Staring At The Sun

 

Absolutely no time to write a post today or tomorrow but I don't want to go four days in a row with nothing so let's all enjoy enjoy some lens flare!

Look Ma! No feet! It's taken me a while to figure out how to frame the shot to stop that happening. It doesn't help that the in-game camera shows the image without the frame that gets added when you take the shot.

Is that a dog kennel over there? Why, do you know, I think it is! But what kind of a dog would live on a rooftop? Would it be one called Ruddy, I wonder?

 

I think that's more glare than flare but I'll allow it. 

Now that's the real thing!

Pretentious? Moi? Mais certainment non!

And a little palette cleanser there, right at the end. Also, it's really about time I got some new clothes...

Tell Me About Your Childhood - Backstory In NTE

Hotta produces a lot of videos for Neverness To Everness. There are one hundred and forty listed the official YouTube account. They come in all flavors, from the exceptionally vivid and vibrant trailers that created so much of the buzz around the game a year or so back to the gameplay and combat and feature reveals. There are songs and cut scenes and appearances at conventions - promotions of all kinds.

None of those does anyone need to watch to enjoy the game, now it's out there to be played. Or to decide whether to play it, either, since it's Free To Play. If you want to know what the game's like, you can just download it, make an account, log in and find out for yourself.

If you do that and decide you like the game enough to keep playing, though, there are a few videos in that hundred and forty that you probably ought to make time to watch. Those are the vignettes, short stories and micro-movies that add background to the characters and also sometimes reveal them to be quite  different from what you might have thought just from seeing them in the game itself. 

Some of these ought to be in the game, not on YouTube and even when you know where to look, it's not just a simple matter of going to the channel and watching them. First you have to find them.

I was hoping to do that before I wrote this post but that was when I was thinking Hotta would have organized them in some way. Maybe they have but if there's any order or sequence, I can't figure it out.

It's not even a simple task to single the damn things out from the pack. There look to be several naming conventions in play but I'm not convinced whoever's using them pays much attention to how they're being applied. There are "PV" videos, "EP" videos, "Animated Shorts". I think PV means a take from the character's point of view, while an animated short is more objective. EPs are definitely music videos.

It's also a job in itself spotting when a new one arrives. I'm subscribed to the channel so they pop up in my YouTube timeline but that moves so fast I miss most of what's there. I get emails from Hotta but not about any of these. This is what comes from playing a game made by and for digital natives, I guess. The target audience doesn't need to be told to pay attention to this sort of thing.

I do, though, and since my audience here is almost certainly not part of the target demographic either, I thought I'd mention it as a kind of public service. If you'e playing NTE and not watching these videos, you're missing out on something you'd almost certainly enjoy and which might even change your perceptions of the characters you like or loathe or feel nothing but indifference for.

It certainly changed my feelings about a couple of them. Hotori was already my favorite character, purely for the slacker chic and anarchic undertow she brings to the game, but my appreciation and understanding of her deepened considerably after I watched this:

It explains nothing and yet it contextualizes everything. I know very little more about Hotori after watching it several times, other than she grew up rich and a Bad Thing happened and yet I feel as if I know her so much better. As for Adler, before I watched the video I thought he was a bit of an ass. Not any more. The gravitas he carries now feels like it comes from somewhere rather than just some pose he's taking.

Then there's this:

I have almost no clue what that's supposed to mean but it's a joy to watch. The animation is exemplary, the art design is gorgeous and it creates a sense of history that fills out the characters without really telling you anything about them. I welcome that approach in any medium. Don't tell me or show me - make me feel it. 

And finally in the Hotori trilogy there's this:

Which is basically a music video. I watch a lot of music videos and that's a good one. The song's not bad, either. And once again it works on emotion not reason.

All of those were released in the ten days or so running up to the arrival of Hotori as a banner pull so they're very much part of the marketing push, something that in no way undermines their value as narrative, lore and story. And, of course, mood.

Mood is really super-important to NTE. It's a mood piece, almost, as much as a game. Kind of a tone poem, perhaps.

At Hunter Level 21, Appraisal Level 2 and a couple of weeks into the game, I still have relatively little idea what the main storyline is, or if there even is one. I've been trying to remember if that was true of Wuthering Waves or Genshin Impact at the same stage but in both cases, later narrative developments have mostly overwritten my memory of how it all began.

Still, I'm fairly sure both those games and indeed almost every other RPG, online or off, multiplayer or solo, that I've played had a clearer through-line in the early chapters than this one. NTE seems to thrive on ambiguity and vagueness. It's an approach that sits very well with me. I do like not knowing what's going on.

For that to work, though, you have to really like the characters or at least find them fascinating. The game does a great job of that but the videos, even as they do almost nothing to explain the plot, do plenty to make the characters feel more empathetic. 

Nanally, for example, can seem bossy, harsh, brash and aggressive. Here's how she sees herself:

That's a PV video, which I'm taking to mean it's from the character's perspective. Here's one from the outside, looking in:

As well as making Nanally seem like a much more sympathetic character, these videos also go a huge way to explaining why such a young girl is part of a clean-up team nullifying and containing dangerous anomalies. She's a very powerful, skillful Esper, capable of showing a great deal of empathy for her targets. (How old is she, anyway? As with most characters in the game it's very hard to be sure.) 

Once again, watching these videos materially changed how I saw the character. I'm guessing - and hoping - that there's a lot more to learn about all of them inside the game but even if that's true, playing through character arcs takes quite a while. Assuming they even exist, it''ll be weeks if not months before I get to see most of them and I'd like to have at least some idea who I'm spending my time with before then.

Nanally also gets a music video. It's not as good as Hotori's but it's pretty good all the same. That means both characters have a PV, an Animated Short and an EP, suggesting maybe every character will eventually get a set of three.

