Chocolate Milk - or - The Dragons Of Warrens Continent

I'm not sure I can think of any precedent for what Hotta's done to Neverness To Everness with the 1.2 update that landed last week. Something similar must have happened somewhere before because there's nothing new on this earth but if it happened in any game I was playing, I can't remember it. And it does seem like something you'd remember.

The closest I can think of would be Super Adventure Box in Guild Wars 2 but that wasn't remotely on the same scale. 999 Nights (Which, I'll remind you, because it never ceases to amuse me, is pronounced "One Thousand Less One Nights.") is a complete, full-featured ARPG, playable from within NTE. 

It's not a holiday event or a mini-game or even a special zone. It's a whole fricken' game! Last time, I estimated it might keep someone busy for about 30 hours but having played through the first two big dungeons, I'm going to have to revise that upwards. There are two more to go so it's going to take me maybe fifteen hours just to do it all on Story mode and there are two further difficulty levels.

That's just the main quest, which is what I've mainly stuck with so far, (There are also side-quests. I went all round the Fuzzy Village, where the not-really-sheep live, and picked up about half a dozen, although so far I've only finished one.) but there are a large number of other attractions, quite a few of which I've done, some several times, mostly because curiosity has led me to go up to a lot of creatures and objects and most of the events are on a proximity fuse.

Some you have to speak to an NPC to start, some start automatically when you get near and some have portals you can go through. The overworld is handled very much like the way Shroud of the Avatar does it, albeit a lot more stylishly. The map is some kind of model village, with the player character taller than the buildings as they wander down the paths from place to place. 

You can't jump or climb and there are lots of invisible walls. It's a representation of a place rather than a place in it's own right and I find it works very well.

There's a good variety - ring events, jumping puzzles, arenas, logic puzzles and more - and they're all as repeatable as you care to make them. I wandered about, doing some at random for a while in an attempt to level up and it was good fun. 

I wanted some more levels because, as I mentioned last time, Flora and her team did not do well on their first run at the Molten Dragon. Defeat was so swift and inevitable, I figured there had to be some trick to it, which did indeed turn out to be the case. Before I even tried to figure out what that trick was, though, I thought I'd give the the tried-and-trusted over-leveling method a go.

Gaining a few levels does help but the effect is limited by the much higher influence of gear on combat effectiveness. The primary way more levels help is that they allow you to equip higher level-limited items but since, at least as far as I can tell, you need to beat the bosses before you gain access to the areas where the next tier of gear drops, it's kind of a Catch 22. 

Luckily, a random comment I just happened to spot on a reddit thread gave me a clue what was needed. Someone tossed an aside into a thread where people were talking about the problems they were having with the first boss, saying there was an "artifact" that would protect one member of your team against dragon fire. 

It was the fiery breath of the dragon, or possibly some kind of massive fiery AE, that had done for my entire team in seconds. I figured if I could find the artifact and give it to Iroi, she could heal herself well enough against the rest of the dragon's damage to solo the damn lizard if she had to. 

That would turn it into one of those long, attritional boss fights I'm all too familiar with from both GW2 and EverQuest II. Not much fun, sure, but if you get it right, you only have to do it the one time and that's bearable. 

I was settling myself into the idea but first I had to find the artifact. I thought maybe the mysterious sheep vendor might sell it but it was more obvious even than that. It turned out the person who'd left the comment on reddit was making it sound more abstruse than it really was.

The so-called "artifact" that nullifies the effect of dragon flame isn't an artifact at all. It's an accessory and it drops off... who knows? Not me. Not google, either, as we'll see. Probably just a low chance off any mob in Chocolate Volcano, I imagine. When I came to look in my bags for it, I found I already had two of them. 

They were still in there because I hadn't even noticed there were accessories or slots to put them in. It tells you something about how I play games because the slots are right there on the paper-doll and yet somehow I hadn't noticed them.

My feeble excuse is I hadn't been looking at the paper dolls when I was gearing my team. I'd been using the scrolling list of slots down the left of the screen to swap out and upgrade gear and you have to scroll that one down past the bottom of the display to see the accessory slots. They're right down the bottom, after the boots. 

I found that out by chance, not long after I'd been reading about the artifact. I just happened to scroll a bit further down than usual by mistake as I was swapping out gear. Once I'd noticed the slots for accessories were there, I clicked on them, which brings up anything in inventory that might fit the slot and it turned out I'd already looted quite a few rings and gewgaws. I'd been lugging them around in my bags for ages without knowing about it.

And guess what? There were two copes of the "artifact" I was after. It's called Hot Spring Egg and it "Grants immunity to monster burn damage." Perfect! 

Here's the really weird thing. Google doesn't seem to know the Hot Spring Egg exists. None of my searches then found it and even now I know what it's called, I'm still coming up blank. Even with the name of the game and the item there are no results. Well, no meaningful results.

If you search, as I did just now, for "Accessory in Neverness To Everness Warrens Continent that negates NPC fire damage.", the AI summary confidently informs you "In Neverness to Everness, the "999 Nights" (Warren Continent) content does not feature a single accessory that universally negates all NPC fire damage." Even if you use the exact wording from the egg and call it "burn damage" it's the same. Doesn't exist, apparently.

Yeah. Well, it does.Shows what you know, Gemini!  I have three of them now after another dropped yesterday. And you're not restricted to using the Egg on just one character, as the reddit comment implied. They're not whatever NTE's equivalent of Lore-Equip in EQII would be. Everyone on the whole team can have one. 

I probably wouldn't have known that if I hadn't found two of them in my bags. I'd have gone with my initial plan to use just Iroi and it would most likely have worked, even if it would have been teeth-grindingly slow.

With two Eggs, I had a better plan. I stuck one on Iroi and one on Flora, figuring the two of them could duo the dragon easily enough if they weren't on fire. The Appraiser has good DPS and Iroi is an amazing healer. Since plot mechanics mean Shinku has barely contributed anything to the team anyway, I've effectively been trioing the fights all along. Things would go slower without Mint's DPS but with Flora involved it would certainly be a lot faster than with Iroi on her own. 

I was almost looking forward to it now. I was about to port back and give it a go right then, when it occurred to me I might as well fight my way back through the whole volcano and get a couple of levels while I was doing it. 

That really says a lot about how much fun I'm having. It's the first time I've ever felt like I got the point of an ARPG. Killing hordes of mobs and picking through heaps of loot for upgrades hasn't really been my thing until now. I guess it can't have been the mechanics that were putting me off when I've tried other games that use them, after all. It must have been something else - the setting or the aesthetic, probably. 

It really helps that all the main armor slots displays, there's a great variety of looks to discover and the avatars are large enough to see what it all looks like, something that's never been the case in any isometric-perspective game I've played. The developers have done a really great job, not just adding a complete ARPG to the game but making me enjoy it, too.

