You Take The Train, I'll Take The Bus This Time: Transport Options In Neverness To Everness

Hethereau is without doubt the biggest video-game city I've ever visited. I've seen it compared to Grand Theft Auto's Los Santos but since I've never played GTA5, I can't say if there's any validity in the comparison or, if there is, which might be the larger.

It certainly feels a lot bigger than Genshin Impact's Mondstadt  or Liyue or Wuthering Waves' Jinzhou, anyway. And it also feels a lot more like a real city, by which I guess I mean a city you might find in the world in which we all live, something that makes it feel almost disturbingly convincing at times. 

I keep getting the feeling it's somewhere I might have been, once. Even though much of the architecture has a South-East Asian look to it, there are streets and plazas that remind me quite strongly of some Spanish cities I've visited.

With a city this big, there needs to be some way to get around. I haven't been playing remotely long enough to produce any kind of Travel Guide To Hethereau but I can offer a few anecdotal experiences. 

Walking, Running and Sprinting: 

The obvious way to start exploring any city is on foot. In the real world, that almost always means walking but in game-cities the default pace is usually a steady lope or a gentle jog. No-one walks when they can run.

In Neverness To Everness, you run unless the game decides you ought to walk. I was surprised, several times, to find my pace dropping to a stately stroll when I entered certain buildings, vehicles or specific outdoor areas. If there's an option to walk voluntarily, I haven't found it yet but I imagine there must be, assuming they have role-players in Hethereau.

Sprinting definitely does come under the direct control of the player. Just hold down Shift. As you'd imagine, it requires stamina, the amount of which you have left is shown in a tiny, unobtrusive, diminishing arc next to your character. So far I haven't run out of stamina before I chose to stop sprinting so it's a generous allocation compared to too many games, where you run out of puff before you reach the end of your front path.

Climbing: 

You can climb just about anything. Buildings, fences, vehicles, you name it. If it goes up, you can climb it like Spider-Man. This also use stamina but once again it seems unlikely you'll run out before you reach the top or at least some intermediary flat space, where you can rest a moment and refill your stamina bar.

Swimming:  

Also an option although the only time I've had to use it was when I fell off a parapet trying to snatch an Oracle Stone from a raven. (It's a thing. Don't ask. We'll get to it here, some day, I'm sure.) Swimming uses stamina too and again it gets you a lot further than it would in many other games I've played.

In other water-related travel news, there are boats in the harbor but whether or not sailing is going to be an option I couldn't say. We can but hope!

Gliding: 

Gliding is available almost from the start. There's a very brief moment where a tip pops up to tell you all you need to do is hold RMB but it passes so quickly you might miss it altogether. In fact, I might have imagined it. 

I think I discovered I could glide when I jumped off a roof and tried to turn in mid-air and found I was hanging from an anomaly that appeared to be keeping us both in the air by flapping its ears. I also think I'm meant to know who or what the anomaly is. I'm pretty sure we were introduced at one point. You can get different glider skins but the default is this little fellow and he's fine. 

Unlike sprinting, climbing and swimming, gliding doesn't use stamina so you can stay aloft as long as you can find more air below you. There's also no falling damage so it's 100% safe as far as I can tell. Don't sue me if it's not!

Driving:  

This is supposedly a big part of the game but after about three or four hours play the only motorized transport I've got is a scooter. It's a really smart, red one, though. Looks like a classic 1960s Lambretta to me. 

I'd love to tell you how I got it but I have absolutely no idea. I was just jogging through the city last night when I noticed an option of some sort had popped up. I didn't read it very carefully and I can't remember what it said but I do know that after I clicked it, I had a scooter and I still do.

Maybe it pops up the first time you go near enough to one. There are plenty parked on street corners around the city. Or maybe it comes after you've done some quest or entered some area or spoken to some NPC. It'd be lovely to explain how it happened but I can't. I guess I could look it up... ah, yes, it's part of the Prologue questline, apparently. 

The scooter is pretty easy to ride although cornering is... interesting. I found out about the prison system in NTE by crashing my bike into something when I missed a turn. The bike was fine but I picked up some Warrant points for damaging public property. Get enough of those and it's a spell in the pokey for you. Or, more importantly, for me!

Traveling By Train: 

In common with quite a few games I've enjoyed, Neverness To Everness lets you get around by train. Unlike almost every one I can think of, though, that doesn't mean clicking on something that looks like a train or a train station and being teleported to the next stop. 

It doesn't even mean entering a train, sitting down and being treated to a cut-scene of your journey. In NTE it really does mean getting on a train and sitting down (Or standing up, if you prefer.) while the train rattles along the tracks in real time.

I have played other games where that happens but the difference here is that the train is an actual, physical object in terms of the gameworld. You can climb up on top of the carriage and ride outside for the whole journey. I've done it. You can jump off anywhere along the way, too. And that!

The train comes complete with other passengers, opening and closing doors, realistically lengthy stops at every station and not at all helpful announcements. Just like the real thing except you don't have to pay and no-one asks to see your ticket. Well, if you don't have to pay, I guess you wouldn't need a ticket... 

Taking The Bus: 

This is the one that floored me. As you jog around the city, you'll see lots of bus stops, often with people waiting for a bus. Sometimes you'll hear an NPC complaining the bus is late or they've missed it. I thought this was flavor and it is but that doesn't mean there isn't a real bus service.

I only found out because I decided to sit down at a bus stop and take a screenshot. I thought it would look cool. As I was framing the shot, a bus pulled up at the stop. I looked at it, expecting it to pause and then move on. Maybe an NPC might even get off. But no, the doors opened and the bus stayed there.

So I got on. I mean, why wouldn't I? The bus, unlike the train carriage, is a bit of a tight fit. The camera didn't like me swinging it about so it was hard to get a decent angle but I was able to sit down inside and get a shot of me through the window, riding the bus. 

I think this is a first. I can't remember any game I've ever played, on or offline, single or multiplayer, that let me ride in a bus. Not that it's been my great ambition but still...

The bus isn't quite as realistic as the train. You can't get up and walk out the door when it stops or I couldn't, anyway, although that might have been the camera. Maybe it is possible and I just couldn't manage it. What I had to do instead was press "F", which deposits you on the sidewalk, just like it does when you want to get off your bike. 

I don't know if you can jump on top of the bus like you can the train and street-surf through town. I haven't tried it. Yet. I can't see why not, though.

Boothing It: 

And finally there's the Booth network, NTE's form of instant travel. Dotted all over the city are structures that look almost identical to the classic red K6 telephone box, as found all over Britain until mobile telephony rendered public telephones irrelevant. You have to visit these and activate them, after which you can 'port from one to another. 

