Fifteen Days To Fly

That's me up there, riding my griffin. Griffon. Gryphon. One of those.

He's called Jepus. Perhaps we'd better stick with that. Although it's a terrible name. Would you call your griffin Jepus? I wouldn't. I didn't. He was called Jepus when I got him.

Jepus is the final reward in what I'm assuming is just the first in an ongoing series of log-in incentives. The way they work feels heavily biased towards slackers, something I find curious. 

The current round lasts two weeks but you only need to record eight non-consecutive log-ins to get everything. For those of us like myself who have absolutely no self-control are hoplessly addicted enjoy an entirely healthy but very enthusistic relationship with the game, it means there's nothing to look forward to for most of the second week. 

Well, except the game itself, of course. Never forget there's a game attached to all these freebies. Anyway, I haven't gotten to Day Nine yet. Maybe something else will happen tomorrow.

Now I come to think about it, there's another way to interpret all this. Jebus is great and all - a cool, flying mount that crackles with lightning - what's not to love? I'm very happy with him. Only there's one thing I forgot to mention: I don't get to keep him.

Jebus is a two-week rental. Don't you just hate those? Of all the money-making gimmicks Free To Play games rely on, rented items have to be the worst. 

It makes a lot of sense commercially, I get that. It also explains why they'd be so quick to hand out what feels like it ought to be a perk from much later in the game. Give me a couple of weeks flying around on this thing and I'm not likely to want to go back to bouncing along the ground on a sheep, am I? I might be ready to spend some money to avoid doing just that.

But maybe I won't have to. In Noah's Heart I have a ton of temporary stat-bonus titles but they might as well be permanent. I receive the same awards repeatedly for doing the same content in each season. Since the rewards are cumulative and I get the new ones well before the old ones expire, the rental period never runs out. 

Looked at that way, if the current set of log-in rewards for Dragon Nest 2: Evolution never change, then so long as I keep logging in every day, I'll always get a new Jepus before the old one goes away. It seems a funny way to run a business but it could happen.

I hope it does because Jepus is great. He's fast and he flies pretty high. If the camera in DN2:E actually worked properly, I'd have some amazing screen shots.

Unfortunately, it's about as much use as the 1980s model Minolta AF-DL my ninety-three year-old aunt left me in her will. I mean, it works... that's about the best you can say for it.

In fact, given how bloody awful the camera controls are in the game, I'm pretty darned pleased with the shots I did manage to get. If I ever get around to doing that post comparing the in-game photographic options of various MMORPGs, DN2:E is not going to come out of it well. 

Then again, at least it has options, which puts it well ahead of just about every Western-made game I've ever played. Why the feature hasn't been cloned wholesale beats me. I consider it essential, now.

As well as having a camera that acts like it's being hand-cranked up a pole sticking out of my backpack, the photo-function's default setting insists on using extreme close-up focus, so everything but my character looks like the work of a pavement chalk artist on a rainy day. You can correct that by adding a filter but if you do, you lose the normal color settings, which is why any screenshot you see that looks sharp is either awash with pink or washed out.

Still, it gives me something to do. Imagine how dull life would get if everything worked properly, eh? 

In other Dragon Nest 2: Eolution news, I'm Level 20 at time of writing. I made more than two levels in about as many minutes this morning just by doing the Scholar's Hall activity, where you have to answer ten questions about the game. I got all ten right, half of them with educated guesses. 

Quizzing to level up sure beats fighting monsters. More games should do it. I have been fighting monsters as well, though. I mean, you have to if you want the plot to keep moving. I'm pleased to report my button-mashing technique is still working and there's no sign as yet of the rumored forced grouping. 

Until that changes, I guess I'm playing Dragon Nest 2. At least until the Palia open beta begins...