So that's what I did. I enjoyed it. Specifically, I enjoyed the return match with the Molten Dragon and I especially enjoyed kicking the crap out of it. 

By the time I got to the dragon's room, the whole team had dinged 21 except poor old Shinku, forever a level behind. But she wasn't going to be fighting anyway. 

Flora woke the dragon up up and whacked it about with her sword. Iroi tagged in to drop her big heal when it was needed. I think Mint might have made a brief appearance, too, mostly to drop her Ultimate then vanish again. She couldn't hang around for long, not having an Egg of her own.

With its fire and lava attacks proving utterly ineffective, the dragon went down pretty easily. As did the  second dragon, over in the Milk Ice Mountain, which was where I went next. I was expecting to have to find some new item to protect me against freezing damage for that one but no. I never checked what damage the Frostspike Dragon who lives there was doing but whatever it was it didn't have much effect on my team, three of whom had the Hot Spring Egg by then.

Maybe that dragon does burn damage too. Or maybe it was my clever strat that did for him. 

I'm being ironic, at least somewhat. No strat I ever come up with is likely to qualify as clever. I think I'm doing pretty well if I know what my characters' main abilities do. Combining them for some kind of dramatic payoff is generally well beyond my remit. 

That is what your supposed to do, I think. NTE, like all the gacha games I've tried, assumes players love complexity. It's ferociously complex in terms of synergies between characters, gear, effects, abilities and a whole lot of other factors, all of which I'm sure the developers imagine the players will just lap up (And probably spend money trying to min-max.). Luckily for me they also seem quite forgiving of lazy bums who can't be bothered to figure out how it all fits together, which is just as well or I'd not be playing.

Sometimes, though, things happen that are hard to ignore. On the way up the milk mountain, something weird occurred often enough to make me tab out to try and find out what the heck was going on. Three-quarters of my team kept turning into flying lambs mid-fight. After that, I couldn't control them at all until combat ended, when they snapped back into their own forms as if nothing untoward had happened.

Fortunately, google knew what it was. It's what happens when you hold down "E" for a little longer than just a key-press, when Iroi's on the field. E triggers what I think of the "ranged" skill. (The game calls it Redirect.) Everyone has one but I'm not sure they all vary on a short and long press. 

I wouldn't necessarily know without looking it up because I rarely use the long-press at all. I hadn't been doing it intentionally this time, either. It was just a fluke but a very fortunate one. What happens when Iroi does it is that she turns the whole team into her puppets. In that form, they can't be damaged at all but they can still attack. 

Given that Iroi is an amazing healer who can keep going for ages on her own, it means she can tank the mob while her flock of lambs whittle away at it. (The lambs all have special attacks as well but I haven't figured out how to get them to work yet.) Perhaps best of all, if Iroi does die, all the characters who were lambs pop back up as themselves, at full health!

That's what happened in the Frostspike fight but by then the dragon was at about 10%. Flora and Mint finished it off with no trouble. And that was the second mountain done.

Next, it's off to the lake. Amber Syrup Lake, to be exact. And to tell the truth I've already made the trip. But that's a story for another day, if only because so far I've only gotten as far as the first campfire so there's not a lot to tell. 

It's Too Hot For Clever Titles - Just Play Us The Damn Songs Already

It's really hot today. In my room especially. Too hot to play games or write a blog post or do much of anything. Maybe I won't bother. 

Or maybe I will. It's been two weeks since the last What I've Been Listening To post and I did say that was the cadence I was aiming for. If nothing else, they're easy to write. Do I have enough songs, though?

Hmm. Not at all sure I do. Still, I expect I'll come up with something.  Might be a short post, though. Stop that cheering at the back...

Terri - Micky Dolenz (Paul Westerberg cover)

I bet that was a surprise. Certainly surprised me when I heard it. Last man standing and he's making it count.

I love the Monkees. They've had an up and down kind of career. I grew up watching them as a kids' show but they were also in the pop charts, which might have confused me if I'd been just a few years older. They went out of fashion to the point of derision and then weirdly came back in with punk, when the Sex Pistols covered (I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone. Since then it's been mostly acceptance into the canon if not outright adulation although it didn't help that they reformed and made some not very good records.

Not that Steppin' Stone was really a Monkees song. It was written by the men who made the Monkees, Boyce and Hart, but they shopped it around to a bunch of bands before the Monkees had the hit with it. And this isn't a Micky Dolenz song either. It's a Paul Westerberg number although kind of an unofficial one.

It's from a bizarre solo album Westerberg released as a 49 cent Amazon download in 2008. Full story at Stereogum, which is where I learned it and from where I'm ripping it off. The album had one, continuous forty-nine minute track and included no information about the songs on it, not even the names. Apparently this one is generally referred to by fans as "(Tell Me) Who You Gonna Marry." Mickey obviously prefers something shorter.

I have never really got Paul Westerberg. He's one of those people, like Alex Chilton or Nick Drake, who I do get, who constantly comes up as a reference point for other artists. I listened to his original version of this one and it sounds a lot more like Eve of Destruction than Micky's cover.

 CPR - Wet Leg (horsegiirl remix)

I still haven't acquired the second Wet Leg album. I say "acquired" because I probably was never going to buy it for myself. It seems like I would have put it on my birthday/Christmas wishlist last year but I didn't. 

Partly it was over-exposure. There was a while when you really couldn't get away from Wet Leg. There was a brief respite and then they came back, firing off singles ahead of the sophomore album and doing interviews non-stop and honestly I felt like maybe I'd had enough of them for now.

Which was a bit silly given the new singles were all good. Just not as good as the old singles from the first album, which were all great. But it turned out the lack of immediacy with the second batch might have been because they were growers. I've heard some of them a few times now and they get stronger with familiarity. 

That could be significant. The main reason I didn't put the second album on a wishlist was that, great though all the individual songs on the first were, listened to all in a row they could be... enervating. That's the bane of all great singles bands and Wet Leg are categorically a great singles band. It's why I can barely stand to listen to Greatest Hits albums by anyone, even people I really, really like.

A good album needs pacing as much as it needs bangers. Light and shade. Otherwise it's like eating a whole box of chocolates, one after another. I realize some people aren't going to see why that's a bad thing...

This, though, is very different. horsegiirl (Not to be confused with Horsegirl.) takes the sugar out and replaces it with a bit of acid. Not that kind. The sharp stuff you get on acid drops. (Seriously? Acid drops? How old do you think your readers are? Even you don't remember acid drops. When you read about those in the Beano when you were a kid, you had to ask your grandmother what they were...)

Talking to myself in the second person now... I told you it was hot.

 CUT THE LINE - deBasement

Okay, I have no idea what that is. I just had it bookmarked. It's great though, isn't it? I love snippets of conversation used as lyrics. Used to be a bit of a thing back in the '90s. Don't hear it so much any more, more's the pity.

Shall I look them up? See who they are? Okay...

