Hethereau Across The River - New District Or New Backdrop?

Malvaltar mentioned in the comments the other day that the inaccessible part of the city of Hethereau, to the east of the river, had been redeveloped. It's a large area, easily as big as any of the existing districts, and it's been there since the game started but we've never been able to go there.

It supposedly can't be visited by NPCs either since the two bridges are closed, although only one is physically blocked to traffic. I guess an NPC could walk across even if none of them seem to be doing it. There are a couple of small boys watching the construction workers but that's all.

Flora can't cross the bridge or the river. She's tried but a big, red barrier pops up to tell her there's No Access. There are clearly people living and working over there, though, because you can see vehicles moving around the streets. No people but maybe they're just too far away to spot.

Since I'd heard something was apparently happening over there, I thought I'd go take a look from as close as I could get. I started off by porting into one of the ReRo Boxes to the south-east and from there Flora did her usual jog-scramble-glide to get to the coast. I still find it much faster to get around that way than to drive. When you can climb over any fence, scale even the tallest buildings in a few bounds and then throw yourself off to glide across the rooftops, who needs a car?

I came out opposite the huge funfair on the southern promontory. That's been a tease since the start. You can see the rides but you can't get to them, let alone get on them.

This time, as I was looking down on the fair from the clifftops, I noticed a huge dirigible in the sky that I didn't remember seeing before. As I got closer, I could see lots of large balloons and other aerial decorations that didn't seem familiar either. 

 "New" fairground, with balloons.

 

Who knows, though? For one thing, my memory is extremely unreliable and for another I'm playing on GeForce Now's servers, where the GPUs are a good deal more powerful than even my good graphic card, let alone the onboard graphics I'd been reduced to using until playing at all nearly killed my PC. There might always have been balloons and I might just have forgotten them or they could have been there all along, just not showing up on my graphics settings.

That latter possibility also makes any comparison between screenshots I took on my own machine, weeks ago, and ones I took today somewhat suspect, at least when it comes to the finer details. It's a moot point where the funfair is concerned anyway because although I remember taking some shots, I can't now find them.

That's not surprising. I have multiple folders of screenshots from Neverness To Everness. The game itself stores shots you take using the in-game camera in a folder in its own directory, while screenshots I take with Win+PrtScr go into the general "Screenshots" folder. I've also had to copy the folders off my old C drive that I'm no longer using, so I have a different location for all the old shots.

Meanwhile, for the new ones, I can't just use the in-game camera any more because those shots go to GFN's servers and get deleted at the end of each session. I'm now using Win+PrtScr for all my shots, something that's been made an order of magnitude easier by the addition of the F7 "Hide UI" command in the last update. (If I do use the in-game camera for the various features it offers, I then have to take a Windows screenshot of the image, which is a bit of an awkward workaround.)

Old fairground, no balloons.

 

Just to add another level of uncertainty over whether I did or did not take any particular shot, NTE doesn't automatically save your screenshots on your hard drive. You do have to remember to use the local download function, when using the in-game camera because NTE only keeps the shots in your in-game Gallery for 15 days. After that, they're automatically deleted. 

With all of that, it's hardly surprising I can't always find a specific shot from the past. I haven't been able to find the ones I thought I took of the fairground so I can't say for certain that it's been redeveloped but my feeling is that it has.

Looking across the river to the east, I wasn't sure anything had changed. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't been clued into it by Mailvaltar, I wouldn't have noticed. One thing that did strike me immediately was that there didn't seem to be any cranes over there. I did seem to remember some construction going on before.

I spent about fifteen or twenty minutes jogging along the riverside, peering across to the far side and trying to see if I could see anything different but it all looked much as I remembered. The bridges were still closed. There were still vehicles moving through the streets.  

After a while, I thought of checking my old screenshots and with some diligence I was able to find a few of the eastern district. I went up and down the riverside, trying to find the exact spots where they'd been taken, so I could get a clear comparison. That took long enough that Flora decided it was worth getting her scooter out, much to the dismay of people walking along the sidewalk.