*** Obviously, this is one I prepared earlier. My griffin is about to go back to wherever loan mounts go when the contract expires and I haven't played DN2 since Dawnlands arrived. I haven't played Palia since then, either. Predicting the future is a mug's game. ***

Sad Goth Girl And The Treehouse Pajamas

If there's one thing I have to say about Dragon Nest 2: Evolution it's that for a game that's supposedly predicated on making money by selling you stuff, they sure are generous with the free samples. I've only been playing for a few days and my character's already better-looking than many I've played for years - or ever - in other games.

It's all happening so fast I'm finding it hard to keep up. It's certainly too much to report as it happens. In the last few, short sessions I've acquired four pets, two outfits and a pair of wings. And they all look great!

Thanks to a weird glitch when I logged in on Sunday, I can offer a benchmark illustration of what my character looked like when she started. For some reason, the game reverted to the default appearance until I rebooted Bluestacks and this is what I used to look like in the dim, distant past of a few days ago:

Ah, the sweet innocence of youth. Although I see I still have my sad goth girl fairy pet.

She's not called Sad Goth Girl for real. I wish! She's not even a fairy. She's officially my Swan-Like Elf pet, which is weird, there not only being nothing remotely swan-like about her but also because my character is an elf, too. It's like a human having a pet human. I think there's a name for that...

Here's a close-up, taken earlier as you can tell because I'm wearing my Ranger outfit. (I'm just going to use "I" and "my character" and "she" interchangeably from now on and not just in this post, either. It's really too much trouble, trying to keep my pronouns straight and if I want to identify as an elf, is it any business of yours? (I do not want to identify as an elf. Let's just make that clear right now...))

Did you also notice Swan-Like Sad Goth Fairy-Elf is wearing a crown? It adds yet another layer of mystery. Have I somehow enslaved a member of the elven royal family? Or is it just an affectation, like when King wears that crown from Burger King in the first episode of The Owl House so he can call himself King of the Demons?

(That's what Douglas Coupland called tele-parabalizing, by the way. I'm re-reading Generation X, something that will no doubt feed into a future post or two. It's a handy neologism. Pity it never caught on.)

Another thing that happened during the glitch was this. I got abducted by aliens. 

No, not really. This is actually a mount. I wish it was my mount but it's not. Not any more. When I couldn't get my outfit to display properly I tried mounting up to see if that might shift something and instead of my Angelic Sheep I got this. 

I've seen people flying about in these things. There's a ray-gun that flips out from the underneath and swings about in a vaguely threatening manner. It took me a few goes to get it in shot. In some of the pictures I discarded you could see my foot sticking out of the bottom of the spaceship. Shoddy alien tech!

I didn't get to keep the spaceship but I do get to wear this baseball outfit whenever I want. There's a baseball cap that comes with it but it goes on backwards, something that always makes anyone look like a dick. It's a look even an elf can't carry off so I'm sticking with the bunny ears. Everyone knows those are cool.

The baseball outfit comes from some login event or holiday or something. I'm already losing track and the game's only just started. There's an actual Summer Beach Party thing going on but it's cash-shop only so I haven't been able to make myself look like this.

Probably just as well. Honestly, I'd be embarassed to post a picture like that if it wasn't that I've played Final Fantasy XIV and everyone seems to find it perfectly acceptable there. And anyway, I've got something even more awkward to show you later.

But first: wings!

Every game needs wings but not every game knows how to do them. Guild Wars 2 definitely doesn't. I acquired several sets there over the years and not one of them fitted properly. It always puzzled me. The GW2 art department is generally top-class but when it comes to attaching accessories to character models it looks like they farm it out to the interns. 

My DN2:E wings fit perfectly. I got them from a new activity that opened up when I dinged 16. Don't ask me what it was. It has the word "feathers" in the title, I remember that much.

If I learn a bit more about how it works, maybe I'll do a post on it, but for now here's a shot of the Feather Insertion screen where you perform Feather Synthesis with the intention of making yourself some fancy wings. Out of feathers. What else?

