I've tried.

In NTE you have plenty of non-combat, non-story options. You can run a business, either behind the scenes as management or out front with the customers if you want. You can be a street racer in your car, go fishing or play mah-jong. You can deliver parcels around the city or moonlight as a taxi driver. You can date, go to the movies, hold hands and hang out with your imaginary friends. You can own multiple properties, decorate them and, if you can build up sufficient bonds of affection, have your friends move in and live with you.

None of this requires any fighting so the entire material grind that so upset Tobold back in the pandemic would seem to have no purchase here. It exists but you don't need to worry about it. You're not going to be punching anyone or anything. 

Or are you? I'm not so sure. All those characters I was talking about the other day plus all the others that will inevitably come into the game as time goes on, how will you meet and get to know them if you aren't pushing through the story? You can roll on the banners and you might be lucky but I'm a bit vague just now about how that works when it comes to interacting with the same characters in the world. I seem to have some I can team with but I can't get them to work in the cafe or come to my house. I think I might need to meet them in context before that can happen.

Or maybe I've just missed something. Gacha games are ferociously complicated. 

In his recent post, Mailvaltar does an excellent job of explaining some of the systems I've been struggling to understand. Not that I've really been trying. I have no real interest in learning how they work. I just want to figure out the bare minimum to get by and then never think about them again. But even if I was fascinated by the complexity of it all, I think I'd struggle to keep all the details straight. There's a lot to remember.

In the end, the best approach for anyone who doesn't enjoy the process is probably just to play the game and only worry about it when you get stuck. After all, if it isn't a problem, it isn't a problem, right? And a problem only becomes a problem when you can't fix it. 

Gacha games want you to be able to fix it. If you can't or if it looks like it'll be too much trouble, then like Tobold you might walk away and that's the one thing they really don't want you to do. Yesterday, when I uninstalled NTE, only so I could re-install it, Hotta responded with a heartfelt exit poll asking what they'd done to upset me and how they could make it better so I'd consider coming back.

They already have, I suspect. They've made everything easier. In retrospect, Genshin was quite an unforgiving game, expecting high levels of both performance and compliance from an early stage. In comparison,  Neverness to Everness positively welcomes slackers.

So far...