So far, Sakiri, Jiuyuan and Fadia are the only others to get PV videos although for some reason the official Hotta PV Playlist also includes Mint's Character Short. So much for the naming conventions. I haven't seen those yet so I'll say nothing. I'm going to watch them later today, though. 

For now, I'll go out with a song. Chiz, who I would be happy to see more of, doesn't get a PV or a short yet but she does get a song. Here's her EP:

 Chiz is pronounced "Cheese". 'Nuff said...

What Are The Odds? Rolling The Dice In Neverness To Everness

In the comments to Monday's post, Mailvaltar mentioned that, since I'd just said she was my favorite character in the game so far, I might be interested to know the next limited banner in Neverness To Everness was going to feature Hotori as the S-Level pull. As I said in my reply, I wasn't as interested as might be expected because I generally don't bother all that much with the whole gacha part of gacha games. 

It's not out of any moral or fiscal objection to gambling. I'm British so I'm fine with all of that. We're a decadent nation. It's just that I prefer to stick with the smallest number of characters possible and change them as infrequently as I can get away with, while still being able to progress comfortably. Laziness is another national characteristic.

For non-gacha-gamers some of that might need a little unpacking. I'm not really the best person to explain it but I'm what you've got so you'll have to make the best of it you can. Then again, if I can understand it, anyone ought to be able to. I certainly haven't put much effort into figuring out the details but even I can grasp the basics. 

The way the games work is that you start out playing a single character but then quickly add several more to make up a team. I found it quite disorienting at first but I'm used to it now. 

The first few characters, you get for free in the early stages of the story. Often you add a few more freebies along the way as the storyline continues but after a while it's mainly down to "pulls". 

Every so often, usually on a set schedule, there are Events in the game. These events are unconnected to the narrative, and it's through these that new characters become available, although the characters themselves will almost always be familiar, having been introduced already through the story.

The characters vary in numerous ways. There's usually some kind of system, akin to resistances in traditional RPGs, whereby they inflict different kinds of damage, to which various opponents may or may not be susceptible. There may also be characters who provide healing or buffs and there will always be certain, desirable synergies between various characters. 

Most importantly, at least in terms of combat, some characters are just more powerful than others. All the characters have a performance grade, usually a letter code. Other games I've played have had three or four gradations but as far as I can tell, NTE just has two - A and S. 

Theoretically the best characters are S-Grade although experience in other games suggests that isn't always the case. Regardless of their actual utility, however, S-Grades are always the hardest to obtain, having a much lower chance to drop from the gacha system. 

The exact nature of the gacha mechanics differs from game to game. NTE uses the visual representation of a board game. You throw dice to move, hoping to land on the square that has the thing you want. 

However it's set up, the effect is the same: you spend a specific currency for each "pull" (Or roll as it probably should be called in NTE.). There are often multiple currencies, used for different pulls like weapons or accessories. Some of those currencies come free with gameplay, some of can only be bought with real money. For most it's a mix of both.

Most games seed you a little of the "real money" kind of currency, the one you need for the important pulls, just for playing the game, presumably to encourage you to buy more when you run out before you get the S-Class character you want, as it surely will. Some games I've played have been very stingy, others quite ridiculously generous. Noah's Heart, for example, gave me many hundreds of free pulls to the extent that I never even got close to using them all before I was given more. It's no wonder they went out of business.

NTE is reasonably even-handed, from what I've seen so far. After playing for a couple of weeks, I already had enough of the good currency for a dozen rolls. Even so, I still wasn't thinking about making a play for Hotori when I logged in yesterday, for the reasons I gave Mailvaltar. I'm barely used to the three or four characters I'm playing now. The idea of changing one out and learning a new one did not appeal, even if that character was my favorite.

I will do a post about the characters themselves at some point so I won't go into details here but I will just say I like nearly all of them. I'd be more than happy to explore any of their backgrounds in character quests. But that doesn't mean I want to fight as them.

But Mailvaltar said something else in his comment that intrigued me. He said "she can literally stop time. Not only in combat, mind you, also in the open world." Now that does sound like an ability I'd like to have, although I have no clue how it could work. (I've since read up how it works in combat and even that seems too complicated for me...)

I would love it if it worked in the open world the way it does in this video, though. 

You can see it in action near the end. It's impressive as hell. I somehow don't imagine we'll all be wandering around Hethereau stopping the trains like that but wouldn't it be nice?

I'll most likely also do a post about the character videos Hotta release, too. That one's just to show off the costumes Hotori can wear, character costuming being yet another possible post. I'm not at all sure I want to see Hotori wandering about my apartment in shorts...

The really interesting videos are the ones that fill out the narrative out of game. They're very impressive and they seem to be almost a requirement to understanding the characters fully. It's a somewhat metatextual approach to storytelling, not unusual in games but taken to a more rarefied level than I'm used to seeing. For now, though, I'll try to stay on track for once, instead of cramming several posts into one. 

Getting back to point of this one, yesterday I had a lot to do in real life so I only had time for a very short session in the morning. I just wanted to claim my login rewards in case I forgot later on and missed a day. 

As I went through all the highlighted options, a notice popped up telling me there was a new banner event, that being the genre jargon for a time-limited gacha draw with a new character. I remembered Mailvaltar saying that character was going to be Hotori and I thought "Well, I don't have time to do much - maybe I'll just take a look..."

I tend to apply the same rules to currency in games that I use in the outside world, namely only spend a fraction of what you have. In games, that fraction does tend to be a larger one but it's rarely more than half. I had a dozen Solid Dice, the "good" currency, so I thought I'd have half a dozen rolls just for the fun of it.

To give it some perspective, in NTE you get a Pity pull after 90 rolls. A pity pull is when you're guaranteed a win. Again, it's a fairly generous system by genre standards. There's a "soft" pity threshold at 70 unsuccessful pulls, when the base chance jumps from 1.87% to 19.59%. If you're still out of luck after another twenty tries, which at those odds would be bad luck indeed, your next pull is 100% guaranteed to be the S-Class character.