I made some and when I'd finished they looked like this:

As you can see, they fit me like I was born with them. Not like I got them for a hen party with a budget of "Don't spend more than $5. We all know it's not going to last".

It's a look I'd happily have settled for but this game doesn't like for you to just settle. Before I even had time to appreciate how great I was looking I was already opening the chest with my next outfit inside. 

Remember I said I had something awkward to share?

I'll warm up to it with the description. Make of this what you will.

Nervous? You probably should be. I was.

I mean, we've all wanted to skip school to spend the day in a treehouse in our PJs. That's a normal thing normal people want, right?

As it turns out, it's all quite innocent. Well, relatively-speaking, although what dictionary they must have been using if this is their definition of the word  "pajamas" beats me. 

To my eye, it looks more like something you'd put on to go to a party than anything you'd sleep in. A little dressy for a treehouse, too. It also really does not go with those boots, as you can see from the shot below. Swan-Like Elf can't bear to look.

It's not without its charm, all the same. I'm hoping there might be some slippers still to come. Or maybe some actual pajamas. It does say it's part of a set and this is just the top.

We'll just have to see what I get next time I log in. There's almost bound to be something.

Dragons, Ponies, Bunnies And Sheep

Immediately after I posted about Dragon Nest 2: Evolution yesterday, I logged in and played for a couple of hours. When I logged out I was level 10 and I had a pony. 

I'd love to show you how cool I looked riding it but although I took some great snapshots I still can't find them. After spending the best part of an hour looking, including a full search of my hard drive by date and file extension, I have to conclude that's because they don't exist.

Luckily, I have a workaround. Two, in fact. I can take screenshots using the excellent Windows 10 Screenshot function, something I do more and more these days, since I finally discovered it existed a few weeks ago. Or I can use Bluestacks own screen saving service.

Why don't I do that now and then we can have a nice picture of a horsie!

Isn't he adorable? He's even better when you can see him stamping and shaking his head. He's called Macha. Or maybe she is? Probably a girl-horse.

Doesn't really matter because I won't be riding him/her any more. Now I'm riding a sheep. Want to see her? Of course you do.

The more observant reader might also notice my character's dressed differently in that last shot. Oh, a lot happened while I was logged in taking those screenshots, let me tell you! For one thing, I got some...

Bunny Ears!

Bunny ears that turn you blonde, no less. It's only fitting.

The bunny ears came from a chest I got that I think was either from the current holiday event - because of course there's already a holiday going on even though the game only started a week ago - or it was a reward for the game going Live. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a Log-In reward because those were mostly coin and gems to spend in some shop I haven't even looked at yet.

 

The sheep, which is actually called Angelic Sheep - it has a halo! - also came out of some chest or other. Judging by the congratulatory message, maybe it was a lucky win. I only saw one other person riding one but then again I am a week late getting started so probably everyone else is on griffins or pegasi by now. 

My sheep is quite charming, don't you think? Yes, well, you should because she is charming and I can prove it.

See? She has a Charm modifier. My pony doesn't.

She's also faster than the pony so you know who's going to win and I don't just mean in a race. I have no idea what riding a charming mount does for you in this game but I'm betting it's better than not riding one. I mean than riding one that's not. Oh, you know what I mean.

As for the new outfit, I bet you can't guess how I got that. Go on. Try. You won't guess.

I fought a dragon for it! Yes, that dragon. A big, red one breathing fire and everything!

I want to say I killed a dragon but I'm not actually sure what happened. It was a quest that popped up at level 10 to "Change" my class. I wasn't sure I wanted to change my class but I was curious so I clicked on it and it took me into an instance where I had to fight that thing.

It was one of those fights where the boss has umpteen defensive layers you have to peel off so it felt like I'd already killed him three or four times when he finally flew off. I was so low on health by then I thought he'd killed me and I'd lost but when I exited the instance it turned out I'd done whatever it was I was supposed to do. 