Or so the game tells you. I've activated a few but I haven't used any yet. I'm having far too much fun exploring on foot, by bike, on the train and by bus. Why would I want to miss out on all of that, just to save a few minutes?

At the moment, in fact, I'm not even particularly interested in following the plot or developing my character. I just want to explore this fascinating city for myself, without any agenda or purpose other than the fun of seeing something new. Plenty of time to get on with the plot when it all starts to feel a bit too familiar.

That might take a while... 

Welcome To Hethereau. Very First Impressions Of Neverness To Everness

 

Big day today: Neverness To Everness goes live. 

Went live, actually. At 3am. I took the trouble to look up the exact time, just in case it was late afternoon in the UK or something. Didn't want to be sitting around all day, waiting for the doors to open.

And then, of course, I woke up and forgot about it until after breakfast, by which time it Beryl was ready for her walk. And it's a lovely day, warm and sunny, so we made it a long one, meaning I didn't get to sit down with the game until after eleven. Now that wouldn't have happened a decade ago!

Luckily, I had at least remembered to pre-download the client yesterday. All 50 gigs of it, which isn't really as big as all that by modern standards. The download was very fast, too. Big pipe.

Even so, there was, inevitably, another patch to install before I could log in. And a replacement for the launcher to install before that. And finally the damn shaders had to compile...

Eventually I got in. After which it was all a bit of a whirlwind ...

I like media that don't waste time with introductions. I like books and movies that start in the middle of the story and leave you to figure out the plot. I like world-building where the building has all been done before you get there and all the characters act like you know as much about the world they live in as they do. 

I like to be overwhelmed with new ideas, concepts and jargon and to be left to figure out what it all means from context. If the writing is good, context should be more than enough to go on.

Neverness To Everness opens like that. Just like that. And then it goes on the same way, at least for the first hour, which is about as long as I've played because after that I had to stop for lunch and after lunch I started writing this, which I kind of wish I wasn't... 

I'd say I can't wait to get back to Hethereau but clearly I can because if I couldn't I wouldn't be typing now, would I? But you know what I mean...

Games don't often stick with the "throw them in the deep end" approach for long for the simple reason that you generally need to be told how to play a game in a way you don't have to be told how to read a book or watch a movie. You can only take a player so far with an opening movie and a cut scene. At some point you have to hand over the controls. And then explain what the controls do.

NTE does a pretty fair job of sliding out of that one. For a start, it avoids character creation almost completely. The entire thing consists of one click - do you want to look like a boy or a girl? Doesn't even ask you for a name. That comes later, when you sign what very much looks like your life away. 

No option on that, by the way. I might have opted out if there had been.

Then, for quite a while longer - fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe half an hour - the only instructions you get are to use WASD to move and Space to jump. Even when the fighting starts, you don't get any hints on what to do. The developers trust you to know. You've played games like this before, right? 

Yes, well, as it happens, I have. Even if I am ancient and the game did feel the need to query my age when I set up the account (And I knocked a couple of years off, too, because who gives their real birth date to any of these people?), even then I have played games before where all you really need to do is click LMB for your light attack and RMB for your heavy attack...

...which won't work here because RMB is Dodge. So, fine, I've played those too. Actually I prefer it that way. Much easier than having to hit Ctrl. And as for the Ultimates and Specials, you can see the keys on screen, just like you always can. Seriously, no-one needs to be told this stuff, right?

Yeah, sure. Until the second or third fight, when the game starts to let you into the secret of how complicated combat is going to get. All that stuff about timing dodges to get parry and how to work with the rest of your team for heals and buffs and how to set up Breaks and...

Heh. Important? Sure it is. I know enough to know that none of that is going to matter for a long time, if at all. Not to me. Not the way I play. And if it does, I'll play something else instead.

For now, just button mashing and hitting the specials when they light up looks like it's going to be plenty good enough. It took me through all the fights up to the one where the Boss is Level 9 while you're still Level 1, anyway. See, at this stage, the developers don't want you to lose these fights. Later on, when they're trying to sell you something, then maybe they'll want you to lose but not until they've gotten you good and hooked first.

Meanwhile, as the fights are going on and the game is giving you suggestions on how to win, the story is exploding around you. It's a kinetic introduction to what I'm kind of hoping will be quite a sedentary game, at least the way I plan on playing it. I'm more interested in the getting an apartment, driving a car and running a business side of things than the spinning 360 degrees upside down in mid air to kick some bad guy in the back of the head part.

But it's a good story. Or, rather, it's a good show. Something is happening all the time and most of what's happening is psychedelic or surreal or both at once. It's like a 1990s Grant Morrison comic, come to life. 

After about ten minutes I was pretty clear on what game I was playing. The elevator pitch for this one must have been "What if Once Human and Wuthering Waves had a baby?". 

And you know that's going to work for me. What are my two favorite new games of the last two or three years? Yep, those two. Not that I'm playing either of them anymore but that's on me, not the games. Harder and harder to hold my interest for long, these days. Still, those two together racked up a few hundred hours of my time. If this one can match either it'll be doing just fine for itself, the way I'm keeping score.

That's speculation but one positive thing I will say for NTE up front is that it feels like a very comfortable fit. I barely had to look anything up. All the controls do what I expect them to do. All the key binds are where they should be. I haven't had to change anything yet. Nothing at all. 

There was only one thing I even had to go into settings to check and that was whether there was a screenshot key and, if so, what it was. Alright, two things. Be like that! 

And there are two keys: F8 and F9. The first is for snapshots, the second for photographs. The only difference I can see is that there are a few more controls in the latter. Not many, though. Not yet. I'd expect that to change later.

What's there already is more than enough for me, in any case. I'd been using Win+PrtScr up to then anyway and that worked fine. I was only looking to see if I could get some shots without the UI. 

Speaking of the UI, it's delightfully minimal and you can make it transparent if you like. Can't get more minimal than invisible.

Enough of the technicalities. I'm sure I'll get into all of that later. This is just an extremely early first impressions piece and my extremely early first impressions are very favorable. The game looks great, it sounds great, the characters are engaging, the voice acting is easy on the ear, the writing is sharp, the translation is fluent...

What's not to like? Well, I'm sure there'll be something but whatever it is, I haven't run into it yet. I probably shouldn't be making any broad statements and assertions at this stage, anyway, good or bad. I've barely been in the game an hour. 

Perhaps the most positive thing I can say about the game so far is that I'm very eager to cut this short and get back to it. That I'd rather be playing NTE than writing about it is about the strongest recommendation I can offer right now.