"deBasement are a queer/trans electropop-bass duo based in LA, comprised of Alli Logout (front person of the critically acclaimed punk outfit Special Interest), and Margo XS (esteemed DJ and in-demand producer who is a primary collaborator for Kim Petras, Zara Larsson and more)."

 Ohh... that makes sense!

MORNING DEW (DONK) - Beyoncé

I'm guessing I don't have to explain who Beyoncé is. Although she doesn't crop up here very often. She's in the "I understand why she's good but it's not doing it for me" pot most of the time. And honestly, I just like the way she goes "DonkyDonkyDonk."

I mean, who wouldn't?

Come and Go - Bodywash

Alright, I'm not going to gab on about who every last act on the bill this week might be. I have no clue who this lot are although I'd lay good money they're Australian. 

The way this works, or one way, is that I listen to a bunch of new stuff every day and if I like it I ignore it because I like a lot of things. Just liking something doesn't get us anywhere. 

If I really like it, though, I bookmark it to come back to when I'm considering candidates for the honor of being included in a post on a blog that's mostly read by people whose main interest most likely isn't music and whose tastes most likely aren't all that close to mine. (Then again, this one has less than a thousand views on YouTube so maybe they'll be glad of even a couple more.)

If I really, really like something, though, I listen to it a few more times and chances are I'll go take a look to see what else they've done, meaning when it comes time to write the post, I usually at least have a vague idea who they are. 

This is one I really liked.

Florida Water Blues - Twisted Teen

And this one I really, really liked. So I looked up who they were. Which was a mistake. I liked it better when I thought the band was the guy and the girl in the video. It's not. It's the two riding in the pickup at the end.

Sometimes, the less you know the better. 

I still really, really like it though.

Nobody - Computerwife

Takes a while to get going but it's worth the wait. Video needs a motion-sickness warning.

Couple of covers to end, I think. I did say I didn't have much and it's too damn hot still to go looking.

 Go F*** Yourself - Fat Dog

Their asterisks, not mine. So coy!

 Dog Dribble - Getdown Services

Oh, I see. It's like that, now, is it? Maybe it's time to stop. How about we go out with something tasteful?

 The Chain - The Tullamarines (Fleetwood Mac cover)

I liked the Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac, back when even getting to hear music from five years ago was like finding fragments from the Great library of Alexandria. Then punk came and they were the antichrist for a while. Now I can see them in the round and I like some of it and not the rest.

The only bit of The Chain I really like is the bit they used for the motor racing on TV back in the eighties. And I mostly liked that because it gave me warning so I could change the channel.  

I like Tusk. Shame they didn't pick that one.

And that, I think, will do for now, especially since my PC just crashed, either because it's fucking up again or because it's hotter than the surface of the sun in here. Think I'll give both of us a break to cool down.

Owning The Problem

Sony's recent decision to abandon the physical format for Playstation games kicked off a frenzy of hand-wringing and name-calling across the gaming media but, perhaps surprisingly, there didn't seem to be much of a reaction here in this neck of the blogosphere, other than this excellent post by Yeebo, to which I'll return later. 

The main concerns I've seen revolve around three quite specific issues:

• Archival
• Income
• Ownership

The first seems like a very niche problem indeed from where I'm sitting. It pre-supposes a future in which academics are sufficiently interested in the social, cultural, technical or creative history of video games to feel they need more than a broad, historical overview. It also assumes academic institutions won't have the capacity or the will to arrange storage for themselves, outside of stockpiling commercially available disks. 

We know there's already a huge problem with archiving always-online, live service and digital-only titles. It would seem Sony's opt-out from physical media just adds their future catalog to that vast, intangible pile. 

You might think the onus for preservation would fall on the preservers rather than the producers, in either case. It's not as though Sony is asking for the games to be archived. I'm sure if they wanted to keep an archive of the games they've issued, they'd be perfectly capable.

I find it hard to worry unduly about the convenience of notional professors in twenty-second or twenty-third century universities, too. If I was going to try to work up some kind of concern on their behalf, even as a life-long gamer I'd be more likely to be bothered that they were fussing about two hundred year-old video games in the first place. I'd like to imagine there'd be better things for them to spend their time and energy on by then.

The whole "Everything Must Be Preserved" attitude, which really only goes back maybe fifty or sixty years, bothers me more than the blasé "Let it all rot" attitude that preceded it. Even for the purposes of academia, representative samples and contemporary accounts usually suffice to recreate an era. Why we need to keep one of everything, in working order, like a gang of crazed, technological half-Noahs, beats me.

That may just be my lack of sympathy with the whole concept, of course. One thing that seems to have gone out of currency during my lifetime is ephemerality. We used to talk about some things being "built to last" and others being "throwaway" and pop culture was firmly in the latter category. Now it seems every last flyer and graffito must be saved for posterity.

There used to be seven day wonders and five-minute fads. There were trends that came and went. There still are, of course, but at some point we seem to have decided, collectively, to assign lasting value to them, meaning they need to be saved, cherished, preserved for future generations and studied in schools and universities. 

In a way it's a welcome recognition and celebration of the work that went into creating these things as well as the pleasure and joy that came out of them. That's nice. On the other hand, it's dead-wood strewn all over the floor of the cultural forest, getting in everyone's way and stifling new growth. 

It's pretty much a truism now that popular culture feeds on itself but the scavenging goes wider and deeper all the time. I'm always moaning that no music I hear any more fails to remind me of something I heard years ago. It's not old geezeritis or not just that. 

Musicians wear their influences not just on their sleeves but as badges of honor. Music critics are all but incapable of describing any new song or act other than in terms of who, in the great back catalog of their memories, it most reminds them. I try not to do it myself but often I just can't help it. Everything really does sound like something else, now.

As for movies, almost all the successful ones are are either sequels or adaptations of familiar IPs from other media. Originality is almost a commercial flaw.

And games are in perhaps the worst state of all, when it comes to living off their past. Most of the most-successful games now are old. We're constantly celebrating the 10th, 20th and even 25th anniversaries of MMORPGs, but mainstream gaming is chock-full of decade-old hits that won't quit. The most ironic thing about Sony's decision is that it's not impossible that, in a hundred years' time, some of those diskless games might still be in the top twenty!

I wonder, more and more, if it wouldn't be healthier and more aesthetically satisfying to let everything have it's natural run and then slip away. That way, one day, a decade or a century from now, maybe some diligent researcher would write a paper and a new generation could marvel at how the elders and ancients amused themselves. And, I hope, think themselves lucky that their own entertainment is so much better! 

So much for the archivists and their problems. On to the developers.

I was quite surprised to learn that developers, who put out games for Playstation, rely in part on sales of physical collectors' editions and the like. The last console I owned was the Atari 2600 and if there were any Special Edition cartridges for that, I never knew about them.

