The Glitched Call Is Coming From Inside The Game

 

The latest "Special Program" for Neverness To Everness's next big update is out. It's fifty-three minutes long although the first ten minutes of that is just a timer ticking down, so call it three-quarters of an hour. It's still a long watch, either way.

And for the first time I watched it all. Usually I just skim through to see the highlights or read a summary if I can find one but now I'm retired I have the time. 

I was hoping to find it informative. I wasn't expecting it to be entertaining too. But it was.

After those first ten minutes of counting down, which I did skip because I'm not that desperate for entertainment, the host comes on to introduce the two people joining him in the discussion. They're two designers going by the names Baggie and Naomi. 

At this point, I still had the video running as an embed on the MMO Bomb page where I'd heard about the update. I wasn't paying that much attention, waiting for the whole thing to get started, but I perked up at the thought of getting some insights from the team behind the game. I was a little surprised they both had Westernized nicknames but then I figured they'd have been cherry-picked for the English-language version for a reason.

And then they started talking. Baggie sounded odd but Naomi... Naomi sounded exactly like she was one of the many helium-voiced characters in the game itself. That got my full attention. What the hell...?

I opened the window to full screen and the mystery was instantly revealed. Baggie is a cardboard box. Naomi and the host are chibi figures. The whole vodcast is metafictional. These aren't the designers who work in some office building in Suzhou, China. They're... 

 

Well, it's hard to pin down what they are. The NTE YouTube channel says "It's real. It's fiction" which doesn't really help a lot. 

They might be representations of actual designers but they also might be notional designers who live and work in another layer of reality that lies between ours and the game itself. Or they might be in the game-world. I'm not sure there's a clear explanation.

As a conceit, though, it's delicious. I never normally sit through these things but I was transfixed. The three of them chatted away in a far more entertaining and professional manner than any game designers I can remember seeing. The whole thing comes across as the kind of thing you might watch and listen to for fun, not just because you wanted to dig out the few nuggets of useful information buried in the awkward banter, uncomfortable pauses and lame in-jokes that are all too familiar from promos featuring the people who make the games.

It's a good thing the format and the presentation were strong because the content they're plugging is less so. It's not terrible but on a first look it doesn't seem to be up to the standards of the better previous releases. Then again, the last one was so good it was always going to be hard follow.

If you were hoping we'd get to explore some more of Hethereau, like that huge district across the river they've just re-designed, you're in for a disappointment. The story element this time revolves around ETD-6, the security unit for which Linko and Chaos work. 

ETD-6 is responsible for dealing with Anomaly crime and also with Meme Anomalies. We've run into some of the team already but never the two people supposedly in charge of the division, Lieutenant Elyms and Captain Exe. I thought Chaos was in charge so it shows what I know.

The update is called Once Upon A Glitched Call and the action takes place in "...a vast stretch of cyerspace that's a blend of nostalgia core, dreamcore, and poolcore. ...A flooded city floating in a digital ocean". Another Anomalous Realm, then, as opposed to any part of Hethereau or the physical space it occupies.

The set-up is that an "Invalid Number" is being propagated through Bagel. Once people hear about it, they can't stop thinking about it, although what actual harm it does, other than being the telephonic equivalent of an annoying earworm, isn't immediately clear. Anyway, ETD-6 has been tasked with putting a stop to it, presumably because the most likely explanation is some kind of Meme Anomaly.

I'm confident it will be an interesting and enjoyable story. They all have been so far. And it is at least an active Anomaly investigation, for once. The whole narrative arc of the game still feels nebulous and ill-defined, though, and this doesn't, on the face of it, takes us any further towards a sense of overall purpose. Maybe there just isn't one and the whole game will be episodic, always. 

Which is fine on paper. I don't have a problem with it, conceptually. But the open world rpg gacha game market is highly competitive right now. Games need a strong storyline to keep players interested or they'll just wander off . NTE only has one more update after this one to get us all firmly hooked before Ananta arrives on January 15, which is where I'll be going.

And sometime after that there's another game I just heard about that sounds even more intriguing. That one's called Ordinary Oddness and I'm already pre-registered with the game wishlisted on Steam. 

But let's not get distracted. That's for a separate post.