So if it's all the same to everyone, I'm going to do just that. More commentary and analysis to follow, I'm sure, by which time we can only hope I may even know what I'm talking about. 

First time for everything! 

EverQuest II - Guides, Links And Not-So-Helpful Advice

Last week Cliff, who's returned to EverQuest II again, apparently inspired so to do, at least in part, by reading some of my recent posts here, left a comment asking, among other things, if I had any sites to recommend that might help with things like understanding the stats in the game or figuring out which AAs are important. Just regular stuff like that, which you might think the game itself would explain.

It doesn't, of course, or not in any particularly helpful way. There's only so much you can do with a tool-tip and EQII doesn't have one of those nifty in-game encyclopedias that tell you everything you need to know. Not that those are ever much help, judging by the ones I've seen in other games.

It's not that SOE or Daybreak or Darkpaw, or whoever was nominally in charge when any and all of the myriad systems and mechanics in the game were added, didn't bother to explain them. It's more that any explanations were couched in long-forgotten press releases, AMAs and forum posts or latterly in Discord discussions, which are even harder to find. The entire game is a palimpsest of ideas, good and bad, some of which have flourished, some of which have atrophied, but all of which have been very poorly cataloged and annotated.

As with most MMORPGs, the best resources for the kind of detailed information that really tells you what you want to know has always come from other people who play the game. Once upon a time, EQII was rich in such resources but not any more. Many have gone dark and the few that remain tend to stop at a certain point, when whoever was updating them lost interest or gave up playing.

After I gave a few less than helpful answers to Cliff's general and specific questions, I had a bit of a think about it and decided I might see if I could find out if any sites that might be useful were still around. I started googling but it was slow going. The returns were meager. Still, there were a few useful results. I thought I might be able to put something together.

And then I ran across this thread on Reddit, the contents of which I am now going to cut and paste into this post just in case the thread gets unstickied or disappears. Full credit for the following goes to Mandalore93, who did all the actual work.

 Official EQ2 Links

• EverQuest 2 Official Site

  • EverQuest 2 Server Status

  • EverQuest 2 Support

• EverQuest 2 Forums

  • News and Announcements (Archive)

    News and Announcements (New) 

  • EQ2 Patch Notes (Archive)

    EQ2 Patch Notes (New) 

    EQ2 Staff Post Tracker (Archive) 

  • EQ2 Staff Post Tracker (New)

• EverQuest 2 Official Discord

EQ2 Guilds

• EQ2 Guild Recruitment Forum

Resource & Info Sites 

• EverQuest 2 Wiki

  • Megaton's Varsoon TLE Guide 

• EQ2U  

• EQ2 Trader's Corner 

• EQ2 Furniture

EQ2 Add Ons

• EQ2 Interface

• EQ2 Maps

• Advanced Combat Tracker

Guides & Strategy

• EQ2 AA Calculator

• Comprehensive Tradeskill Equipment List

• Tradeskill Timeline

• Harvesting Timeline

• Food and Drink Comparison

• EQ2 Travel Baubles - (Sigrdrifa's post, specifically.)

• EQ2 TLE Youtube content by Bear Necessities

I have checked all the links They all work, although at time of writing the EQII API is non-functional so the EQ2U site is of limited functionality. Darkpaw are supposedly working on fixing the API so it should be restored to it's usual self at some point. Cross your fingers! Also, when I tested it, EQ2 Trader's Corner had exceeded its permitted bandwidth and wasn't responding. Presumably that, too, is a temporary condition.

I also removed two links from the guild section because they threw up a malware warning when I clicked on them. You can find them in the Reddit thread if you want to take your chances.

And I added in links to the current forums where appropriate. Mandalore93's links go to the old forums but I've left those in because there's a ton of useful archive information there, at least for as long as Darkpaw keep the old pages up.

As you'll see if you click through all these links, many of them go either to the official Daybreak EQII website or to the excellent EQ2i wiki. In all honesty, these are probably the two most reliable sources these days. There used to be a lot more but time has withered most of them away.

For anyone coming back or just starting, I would strongly recommend Megaton's Varsoon TLE Guide, regardless of whether you plan on playing on the Varsoon server or not. Apart from the restored starting areas, which don't exist on the Live servers, I think most of the rest will be there or thereabouts correct for content on Live, up to wherever Varsoon has gotten to right now. I believe it should be going into the Chains of Eternity expansion next month, which will give it a level cap of 95, right before everything changes at 100, so the guide will stand as the definitive source for how to play what now feels like almost a separate game.

Cliff also asked a couple of very pertinent, specific questions that I ought to be able to answer. Unfortunately, I can't. Not with any confidence, anyway.

One was about stats and what they mean. If only I knew! It would make things so much easier. 

Stats have changed many times. I understood them once but that was a long time ago. The Megaton guide has an very illuminating overview on how they've altered over the years and, more importantly, on what's most important now. It's in the "Adventuring" section. My rule of thumb is that it's generally your Primary stat, Stamina, Potency, Crit Chance and Ability Mod you want to concentrate on but don't quote me on that. It does keep changing...

The one crucial stat Megaton's guide doesn't mention is Resolve. Varsoon hasn't gotten to the expansion that introduced it yet. Resolve, for players on Live servers, is probably the most important stat of all.

Resolve is explained in enormous detail here on the wiki. It doesn't become relevant until Level 100, after which it becomes absolutely central to Heroic and Raid players but less so for soloists. It does still gatekeep solo content but since every expansions gives you a full set of gear with the required Resolve for solo instances, you don't really need know much more than to be sure to pick that up and equip it before you start any new expansion. It'll usually be in a container with the name "Tishan" attached, next to an NPC in the very first area you arrive in.

What Resolve does do is make for a very handy way to decide if a new item is an upgrade or not. If anything you find has higher resolve than what you have, you'll want to swap it in, unless there's some triggered or passive effect you particularly want to keep on the old piece.

On the topic of free gear, solo players working their way up the levels probably also want to make sure they do the Panda quests. There's a ton of free stuff in there, much of it worth having although the Tishan's items tend to overwrite it. 

Cliff's other question was about AAs, which for anyone that doesn't know stands for Alternative Advancement. I wish I could give a good answer to this one. I can confirm that having the right AA build can make a huge difference. 

For example, a few years back, I read a comment on the forums that explained why my Berserker wasn't feeling nearly as robust as he should have. I applied the advice given there and he immediately became much more powerful. 

For what it's worth, I wrote about that in this post and the forum comment that helped me is here. The key AA in that case is Enhanced Vigor in the Prestige line. Max it to double your hit points.