Probably just prove I was dumb enough to try and solo a red dragon, I guess.

I found out what "Change Class" meant when I did the hand-in. It means pick your sub-class. Or advanced class. Or whatever. 

My inclination was to take the ranged option, Bowmaster, but then I looked at those helpful diagrams at the bottom and decided that given the way I'm approaching combat, Ranger would be the better option for me. 

When I started, I tried to play my Archer the way I imagined a ranged DPS ought to be played solo. I stood back, picked targets, kited and tried to stay out of melee range as much as possible. That worked fine in a couple of instances but then at around level 5 I hit a quest instance I couldn't finish. 

I kept dying almost as soon as I engaged the final boss. At first I figured he was too strong and/or he had some kind of one-shot ability I was failing to avoid but after a few runs, while I was going very carefully and slowly, trying to figure things out, I got "one-shotted" before I even got to the boss - after I'd killed all the mobs.

It was then that I figured out what I was doing wrong. The instance had a timer I hadn't even noticed. You had to complete the whole thing in under three and a half minutes or the instance closed and kicked you out. That's what had been happening to me every time.

Clearly I needed to go faster. Careful pulling was too slow. So I changed tactics one-eighty. Instead of backpedalling and plinking away with my bow as the mobs chased me, I ran straight at them and stopped in melee range. Then, instead of carefully selecting each of my attacks, I just rippled my fingers as fast as possible across keys 1-4 like I was playing a keyboard trill.

And guess what? It worked. I finished the whole instance, boss included, with a minute to spare. I didn't even take all that much damage. Since then, that's been my go-to combat style. Absolutely no skill or thought required. I can't imagine it's going to work for long but it's gotten me to Level 10 and it beat that dragon so I'm sticking with it until it stops working.

It also got me a parade through the city of Saint Haven complete with cheering crowds and a fanfare from iconic NPC Irine. I've had similar experiences in a few MMORPGs over the years but this was one of the better ones. It gave me feels, I'm not gonna lie.

It's nice to get this kind of thing at the start of the game, too, rather than having to wait until your all cynical and jaded after weeks of grinding. Not that I'm going to be doing any of that. Much though I love Dragon Nest in all its myriad forms, I don't think of it as any kind of "forever game". A Forever Franchise, maybe.

Even if I was minded to settle down in Altea (That's the name of the world where Dragon Nest is set.) it wouldn't be a good idea to become too fond of any one iteration. They open and close like California poppies (If that's botanically inaccurate you can blame Bard. I didn't cross-reference it.) A previous attempt at a mobile MMORPG version of the game, World of Dragon Nest, barely lasted a year and the way the ratings for this one are going (Down to 1.9 today.) I wouldn't bet on it lasting even that long.

Which would be a shame because it's a lot of fun, at least at the beginning. How long it'll stay fun I wouldn't care to say, although comments I've read about the necessity to find groups or even raids to complete basic main quest instances don't bode well.

For now, though, I'm happy to keep mashing buttons and picking up prizes. We'll see how long that lasts, I guess. If nothing else, it makes a change from doing the same thing in Noah's Heart.

You Can't Keep A Good Dragon Down

In the extremely unlikely event someone were to ask me if a particular new game from SquareEnix had been released yet, in theory I'd be able to tell them immediately, even though I haven't played an SE game in a long while. That's because Square delight in bombarding me with information about every last little thing they do. 

In practice, of course, I never read any of their press releases or bother to remember any of the names so I wouldn't be able to help anyone out on the latest Final Fantasy game or whatever it might be.  I have next to no interest in anything Square Enix is ever likely to produce.

I find it almost painfully ironic, then, that I didn't find out about the launch of a game I would have loved to have known about until I read about it at MassivelyOP almost a week after said game went live. I should make it clear, I'm not complaining about MOP's tardiness. At least they got around to covering the launch eventually. The other MMO-specific news site I follow, MMOBomb, still hasn't seen fit to mention the game at all.

