That Crazy Feline

Here's an existential question for a Wednesday: why spend time and energy on a character in game you know you have no intention of playing? Why do they need to look good, when absolutely no-one, real or fictional, is ever going to see them?

Don't look at me. I don't know either. But we all do it, right?

Okay, some of us do it. It's not just me. 

I'm pretty sure it's not just me...

It's not like I'm even a cat person any more. Well, I am, I'm just not only a cat person. I was a cat person pretty much exclusively for half a century or so but then, for reasons we won't go into right now, I turned into a cat-and fox person and then fox took over for a while.

Latterly, since we got Beryl, I have also become a dog person, something I never expected, although that's a different kind of "person" altogether. I like dogs a lot now but I don't identify as a dog. Ew!

Expanding a little on that, I find it very easy to imagine having a dog pet in a game but very hard to imagine dressing my character up as a dog. As a cat, though? (Or a fox.) Just try and stop me!

As I think I mentioned a couple of times, Once Human has been eating every other game's lunch around here for the best part of a month now. Before it arrived I was playing Wuthering Waves every day but I was also logging in to AdventureQuest 3D, purely to open my three, free daily chests. 

The reason I was doing that was because AQ3D added housing a while back. Because I have a Pavlovian reaction to housing in games, the  moment I learned I could have a house in Battleon, the capital city, I had to have one. Never mind I don't play AQ3D more than a few minutes a year. Never mind I will never hang out in that house or show it to anyone or probably even write another post about it. Still had to jump through all the hoops to get one.

Once I had it, of course I wanted it to look good. I imagine there are plenty of ways to work on that by playing the game but I've tried playing AQ3D and honestly, although it has a ridiculous amount of content, none of it ever grabs me. The combat is very slow and the graphics aren't really to my taste so even exploring isn't all that appealing.

You don't actually need to play the game to decorate your house, of course. You can buy housing items in the cash shop because why else have housing in a F2P game at all? 

I hope it goes without saying that I am not going to pay actual money for pixel furniture in a game I don't even play. I may be whimsical but I'm not crazy. Well, not completely, althogh apparently I am sufficiently dislocated from reality to consider it worth my while to log in every day to see if I can grab a few coins to put towards a rug or a lamp one day.

The daily log-in reward gives you three chests to open, the first of which always contains some cash shop currency. Usually it's a pitiful amount. Single figures in a game where basic items are priced in hundreds. Once in a while you can get a bit more. I had thirty or so one time. Mostly, though, it's peanuts.

Still, peanuts add up, as any mathematically-inclined elephant will tell you. After a few months of logging in religiously I had about 1600 of whatever the currency is called. 

Hang on, I'll look it up...Dragon Crystals, that's it.

I stopped logging in to AQ3D when I started playing Once Human. In fact, I stopped paying attention to any other games for a few weeks but as we near the end of the first season and I wait to find out just how that's going to work, my motivation there has dropped and my desire to play obsessively has diminished. I suspect that may turn into a problem for the game going forward but we won't have long to wait now to find out for sure.

On Monday I actually logged into EverQuest II for the first time in weeks, mostly to collect my free play-money, something you have to do once a month or you lose it, even though the stipend is part of the All Access sub. While I was there I even did some content. I've missed most of the big, summer event sequence that takes in several holiday festivals but the final one, Oceansfull, is still running and I did the main dungeon for that one. It was a lot of fun and quite profitable in terms of upgrades.

I say upgrades... I haven't gotten around to equipping them yet and I'm not sure I will. The big, mid-year Game Update is in beta right now and when that goes live I'm sure the drops and rewards will raise the item level cap yet again, making the stuff I got two days ago obsolete. Then a month or two later we'll have Pandas, meaning upgrades to everything yet again and a month after that the next expansion will come out and...

Well, you get the picture. It happens in every game but in EQII it happens at the very least four times a year, every year. It can be a bit much. I was quite into it for a while - upgrading is weirdly satisfying in its own right, regardless of how useful it is - but I think I might take a break and skip all the interim steps until the expansion arrives in December. 

At least, now I'm coming down off my Once human high, I'm starting to pay attention to what my other options are. Tomorrow there's the second major update to Wuthering Waves so I'll most likely go back for a while. 

I did consider the Guild Wars 2 expansion, dropping next week, for the sole reason that it adds housing to the game but it costs money and I'm not convinced I want what looks to be GW2's typically half-assed version of owning a home enough to pay for it. Which, given my aforementioned housing obsession, says a lot about my opinion of GW2 these days.

But enough about housing (If such a thing could ever be possible.) You may recall, although no-one could blame if you didn't, that I started off talking about cats. 

You may also remember that 8 August was International Cat Day. Or maybe you don't because it seemed to get surprisingly little attention, probably because there are thousands of Something Days every year, all piling up against each other like junk mail on a 1980s doormat.

According to Wikipedia, whch has a very short entry on the subject, "International Cat Day is a celebration which takes place on 8 August of every year. It was created in 2002 by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. It is a day to raise awareness for cats and learn about ways to help and protect them."

I'd have thought if there was one animal that didn't need awareness about it raised it would have to be the cat. Cats infamously rule the internet and are ubiquitous in all forms of popular culture around the world. In some countries, cat-worship appears to be an almost un-ironic national stereotype.

Nevertheless, cats have their day and at least one game I nominally play has decided to honor it. If anyone knows of any others that have, I'd be interested to hear about it because I didn't spot anything else in my feeds this year. I'm surprised Gamigo didn't come up with a quiz about cats for Rift. That does seem to be how they like to pretend they're still invested in the game these days.

AQ3D went all-in on the cat theme with a whole bunch of purchaseable cat-themed items - cat pets that follow you about, sleeping cats for your home, cat-paw-and-claw weapons and the one that caught my eye - Cat Onesies. Some of these can be bought for real money in the cash shop, others require a special event currency - Cat Fur - that can only be obtained by defeating the Cat Day Boss, an Astral Tiger.

There's a Cat Day vendor by the name of Not Alma (I'd explain but life's too short.) and the regular Pet vendor, Aria, also has a lot of new, cat-related stock. In keeping with AQ3D's consistent drive to make everything immediately accessible to everyone all the time, especially if makes them money, you can just click on the event notification in-game to be taken straight to the shops.

Which I did as soon as I logged in this morning. Then I spent an hour (Yes, really. A whole hour.) browsing the cat-wear, trying it on, deciding what to buy, buying it and finding somewhere good to pose for the pictures. It's far too difficult in most games to find a nice, plain wall to pose against.

It wouldn't have taken quite so long if I hadn't had to work out how to clear my bags, which were so full from the free stuff I'd been getting from the log-in rewards the vendors wouldn't let me spend any money until I made some space for what I wanted to buy. I even took a swipe at the big tiger to see if I could snatch some fur. I knew it was suicide but what the heck. There's no death penalty to speak of. It was worth a shot.

I had almost exactly just enough Dragon Crystals to buy the three pieces for the Onesie. Kind of a dumb thing to call it, if you ask me, when you also need a hat and a tail for the full look. Might as well call it a set and have done with it.

I would have liked either the black or the ginger one but both were only available for Fur. For Dragon Crystals you get a choice of either pink or grey. I went with grey, which I think looks very stylish. Pink would have looked... pink.

I would have liked to have bought the cat pet, Skratch, to complete the look but I didn't have the crystals. Maybe next year. I may not play AQ3D but that doesn't mean I won't do all this again next time it comes arouind. Or whenever I see something I like.

Why? Probably best not to think about that too much.