The good thing about AAs in EQII is that you can have multiple builds saved and swap between them, although it is a bit of a faff to do. The best I can suggest if you're not sure what to take is to make a few builds and swap between them. 

And that, I think, is about as helpful as I can be. There are a myriad of quests that give all kinds of highly useful and desirable items and abilities but trying to list them would take forever. I'd suggest keeping Overseer up to date as you go along, if possible, although it can be a diabolical grind. The various time-reducers it gives for Mount, Mercenary, Familiar and Spell progress are invaluable. 

Always remember to keep your upgrades for all of those going and, if you have the time, do the Familiars Wild quest daily every day. At higher levels (Post-100, really.) a huge proportion of your effectiveness comes not from your own stats but from those of your Mount, Merc and Familiar.

But I'm not going to get into that in detail. I barely understand the how the synergies work myself and certainly not well enough to explain them. As I keep saying, systems and mechanics in the game are ferociously complicated now and as population and interest continue to drift down, accurate, up-to-date resources are increasingly hard to come by. 

I hope that helps a bit, anyway.

Muskrat Love?

The first thing I did when I started this post was check the Labels to see what I'd written about The Expanse already. 

 

There is no Label for The Expanse.

OK, so I forgot to make a Label. That's fine. Blogger has a solid search function. I'll find my posts and reviews with that.

 

Plenty of matches but almost all of them for other Expanses, mostly the Svarni Expanse, a zone in EverQuest II. There was the odd mention of the TV series but only a line, here and there, in posts about other topics entirely. It seems I never reviewed the show at all, not even a single paragraph in a portmanteau post.

Well, that's strange. I watched all six seasons. Not like me not to have said something about them. But I didn't. I just scrolled back through all the posts labeled "TV" from 2022, when the final season aired on Prime, to when I first began writing about TV shows here which, somewhat to my surprise, was only in 2020. Posting about what I'd been watching started as a pandemic thing and never ended , apparently. A bit like Valheim's Early Access.

That kind of puts a rail gun round through the double hull of the post I was going to write. I can hardly reflect on what effect reading the books has had on my feelings about the TV series if I can't go back and refresh my memory on what those feelings might have been.

I mean, you can't expect me to remember, surely? I don't have that kind of self-starting memory. I have the kind that requires a catalyst for the reaction to begin. If I even see the cover of a book I read years ago or a still from a movie, everything slowly starts to come back but without some kind of stimulus, I got nothing.

Oh, yes, sure, I could go watch some clips on YouTube. The trailers usually do a good job of reminding me what went on. But it would be missing the point more than a little. I wanted to know what I thought about it then, not what being reminded of it makes me think now.

So we'll scrap that idea and just talk about the books, I guess. I just finished the ninth and final volume, Leviathan Falls. It took me about a month to read them all. Maybe it was a bit longer. I wasn't counting. 

I bought the entire series for £2.00 each in a charity shop last year. Or I thought I did. When I got to the end of the last one, that was when I found out there are actually nine books in the series, not eight, so I had to buy the last one pretty sharpish. Good thing I work in a bookshop. 

It was certainly a lot of reading to do in a shortish period, whatever. None of the books runs under five hundred pages so that's getting on for five thousand pages in total. It's an extremely easy read, though. It fairly races along. There are hardly any longueurs, at least not until the smattering of faux-poetic/surrealist "Dreamer" chapters turn up in the last book. Those did slow the whole thing down a tad.

The most notable thing for me was how incredibly closely the TV series seems to have stuck to the original. Not always a good thing in my opinion. I love adaptations the way I love cover songs and for the same reason; it's fascinating to see what changes. In this case not much changed. Not much at all.

I could almost literally see the scenes from the adaptation playing out in my head as I read the books. The characters are all exactly the same, with the possible exception of Bobbie Draper, and then only, presumably, because the casting director didn't manage to find a suitable Polynesian actor to play her. My friend, who watched and read all of this before me, says Amos is different in the books but I couldn't see it. Well, not until... but, no, spoiler... let's not go there.

Also in my head, everyone in the books sounds exactly like the actors who played their characters in the show because the dialog seems to be identical down to the inflection. Except I can't remember the dialog, so that must be subjective. Still true, though, I bet.

The one huge deviation, of course, is that Alex dies in the TV show, where he doesn't in the books. He got written out because the actor playing him did something Amazon didn't want to be associated with, i think. Can't remember what it was, if I ever even knew.

I knew, roughly, when Alex disappeared but even now I have absolutely no clue how the narrative changed in the show to allow for his absence. That was the point where I realized I wasn't so much remembering what happened in the show as re-watching the show by way of the book. 

I felt the narrative in general becoming less familiar after that. More divergent. I seem to remember Drummer having a much bigger part in the show than she does in the book, for a start. I also thought Filip ended up going dutchman with his father's ship, too, not going AWOL before it left port and thereby surviving.

If that's what happened. Filip literally never appears in the narrative afterwards.He barely gets a passing mention. I kept waiting for his plot-line to pick back up but it never does. Did I miss something?

There are a few moments like that but not many. Mostly, the two authors that make up the James S. A Corey gestalt (Ironic, that, isn't it? Given the ending of the series.) keep all the balls in the air and all the plates spinning. I bet they were glad to get to the end all the same.

The last few books, the ones that carry on "Thirty Years Later..." past the point where the show ended, feel a little different to the rest. The series starts off as a kind of gritty, near-future noir, confined to a single system and focusing on very human concerns but it ends up being a full-blown cosmic space opera, a universe-shattering battle with quasi-Lovecraftian Elder Gods from another dimension.

None of it really bears close examination, not if you're trying to avoid picking holes. At one point, quite late on, someone makes the observation that Holden and his crew seem to be extraordinarily lucky. Geez! You think? They have more lives than ninety-nine cats!

But that's just about the best thing about the series from my perspective. The older I get, the less time I have for stories that don't turn out well. I don't just want to like the characters I'm reading about, although I very much prefer it if I do. I like them to have a good time, too. I like a happy ending but I also like a happy beginning and a happy in-between if I can get them.

The Expanse is all happy endings. OK, not for the literally billions of people who die, many of them horribly. But they're just NPCs. We don't know them and we don't care about them. Almost everyone you could think of as even a minor supporting character either gets a noble death Doing The Right Thing or doesn't die at all. Even nearly all the baddies! 

In fact - no spoilers - some of them don't even die when they die!

