In The Event...

Just three days ago, Kay at Kay Talks Games was looking at Steam's Hidden Object Fest and saying how nice it is that the platform hosts such events for anyone that cares to put one together. I have no interest in hidden object games but the post started me thinking about how quite a few bloggers in this part of the 'sphere, myself included, jump on Next Fest just about every time it rolls around and yet hardly anyone mentions any of the other Steam "Fests" or events.

I don't even have any idea how many there are, much less what they're about. Is there always one running, every week for the whole year, except when there's a seasonal sale on? More than one? And why doesn't Steam really publicize these things? 

There's that pop-up window that appears the first time you log in that tells you about some promotion or other, usually some kind of sale from a specific publisher, but even when Next Fest runs I sometimes have to dig around a little to find it.I certainly never seem to get any emails about Steam events, whereas other publishers deluge me with press releases and promos (/wave Square Enix.)

Did you know, for example, that there are two events on right now?  One is getting the pop-up treatment and the other isn't. Unless , of course, they're taking turns.

The one in the shop-window today is Lovecraftian Days, "The fourth annual celebration of the widespread influence of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the cosmic horror genre in gaming ", hosted by Fulqrum Publishing. I'm not a big Lovecraft fan but I clicked through anyway, just to see what was there and after I pushed my way through the inevitable forest of tentacles, I came to Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened.

I'm a lot more interested in Holmes than I am in Cthulhu. A 90% discount on a £39.99 game from 2023 with a Very Positive rating seemed like a tempting prospect. I was pondering on whether I'd actually get around to playing it when I spotted a banner across the top of the game's Store page. It read   

Hmm. Weird. A Sale Event within a Sale Event? What was that all about? 

So I clicked on the banner. It took me to the expanded version, which looks like this:

Half an hour's browsing later and here I am, writing about it. I have a couple of things to say and the first is, who knew there were so many crowdfunded games? 

Not me, for sure. I mean, I feel like I ought to have known but I really didn't. When I think about it, though, it seems obvious. I must read about a new fundraiser at least every few days and those are just the ones in the genres the niche gaming sites I follow feel the need to cover. Anything that's not some kind of MMO or RPG probably isn't going to ping my radar at all.

Then there's the spread. These are games old, new and yet-to-be. There are some titles in the sale that have been around for years, names you'll recognize, like My Time At Portia or Sunless Sea. There are games just about to launch that you also might recognize by name, things like Outbound or Your Crown Is Mine, both out in May. And then there are the games with no launch date at all, just "crowdfunding soon". Games from developers who, presumably, would still like you to chip in so they can get them finished. 

There were more games than I could readily evaluate. I scrolled through what seemed like hundreds of titles and didn't get to the end. I'm not sure how many crowdfunding platforms for games there are. They can't all be Kickstarters, surely?

Those were the games the event organizers were hoping you might buy or fund but of much more interest to me were the demos. I only knew there were demos because one of the sort categories is "Top Demos". I started scrolling and it went on and on. If those are the top ones it makes me wonder how many there might be with the middle and bottom ones thrown in. 

And that was when I started to wonder why we make such a big deal of Next Fest if there are always dozens of demos just waiting to be played. I like playing and reviewing demos and it's a long time between Next Fests or it can feel like it. It'd be good to have another snack of them between-times.

So I had a look at what they had and I picked a few. Not too many. I can't be sure of finding the time to play, let alone review them.  For Next Fests I usually go for six to eight but this time I settled on four,

And they are:

Lucy Dreaming - "Discover a dark family secret and rid a young girl of her nightmares in this splendidly British point & click comedy adventure. Playing as sharp-witted Lucy, explore both dreams and reality to meet all the colourful characters who'll help you solve puzzles, gather clues and find a murderer."

When it comes to games, normally I just have to see the words "British" and "Comedy" in the same sentence and I'm on to the next. It almost always means labored Monty Python or Terry Pratchett pastiches and I'd had more than enough of those by the '90s. I liked the illustration for this one, though, and the title. And it's a point&click...

I watched thirty seconds of video. It was... mildly amusing, no more than that. But much more importantly it wasn't Pythonesque. Or Pratchetty (Can that be right?) 

I heard Lucy say "I bloody love queuing, me!" and I was in. Self-deprecating irony and cultural stereotyping! Now that's British comedy! And the developers, Tall Story Games, are based in Telford, so they'd need a sense of humor....

Phoenix Springs -  "Lose yourself in Phoenix Springs – a modern point-and-click set in a mysterious neo-noir world. It begins with an investigation: find your brother Leo. You already know where it ends."

Arthouse point&click with an aggressively over-designed visual style. Featured review quotes on the Store page from the New York Times and the Guardian. Ah, I know where we are!

I'm always up for a bit of pretension and the voice-over on the trailer is deliciously dry. Just hope it doesn't take itself too seriously.

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!"

Didn't even look at the video. Saw the title, read the description, hit download.  

It's just as well I didn't. I have watched it now and if I'd had to listen to that caterwauling racket, I'd most likely have passed. Visuals are good though. If the story is too, maybe I'll play it with the sound off.

Habromania - "A dreamy Alice in Wonderland-inspired RPG that follows 19-year-old Alice as she tries to escape the surreal, cozy hellscape that is Wonderland—hopefully with her sanity intact."

Not even sure this one is in the event. I might have just grabbed it when I was looking at the Store before this all started, when I was checking the price of Equinox: Homecoming, whose demo (That I wanted to finish.) no longer works since the game launched. I'll almost certainly grab it if it goes on sale again at a decent discount.

Back to Habromania: it looks charming but I'm curious as to why Alice is nineteen. that seems weird. In the books she's seven, which is one hell of a leap. Would any of the story work if Alice was an adult instead of a child? Then again, there are so many versions of Alice, I guess by now she's whatever people want her to be.

