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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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