Jim Holden is a total Pollyanna and I get the feeling the authors must be too. They really do want all their readers to have a good time. They even bring in a lovable dog towards the end for absolutely no reason I can see other than they thought it would be nice to have a lovable dog in the story. Talk about fan service!

That dog, though... If there's one moment when disbelief ceases to be suspendable it's when you think about how that dog stays happy and healthy through the same physical stresses that almost kill most of the crew. She's always described as smiling or grinning or having a great time, even when everyone else is getting crushed into paste by thrust.

And she's not even a young, fit dog! She's an old dog being subjected to G-forces that Corey spends paragraph after paragraph telling us are incredibly hard to survive, even in custom made crash couches, with huge doses of custom-designed drugs, some of which are amphetamines. 

Yet they can just get a dog on the spur of the moment and Amos somehow whips up a perfect dog-suitable equivalent in five minutes! And the dog doesn't just survive, she settles in and acts like she's been in space all her life!

Yeah, I had a problem with the dog. But don't start picking holes in the plot, that's my advice. So I'll stop. I really didn't have anything to say about The Expanse anyway, other than it's good and if you haven't seen it, you should see it and if you haven't read it, you should read it.

I might get the audiobook next...

A Rockin' Good Time - The Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll Demo

One reason I like reviewing demos is that they're concise. They're mostly either short stories or single chapters as compared to the full game's novel. Sometimes they're purpose-built but more often they're discrete segments pulled out of the finished work, usually the opening chapter or the introduction or the tutorial. 

It makes them very easy to assimilate, assess, analyze and review. It's neat and tidy and satisfying. I look forward to playing them and I look forward to reviewing them.

That's most demos. But then there are demos like Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll. 

Is it even a demo?  After about an hour I had to tab out and check to make sure I hadn't somehow downloaded the full game by mistake. When the sun came up on the fourth in-game day, I decided it was time I stopped. There was no sign the demo was going to.

Steam tells me I have 82 minutes played although I'm not convinced "played" is the most appropriate term here. Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll is a visual novel although I'm not convinced "novel" is the most appropriate term either. Heck, I'm not one hundred per cent sold on "visual"...

Whatever LMRnR is, it's not a game, that's for sure. It does have a handful of inflection points, moments when you appear to be able to change the flow of the narrative, but from an hour and twenty minutes I can only remember, at most, half a dozen. 

Being asked to make a decision about every fifteen minutes doesn't constitute a game by my definition. If anything, it reminds me of one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books, but only if someone had redacted almost all of the choices.

At this point I should step in to clarify that I really enjoyed my 82 minutes with Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll. I'm also okay with the visual novel format although I don't think it's necessarily the best option for a narrative like this. As a story, though, it's intriguing, entertaining and a bit of a page-turner. It's also absolutely nothing like I was expecting.

But what was I expecting?  The Steam Store sales pitch, which I quoted last time, doesn't give much away: "Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll: the romanticism of the Eighties, mystery and intrigues, betrayal and sacrifice, hatred and passion — all this and more in the new game from the creators of the legendary visual novel Everlasting Summer!"

I realize now I'd taken most of my cues from just the title and that mention of the Eighties. I'd pretty much skipped over all the rest, the stuff about mystery, intrigue and so on. I'd somehow come away with the idea I was going to be playing a game where you put a band together and went on tour - something like that. 

Yeah... nope. There's nothing like that at all. Not in the first 82 minutes, anyway. What there is is a whole lot of story.

Here's my précis of the plot so far. I'd spoiler-warn it but this is the fricken' demo! The whole point of demos is to give stuff away so you can see if you want to pay for the whole thing, isn't it? To say revealing the plot of a demo is like spoiling the plot of a game is like saying trailers spoil the plots of movies. 

Oh, wait... 

You play as Nickolai, a senior in an elite Tokyo high school. He's Russian, as in both his parents were Russian, but he's lived in Japan since he was six, speaks fluent Japanese and is consequently treated neither as a local nor a foreigner, leaving him in some uncomfortable third space between.

Nickolai is one of those odd, semi-emancipated teens who seem to crop up a lot in Japanese narratives. He's eighteen, which where I come from would make him unequivocally an adult and he lives alone in the house his parents bought before they died. Big house, too.

Despite living as a self-supporting adult (On money left by his parents, I think...) he's still in the final year of high school and he behaves - in school, at least - in that very disconcerting way young adults mostly behave in anime, which is to say a bit like any young adult would behave here in the country where I live but also a lot like someone much younger.

In another familiar but bizarre trope of the form, Nickolai has a neighbor of the same age, Himitsu, who goes to the same school, who has a key to his house, who cooks his meals for him, walks to and from school with him, hangs out with him all the time, is in love with him maybe as a brother, maybe not that way at all, and who absolutely is not his girlfriend! Mostly because he's an idiot would be my take on it.

She's also half-Russian, which seems like a bit of a co-incidence, but then one of Nickolai's only two other friends is American, as is his ex-girlfriend, who we'll get to later. The school seems to be full of the children of non-Japanese VIPs as far as I can see.

Himitsu is not a stalker. We need to get that clear from the start. She rings Nickolai up at three in the morning because she sees his light on but she absolutely hasn't been staying up all night, watching his house. She just can't sleep. 

She comes into his house, uninvited, at three in the morning purely because she's worried abut him. And because she has a key. Which he gave her, so that's all quite alright and perfectly normal. And when she mumbles under her breath that since it's like they're living together, maybe she should move she absolutely isn't suggesting anything weird is going on in her head...

Actually, as is always the case with this trope, or at least in the few times I've encountered it, she's so very far from being a stalker that you want to grab Nickolai by the scruff of his neck and tell him how bloody lucky he is and how he should stop mooning after all the other much more melodramatic, enigmatic and just plain stroppy girls he seems to find far more interesting and pay her the attention she goddam well deserves.

About those other girls...

There's the one he "saves" from a gang of bullies, who turns out to be the Class President of the class he is in, which he doesn't even know! How does that work?! She can't stand him, of course, and she isn't at all grateful, quite the opposite really, but inevitably they keep getting thrown together all the same.

 

Then there's the girl who spills orange juice over him in the cafeteria and blames him for it. She turns out to be the daughter of the President of the School Board and the Queen of the School, which is news to him because he's only been at that school for how many years? She can't stand him either, so naturally they keep running into each other, at one point even hiding in a tiny cupboard together, something which causes both of them a great deal of necessary embarrassment.

But most importantly there's Catherine Winters. Catherine is Nickolai's aforementioned ex. The demo begins with an elegiac sequence about cherry petals drifting in the wind, which was what was happening the last time he saw Catherine. She left without explanation, was it a year ago? Maybe two? But now she's back, again without explanation, and back in his class, no less. Nickolai is very much not over Catherine. 