I got Hotori on my fifth pull. 

This is why gacha games never get any money from me. I didn't particularly want the character, even though she's my current favorite but now I've got her anyway. Not the first time, either. Go me! Ironically, it wasn't until the next day I got the email from Hotta telling me the event had started.

The next question is, will I add her to my team and actually play her? If I'd been playing for longer the answer would most likely be no, unless I was already struggling to win fights. I'm just too lazy. Within reason, I'd rather have a longer, slower fight using tactics I already know than stop and learn new ones to speed it up. It's not like I'm on a contract.

Of course, since my current tactics consist almost entirely of swapping between characters to hit the cooldowns, it wouldn't take a lot of re-learning but I'm guessing at some point I might need to do a bit more than that... 

But since I've only been playing for a couple of weeks, I haven't really had time to develop any specific muscle memory for the three characters I'm using. And there's one I don't have any particular fondness for: Adler. I don't dislike him - as I said, I like all the characters well enough - but he didn't really resonate with me at first. I'm coming to like him more but there are plenty of other characters I find more interesting or who seem like they'd be better company. He could easily step back to make space for Hotori.

I'll try it and see how I get on. She ought to bring more to the battlefield, being S-Class and anyway Adler never seems to do all that much. Then again, I haven't really got much of an idea what any of them do. Yet another post waiting to be written: how insanely complicated combat in NTE is on paper and how little any of that ludicrous complexity seems to matter when you come to the actual fighting.

The other thing about adding new characters to the team is that you have to level and gear them up. In past gacha titles, I've found that to be a real disincentive to making changes to the line-up but after just two weeks it won't be a problem. I've barely bothered to gear or level anyone yet!

So there we are. Looks like it's time for Hotori to tag Adler and let the butler sit it out while his boss takes over. (That, for those who don't play, is their relationship in the game.)

Maybe I'll report back on how it goes. And if it does turn out that Hotori really can stop time in the open world, not just in combat, then you'll definitely be hearing more about it!  

 [Edit] And sooner than expected. I just tested it in the streets of Hethereau and it actually works! One of the weirdest things I've ever seen in a game. Not sure if it has any practical applications but it's a lot of fun to play around with. Also, it seems you can have four in a party so Adler doesn't get to take a sabbatical just yet!

Head In A Hole

There's a new movie out just now called The Sheep Detectives. In it, a bunch of sheep - alright, a flock of sheep then, if you want to be pedantic about it - investigate the mystery of the murder of the farmer who owns them. They know how to do this because the farmer was in the habit of reading them detective stories in the evening because that's a thing farmers do, just like sheep solve murder mysteries. Frankly the one is about as likely as the other.

I watched the trailer last week and it looked surprisingly amusing. By chance, the novel on which it's based came into my hands at work a few days later. I had a look at that as well and it seemed like it would be a fun read.

Do not let any of this supposed evidence fool you into thinking sheep are clever, though. This are fictional sheep. Real sheep are not so smart.

Not that I'm saying sheep are thick. Most animals are a lot more intelligent than they're given credit for and I'm sure sheep, collectively and individually, have the capacity for all kinds of wickedly canny mischief you might not imagine they were capable of. Anecdotal experience of all kinds of domestic animals suggest that's likely to be true. 

I can tell you a couple of things the average sheep is not bright enough to work out for herself, though:

1. It's a bad idea to put your head through a hole in a fence.
2. How to get your head out again if you ignored rule #1.

When Mrs Bhagpuss and I got up this morning, it looked like being a reasonably pleasant spring day. We neither of us had anything pressing to be getting on with, so we thought it might be a nice idea to take a flask of coffee and a couple of apples and go sit on top of a five thousand year old burial mound, since we happened to have one handy nearby.

Stony Littleton Long Barrow is one of the finest surviving examples of a neolithic stone and earth tomb anywhere in Britain but it's not exactly on any tourist trail. There are no signs to direct you there and even if you have an idea where it is, to get to it you have to drive down a single track road with no passing places. 

When you get there, there's a parking space for about four cars and the enterprising small farmer opposite (I mean he farms on a small scale, not that he's the size of a Borrower.) has put out a couple of benches. You can buy an ice cream from him and sit on one of the benches to eat it, assuming he happens to have opened his little hut that day.

We've been there a few times. It's a lovely walk, over the bridge and up the long hill to the barrow. Once there, you have a fine view of the surrounding countryside, which is to say some fields, some more fields and some more fields after that. 

The barrow itself is amazing. I'd show you a photograph but I didn't take any today and I can't find any of the ones I've taken on previous visits. I bet it's on the internet though. Just hold on moment... Ah yes, here's the English Heritage page. And it's on Wikipedia. 

And up there's a picture of the sign at the site itself. I took that this morning, when I thought I might be writing this post.

Take my word for it, anyway. The barrow's a lot more impressive in person than in photographs because you can crouch down and shuffle inside it and get an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia even if you don't normally have a problem with confined spaces. It's worth the long walk up the hill just for the relief of getting out of the damn thing and back into the sunshine.

But this isn't really a post about the barrow. It's about the walk back. 

We had Beryl with us but she was on her lead most of the time because the entire hillside as far as you could see in any direction was rife with sheep. There are often sheep there but this was way more sheep than usual. 

I quite like sheep. They look decorative, they're non-threatening and they nearly always get out of the way when they see you coming. Not like cows, which sometimes express a disturbing degree of interest and have been know, all too frequently, to trample people to death. My aunt and uncle once had to jump into a hedge to avoid being trampled. They're both dead now, although not from bovine trampling, I'm pleased to say.