I do know something about online games, though. Digital online games. With no physical editions. All MMORPG players know about those. We have no choice. There used to be boxes but they went away. I have a whole row of them on the shelf of a bookcase next to me right now. I don't think there's anything there less than a decade and a half old.

I remember there being a good deal of angst about the end of physical media for online games. People liked their boxes. I liked my boxes. And honestly, if games came in boxes now, with manuals and posters and cloth maps, I might still buy them. They make nice keepsakes.

The question, though, is did MMORPG developers deny themselves the revenue that comes from being able to sell people a bunch of tat in a box, when they went all-digital? No, they did not!

I refer you to Daybreak's near-infamous Collectors' Editions of every expansion for the aging dinosaurs in their stable, EverQuest and EverQuest II. What were they asking for the top-end imaginary boxes last year? Let me see...

Two hundred and fifty fricken' dollars! That's what! Makes all that fuss about GTA6 costing $80 look a bit wet, doesn't it?

And did you get a disk for your $250? Hell, you did! 

I'd call that precedent. I'd imagine any games with an actual fanbase could make out like bandits, selling digital special editions, always assuming Sony would cut them a deal. Although maybe there are console-specific technical considerations there I'm not seeing. As I said, not a console person. 

But even if there are, there's always merch. Bands worked out years ago that's where the money is. Daybreak cottoned on late but they're all-in on it now. Want a mug with the symbol of your class? A poster? A mouse mat? A T-shirt? Any of the extras they might have bunged into the Collectors' Edition box, back when there was a box?

Anything, in fact, except a disk with the game on because you can't fit the fricken' game on a disk! How small would your game have to be now to fit on a single disk? EQ is ancient and quite small. The installation on my drive would fit on three DVDs. Neverness To Everness, though, would need a dozen. And what's actually going to be on these disks the archivists want to preserve? 

Sorry - we covered archival already. Let's move on.

And so we come to ownership, which I'm now realizing probably ought to have a post of its own. Ironically.

That was Yeebo's main concern, I think, and so it is most peoples', for very good reason. Some very, very big businesses are hell-bent on converting the capitalist system to a quasi-feudal Lords and Peasants arrangement, where at best we're all tenant farmers on the Lord's lands and most likely we're merely digital serfs.

It's not an appealing prospect although, just as it was in the middle ages, it does depend on what sort of Lord you've got lording over you. If it's the typical squeeze em 'til they bleed then feed what's left to the hounds type, you're pretty much screwed but if it's the responsible steward of the land sort you might at least hope for a quiet life with Sunday mornings off for church.

Badly thought-through metaphors aside, we are clearly slipping into a rental culture without necessarily being aware of it. When I was pondering the virtues of playing my games on someone else's servers on Tuesday, Angry Onions, the appropriately-named regular commenter (The angry part, not the onions...) popped into the thread to point out the shortcomings, namely that NVidia could switch the servers off any time they felt like it and I'd be S.O.L.

That, though, is a somewhat bad example. GeForce Now only lets me play games I already own or games I don't need to own because they're free to play anyway. It doesn't pretend to sell me games that only exist on their servers for as long as they care to keep them running. No, for that you need to go to Steam.

We all talk about our Steam libraries as games we own but ownership there is predicated on Steam a) continuing to exist and b) not morphing into something else. As everyone always says, if you want to own your games, you have to go to GOG. 

But do you want to own your games? Some of them, sure. The ones you know for certain you'll play again. The rest, though? Not just the ones you bought in a sale and never played or played for an hour and didn't much like or even the ones you finished and were glad to see the back of? 

Not all games have much replayability and not all of those that do actually get replayed. I can count the number of games I've replayed on the fingers of... hold on... yes, one hand.  

Re-experiencing entertainment is a bit of a niche hobby anyway. Most people don't do it or that's been my impression. 

I re-read a lot of books, often more than once, but when I talk about re-reading at work, in a bookshop, with people who read obsessively, nearly everyone thinks it's a downright weird thing to do. I was thinking about movies the other day. I re-watch those as well, or I used to, but I doubt there's any movie I've seen all the way through more than three times and not many of those. For most people it's once and done and then maybe once more that they didn't plan on, like when a friend drags them to see a movie they saw already.

And that's probably the right way for everyone other than the poor old professors and students who have to study this stuff. I'm in the process of clearing cruft out of my house. It's going to be a year-long job, if I'm lucky. I have a lot of comics, magazines, books, DVDs and VHS cassettes. That I own. Most of them I read or watched once, if that. 

Would I have been better off to have rented them? Then rented them again, if and when I ever wanted a second go? I'd sure as hell have a lot more space in my house now. And probably more money in the bank, too, assuming a rental culture priced itself appropriately. 

As for games, of which I also have quite a few boxes from the old days, I was delighted when I could just download the damn things so the only space they took up was hard drive space. And even that's a pain, frankly. Cf. my current enamorment with playing the things on someone else servers.

The real problem I see with the current push to get us all to rent rather than own is the blatant dishonesty behind it. I'd say a big notice you absolutely could not miss, right at the point of purchase, saying "YOU ARE RENTING THIS ITEM. YOU ARE NOT BUYING IT AND YOU WILL NOT OWN IT" would solve the problem altogether.

And I'd be happy to rent. I'd prefer it, honestly. The only hard copy media I use these days are CDs for music and physical books, the former only because I have to have something to put on wish lists for birthdays and Christmas and the latter because I work in a bookshop and I get a shit-ton for free.

I'd love to drop both and go all digital. And also I wouldn't. I'd hate it.

Because physical objects feel nice and look nice. It's not about ownership for me. I really don't care about ownership all that much. I care about access but that's a different talk. 

No, it's about tactility. Touching stuff is hard-wired into us. You can't touch your digital games which I'm guessing has as much to do with the furore over Sony's decision as anything else. How many people really go to Gamestop to sell their old disks or hand them on to their friends or descendants? I bet most of those disks sit on a shelf to be looked at and sometimes taken down and handled for the sheer pleasure of it.

That's what I do with my old PC games, anyway. The question is, do I miss not being able to do it with the new ones? 

Hmmm.... well, I didn't until you asked me but now I'm thinking wouldn't it be nice to have a box with Neverness To Everness on the front and a cloth map of Hethereau inside that I could pin up on the wall.

As I knew before I started, there's no answer to any of this. I like it and I don't like it. I think it's important and I think it's trivial. I think we should keep everything and I think we should let it all fade away. 

But what I really think is I'm glad it's not me that has to decide. Well done to Sony for pulling the plaster off. Let's just hope too much skin didn't come off with it. 

Dicing With Dragons In NTE

 It's not entirely my intention to turn Inventory Full into an "All Neverness To Everness, All The Time" kind of blog but I have to say the game just throws out ideas for posts like Beryl shaking off grass seeds after a walk in the country. I could very easily write four or five separate posts based on just what I've seen, done and thought about in the game over the last two or three days.