So, eighty minutes in and he's got four girls to juggle. Seems like it's going to be a high-school romance, right? Yeah, and it is. Except there are also the mysterious notes in misspelled Japanese left on his doorstep, followed by the even more mysterious phone calls in the middle of the night. It's not Himitsu this time. It's someone with a Russian accent, warning him Bad Things are going to happen because of Something His Father Did and he should Watch His Step.

Okay. Recap and recount. 

Love? Check. 

Money? No sign of any so far.

Rock'n'Roll? Coming to that right now.  

 

Orange-juice girl, whose name is Ellie, plays the guitar. Nickolai, who plays the bass, although by his own account not very well, runs across her in the music room at school. She's playing an acoustic guitar when both of them ought to be in class, an odd affectation that leads directly to the two of them squeezing into a cupboard together to avoid being discovered bunking off lessons by the Principal, who just happens to wander into the music room for a quick, secret conversation with another member of staff.

Nickolai thinks Ellie plays pretty well but he doesn't expect to see her fronting a glam rock band in a grungy back-street club. Well, why would he? Even though it's one of his regular hang-outs and even though Ellie's band, whose name I've forgotten but they're named after an anime robot, is headlining and even though Nick makes the point earlier that only local bands ever play at the club...

Even though, as I hope I'm making it clear, none of this really bears close examination, it does not matter a jot. It all works. I believed it at the same time I didn't believe it.

That's because the characters are all well-differentiated, convincing, believable within the local physics of credibility. Other people might not do these things but these people do and it feels right that they would.

The writing is crisp and clean except when it's Nickolai being about as flowery as any lovelorn adolescent feeling sorry for himself might be. The dialog is charming. The story trips along nicely. It's a damn good read.

There's also whole layer of very welcome meta-referentiality that really appeals to me. Nickolai is always making comparisons about the way similar situations would play out in manga and anime, usually without realizing that's exactly what is happening to him, only without the "magic girls" and superheroes.  

There are also lots of useful, explanatory notes on Japanese culture as seen from an outsider's perspective. That'll be because the developer is Russian, I imagine. I do find it slightly disturbing, how many games and anime I enjoy, initially believing them to be authentically Japanese in origin, turn out not to have been made by Japanese creators or studios at all. Probably says something about me or the culture or both.

Graphically the game is a real pleasure although it's pretty much a slide show in which most of the slides get repeated over and over. Occasionally something will move on the screen - a train crossing in the background, a character lifting a glass, but mostly everything is static. It's like looking at a series of pictures in a gallery. 

Good pictures, too. Every image is meticulously crafted with far more detail in the background than the narrative requires. I took a lot of screenshots because every new slide is as lovely to look at as the last. 

The controls are almost literally as minimal as it's possible to get. There are no instructions at all on how to play. The demo just starts and it's up to you to figure out how to get it to do anything but since all you really need to do is click the mouse anywhere on screen to make the next line of dialog appear, that's not a problem.

Once in a very long while you might have to choose between a couple of options like "Follow Her" or "Do Nothing", which just takes a click, but other than that there's nothing for you to do but read and watch.  If you were hoping to get up on stage and jam at any point, like I was, you're going to be disappointed.

Or maybe that comes later. I doubt it. You might get the option to "Join In" or "Just Watch" I guess.

I really like Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll. It tells a compelling story through likeable characters and pretty pictures. As with many visual novels I've "played" I'm far from convinced it's a game or needs to be one. It'd be a perfectly good manga or anime. 

I'll finish the demo for sure. I might well buy the full game at some point. 

I'd much rather watch it as an anime, though.  

Fracturing The Fractal

Who wants to read another post about AI, then? Always a popular subject, I know. But I think we may be past the point where putting our fingers in our our collective ears and singing "La! La! La! not listening!" is going to work.

Did anyone ever actually do that, by the way? It seems like one of those things you grew up knowing other people did, somehow, rather than anything you ever would have done yourself. 

There's a lot like that in the book Mrs Bhagpuss and I are collectively and separately reading Homework by Geoff Dyer. Mrs Bhagpuss got it for Christmas, or maybe it was her birthday, and it's been the bathroom book for a while.

Does everyone have a bathroom book? I first came across the concept back in the 'eighties, when I stayed at a friend's place and saw they had a bookshelf over the cistern. It was all the same book, too. Not literally the same book. Now that would be weird. No, I mean a series of books. I can't remember what the series was except that it was a comic strip. Peanuts maybe?

No, it definitely wasn't Peanuts. I did  have another friend back then... he's dead now, been dead a while... who was, I won't say obsessed with the Peanuts strip but he sure did like it. But then everyone liked Peanuts in those days.

Peanuts is back in fashion now. Did you know that? It goes up and down, somehow. The high point was back in the 'eighties or 'nineties, when there was even a shop in town that sold nothing but Peanuts products. Then it kind of dropped out of the cultural conversation for a while but now it's back. I have no idea why. These things happen.

Oh, that brings me back to what I was saying about the Geoff Dyer book. So, Geoff is exactly the same age as me, give or take a few months, and he grew up within less than an hour's drive of where I grew up. His book is a memoir about that but since he's a... wait, what is he now? 

We were talking about that, Mrs Bhagpuss and I, back when we both started reading the book. I knew his name very well from work but I couldn't exactly put my finger on what he was best known for. With most writers it's easy to go "Oh, him? Yeah, he writes historical crime novels set in the Reformation" or "I know her. She's the woman who writes all those romantasy books with the dragons..."

Authors generally stay in their lanes or they do if they want to have a long-running career. Same as musicians, which is why that Spinal Tap line about "Hope you like our new direction" lands so hard. Nobody ever does.

Some writers, though? Their lane is not being in a lane. The emperor of all of them is Bill Bryson. Bill is real nuisance. People come into the shop all the time and ask "Where are your Bill Brysons?" and the answer is "Depends what he's writing about".  Not the answer anyone wants to hear.

Geoff Dyer is like that, I think. He's a novelist, an essayist, an editor, a critic and I guess he's best described as a cultural commentator. And now he's a memoirist, too.

Except his memories don't exactly tally with mine. Or Mrs Bhagpuss's. She's a couple of years younger and grew up a couple of hundred miles further East but she's still solidly in the same growing-up space as Geoff and me. And both she and I recognize all the experiences Geoff relates but we don't always relate to the experiences. Or not the way he does.

It's a thing about the culture, isn't it? Pop culture, I mean, specifically. I nearly said it's the thing about it. It's fractal. 