As for horses... do not get me started on horses. I grew up with horses in the fields next to my house and
you do not want to go into any field that has horses in it, trust me. Horses have a very peculiar sense of humor, which includes running at people as fast as they can to see how they react. Then they stand there and laugh at you when you run away or fall over. At least they do if you're lucky. If not, they trample you, too.

So much for horses and cows. Sheep, though, sheep are fine, so long as you don't have a dog with you. Not that the sheep go for the dog. More the dog goes for the sheep and it all ends in tears and/or a fatality, usually for the sheep but sometimes for the dog, if the farmer happens to be out and about and has brought his gun and in my experience no self-respecting farmer leaves the house without a gun.

Beryl is not a dog for running after anything bigger than a squirrel and sheep are the size to her that elephants would be to us so we're not worried about her doing them any actual harm. Still, some sheep get scared by any dog, even small ones, the way elephants are supposedly scared of mice and we don't want to scare the sheep or get Beryl shot so she's always on her lead if sheep are around.

On the way back, though, we went along a high ridge and the sheep were hundreds of yards away along the bottom of the valley so we let her amble along behind us for a while until I spotted one, lone sheep ahead of us, apparently grazing in the hedge. There's always one that has to be different.

I put Beryl back on her lead and we were about to go around the sheep when we realized this sheep wasn't being different. This sheep was stuck.

The dim-witted creature had apparently tried to reach some particularly tasty leaf just out of reach in the hedge and now it had its head firmly wedged in a square of wire. As we got near, it thrashed about a bit and tried to force its way further into the hedge, which wasn't a great plan. Mrs Bhagpuss took control of Beryl, who was starting to express some interest, and I went to see if I could unstick the poor creature.

Sheep aren't exactly wild about about letting people they don't know come within arm's reach but this one didn't have a lot of choice. I've rarely had the opportunity to test it before but it seems as though, if they really can't get away, they go completely still, presumably in the hope of being taken for a particularly fuzzy boulder. Or maybe it was my soothing tone.

The sheep stood dead still and let me pull her head this way and that, even move her ears about, as I tried to see if there was any way I could maneuver her loose. There was not. I bent the wire as far in all directions as it would go but it was obvious the head that had gone in with sharp end first was not coming back out with the thick end leading. Same principle as a lobster pot, presumably.

We spent a while thinking about it but there was clearly no way to shift the sheep without a pair of wire-cutters. We decided we'd best leave the sheep be and see if we could find the farmer to let them know. We were pretty sure the small farm at the bottom of the hill had nothing to do with the sheep on the hills but there was another big house right in the fields where the sheep were roaming so we carried on down the path to to try there.

That turned out to be a bust, No-one home but a dog. I don't think is was a sheepdog, either, although I only heard it barking.

We worked out way back to where we began and I tried
the other farm. The one that sells the ice-cream. There was someone there but as we'd suspected they didn't own the sheep. Or any sheep. 

Still, even being the nearest person to some sheep comes with its own responsibilities. The chap's face did fall a bit when I explained the problem. "Oh, not again..." he said. 

He cheered up a bit when I asked him if he had a pair of wire-cutters I could borrow. "I don't mind going back up and cutting her loose if you can lend me a pair", I said, although what I was really thinking was "What a jolly jape! I hope he lets me do it!" In my head, I was nine years old and it was an Enid Blyton story...

The farmer (Not really a farmer at all, in fact, just someone with a couple of alpacas and a horse in a field behind his house. Yes, alpacas. Surprisingly common around these parts...) offered Mrs Bhagpuss a coffee while she waited and I trudged back up the hill to the sheep which, when I finally got there, was no more glad to see me than it was before.

Once it had calmed down a bit and resigned itself to being eaten by wolves or whatever it thought was going to happen, I was able to cut through the fence-wire with the cutters and watch the sheep just stand there as if nothing had changed. 

It turned out she wasn't just being extra-specially suspicious or even extraordinarily dim; she'd also managed to get some wool on her head wound round a strand of barbed wire because whoever fenced the field obviously though a thick hedge and a sturdy fence didn't make it nearly secure enough, so they'd run a strand of barbed wire between the two as well, just to be on the safe side.

I can tell you now that you can't cut wool with wire cutters. Or I can't, anyway. Luckily, with a bit of encouragement the sheep gave a mighty shake of her head and tugged herself loose. Then she scampered off, bleating. 

It would be nice to think she was saying thank-you but she bloody well wasn't. She never looked my way once, just towards the rest of her pals, all of whom had abandoned her to her fate without a second thought. She was either yelling at them to ask what the hell they thought they were playing at or trying to warn them about the crazy human with the metal claws.

For me, it was back down the hill to return the wire-cutters and accept a cup of coffee. Beryl and Mrs Bhagpuss had watched the whole thing from a comfortable distance. Beryl, reportedly, was not impressed with my heroism, although apparently she was quite interested to see me go and come back.

Dogs are easily amused. Sheep are dim. Life goes on. 

Career Opportunities - Work-Life Balance In Neverness To Everness

As Tyler Edwards pointed out in the comments to yesterday's post, there are certain constraints involved in designing a game to be released in China. Or there are if you don't want to fall foul of Fenris Creations - er, sorry, I meant the CCP. Easy mistake!

Until then, it hadn't really occurred to me that Neverness To Everness was a Chinese game. Indeed, it didn't even occur to me then, or not in that exact form. What did occur to me was that I had no idea where the company behind the game I was playing was based other than somewhere in the mysterious East.

I rarely do. Honestly, it might as well be the nineteenth century for all the attention I've been paying to where most of the "imports" I keep picking up and then dropping might be coming from.

This has been going on quite a while now, hasn't it? Forever, really, for as much as that means in the context of online gaming. I remember Mrs Bhagpuss and I playing the beta for some MMORPG from China so long ago I can't even remember what it was called any more. Just that it was one of her favorites for a while.