 

The point is, good as all these games can be, even with a six-week cadence and huge content drops every time, it's still not guaranteed they'll hold an audience. There's just too much choice. I have absolutely no complaints at all about Wuthering Waves, for example. It may be the best of all these titles. And yet since I fell off it for a few weeks, through no fault of the game's, I've never been able to climb back on.  

For now, I'm committed to NTE. I play it virtually every day and really enjoy it. One update that doesn't quite grab me, though, and that could turn into a few weeks when I'm not really feeling it and then some other, no doubt very similar, game will take its opportunity to suck me in and that may very well be that for Hethereau.

Yeah, Hotta will be really gutted to lose the no money I was giving them, I bet So many great, free games, so many cheap, stingy players...

Even though the Special Program puts the story update front and center, the trailer doesn't make it look all that interesting. Or exciting. It's a lot of hanging telephones and shots of the digital city, and even there a warning along the bottom of the screen makes clear this isn't necessarily how the place might look in the game itself.

So, yeah, I was underwhelmed. What else is there? Quite a lot and none of it all that thrilling either, I'd say. 

The two banner characters are, of course, Elyms and Exe, who appear as pulls in that order. Having never met either of them, my interest, going in, is about as low as it could be and nothing I heard about them in the Program made me feel any more enthusiastic. Elyms is yet another bubbly, outgoing young woman, of whom I already have more than enough on my team. Exe sounds like a dull introvert with no social skills, which seems to be going too far in the other direction. 

 His name, by the way, is weirdly pronounced by all three presenters as if it were three separate letters, E-X-E, as opposed to the much more natural X. That also did not endear him to me.

Coming back, as the characters you can try for again if you missed them last time, are Shinku and Chaos. I opted out of pulling for both of them first time around and I can't imagine I'll feel any differently this time but at the moment I'd rather roll for either of them than Exe or Elyms.

There are two new vehicles, both of which are nuts. One's a toy lion. The other's a tank. The lion has the dubious USP of requiring Fons to go into overdrive, which is not what I'd call a winning feature. The tank, though, comes with a working cannon you can use when fighting anomalies and bandits on the streets of Hethereau and it also features in a new World of Tanksesque arena mode, where four players try to blow each other off the map. That does look like it might be fun.

Another major addition is a whole new business enterprise. You move from making your own deliveries to managing a team of drivers who'll make them for you. It's a full sub-game along the lines of the existing Cafe Origen one, with its own progression and rewards. You'll be able to meet job-seeking NPCs on the streets of Hethereau and choose which you want to hire. There are different vehicles and skins for them and all of that stuff.

 I am not interested in so many ways but also interested, too. I don't do deliveries because driving in NTE is not much fun, so in theory this would play to my weakness. But then, I also don't like business management games, so it might just be swapping one mode I don't enjoy for another. I do like talking to NPCs, though, and apparently the delivery business will open up some "factions" in Hethereau to interact with, including the criminal underground. That does intrigue me.

I'll probably at least try it but it's not really my kind of thing. Neither is combat and yet I paid full attention to the huge section of the program that goes into just how effective Exe and Elyms can be in a fight. It's not that I want to use them but it's interesting in how it really showcases just how complex combat in the game is, while making me wonder how that can somehow still matter so little that although I'm really, really bad at it and don't take any trouble to get any better, I can get through the fights just fine. 

Another addition I will not be bothering with is a new board game from the in-world company that gave us 999 Nights. Sadly, this isn't another RPG but some kind of city sim where you place businesses to try and get the maximum footfall. There's a long explanation in the video that bored the fekkin' backside off me in seconds. It was the only part I fast-forwarded. Hard pass on that.

 There are, of course, the usual new outfits, all of which are horrible. Seriously, who designs the male clothing for this game and why are they still in work? And why does everything have to be silver and black? The women deck themselves out like explosions in a paint factory and the men look like they've just walked off the set of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

The only good news about costumes is that some of the existing ones can now be worn by more than one character. I haven't got any of those though so...

There are a few tweaks and changes to some of the existing features and word of a visual upgrade for players on mobile and that, I think, is about it. I did all this from memory so I probably missed something important. Oh, yeah, there will be overflow storage for Stamina and Pixels, which would have been handy for me if it had come in months ago. Not so much now.

The update arrives on November 11. There's a five minute video with just the highlights if you need it. 

I'm looking forward to it all about as much as you can look forward to anything you're not much looking forward to, I guess. Let's hope I'm back here on the 12th to eat my words.