Now, see, there's a thing. Another thing. Do I mean fractal? Is it the right word? Do I really know what it means and if I do or if I don't, is it appropriate to the context?

I'm not sure it matters. What does matter is that it's an example of itself. Hey! Recursion again! Recursion is really my jam at the moment. Oh boy, another example.

So, fractal was a moment in the nineties. We sold a lot of books on the back of it and some of us got at least a vague idea what lay behind the pretty pictures and weird optical effects, which led to the word slipping into the language as a vague, hand-wavey metaphor. Kind of but not exactly like I said "jam" there, without really having grown up saying it or having the automatic cultural appreciation of its nuances you get from encountering something while your synapses are still settling in. 

As time goes on, these things get layered in like laminate. It's all surface but add enough surface and you have depth.

Like Peanuts. Peanuts goes back to the 1950s, to a Charles Schulz strip called Li'l Folks. Actually, the 1940s. I just looked it up. It ran from 1947 to 1950. Li'l Folks isn't Peanuts, though. It just looks like it and sounds like it. And was written and drawn by the same person. 

But Li'l Folks is not in the culture in the way Peanuts is. I know it because I've been a comics fan for almost as long as I've been alive. You probably know it too because chances are you came to this blog, directly or indirectly, because it is or at least was a gaming blog and comics is to gaming as jazz is to blues.

Is that fair? I feel like that's an order of magnitude too close. Or maybe the whole analogy doesn't work. This is why editors exist. Cut me a break. I'm wearing a lot of hats, here.

Peanuts is one of those cultural artifacts that transcends both taste and preference. If you lived in a certain place at a certain time you will know who Snoopy is. You may not care but you will know. This is what reading Geoff Dyer's Homework is like. 

It's filled with anecdotes and stories that reference all the same things both I and Mrs Bhagpuss grew up with but the importance Geoff places on them and the conclusions he draws from his experiences with them frequently don't tally with ours. And ours don't always tally with each other, either, although they do come closer more often, which I suppose goes some way towards explaining why we've been able to stand each other for over thirty years.

And understand each other, too. Sharing a cultural identity does lead to a degree of understanding even if it's often as confusing as it is comforting. All experiences are unique as the cliche goes, if I didn't just make that up.

So, yes, pop culture is fractal. I was right all along! Maybe.

AI, though.. 

Ah! Look! We're back to AI. Lulled you into thinking I'd forgotten, did I? Well, I said at the top that was where this was going, although I'd almost forgotten, myself.

Here's what I was thinking. You know the AI bubble that was going to burst? Is it, though? It seems to be taking it's time to pop, doesn't it? And meanwhile new AI stories keep cropping up. Gaming stories, I mean. (Here's the famous writer, staying in his lane.)

Like Roblox (Ptuiii!) and its "agentic AI  tools" or the $50m fund to "invest in AI-driven games". AI is going to "save the games industry." Or at least the part that isn't swearing on a stack of Bibles that it's never going to use AI at all...

I don't have any links to the people saying that. They tend not to be very interesting. People fervently advocating for the maintenance of the status quo rarely are.

A lot more interesting are the people willing to engage not just with the future but the immanent present, even if I'm not sure Infinity Nikki is the best example of the ineluctable importance of the human soul.

I'd be happy to engage if someone would hand me the controls. Here's what I'd like AI to do for my gaming. I'd like it to let me prompt for a game featuring my characters, the same ones I've spent the last year recovering from the dead spaces of the past and turning into songs. I'd like to see them walking around, interacting with each other and with me. And no-one else.

I wouldn't want to share them. They wouldn't become part of the shifting, drifting cultural backdrop, not even to the degree this post you're reading has. And congratulations if you are still reading. You have some stamina!

AI has the potential to create hyper-local cultural bubbles. It's nothing new. The Brontes were doing it on a family scale with Glass Town two centuries ago. Li'l Folks was doing it, an order of magnitude larger, for the people of  St. Paul just after the war. (You probably need to be the same age as Geoff Dyer and me not to need to add a qualifier to "the war" there...)

My wished-for bubble would be the smallest of them all. I'd be the only one in it. Me and my imaginary friends.

I've always had a thing for imaginary friends but they're had to sustain without psychosis or psychedelics once you get past seven or so. Paper and pen has been the best way for me but it is, frankly, a lot of work. Uplifting, elevating, wonderful work but work all the same.

Wouldn't you like to have a faithful amanuensis to turn all that creativity into a playground designed and built just for you? I imagine I would but maybe that's just my imagination. The reality might not taste as sweet.

If it did or if it didn't, though, I'd be the only one tasting it. 

And where does the culture go, if everyone's creating their own?  

 

AI used in this post

The three images. Obviously. Although none of them is what you'd call original AI. I fucked around with all of them in paint.net. I think messing up AI images with filters and effects is both fun and aesthetically pleasing. Artistically valid is another question.

The thing is (I do say that a lot, don't I? It's like a nervous tic.) it's quite hard to get useable images out of non-visual prompts. Go figure! And I tend mostly to use AI for illustrations only when I don't have obvious visuals to work with. Otherwise I'd use a screenshot or take a photograph.

For this post, I did the old "pull out a sentence and see what the AI comes up with" routine. I think it did a very good job with the one I used for the header image. That was with the very catchily-named Flux 2 Klein 9B Fast. Who's in charge of these naming conventions? Clearly not the Marketing Department. The prompt was the entire third paragraph of the post, which I'm not going to repeat here. Just scroll up if you're that interested. I added the style instruction "1950s comic strip. Sunday color page."As for the settings, honestly these days I'm past caring. I don't even look at them so whatever the default was.

The next image is by Qwen Image SD from the prompt "fractal was a moment in the nineties. We sold a lot of books on the back of it and some of us got at least a vague idea what lay behind the pretty pictures and weird optical effects". No style instruction.

The final picture is a hybrid created by both the previous models. I had Qwen Image SD make something from the prompt "So, yes, pop culture is fractal. I was right all along! Maybe." with no style instruction and then I used that image a starter for Flux blah blah blah, only using the cut-down prompt "pop culture is fractal" and the style instruction "line drawing, ink wash, color."

Then, as I said, I really messed them all up. If you think they look ugly now, you should have seen them before!

Also, is it really obvious I enjoy doing these "AI used..." postscripts as much as or maybe more than doing the posts themselves? I can see why all those actors and directors love doing the commentaries on the special editions of the DVDs...