Whatever it was, I don't believe it ever came out in "the West". I just know it was long before we played Runes of Magic or Zentia although maybe not before I played NeoSteam...

The more I think about it, the more it seems it's always been this way, even if I do have a vague feeling I used to be much clearer on where the games I was playing were made. Final Fantasy XI came from Japan for a start. I always knew that. NeoSteam was Korean. I did have to fact-check that one just then but I was pretty sure. 

Zentia was from China and so was Loong. Or was Loong just set in China? It was published by Gamigo and they're... what are they now? German! I had to look that up even though I see some news item about Gamigo very nearly every day. Loong, it turns out, was developed by DACN out of Shanghai so it was Chinese.

These days, though, I rarely have much of an idea who's behind anything I'm playing, unless it's a company I know already. And sometimes, even when it's one I ought to recognize, I find I don't. 

I'm well aware Neverness To Everness is being developed by Hotta Studios. I've known that from the start. It's an easy-to-remember name. Or you'd think it would be. It can't be that easy to remember, though, because I only just realized this morning, as I was researching this post, that Hotta is the company behind that very successful MMORPG from a few years back, Tower of Fantasy.

At least, I think it was very successful. Wasn't it? For a while I saw a lot of people talking abut it but now I come to think of it, that didn't last long. No-one ever mentions it now. 

I never played it, which seems strange, given I'll play just about anything, so long as it's free and I think I can get a couple of blog posts out of it. As it happens, I know why I didn't play Tower of Fantasy. You won't guess. It's not a rational explanation. Or maybe it's too rational. 

I didn't play Tower of Fantasy because from the moment I saw the name I imagined the entire game was literally in a tower. I thought you'd have to start at the bottom and work your way up and that would be the all you'd ever do, which did not sound like a lot of fun to me, so I passed.  

I'm not completely crazy! There are MMORPGs that have towers like that inside them. It's a popular feature, I believe, although obviously not with me. I thought someone had just decided to make a whole game out of it, the way some developer or other is always trying to make an MMORPG that's all raids or all dungeons, one with no actual world to waste anyone's time.

By the time I'd realized my mistake it was a couple of years too late to jump on the very short-lived ToF bandwagon and so far I've never gotten around to giving it a go. I'm still not saying I won't but I'm guessing that particular bus has left the stop.

Although I feel like I might at least have recognized the name, in one way I'm not surprised I didn't. There doesn't appear to be a great deal of similarity between ToF and NTE. Different setting, different genre, different everything, pretty much. (ToF veterans are welcome to pop into the comments and tell me why that's just so wrong...assuming there's anyone reading who ever played it.)

Less defensible is my complete ignorance of where NTE was made. Is being made. It'd be nice to think country of origin doesn't matter for a video game but that would be a hard case to make. For all the hopes and fears trotted out across the past few decades, all the arguments in favor or against globalization, this is still a world of nation states and nations have cultures all their own.

Only in games, maybe not so much. It's blurry at best. For one thing, publishers with a global reach want to sell to all markets and they don't necessarily want to be running multiple versions to suit local tastes. Even if there is still a surprising amount of that sort of thing going on. 

For another, "globalization", as it applies to entertainment these days, often means "localization". Movies are made with different endings or a different emphasis in the storyline so as to play better in various territories. Games are localized not just by language but by cultural expectations including but not limited to age, dress code and the creatures you have to kill. I have a post brewing about aesthetic fragmentation that might get written one day...

Localization for the "Western" market does, theoretically, make it less obvious what the original intentions of the creators might have been but it's often no more than a thin, surface veneer stretched over a mostly unchanged framework. The innate cultural values and taboos that, consciously or unconsciously, drive the narrative and the aesthetic remain.

Or I assume they do. Except that I have such a shaky understanding of what those values and taboos might be, it's touch and go whether I'd recognize them in the first place. If there's one thing playing more games developed in China has taught me it's that I don't really know what China's like. Modern China, anyway.

Zentia used to be my idea of a "Chinese" game - all pagodas and dragons and people wearing straw hats. Neverness To Everness feels much more like my idea of a Japanese game, all modern technology, skyscrapers and neon. Which, to be fair, would also be my ignorant take on a Korean game, I guess, except I'd expect anything from Japan to be quirkier and cuter...

Is this racist? Maybe. I think it's more likely just ignorant. And lazy. I'd hold my hand up to both of those. 

Does it matter in the context of playing a video game? I guess not, so long as it leads to unconsidered assumptions being challenged and changed. And that does happen, quite a lot.

For example, unrelated to Tyler's comment and how it got me thinking about who was behind NTE and what they were trying to tell me, I'd already been wondering why there was such a huge focus on work in the game. It's a major theme. Possibly the major theme.

All the characters talk about their work all the time. It might be an even bigger obsession with many of them than food. All of them have jobs that they seem to take very seriously but despite their career goals, most of them also seem to have some kind of side-hustle going on. How they find time to sleep, let alone fit in any kind of social or private life, beats the hell out of me.

I'm not even talking about hand-wavy game mechanics, like the way they can all somehow pop up to fight my battles for me any time, anywhere. Or how the same characters can work for me, 24/7,  staffing the ever-increasing number of cafes that make up my growing business empire. No, I'm talking about proper, in-game second jobs the characters hold in character, usually menial, entry-level, gig economy deals like handing out leaflets in the street or doing courier work.

More worrying is the way no-one seems to have any kind of employment rights. The subject of overtime comes up constantly, always with characters dreading it but glumly accepting it as an inevitability of employment. And everyone appears to be on-call all the time. Having an official day off in no way prevents anyone from getting an urgent call telling them to come back to work. 