The temptation today is very much to weigh in on Version 1.2 which dropped this morning. Top line: it's very, very odd and so far quite wonderful. 

I patched up my own installation this morning - it was a 13GB download - but I didn't use it. Instead, I thought I'd give GeForce Now a real test run. I'm very happy to say it passed the test with the highest of marks.

I played two sessions, each about ninety minutes long. I only stopped the first time because someone came to the door and Beryl went nuts so I went down to show her we weren't being raided by pirates or bears, which is always her first assumption. 

Once I opened the door, she decided it would be a great time to sunbathe on the front lawn, despite it being just over 30c in the shade. Dogs aren't supposed to move about much in temperatures over 25c and we're assiduous about not taking her out in the heat and making sure she drinks plenty of water and stays in the cooler parts of the house but she does love to lie in the sun for as long as she can stand it. 

In the current heatwave that's about four minutes so I usually indulge her. I sat on the front step in the shade to keep an eye on her while she basked until she baked and then Mrs Bhagpuss decided it was cup-of-tea-time, a mid-afternoon ritual, so it was about three-quarters of an hour before I got back to the game.

I played all the way through the new storyline until I got to the first real boss, the Molten Dragon. Up to that point there'd been no problems with the combat, of which there's a fair amount, but the dragon handed each member of my team their individual ass in short order so I thought it might be a good place to stop.

Three hours and change is a long session for me these days, even with an intermission. It's very clear that GeForce Now's six hour session limit is never going to bring the curtain down early on any game I'm playing. I doubt I'll ever break the three hour session barrier again, probably in the rest of my life. 

For ease of access and quality of performance, I can't fault GFN at all. Now I'm subbed it's a single click to open the interface, another to start the game and in I go. No queues, no wait, no fuss. 

For a lot of games on the service, that would be the end of the story but there's a slight wrinkle where NTE's concerned. I used Play With Google when I set up the account back when the game began and my Perfect World/Hotta account is tied to a Google email address. 

That's absolutely fine on my own PC, where all the necessary details are safely stored. Unfortunately, because I'm playing on a remote server with GFN, Google wants me to confirm my identity every time I log in, which means entering my email address and password and also a security code they text to my phone because I have 2-factor authorization. And I even have to type the bloody phone number in every time, too, for extra security.

None of that is NVidia's fault and it only takes me about a minute but it's just the tiniest bit fucking annoying. Still, at least I'm going to learn my own phone number this way. 

Sidebar - I can tell you from my time as a bookseller, at least from back when I actually served customers, which seems like a long time ago now, since I got a nice back-of-house role not long after the pandemic, that almost no-one knows their own mobile number. I regularly used to have to wait while someone fiddled with their phone to find it in the settings when I asked for it for customer orders or to set up a loyalty card. At least I have mine written down in a book on my desk. I'm not going to need to look at that for much longer, the way this is going...

Once I was in the game, though, everything worked immaculately. In fact, noticeably better than on my own machine, even before it went wrong. At the subscription level I've taken, my sessions automatically take place on the RTX-equipped servers. I didn't think to check the setting but the graphics looked exceptionally sharp and detailed so I imagine the game must have defaulted to one of the higher options.

As for lag, there was absolutely none of any kind. None whatsoever for the whole three hours. Neither frame rate nor hitching nor internet lag. 

To prove it, at one point I came across a jumping puzzle. A real, honest-to-god, could easily have been from Guild Wars 2, jumping puzzle. I am neither great nor terrible at jumping puzzles and I neither like nor hate them. And yet I'm not neutral about them either. How's that, you ask?

I really like jumping puzzles that I can do. It's a lot of fun and very satisfying if I don't fall off. In fact, of all the kinds of content I can think of in games I've played, the two with the closest correlation to Goldilock's taste in porridge and feather beds are logic puzzles in adventure games and jumping puzzles in MMORPGs. The difficulty has to be just right.

This one was perfect for me. It looked very daunting indeed and I did fall off a couple of times but the developers had thoughtfully included staging points (Without flagging them up or making you click on them.) so even when I missed a jump, I didn't have to do much of the puzzle again.

What would have made the whole thing no fun at all, of course, would have been even the slightest hint of lag. A lot of the jumps were quite hairy. I wouldn't have made them if there'd been a hitch or a stutter let alone any rubber-banding. But there was absolutely nothing. Smooth as melted butter. 

Since I've mentioned the jumping puzzle, I will say a little about the new game-within-a-game. But not much. I'll save any full review for after I finish it, assuming I figure out how to get past the first boss. 

I'm waiting for the walk-through for that one or at least a few hints because there's obviously a trick to it. I suspect I should have bought some special item from the vendor that fortuitously popped up right before the boss room. Or maybe it's down to which of the three lying sheep mercenaries you pay to join you.

Ah, but there I go again, digging into the detail. Maybe I should leave that sort of thing for when I know what I'm talking about, assuming such a time ever comes. Let me draw a broader picture instead.

Here's the set-up. It's "several weeks" after the attack by the Scarlet Letter that left Nanally traumatized, and you get a call from Mint, inviting you over to hers to play games for a sort of games night, except it's in the afternoon, or it was when I got the call. 

She says to bring Nanally, who's still recovering, so you go to pick her up from Eibon. She's in the garden and she seems much better, back to her old self almost. She's keen to come but she says she'll have to sneak out because Adler is making her rest and recuperate. Adler turns up, unseen and silent like the creepy stalker he sometimes seems to be. He's overheard (Or rather eavesdropped on...) the whole conversation so Nanally's plan's a non-starter.

Nanally stays at Eibon (She's pretty good about it so she can't be back to her full stroppy self quite yet.)  and you go alone. At Mint's you meet two new BAC employees, now on Mint's team because she seems to have finally been promoted to team leader. She introduces them in typical Mint fashion by making up names for them that they'd rather not be called but you already know one of them - it's Iroi, the girl who showed you around the island last time. 

The other is Shinku, a young woman with an absolutely gigantic lizard-like tail. I don't believe we've met her before but I might be wrong, although you'd think it would be hard to forget a tail like that.

Mint then explains, again in typical Mint fashion, i.e. leaving most of the important stuff out, how the game works. It's basically a tabletop fantasy rpg with the extremely important proviso that it's GM'd not by any of the people in the room but by what seems to be a very powerful anomaly. 

The anomaly, whose name is Dice Lord, takes the form of a ten-sided die. It not only talks to all players both collectively and individually, as a GM naturally would but, unlike any GM I ever met, it can physically change the players into their characters and send them to another dimension to have their adventures in the flesh.

 

This is the game-within-a-game that's been added to NTE. It's called The Warren Continent (Or the land where it all happens is, anyway.) and it is quite literally a full ARPG complete with just about everything you might expect - quests, dungeons, loot, levels, NPCs and as I discovered jumping puzzles. Well, one of those, at least.

