Duskwood By Night

 Since I knew I was going to be working on Sunday, on Saturday evening, after I'd come home from work, had tea, played with Beryl and caught up with my bloglog (That's a portmanteau I just now came up with for a backlog of blogs. Think it'll catch on? No, me neither.) I figured I'd better at least make a start on preparing a post for tomorrow. That's today if you're reading this on the day I'll be posting it. I think those are the right tenses. Don't you just love grammar?

I'd already decided on a screenshot post showcasing the new region, Duskmoor, the one got added to Neverness To Everness with the most recent update. I was thinking that, thanks to the miracle of GeForce Now, I could run around Duskmoor in bed on my laptop, a sentence wide open to misinterpretation, I know, but we're all gamers here, aren't we? I'm sure everyone knows what I mean.

  Once I got into the game and opened the map to figure out where to go first, it occurred to me right away that the obvious thing to do would be to visit all the Rero Boxes (Red phone booths.) and open up the teleport system for the new map. There are only three of them so it oughtn't to have taken long. (There go those tenses again...)

Except, as noted, Duskmoor is fricken huge! I started jogging towards the first box from where I left Flora last time, which was  at the entrance to the Fogden instance, then I realized it was a kilometer and a half away.

 I'm in the habit of running everywhere in Hetherau, by which  mean I open the map, locate the teleport location nearest to wherever it is I want to go, port there and jog the rest of the way. You can teleport to all sorts of things in NTE, not just the Rero Boxes, so there's usually something close by.

At least, there is in the city. Duskmoor is very much not in the city. Duskmoor is out of town and it's about 90% forest and lake, as far as I can tell, with a tourist and resort strip along the coast and not a whole hell of a lot of civilization anywhere else. 

But it does have highways. And I do have a car. I don't use it much but I have one. And I can drive it. Not very well, I'll grant you, but well enough to get around.

 I whistled for my trusty steed and along the road it came. With no-one at the wheel. How does that work? An Anomaly, I imagine. If anything odd happens in Hethereau, there's always an Anomaly behind it.

I got in and started to drive and in about ten seconds I realized why it is that Flora goes everywhere on foot. If only that unseen Anomaly could drive the car when she was in it, too. 

But wait! Maybe it can!

There's an auto-drive option. I've tried it before and never got it to work but there's always a first time. 

I hit the key to put the car into auto-drive and for the first time it I didn't get an error message about not having a target. The car set off down the road without Flora's hands on the wheel. It was night and we were careening along at top speed but fortunately traffic was light, although not, as it turned out, nearly light enough.

 I learned a few things on my trip through Duskwood.

1. Autodrive requires you to set a target destination before engaging. That's what I'd been doing wrong all those other times. 
2. Having the car drive itself does not mean you smash into other vehicles. In fact, on this evidence, I'd say it's even more reckless than Flora.
3. If you get out of your car and leave it in the middle of the road, a huge traffic jam will form behind it, even if it would be easy and legal for them all just to pass. Also, NPC drivers get really cross if you do that. 

 Even using auto-drive, which was a lot more efficient than having Flora take the wheel, even allowing for the collisions, it still took quite a while to drive the route that took me past all three Rero Boxes. I wasn't timing it but I'd guess it was something like fifteen or twenty minutes, counting the time Flora spent getting out and going to the boxes, all of which were very close to the road.

There was surprisingly little to see other than some very lovely scenery. Even the spots where the boxes were didn't seem to have a lot going on. It wasn't entirely clear why someone would have taken the trouble to place them there in the first place.

 The oddest thing I found was a ramp, clearly designed for a car to run up at speed so it could launch itself over a cliff. Flora walked up it and peered over the edge and decided it looked like a sure way to kill yourself in  blazing car wreck so she declined to do a solo Thelma and Louise and moved on.

I'm guessing it had something to do with the racing circuit that came with the update. Indeed, the whole of the extensive Duskwood highway system, which appears to be serving no-one and nothing, might be there just for the purpose of giving people somewhere new to race. It certainly seems a more realistic plan than setting up new courses in the city itself.

 And that was all I had time for, other than to jog through the woods to take a look at a tall steel pylon, which turned out to be frustratingly just beyond the limits of the explorable area. It immediately made me wonder if further expansion in that direction is planned because if not, why put the damn thing there at all?

All of that took place at night, as you can see from the pictures I took (The new "Hide UI" toggle, now available on F7, makes it so much easier to take quick snapshots.) so it's highly likely I missed something. I could have changed the time to make it daylight but I was so involved in what I was doing (You can call it immersed, if you must.) that I forgot it was an option. 

So far, I can't say I have a very clear idea what Duskwood is for. It's big and it's beautiful but what does it do? Then again, maybe it doesn't need to do anything. Maybe it just needs to be. 

Good advice for us all.