Old district with forested hills and over-road walkway.

 

After a great deal of trial and error, I eventually managed to isolate two locations that seemed to be the right places. One was looking south-west, back towards the fairground, the other north-east into the hills. And both looked substantively different in game to what I was seeing in the record.

The whole of the cityscape on the far side of the river has changed. It's very interesting that I couldn't tell without the evidence in front of me because it's not a subtle change. It's a fairly radical re-interpretation. 

The buildings that used to be there were, now I come to examine them critically, really quite old-fashioned. They have quite a lot of the 1960s and '70s about them, the sort of pre-stressed concrete neo-brutalism that used to be so popular with local government architects when I was growing up. 

In the shot looking over the bridge, for example, you can see one of those completely enclosed over-the-roadway walkways that were a feature of the city nearest to me when I was in my teens. In fact, that whole square, boxy office-block waterfront could almost literally have been copied from a photograph of that town back in the seventies.

I'm very fond of that style of architecture, partly because it feels quite nostalgic but also because I find its clinical austerity quite soothing. The muted color and smooth-but-rough texture of concrete has a pleasant, tranquilizing effect, especially in the rain. 

I can see, though, why it might not be quite the right style for a near-future metropolis like Hethereau. The revised district is much more modern. The skyscrapers are much taller and the tallest have that edgy, knife-like look so familiar from the skylines of Dubai or even modern London. There's a lot of glass and the late afternoon sun glares back at you balefully as it sets. It's a mood.

New district with bare escarpment and completely revamped architecture.

 

Even so, there's still a surprising boxiness to it all. If the old version looked extremely mid-20th century, the new one hasn't quite shaken off its past. 

What it has done is grown. As you can see from the view behind the buildings, looking out to the countryside... well, there's not all that much countryside left. Where there used to be low hills covered in trees with higher, forested hills rising behind them, now there's just one escarpment, topped with trees but bare where there's clearly been felling and quite possibly quarrying.

To the east of that there are a couple of large blocks of offices or apartments. Below the rise, the valley floor is filled with what definitely look like apartment blocks. The city is growing.

In his comment, Mailvaltar hoped the redesign meant a new playable area on the way, not just a cosmetic uplift. Before I'd been to see it, I thought it would have to be the former. Surely no-one would waste resources on a changing the appearance of a part of the city players would never be able to visit?

Having seen it, though, I'm not quite so sure. The screenshots of the former version point up just how out of place it used to look. Or, perhaps, it makes me wonder just how old the rest of Hetherau is, if you stop to look at it properly. 

Old Hethereau, as we remember it. Fondly, even though we were never there.

 

It also makes me realize that one of the reasons the city has always felt so convincingly like a real place, right from the start, is that it has more than just a patina of age. Architecturally, culturally and aesthetically, Hethereau gives a very solid impression of a city that's developed organically over time. The center is very modern and slick but as you travel further out, you find yourself in what can only be smaller towns or villages that have been assimilated by the urban sprawl. Different districts, even streets, have a very different feel to them, just as they would in a real city.

It's extremely effective in evoking memories of actual places I've been and I haven't even been to the part of the world from where the designers are most likely drawing their inspiration. Nevertheless, I can all but name places I have visited in real life that parts of Hethereau remind me of, quite specifically.

In that context, it makes a great deal of sense for there to be an older, slightly more run-down district across the river. And the new version doesn't entirely dispel that impression. The buildings are newer, yes, but only some of them are flashier. Alongside those cutting-edge skyscrapers that have just appeared, there are ranks of more modest, more utilitarian buildings. 

From across the river, the eastern district looks like where the urban workers live, studded with enclaves of the rich, who look out from their massive windows, high above the gritty streets to the forested hills that they can still see but which the workers beneath them can now enjoy only in memory.

There would certainly be plenty of stories to be told in a place like that. We can only hope we get to hear some of them.