It's an astonishing conceit, especially so early in the life of the game. I don't know how much content there is but the main quest (Because of course it has an MSQ of its own.) is tripartite and the Molten Dragon is presumably the boss of part one. That took me three hours, so shall we say ten hours for the whole thing? 

And it has three difficulty levels, as ARPGs do, so you redo it twice for better loot. That'd be maybe thirty hours. You could very reasonably sell that as a standalone game and the quality would totally justify doing it, too.

But it's a lot more than just a clever maxi-game. It's one of the most metatextual experiences I've had in a game for a long while. The writing is really top class, extremely nuanced and complex. There's the game itself, which works perfectly as an ARPG but there's Mint's limited and partial understanding of it and her desire to make sure everyone has a good time, which leads to numerous, knowing side-comments about the nature of role-playing games, the mechanics they use and the way they seek to manipulate the people who play them.

That's very funny. I laughed out loud several times. But there's a lot more going on. For a start, the whole thing is being controlled by an Anomaly and as we've learned, anomalies always have an agenda. This one is clearly up to something. It's an unreliable narrator at best. Whether it's evil or just tricksy isn't yet clear but something's going on.

And then there's Shinku. Something is very clearly up with Shinku. She knows more about how these kinds of games work than she's saying and her Warren Continent character is substantively different from everyone else's. 

Mint, Iroi and Zero all have very recognizable classes - Barbarian, Mage and Swordsman - but Shinku is a Commoner. She levels more slowly and not a single piece of gear she could use dropped in my playthrough, where the other three received literally dozens of possible upgrades. She knows something is going on but she's not sharing.

The world is also populated by Fuzzies, a familiar kind of fairly harmless anomaly, here representing as sheep. They are also liars. Some of them are probably being voiced directly by the anomaly, which makes them exactly the kind of lying NPCs some GMs love to use. Others might just be confused.

It's hard to be sure because it's hard to be sure about anything. You're in an anomalous realm that's pretending to be a role-playing game. Who knows what's real?

And that's where I'm at right now. Maybe it'll all make sense later but knowing Neverness To Everness, I wouldn't count on it. One of the big draws for me is the way the game rarely seems to feel the need to explain itself. 

Suffice to say, having been a little apprehensive about the idea of the lurch into high fantasy, I'm now completely sold. More when I know more. 

Local Games For Local People?

Following on from yesterday's post, it's now been brought home to me just how unnecessary my self-inflicted sabbatical from Neverness To Everness really was. Not only could I have been playing the game perfectly well on my machine's own integrated graphics, I could have been playing it on someone else's machine altogether. Specifically, I could have been playing it on GeForce Now.

Given there are posts here about playing other games on Nvidia's streaming service, you might have imagined I'd have thought of it before but it was only when I read Nimgimli's post at Dragonchasers this morning, where he talks about what he'd been playing over the long holiday weekend and mentions using GeForce Now to avoid dumping even more heat into the house from a local PC, that I remembered it existed. 

Okay, that's not strictly true. By complete co-incidence, I was fiddling around with some old drives yesterday and I happened to notice an installation of GeForce Now on one of them, so that was when I remembered it existed. Only then, what I thought was "Didn't GeForce Now close down ages ago? I wonder if I should uninstall it?"

Luckily, I didn't carry through with that plan. Far from closing down, GeForce Now seems to have expanded enormously. There are now a couple of thousand games to choose from - twice as many if you opt for the Install To Play feature. I'm not sure now why I thought the whole thing had fallen over. Must have been thinking of some other cloud gaming platform, I guess.

I found all that out when I went to look at the website. That's the link to the UK version. I don't know what anyone in the rest of the world will see or how localized the service is. 

And I don't much care, not from a personal perspective. After reading Nimgimli's post, all I wanted to know was whether I could use GeForce Now to play Neverness To Everness. Sure, I'd worked out how to play it on the machine next to me but I was looking ahead a little. What if this machine crapped out on me again before I'd replaced it? The big new update drops tomorrow. It would be annoying to be shut out again, even for a little while.

I thought I should at least give it a try but there were a few questions to answer first: Did I have my old login details? Was NTE on the service? If so, was it available at the free level or would I need to subscribe? And most importantly, would I be able to link the GeForce Now version with my existing account? I sure as heck wasn't going to start all over again.

A fall at any of those fences would probably have meant the end of my interest, at least for now, but GFN soared over them all with room to spare. Yes, I had my old details and yes they still worked. Yes, NTE is on the cloud platform and yes it's in the list of games you can play without a subscription. 

Most importantly of all, I was able to link GeForce Now with my Perfect World account with no trouble at all. Some of that surprised me a little but what surprised me most was how easy it all was. It only took me about ten minutes to get the whole thing installed, set up and linked. And then there I was, back in the game, with my character standing just where I left her yesterday.

I ran her around for a bit before it occurred to me I ought to check the graphic settings. I hadn't forgotten that part of the point of trying the service was to see if it would let me play at a higher visual quality. Except it looked to me as though I already was. The straight lines looked sharper, the trees looked leafier, the colors looked richer, the whole game looked like it had been washed and polished.

That would appear to have been all in my imagination or at least some sort of subjective bias. When I checked the settings, they were still on "Smooth", just as I'd left them. To see what would happen, I bumped them right to the highest grade - "Cinematic". That's higher than I used to play the game on my good GPU.

And everything seemed fine. The game ran well. It felt like there was occasionally some very slight lag but it was barely noticeable. Certainly no worse than how playing on my own machine had felt the day before and I'd had no problems there.

I roamed around the north of Hethereau for a while, exploring and chatting to the locals. Then I thought I'd try driving the long road that flirts with the edge of the map so I called my car. 

OMG, am I bad at driving in this game! I'd say I was bad at driving in every game but actually I was fine in Once Human. Quite good, even. Here, though, I'm an absolute menace. I shouldn't be allowed on the road. When drivers yell "Do you even know how to drive?!" at me out of their windows after I've rear-ended them or crashed into them from a side-road I want to yell back "No! I have no idea what I'm doing!" And I had the Comfort Mode on, too...

Having googled it, I see it's not just me. Apparently the driving controls are considered somewhat touchy. There are things you can do to alleviate the problem and I might try a few but more likely I'll just go back to my bike. I find it a lot easier to control.

My driving skill or lack of it aside, the game seemed fine at speed. No more lag, no hitching or glitching, everything looking great. There was one moment when I got a "low frame rate" warning but I hadn't noticed anything different. I did nothing about it and it went away.

When I'd had enough cruising around the back roads I thought I might carry on with an interesting side-quest I picked up yesterday, one involving a bookseller. It interested me for professional reasons. I ported back and did some more of that one until Mrs Bhagpuss informed me it was time to get Beryl ready for a trip into town. 