They all complain about it but none of them questions it. Work comes first seems to be a universally acknowledged maxim. Someone literally says it in one of the quests I did yesterday although I failed to get a screencap. As someone who's spent their entire life doing their best to avoid as much work as possible, I find it exhausting just to watch! I want the characters to kick back against the system that exploits them - organize, unionize, withdraw their labor - anything other than just complaining about it in private but doing it anyway.

I guess that's why my favorite character in the game so far is Hitori, the boss of Eidon Antiques. Hitori seems to do as little work as possible. She sleeps a lot, drinks a lot more, and mostly sends other people to do the jobs she can't be bothered with, which is all of them. As we see in the Main Story sequence, she's extremely capable when she needs to be but she doesn't feel the need to waste any energy proving herself to anyone. Mint, for one, could learn plenty from her example. 

The whole milieu reeks of double standards, hypocrisy and compromise, anyway, and Hitori is management so she can afford to delegate. She's not in any position to set an example. Half her staff is children! 

Granted, it's hard to tell exactly how old anyone's meant to be in NTE, what with the ever-rejuvenating anime art style, but Nanali, Edgar and Sakiri are specifically referred to as "kids" on multiple occasions, not least by Hitori herself. And Eidon isn't an isolated example of child labor. Illica and Haniel from Sterry Express seem to be much the same age, give or take a year or two.

What are the rules in Hetherau about employing children? Aren't they supposed to be in full-time education? There are certainly schools because one of the side quests takes you inside one but I don't see the slightest hint that any of the teenage cast is enrolled anywhere. 

Maybe being an Esper takes you out of the classroom? I could buy that if they were all transferred into some government program for potential assets in the Anomaly Wars but how would it square with them all ending up in the back room of an antique shop owned by an alcoholic, spending their time watching TV, bickering and pretending to run a junior version of the mob? 

But then the ordinary rules don't seem to apply to characters destined to become playable some day. It's different for Hethereau's regular citizenry. They don't get to sit around watching shows all day long.

Still, it is true that most of the people Flora meets seem to be reasonably happy in their work. All those hucksters outside stores and the sales people behind the counter inside. If you talk to them at length, though - and you often can because there's a lot of incidental, non-storyline dialog in NTE - it's often possible to sense an underlying dissatisfaction or ennui; workers for the same company getting a better deal, other branches offering a better quality of life... The grass is always greener ten blocks over.

Perhaps the most overtly subversive conversation I've enjoyed so far was with an unnamed "Slacking Citizen", who gleefully informed Flora that "slacking off is the essence of work". That's the attitude! She was still very concerned Flora not tell her boss, mind you, so i don't think she's going to be doing any organizing anytime soon

Maybe I'm reading more into all of this than I should but I can't help feeling the writers are telling us something about the society they live in. I get the feeling they may not disagree with the ethics of the way work is where they're from but they find the execution just a little hard to manage. Yes, work is great and of course we all need to do our best all the time but wouldn't it be nice to have a goddam day off, once in a while?

I imagine, if you're sufficiently attuned to it, you'd be able to sense specific cultural nuances within all the games that would clue you in to which specific countries the developers - or maybe just the writers - came from, without needing to look up the street address of the company to be sure. It's probably all there, embedded in assumptions about family, responsibility, work and individualism, themes that seem to come up in dialog over and over again.

For an ignorant westerner like me, though, what it mostly does is reinforce a pre-existing idea that life is more regimented in the East, wherever the East might be. And for me, the whole idea of taking what you do for a living in any way seriously seems almost distasteful. That's how I was raised.

I mean, it's only a job, isn't it? It's not like it's anything important...

We Don't Need To Talk About Lacrimosa (But We're Going To Anyway)

Yesterday's post was supposed to be about something entirely different but it got away from me in the first paragraph and I never even tried to wrangle it back to where it was meant to be going. Sometimes it's best just to give these things their head, although if you were wondering why it felt so under-researched and lacking in focus, now you know.

The upside was that I got an extra post out of it. The downside was that all day I couldn't stop thinking about the one I'd meant to write. It was going to be a really short one, too. Well, it might have been. I always say that even if it rarely turns out to be true.

Here's the short part, coming up now. So short I could use it for the title and pretty much leave it at that. 

Lacrimosa is a vampire.

There we are. That's it. That's what the post was going to be about. I'm not claiming it's a great revelation or that I've had some kind of amazing insight. It's bloody obvious. It's clearly not meant to be a secret.

The odd thing, though, is that if you google "Is Lacrimosa a vampire?" you get... well I'll get to that in a moment. If you google "Is Lacrimosa in Neverness to Everness a vampire?", though, you get a bland handful of links confirming she's "officially a sleepy vampire" and pretty much nothing else at all. 

I thought it would be more of a discussion topic but it seems not. Either people genuinely don't care or they haven't even noticed. 

It has to be the former. You can't possibly not notice. Here are the giveaways:

• She sleeps in a coffin
• She can turn into a bat.
• She lives on tomato jelly.

Wait? What? What was that last one?

Lacrimosa is obsessed with tomatoes in general. As you can see in one of the screenshots above, she has tomato plushies all over her apartment. She also grows tomatoes in the yard outside. What she really craves, though, is tomato jelly, which for some reason can very easily be had from vending machines in streets all over Hethereau. 

But hang on a minute... vampires don't drink tomato juice. Or jelly. They drink blood. Famous for it, in fact. And I guess that's why Lacrimosa can't be a proper vampire. Well, that and how she seems fine with being out in the sunshine and all.

But tomato jelly looks an awful lot like blood. Not just in the game but in real life. Oh yes, didn't you know? Tomato jelly is a real thing. I'd never heard of it but google it and you'll find dozens of recipes and countless photographs and in some of them it looks really quite bloody.