The game in question, as you'll already have gathered from the picture at the top of the post, is Dragon Nest 2: Evolution. Anyone who's been around this blog for a while will have heard me mention Dragon Nest a number of times. It's one of my favorite MMORPG franchises and one I've been playing on and off - mostly off - for many years. 

The last time I posted about Dragon Nest was a couple of years ago, when I helpfully recapped my history with the game, saving me the trouble of having to do it again now. I will just re-iterate the surprising - even to me - fact that I've been playing various versions of Dragon Nest for longer than this blog has existed.

Next time I do a recap like that I'm going to have to add another chapter. Dragon Nest, despite having barely been mentioned by any MMO news outlet I've ever read, let alone by any other bloggers in this part of the blog forest, is a pretty big deal in some parts of the world. There have been many iterations of the IP on both PC and mobile. There are often multiple versions running simultaneously in different regions. Dragon Nest is very much A Thing.

The MOP news story reports that the newest addition to the stable collected more than three million pre-registrations of which I would have been one if I'd know there was anything to pre-register for. I'm aware these big numbers can sound specious but I did some research on the worldwide popularity of Dragon Nest a few years back and all the data I was able to find spoke to a global audience measured in millions. The current iteration is even tagged as a "Global" release so I find this new figure convincingly consistent.

Naturally, as soon as I found out what I was missing, I moved to remedy my loss. There's a satisfying degree of synchronicity here in that Dragon Nest 2: Evolution is a mobile-only title that my Kindle would probably burst into flames if it had to try to run so it's incredibly good timing that it happens to have launched just as I've been updating my Mobile-On-PC capabilities.

First, I had to choose a platform. I discounted Google Play Games immediately on the grounds I'd already checked to see if I could play any of the earlier Dragon Nests there and come up blank. I've just done a due dilligence check to see if DN2:E might have been added to the GPG roster in the last few days; it hasn't.

My next choice was Bluestacks 5, where I was delighted to find the game right away. Unfortunately, when I installed it and pressed "Play", I got the introductory movie followed by a swift return to the game selection screen. 

Rather than fiddle around with that, I tried Nox. The current version of Nox has a horrible search function that seems to do nothing more than open a web browser. When you search for a game, most of the top results are for third-party websites that offer to install the game for you. Yeah, right. Nope.

I found the genuine Google Play link and used that but all I got was the dreaded "This phone isn't compatible with this app." Fortunately, I still wasn't out of options. 

When I was tinkering with Bluestacks the other day, trying to get Sky: Children of Light to run (Still no joy there...) I set up a couple of variants, each of which appears to register as a different "phone". I tried another and this time... 

It still didn't work. But that turned out to be because I'd refused to allow the game access to my photographs. 

I know. Why? Apparently you have to, though, if you want to play. I did want to play that much so I started over. Fine, you can look through all my pictures of Beryl if you really feel you must. Then is everything cool?

It was. I was in.

Since I hadn't even discovered Dragon Nest 2 : Evolution existed until about five minutes before I was about to close down the PC for the night and since getting it up and running had taken me about half an hour, there wasn't really time for me to log in, make a character and take a look around. 

So I logged in, made a character and took a look around.

Of course I did. It's Dragon Nest!

I'll most likely do a proper First Impressions piece at some point but for now I'll just bang out a few bullet points:

• Classes: There are only four: Warrior, Archer, Sorceror and Cleric. I picked Archer because for some reason I almost always pick someone with a bow and then almost always wish I hadn't. And yet I never learn.
  

• Character Creation: Isn't bad, especially for a mobile game. There are a reasonable number of choices in hairstyle and eye-makeup and you can make your character's face look round or pointy. So long as you want your character to look like a seven-year-old playing dress-up you'll be very comfortable with the results - and if you don't, remind me why you're playing a Dragon Nest game again?
  

