Missing The Boat?

That's me up there, waiting for the boat in Noah's Heart. Again. 

Yep. It's 2023 and I'm still standing at the dock, waiting for the boat to come like it's 1999. That's odd enough in itself but in a game with autoquesting, autorun and automated fast travel? A game with free teleport-by-map? That's a little more than just odd, isn't it? That's wilfully perverse!

So, why am I doing it?

Why am I waiting for the boat? Is it to travel from one continent to the next? Because the boats do that.

No it's not.

Is it to travel to another city along the coast on the same continent? Because the boats do that, too.

No, it's not.

Is it to use the boat as transportation in any way, shape or form? 

Nah. No-one does that. At least I don't think anyone does.

Why would they? I woudn't. If I actually wanted to sail somewhere I didn't already have the teleport location for (Not going to happen because I have all of them.) then I have a boat of my own I could use. Why would I stand on the dock, twiddling the feather in my headband, waiting for the next shceduled departure, when I could just summon my own ship and be on my way?

See? I wouldn't. So why am I there in the picture, waiting for my ship to come in?

Money, of course! And reward! It's a quest. Or, more accurately, an Encounter, which is a kind of pop-up landscape quest.

Someone called Sef tasked me with collecting a package from an incoming ship and delivering it to someone called Grego. Why me? Because I happened to walk past and because I clearly have nothing better to do with my time than run erands for strangers, despite being a leading member of the nation's foremost Mercenary crew, Gale Force, as well as special confidante and helpmeet to kings, princes and powers across the land and despite being currently engaged in trying to stop an extra-dimensional invasion that could bring on the apocalypse. 

So naturally, I dropped everything and ran off to spend seven full minutes of real time, standing on some planking staring out to sea, waiting for a ship to arrive. When it did, there was someone on deck waiting for me. Lucky I decided to take the job. Otherwise I guess he'd have just had to ride the ship back to wherever it came from and take the package with him. And I'd be out 50k and a stack of SSR shards.

Thinking of ships reminds me of trains. Back when I began playing Noah's Heart, one of the first things that impressed me was the extensive and well-implemented railway system. It featured quite prominently in the tutorial. I assumed it would continue to be a significant feature of the game.

It's not, or if it is I must not be finding any of the content that uses it. The great stations with their impressive architecture and detailed schedules provide a reliable transport infrastructure that no-one needs to use. Like the ships, as soon as you have your teleport stations, why would you take public transport?

It's emblematic of Noah's Heart, a game that has far more genuinely good ideas than uses for them. Playing the game is to be exposed over and over again to aesthetically pleasing, narratively satisfying systems and mechanics that then seem to go nowhere. 

Okay, alright. Some of them, the trains and boats for example, do go somewhere - literally. They just don't go anywhere thematically.

I guess it's a lot better for a game to have so many ideas it can afford to throw most of them away, scarcely used, than to have hardly any and try to stretch them thin enough to cover. I'd still like to have some reason to use the ships, trains, balloons and other mechanical contrivances, but even without need, the game's better with them than without.

Then again, even after nearly six months, I can't help feeling there's a lot about the game I still don't understand. Maybe one day I'll find out what I've been missing.