Although not nearly so much in the jars it's generally stored in as it does in Lacrimosa's preferred container, which is via something that looks extraordinarily like those plastic bags full of blood you see hooked up to an IV in hospital dramas. And which I have seen, on numerous occasions, in TV shows and movies about vampires who're trying to go straight and who only drink human blood from blood banks and the like.

So, Lacrimosa is a sleepy vegetarian vampire, maybe? She likes the look and feel of drinking blood but not the actual blood itself. A bit like vegans who still like to pretend they're eating bacon by mocking it up from mushrooms or whatever the hell they make the revolting stuff from. I wonder how she'd eat an actual tomato? Would she sink her fangs into it and suck the juice?

And that about wraps it up for Lacrimosa in NTE. Except remember how I said earlier I'd get to the "Is Lacrimosa a vampire?" google search results later? Well, this is later.

On my first attempt to find out if, indeed, Lacrimosa is a vampire and if so what people were saying about it, I omitted to include the name of the game. That's how I was reminded of something I theoretically ought to have remembered, having read the book, namely that Lacrimosa has a namesake, who I strongly suspect she was named after. It'd be a bit of a co-incidence otherwise, wouldn't it?

Lacrimosa de Magpyr is a teenage vampire in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel, Carpe Jugulum. The Discworld Wiki describes her as "excessively cruel". The LSpace Wiki goes into more detail, calling her "spiteful, sadistic and malevolent" and noting she "acts as an obvious teenager with traits such as surliness, rebelliousness and being argumentative."

I haven't seen our Lacrimosa doing anything like that but it's interesting that the Tomato Jelly Rampage quest ends with Skia (Who is himself, at least by appearance, some kind of werewolf.) reminding  Lacrimosa about certain basic aspects of civilized human behavior, which he has apparently had cause to tell her about before but which she clearly keeps forgetting.

As with Tako yesterday, I'm beginning to think there may be more going on here than we're being told. On the other hand, Lacrimosa is set to become a playable character so I can't think she's going to turn out to be a villain like Tako almost certainly will.

The whole concept of people behaving like vampires without necessarily being vampires is of some personal interest to me, as it happens, so maybe I'm more alert to it than average. One of the two quasi-novels I wrote in the '90s, the one for which I actually finished the first draft, has at its center a group of suspiciously long-lived, slow-aging, vaguely unsettling characters who may or may not have something to hide.

Since I've spent much of the last twelve months turning that novel into songs, it's at the forefront of  my mind and I'm easily triggered by anything even remotely similar. It's entirely possible I may be reading more into this than there is but it has me wondering...

I really like a lot of the characters in Neverness To Everness. There's some very strong writing here, supported by equally strong voice acting. I'd be happy to spend time with most of the characters I've met so far. Lacrimosa, though, is... problematic.

I'm not concerned about her being a vampire. if indeed she is one, although the tomato fetish is a little disconcerting. It's really the sleepy part I'm having trouble with, though. Her pauses are positively Pinteresque. I keep wanting to finish her sentences for her. And her voice makes her sound like a six year old doing an impression of Vivien Leigh in Streetcar. 

Which is good, in a way. I don't not like it. But it can be a bit much.

Then again, Neverness To Everness is all a bit much at the moment, not that I'm complaining. I just hope it doesn't end up going the same way as Wuthering Waves and end up being so much I can't play it any more because that degree of commitment just isn't what I'm after when I settle down to play a video game these days.

A Few Improvements Necessary - Things I'd Like To See In NTE

Something the developers - or maybe it's the publishers - of most of the open world gacha games I've played like to do is poll the players. Not the core fanbase, the people who follow the game on social media and chatter about it on Reddit and Discord, but all the people, the silent millions who actually play the games. Neverness To Everness has barely been out for a week and I've already completed two enormous in-game polls asking me how I feel about it.

The polls are multiple choice but they also have plenty of space to give your opinions and suggestions. The one I filled in yesterday ended, as they often do, by asking what I thought Hotta could do to make the game better. Given I'd picked "Very Satisfied" for almost every answer up to then, you might have thought I'd struggle to come up with anything but I didn't have any problem at all.

What the game is missing most, in my opinion, is personalization, something that applies to just about every game of its kind. When you have a business model that revolves around constantly encouraging players to add new characters to a team and then to swap from one character to another during gameplay, the underlying design mitigates against any form of personal identity for or identification with whatever character you're playing.

It doesn't much help that you can dress them up, either, especially when the only way you can acquire new clothes is through the cash shop. I'm not sure if that's the only way to do it in NTE because, as I told them in the poll, I haven't even looked at the cash shop offers yet, but if there's another method I haven't happened across it. 

I haven't taken a look at the cash shop yet because I'm a terrible, terrible customer as far as any game developer is concerned but especially for anyone operating any kind of Free To Play game. F2P to me really does mean free. I struggle to think of a single, wholly F2P game, where I've ever spent any money at all.

There are several reasons, the first and foremost of which is that I'm a mean-spirited old skinflint I barely have any desire to spend money on anything, period. I'm not much of a shopper, in or out of games. My default, baseline emotional reaction to just about anything I see up for sale is "Well, I'm sure I can manage perfectly well without that!" 

In games, I frequently don't bother to spend even the in-game currency other than on essentials. I just let it pile up until I need it for something practical. Money doesn't burn holes in my pockets, real or imaginary. 

Still, there are occasions when I might make an exception. I do like playing dress-up...

In fantasy games, I generally don't much care what my characters look like. Or, rather, I do but the games rarely want to facilitate my low-rent fashion aspirations. I'd quite like my characters to look like regular people but apparently that's not what I'm supposed to want.

Redbeard was saying something the other day about how hard it is to get a character in a fantasy MMORPG to look like an ordinary person rather than an extremely rich one but really that's the best scenario. Most player-characters in fantasy games look more like a ten year-old's idea of a super-hero than any member of the aristocracy. 