By then, I still hadn't had any warnings from GFN about how long I'd been playing. From memory, I seem to remember one popping up after half an hour, then another at fifteen minutes, after which there was an on-screen timer ticking down the minutes. It felt like I must have been playing for at least the half hour and I can see now from the report you get when you log out that it was in fact 34 minutes, so either I'm misremembering it or it's changed. 

As a free player, you're limited to a maximum session time of one hour although you can just log back in immediately to repeat that as often as you want, always depending how many other people are in front of you in the queue. When I logged in at about nine in the morning on a Tuesday, there were nine people ahead of me and it took maybe thirty seconds before I got my turn. More than acceptable.

So far so great, then. If that was a test, GFN definitely passed. There were a couple of trivial issues, foremost among them the annoying discovery I made after I logged out that any screenshots you take using the in-game camera or selfie function are saved on GeForce Now's servers, not on your own PC, and they're immediately deleted at the end of your session. That's why there's only one screenshot in this post from my session this morning. It's the only one I took with the Windows screenshot instead.

The one screenshot from today's session that survived. It tells us absolutely nothing.

That's easily fixed by using the GFN screenshot facility, though. That does store locally. I believe it's what I used to do when I played New World this way. Long time ago now. I wonder if they've allowed New World to stay on the service pending its final execution next year?

At the end of the session GFN gives you some stats about its performance. Everything was aces except for the game itself, which scored just 15%, putting it deep in the red warning zone. Apparently the servers free players get to play on aren't up to the task of running NTE at top graphic fidelity. If I want to play on Cinematic I'd need to subscribe to get the better machines.

Except, as I think I've made clear, I didn't notice the game was performing badly. It ran fine, looked great and I had no problems doing anything I wanted to do. I had no complaints. So much comes down to expectation. 

And taste. Because here's the strange thing: having played for weeks on my PC on High or Extreme and now having glimpsed Cinematic, I think I might actually prefer Smooth. Not for the increased frame rate or improved performance but because in some contexts it just looks better.

When I was playing on Smooth yesterday, I took a lot of screenshots of wet streets and buildings in the rain. The rain in Hethereau always looks picturesque and a lot more appealing than real rain ever could but on Smooth it looks positively painterly. It gives the whole city an impressionistic sheen that's just lovely to see. At the very least. I'd say the game looks no worse in Smooth than on the higher settings and when it rains, I'd say it looks considerably better.

All of this has given me something to think about.

Most of the visually-taxing games I'm likely to want to play are available on GeForce Now. Baldurs Gate 3 is. All the well-known gacha games are. You can bet any new hot title will be. 

The free service does have some limitations that make it less appealing as a long-term option but the mid-level, "Performance" subscription removes them all. The Performance subscription includes sessions that can last up to six hours and there's a queue time averaging less than a minute to get in again. You get access to the more powerful machines, able to run the games at high settings and you're eligible for the Install To Play option so you can add games you own that aren't part of the core offer. You can also link GFN to Steam to make it even easier.

Perhaps even more temptingly, I'd never even have to think about updates or patches while I was playing on NVidia's servers because they'd handle all that for me. I'd also be able to free up a whole lot of drive space on my own machine because I wouldn't need to keep the games installed locally. 

And best of all, I could play all my games on any device I own. Not just on this desktop but on my laptop, my Android tablet or even my phone. Not that I'd want to play on my phone...

And it's so cheap! An annual subscription costs just £65 in the summer sale (The offer ends tomorrow although who's to say there won't be another soon after?)  but it's only £99 at full price. Which means I could pay less than a hundred pounds and be able to play all my games as much as I realistically would ever want to with just the hardware I already own...

... or I could spend more then £2,500 on a new PC and a laptop that could do basically the same thing. And maybe throw in a good tablet to make it a round three thousand. Which would get me what, exactly?

Hmmm....

Yeebo has a great post up about media and ownership that I need to reply to with one of my own. I left a comment in his thread indicating how conflicted I am, not just about the necessity for owning entertainment but the desirability, too. Conflicts of interest like this really don't help me come down on one side or the other.

All my logic tells me I should just buy a subscription to GeForce Now and forget about buying new hardware altogether. If GeForce Now lets me down at some point, I can deal with it then. If it doesn't, I've saved a ton of money and I have all the access to games I need.

Logic tells me that but emotion still tells me I want my games running on my machines in my house. Which will win out isn't clear but I really can't see any good reason not to give Nvidia their £5 a month anyway. If nothing else, it's going to be a handy back-up. 

And who quibbles over a £5 monthly sub these days?  

An Unexpected Return To Hethereau

Since my PC decided to go on the fritz a week or so ago, I've barely played any games at all. Other than when I've been on holiday, away from home, or too ill to play, it has to be the longest I've gone without gaming for nearly thirty years. 

At first I barely noticed. It's summer, the weather's been lovely and I've got more than enough practical things to do - gardening, my ongoing project to sort and clear all the cruft and kipple from the house, taking Beryl for interesting walks - without needing to sit in front of a screen. If I do want to sit down and do something less physical, there's blogging and song-making to keep me busy. 

Anyway, I've been drifting away from gaming of late. I've mentioned it a few times. I play fewer sessions and they tend to be shorter than they would have been even three or four years ago, let alone back in noughties, when I devoted most of my leisure hours to MMORPGs. Chances are I wouldn't have been playing all that much anyway. 

Or so I thought, so it was quite a surprise to find out how much - and how quickly - I missed my games. Even though I was getting a lot done around the house and garden, which was very satisfying, and I was getting lots of time in the sunshine, walking in the countryside with Beryl, which was fun, I still found I had more time than I quite knew what to do with, some days.

There were hours, here and there, where I felt a little adrift. Those were the times I'd usually have been logged into something or other, doing a bit of leveling or a quest or two or fiddling around with the decorations in one of my many imaginary homes. Not being able to do any of that gave me some useful perspective on what value even a modest amount of gaming adds to my day. 

It's more than just habit. It's a core part of the way I've lived my life for so long now that to cut it out completely feels wrong, just like it would feel wrong to stop reading or listening to music. That was actually a bit of a surprise to learn.

My intention was - and still is - to buy a new gaming PC and a gaming laptop as well. Thanks to the money I will eventually receive from my mother's estate (Eventually - it'll come some time but it's hard to say when.) I am for once in a position to spend a reasonable amount of money on myself and decent gaming hardware doesn't seem like too much of an indulgence for once. 

I'm a notorious prevaricator when it comes to choosing anything that's going to cost a significant amount, though, and I'm not looking at off-the-shelf models this time, so once you allow for a few days for fitting and testing and shipping, even if I made up my mind and placed an order today, it could be the best part of a week before I could sit down at a new PC and log into a game.

A game I want to play, that is. I have plenty of games I could play right now, on the hardware I have. But being able to play any old game isn't the issue. I want to play the games I want to play and the game I most want to play at the moment is Neverness To Everness. That's the one I'm missing. 