• Controls: The screen is covered with dots which is weird. There's one for every location where there's some kind of command or trigger. I'm guessing on a touch screen that's where you'd tap and you can indeed click the icons there with your mouse pointer when they appear. They also tell you which keyboard shortcut you can use. All of which is fine except why they need to be permanently visible beats me. If there's a way to turn them off I haven't found it yet but since my brain was already refusing to notice them after half an hour I imagine I'll just forget they're there altogether in a while. * See comments below - this is actually a Bluestacks option that can be changed or removed, not a feature of DN2:E.
  
  

• Aesthetics: Those dots are going to be the least of your problems when it comes to screen clutter. What is it about mobile games that makes designers want to cover every inch of the screen with pop-ups and windows and notices? How does anyone play these games on a five inch screen? Can you even see your character on a phone? That said, Dragon Nest 2: Evolution is better in that respect than Dragon Nest M was and it's almost minimalist by comparison with something like Black Desert Mobile, which I found totally overwhelming.
  

• Translation: The big surprise to me is the translation. It's good! I'm so used to having to pick my way through the quaint, charming, fractured English in search of anything approximating a meaning in all the other Dragon Nests I've played, it's almost shocking to be able to understand everything completely, first time. Better still, all the English text I've seen in the game isn't just technically correct - it's idiomatic and characterful too. It's a miracle!
  

• Voice Acting: Maybe the reason the translation is so much better than usual is that they were able to hire a genuine English speaker with the money they saved on not hiring any English-speaking voice actors. The game seems to be fully-voiced - at least the tutorial is, which is as far as I've got - but all of the actors are speaking Korean (I think... could be something else... I'm not entirely clear on who made the game, which is published by Tencent subsidiary, Level Infinite.) It's a compromise that works quite nicely for me. I've always been fine with subtitles.

• Selfies: There's one of those in-game photo features that I like so much. I took some great shots of my character. At least I think I did. Unfortunately, the game doesn't tell you what directory it's using and I haven't been able to find them. I looked in all the usual places but nothing so far. All the shots in this post were taken using Windows own screenshot function.
  

• Authenticity: The game really looks and feels like Dragon Nest. The character design is the same as always, the NPCs are all familiar names and the tutorial opens in Carderock. I recognised the starting town immediately. It looks much the same as it did in all the other Dragon Nests. 

I'd have looked around town and taken some selfies but before I could orient myself the tutorial shunted me off into an instance and then another and then I died so I thought it was probably time for bed.

DN2:E has a lowish rating on Google Play (2.6 out of 5 from more than half a million downlaods as I write this, up from 2.5 last night.) following a rocky start when some things kept falling over or didn't work at all. It looks like most of that's been fixed since and some of it seems to have been no more than the usual mmorpg launch issue of everyone trying to log in at the same time, anyway. It ran smoothly for me is all I can say. 

Reddit is even less happy, though, and for reasons that have nothing to do with launch day blues. The general consensus there seems to be that the whole thing's just a blatant cash grab based on re-using existing assets to exploit any remaining pockets of nostalgia that aren't already tapped out from all the other Dragon Nest cash-grabs there've been.

I can't say I disagree. I am absolutely not going to recommend DN2:E to anyone who hasn't already played other games in the series and even then only if, like me, it feels like it still hasn't been enough. If it wasn't for the nostalgia factor I wouldn't be bothering with it myself and even with those warm fuzzies, it's pretty unlikely I'll play this iteration for more than a few sessions. 

Like all the later versions, it's like a photocopy of a photocopy of the original, just enough fidelity left that you can picture what it's supposed to be if you squint hard enough. I'm happy they keep making new Dragon Nests because I always enjoy trying them out but the best one was the first one. That's the game I really miss. It's been a slow roll downhill ever since.

I'm just a Dragon Nest tourist at this point and happy to be one. Or I will be, when I can find my holiday snaps...