If you want to look like an average member of society, you'd often be best off sticking with whatever starting clothes the game gave you. You remember? The dull set that was clearly intended to make you as keen as possible to level up just so you could get out of them and into something better. 

In games with a contemporary setting or a near-future approximation thereof, the chances of putting together something that both feels natural and looks stylish tend to be a lot better. In the really good games you might even manage to dress your character in clothes that would look cool even to someone who doesn't play video games. I know! It's the dream, right?

My gold standard for dressing well in video games is still The Secret World. No other game I've played has ever done a better job of letting me create a character that looks like I wish I looked like in real life. Or indeed, who's dressed in clothes I'd be prepared to leave the house wearing. (It also lets you look like a crazy person who thinks it ought to be Halloween every day of the year, so there's something for everyone!)

One of the many things that's pulled me out of fantasy MMORPGs and into open world gacha titles over the last few years is the clothes. Everything just looks so much better. The design sensibilities and attention to detail are orders of magnitude beyond anything I'd been used to seeing in the games I'd been playing before (TSW always exempted.). The streets are full of NPCs who look like they actually thought about what to wear when they got up and obviously all the characters the company is hoping you'll pay money for are catwalk-ready.

The problem is, they never really change. All the characters have a signature look and they stick with it. There are cash shop options to change things up with appearance gear and sometimes it comes free with special events or holidays but if you don't want to spend money or wait for the rare opportunity, you're mostly going to have to keep on wearing the same old duds.

Where MMORPGs have the advantage is that they expect the player to have just a few characters, who they'll stick with for a long time, not constantly be acquiring new ones. To keep people playing they have to provide lots of chances to change things up for those characters, keep them fresh. New possibilities come at you from all directions: drops, quests, holidays, events, crafting, cash shops. There are so many ways in an MMORPG to keep your character looking... well, if not good then at least different. 

And players lap it up. Some even have fashion as a kind of end-game goal. It wasn't always that way. There was a time when you just wore what had the best stats and complained about how awful you looked but those days are long, long gone. Now every Western MMO has some form of transmog or appearance tab so you can wear your best fighting gear while looking like you're dressed for the Met Gala.

In most of the gacha games I've played there is no gear as such. I don't believe the characters even had a paper doll with gear slots in the traditional manner. Maybe a weapon slot if you're lucky. Or a hat. 

The notable exception, in my experience, was Noah's Heart although that was kind of a gacha/MMORPG hybrid. Noah's Heart did have a few gear slots but what it did that worked so well for me was allow me to fill them by mixing and matching items from each of my playable characters to build a look of my own. 

It managed that through a clever mix of an Affection system and crafting that made the process feel more organic. I played Noah's Heart for over a year, longer than I've played any pure gacha title so far, and although the general quality of the game and its story were both well below the standard of the market leaders, the main reason I stayed so long was that I was working on looks for my character. 

Not that it did the game much good. Noah's Heart, of course, is no longer with us. I think it's the only gacha game I've played that's not. It was the lack of polish that finished the game off but I don't imagine the way it let you dress your character up without spending any money did it any favors. I'm not really surprised other gacha games don't allow it.

I had all of this in the back of my mind when I filled out the poll and gave Hotta my considered opinion on what might make their already excellent game even better. I didn't have a lot of hope they'd be willing to add costumes and appearance gear as quest rewards or implement crafting so you could make your own clothes. 

Of course, I still asked. I mean, if you don't ask... 

What I thought might be a bit more realistic would be pets. Pets are great for making your character feel like an individual. And most games have them so they can't be that hard to add. I also think pets are something that could happily co-exist in a gacha game as both cash-shop items and in-game purchases or rewards.

I'm pretty sure I'm pushing on an open door here. Hethereau already has pet shops and it already has pettable dogs and cats, although you have to do a quest (That I've started but haven't finished.) before you can actually pet them. There's apparently even a hint or two in some conversation or other that a pet system might be coming, or so I've heard.

That was one thing I suggested in the poll. I wasn't the only one. 

I also suggested they should  add some form of crafting and gathering. It's hard to believe they don't have gathering already. Every game has gathering. And since they have housing, furniture and house items would be the obvious output. Can't say I have a lot of hope for that one either, since they already have a well-established in-game means of obtaining housing items via furniture shops but it's a possibility. 

The final suggestion I made, one that I'm sure must have been echoed by thousands of respondents, was for emotes to be added to the open world. There's already a very limited selection, maybe half a dozen of the most basic gestures, in the game already but they're accessible only when using the camera. Even then it's via a somewhat obscure menu option and they don't persist long enough for you to take a picture unless you're in snapshot mode. 

Well, they didn't for me, although I might have been doing something wrong. I was only testing it, anyway. I don't use emotes much, so their omission doesn't impact me significantly, but even I was surprised they weren't in the game from the start. What sort of anime game launches without a full suite of emotes? 

Not to mention dances. I haven't seen any of those, either. Damn! Should have thought of dances... And boats! I forgot boats...

Those were my suggestions to improve the game: better appearance options, crafting, gathering, a pet system and emotes. I'd bet we'll get a couple of those very soon indeed and a few of them sometime closer to never. 

Oh, and the other suggestion I made was that they add a PayPal option to the cash shop. That's the other main reason I never buy anything F2P games. They always want direct payments and I'm not happy about giving new companies I don't know much about my financial details. 

It's irrational in a way. I'll quite happily pay a subscription by credit card. Not sure what the difference is. Maybe I should have a rethink. I would actually spend a little money in some games, sometimes, if it wasn't for that.

Hey, who knows? Maybe NTE will be so successful they'll start selling currency cards in stores. Then I could ask for some for my birthday and Christmas. I should have suggested that, too. 

I'll mention it in the next poll. There's bound to be another in a week or two.