That was a surprise, too. I knew I liked it but I wasn't expecting its absence to feel like when your favorite MMORPG goes offline for extensive maintenance. That sense of an irritating itch you just can't quite reach to scratch.

Plus there's DCUO. I know! I know! I don't even play DCUO. Not really. But it's the Summer of Supergirl (Damp squib of a summer for some but not for me.) and Digital Ink keeps giving new Supergirl stuff away. Like the duster coat she wears in the movie.

Having seen the movie, which I loved, as you'll know if you've been keeping up with the blog, I realized I really wanted that duster coat. I've always loved duster coats. Who doesn't? I'd buy one for myself if I wasn't worried I'd look a complete twat in it. But I can just imagine my DCUO character wearing one. She'd look so cool!

It's not time-critical. If you miss the window to earn these things for free through normal play, you can just buy them later for Daybreak Cash, of which I have plenty. Or I think you can... I hope you can... Maybe you can't.. Maybe you have to buy them while the event is still running... 

That was how my logic went on Saturday. I guess that's FOMO? I don't experience it often enough to be sure. It could just be sensible forward-planning. Whatever you want to call it, it was a spur. And what it spurred me on to do was see if this PC could at least let me log into DCUO for long enough to buy a coat, even if it crashed right afterwards.

This PC has what are supposed be decent integrated graphics, so far as integrated graphics can ever be described as decent. They're supposed to be good for what's euphemistically and optimistically called "light gaming". Exactly what that might mean in this context I couldn't tell you. When I bought it, I already had a pretty good graphics card so I didn't pay too much attention to what the in-house alternative might or might not be able to handle. 

I probably never would have considered using the integrated graphics to play games until I started having all these conflicts with the card. Then, the first time I tried it with EverQuest II a little while ago, it didn't go well. I thought I'd given up on the idea but I wanted that duster coat so  why not? What's the worst that could happen, right? I've already broken this machine twice and look at it now - working just fine.

This is the point where you're probably expect a story about how I nearly bricked the whole thing just for the sake of an imaginary overcoat. Luckily, that's not what happened. 

What did happen was that DCUO ran flawlessly. I started off very cautiously, collecting my login rewards and checking to see what I needed to do for the coat. It turned out I could either just buy it (And all the other items that came with the event package, a few of which were pretty nice too.) for 2000DBC or I could do some dailies and reduce the total cost by 200DBC a day.

If I'd had ten days, maybe I'd have done that and gotten my coat for free. But I didn't have ten days. The event had less than half of that still to run. Even so, I thought I'd get started. Neither the game nor the PC had crashed so I was getting curious. I wondered if I'd be able to do something simple like a few dailies?

Yes, I would. I did. And I couldn't really tell much, if any, difference from how the game played through the GTX 4050. I hadn't even changed any of the graphic settings but it all seemed to zip along just fine. I did all the dailies that counted for the event and a few more besides. I wasn't timing it but I think I'd probably played for about an hour when I decided I'd had enough.

I thought about whether I'd want to do the same again for another few days just to save maybe a thousand DBC and I was pretty sure I wouldn't  so I bought the coat. It cost me 1800DBC minus the 10% discount for being a member, so 1620DBC altogether. 

Since DBC has a nominal exchange rate of 100DBC to the dollar, that's just over $16. Would you pay $16 for an imaginary duster coat? I wouldn't. Then I did anyway. And I still had more than 30k DBC left. I'm DBC rich, still. 

Once I'd gotten my coat, I spent another half-hour or so redoing Nini Mo's whole outfit. They've certainly improved how that works over the years. I remember it being very fiddly and unintuitive but it seemed very comfortable this time. I have quite a lot of options, including not just in all the costume slots but cosmetics, auras, colors and effects. And for possibly the first time, I could find them and apply them all without much trouble.

I put together a look I was pretty happy with. I'd love to show it to you but one thing that didn't seem to work with the integrated graphics was the screenshot key. I tried the in-game version and the good old reliable Windows+Prt Scr method, all without success. I'm sure I could figure out how to make it work but DCUO screenshots tend to look like crap anyway so it doesn't seem likely it'd be worth the effort. You'll just have to imagine it. 

Nini Mo also has the Super-S-Symbol on her chest now, if that helps. I got that in the package, too. And Supergirl will come hang out at my base now. An imaginary $16 well spent, if you ask me.

So that was DCUO and Supergirl done. I logged out and waited for the PC to crash and it didn't. Then it went on not crashing for the rest of the day. Hmmm.

Sunday, I had to work so I wouldn't have been playing much anyway but this morning I started to wonder. If the onboard graphics could play DCUO, could they maybe handle NTE? 

First, I had to find the installation. It wasn't on any of the three disks in the case. I found it on an SDD I had in an external caddy. I plugged that into a USB slot and patched up the game. It didn't take long. The big new update doesn't get here until Wednesday.  

Then it was time to log in and the launcher wasn't happy. I got a big warning, telling me my device didn't meet minimum spec and politely suggesting I might like to try another device instead. That might have put me off but I'd already worked out, through a combination of Can You Run It? and Reddit threads, that although my integrated graphics show up as having less than a gigabyte of VRAM, they can actually draw as much as they need from system RAM, as much as 4GB if you tweak the bios, something I haven't yet tried, not wanting to invite trouble.

I ignored the warning and carried on. Loading was a little slow, thanks to playing through an external drive, but once I was in the game everything seemed fine. I didn't notice any stuttering or hitching with the graphics on "Balanced" but just to be on the safe side I dropped them to "Smooth", Hotta's interesting choice of name for the second-to-lowest setting.

Two hours later I logged out after a thoroughly enjoyable session. I did all the usual things, restocked my cafes (For which I always do my own shopping, meaning a lot of traveling through  Hethereau.), stopped a bunch of random street crimes (Combat seemed completely normal.), bumped into Lacrimosa in a couple of places (There's an event where you have to meet her numerous times, allegedly by chance, although there's a list of where she'll be...) and finally a long and very enjoyable quest I just happened to pick up as I was running around.

When I logged out... nothing happened. Apparently I can play NTE just fine on integrated graphics. Then again, I was playing it just fine on the graphics card until I wasn't, so who knows? 

All of which somewhat changes my plans. I'm still going to get a gaming laptop for certain. That'll give me portability for gaming such as I've never had, something I will certainly enjoy and  use. I think I'll still get a new gaming laptop, as well. It will give me redundancy for the next time something breaks. This his machine can move into the back-up slot and its predecessor can go to the recycling center, which will save me trying to figure out how to fix it. 

In the meantime, though, it looks like I'm back to playing Neverness To Everness, until and unless that breaks something else. I'm very much looking forward to the new update on Wednesday and just two hours in the game today gave me more than enough ideas for several posts, not counting this one, so expect to hear more about it.

If you're going to blog about gaming, I guess it really does help to play some games now and then...