 

Recursion To The Max

Now there's no more leveling to do, it's time to start filling out the many gaps in Mordita's character sheet so she can become the do-it-all character Conkers was. I did a fair bit of prep on that last year but there's a long way yet to go.

And it's complicated, not to say confusing, deciding what's essential, what's merely desirable and what's mostly irrelevant. One problem with bringing a new character in at the current end game (Solo end game, that is. Let's not get carried away.) is that by definition they weren't there for all the previous end-games, so whatever the point of doing those might have been, you've missed it. Haven't been there, haven't got the T-shirt. 

Every expansion comes with a bunch of features that require you, at minimum, finish the Signature quest-line to get the full benefits. Often there are side quests and other content you'd be expected to do as well, if you want to make sure you've got all the goodies. There could be skills and abilities and items and spells... all kinds of things you probably don't want to be without, not least because, when the devs are designing later content for subsequent expansions and updates, they may very well assume most people have them.

A surprising number remain relevant for years, while others are swept aside and forgotten. For example, there's a crafting quest in 2016's Kunark Ascending that gives you a buff that makes gathering materials very significantly quicker. You really wouldn't want to miss out on that, especially if you were used to having it on a previous character. It's like gathering treacle without it.  

On the other hand, there's not much point back-tracking to get the widget that lets you see Shadow Nodes and gather from them, much less spend the many hours needed to raise the skill. To everyone's relief, the deeply unpopular Shadow Prospecting from 2019's Blood of Luclin expansion never made it off the moon.

But you could if you wanted to. All of this stuff - indeed very nearly everything there ever has been in the game - is still there, waiting for anyone that feels they missed out. Some of it is worth doing for the fun of it, even if the rewards don't mean much any more. If you're just trying to catch a new main character up to where you left off with the previous one, though, you'll probably want to be a bit choosy.

The question is, where to start? There's a lot of quality of life stuff that isn't essential but that's exactly what I miss most, when I suddenly run into something that reminds me I don't have it. Like languages, for example. It's always a pain when you try to speak to an NPC you know has a quest you want, only to find you can't communicate with each other.

These days, you can just buy a book from an NPC to learn most languages but there are still a few you need to do some work for. The question is, which is which? I probably ought to take Mordita to the vendor and buy everything she hasn't already got, then compare her language skills with Conkers, my Berserker and make some notes on what's missing. Then I'd have to look up how to fill in the gaps.

It's some work, changing Mains in mid-stream, for sure. Not everyone enjoys the admin. Luckily I do. Mostly.

In theory, QoL improvements ought to take second place to combat efficiency but as I've been saying all along, as a Necromancer I'm suddenly finding the solo content a lot easier than I was used to, back when I was playing a Berserker. If she's winning all her fights easily already, is the effort involved in upgrading all her spells going to be worth it?

And let's not pretend it wouldn't be an effort. I got my Sage, Barnabus, out yesterday to see how many Expert spells he’d have to make and how many rares it would take. I make it thirty-three spells. Every spell requires two rares these days, so sixty-six rares.

The rares for cloth caster spells are Flowfall Vines. There are enough on the Broker to make everything but they go for about 25m plat each so that would be 1.65b plat for the lot. Hyperinflation is rampant in Norrath these days. It's true Mord did have a windfall recently. She got a key Inquisitor Master as a boss drop and sold it for 1.7b. I wasn't planning to spend it all on crafting mats, though.

The preferable alternative is to gather the vines myself but they call them rares for a reason. Last session, I spent about three-quarters of an hour gathering and I got five, which was honestly a pretty impressive haul. Maybe I could average six an hour if I was really lucky, so eleven hours of gathering, but realistically I'd expect it to take more like double that long.

Which is fine. I like gathering. It's restful. I generally don't listen to the radio or podcasts any more when I play games but gathering mats is made for it. If it was June and the cricket was on...

If I was going to do it seriously, of course, I'd need to get Mordita's Rare Harvest Chance stat as high as possible. And her Bountiful Harvest stat as well. She already has the AAs for both but there's gear with boosts she and her mount could be wearing that they're not. 

Well, the mount has some, now. I had Barnabus make a saddle and hackamore with relevant stats since I already had him working. He, or any of my high-level crafters, could make other items, too. The Artisan pieces, at least. Any crafter of high enough level can do that, always assuming they've scribed the recipes. There are consumables too...

Except the problem with the whole plan is that a lot of Mordita's existing spells are already upgraded to a degree that means the Experts from the new spell books, which I just got Barney to buy because he didn't do much in the last expansion or three either, won't actually be upgrades for Mordita. Although I haven't been playing her as much as Conkers these last few years, I have been keeping up with her free, time-gated spell progression and as a result all her important spells from before the level cap went up (And a lot of the less-important ones, too.) are Master level or above. 

That means I'd be gearing Mordita up so she could get mats so Barney could make her upgrades she doesn't really need, which wouldn't upgrade the spells she already has anyway. And yet I do still need to do it at some point, if not right away.

She may not need those upgrades now, but if I keep on passively upgrading her old spells without replacing them, at some point they'll be maxed but still be too low to be really effective. Every expansion comes with power creep as a built-in feature, whether you want it or not. 

I could certainly leave it until the next expansion, later this year. That won't come with an increase in the cap so it should be fine. If I do, though, in two years, when the cap goes up, I'll almost certainly need to swap to at least the new spells that came with this expansion and if I make the Experts for those now, I'll have a year and a half to upgrade them with the passive system, meaning they'll be more powerful than the Expert-level spells in the expansion-after-next.

Yeah. Makes my head hurt, too. I think the percentage move is just to keep gathering every time I'm out doing anything, pass the vines to Barney and have him make the key Experts piecemeal as and when I have the mats. There are probably only a dozen or so spells that really need to be kept at peak effectiveness. That should be easy enough.

Of course, that's just for one character. I have a whole lot more clamoring for attention. At one point I had half a dozen at cap although that was when leveling took hours not weeks. And the above examples are just a few of the things that need to be done to get Mordita to where she could be. Where Conkers already was before I swapped over. 

There are all those adornment slots that could be improved for a start. She could make the Adornments herself if she did the dailies to skill up. And she ought to max her Tinkering, too. I think Transmuting is already done just from clearing the many unwanted drops from doing the Overland dailies and Weeklies and the instances in the last update. Come to think of it, she only did one of those because the rest were Level 135 Required. I guess I should run her through the rest at least once, just to see what's there...

And so it goes. On and on and ever on. But to what end? 

Don't look at me. After more than twenty years I think it's clear the only reason I'm doing any of this is so I can keep on doing more of it. I'm seeing recursion everywhere these days.

I kinda like it...