And that's the lot. If I play them I promise I'll write about them but I'm not promising I'll play them. I probably will, though. I mean, how long does it take to play a demo? 

Oh, and Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened? Never did get around to buying it. 

Out Of The Fog They Came

EverQuest II is a very busy game for one that's been plodding along for more than twenty years, largely catering to the same, ever-diminishing group of players. I've mentioned the plethora of holiday events many times. Since all of them tend to get one or two additions every year, the dense crust of content surrounding each gets thicker all the time. But the holidays are just one of the numerous content streams that keep bubbling up, over and over again.

Panda Panda Panda, for example. That's back. It's not exactly a holiday, in that there's no specific event being celebrated. It's just some agarophobic pandas with a warehouse of extremely powerful items they keep trying to give away for information they could very easily google. Assuming Norrath has the internet, of course.

I'm not going to say any more about Panda Panda Panda today because although I read that the event had started, I haven't been to see what the reclusive bears want this time. I'll get a separate post out of that soon enough, I'm sure.

I'm also not going to talk about the new(ish) Fabled dungeon that only arrived in the game a short time ago, with the summer update. It does have a solo mode I could try out but until yesterday I hadn't bothered to find out didn't know where the zone-in was. I do now but it's going to have to wait until I'm both in the mood and have the time for a proper session.

No, today I'm going to reveal a very few facts about this year's expansion prequel event, Heralds of Oblivion. Every year we get one of these, whether we want it or not. Sometimes they can be really good. I can remember a couple that kept me occupied for weeks, putting several characters through them for the experience or the loot. 

 

Mostly though, and especially recently, they've been a bit thin. Usually a very quick quest to introduce us to the next, previously unheard-of, Norrathian secret society and a bunch of repeatable quests so we can ingratiate ourselves with them for no very obvious reason. There seem to be an unlimited number of these groups, most of them self-appointed guardians of something or other, roaming around the world like a bunch of Boy Scouts looking for old ladies to help across the street or planar incursions to repel.

This yeare's bunch are called The Flamebearers and they differ from the usual run of do-gooders by being associated with Lady Najena, who I could have sworn was a Medium-Sized Bad last time I met her. She's organizing this year's bunfight all the same so maybe it's one of those enemy-of-my-enemy things or perhaps she's had a bang on the head. I imagine we'll meet her at some point and she'll monologue all about it.

Angeliana on the forums claims "Heralds of Oblivion is shaping up to be the biggest prelude event to rock Norrath since 2018’s Against the Elements event that preceded Chaos Descending." If I could remember what that one was like I might be able to benchmark against it. I bet I posted something... ah! Here we are...

"I spent more than two hours helping Freeport’s Academy of Arcane Science this morning. The introduction to the event was even more perfunctory than usual and the quest itself took less than ten minutes, half of which was finding the main questgiver... "

Hmm. That doesn't sound like it was much to write home about, does it? But wait...  "None of that mattered a jot when I got stuck into the gameplay. It's exactly what I want from an MMO."

Aha! That's more like it! And I remember something about it now. It was a big, open world affair, where you could fight waves of mobs and close rifts, just as if you were... playing Rift, I guess. I also noted "the rewards are fantastic", suggesting it wasn't just fun but profitable, too.  

It's too soon to say if this year's prequel matches up but the signs are promising. I ran through the first several quests last night and those were more substantial than usual. They took a while and involved some travel and some combat that was easy but not a complete walkover, thanks to mostly taking place in endgame zones, where I had a lot more trouble from random, wandering mobs than the ones I was there to kill. (There are also tradeskill quests for the non-combattants among us. I took those but haven't done them yet.)

 I can immediately see the similarity between 2025 and 2018 - it's another bunch of rifts that spawn waves of mobs you have to dispatch before firing up your doohickey and closing the portal. I did that the required number of times to progress the quests, along with a few other menial tasks, acquiring a bunch of event tokens along the way. Who takes those and what they give you for them I do not yet know.

I also don't know where the next questgivers are, the ones that hand out what I'm guessing are the repeatable quests. The event neatly sends you to whatever the highest-available open world zones for your character level might be, so in my case the NPCs will be somewhere in the two endgame open world zones, Sodden Archipelago and Western Wastes, but I couldn't find them and it was getting late so I decided to wait until someone posts their exact locations on the wiki or, better yet, adds the POIs to EQ2Maps.

I can say that the rifts I've had to close so far are not random. They appear in the same spots and have a fairly short cooldown, of the order of five or ten minutes I'd guess, meaning you can just pick one and stay there as long as you need. Or you can fly around like a dumb-ass like I did, looking for new ones, until you finally realize you just keep coming back to the same two.

At max level, I'd recommend the ones in Western Wastes for the simple reason that zone is much less cluttered with foliage, as the name suggests. A lot of it is flat ice floes, which makes spotting the rifts as you fly around much easier. Sodden Archipelago is a jungle and a bunch of ravines, so not ideal for aerial reconnaissance.

The storyline is interesting. Well, it is if you play EQII. Not, I imagine, for anyone else. The rifts are planar but don't appear to come from (Or, presumably, go to...) any planes we already know. The creatures coming out of them are vaguely elemental but of that odd order of elements that includes things like fog and mist. Dragon magic seems to be involved but there's no obvious draconic connection.

 

At one point a treant of some sort turns up and starts throwing threats and accusations about. Everyone denies having any intent to invade the plane of wood or wherever the hell the thing comes from but it pays no attention and keeps on ranting. 

I have to say I was intrigued. It made me wonder what the expansion might involve and where we might be headed, which is clearly the main point of an expansion prequel, so job done there, I'd say. I'll definitely follow the questline to the point when it becomes certain there's nothing more but repeatables for token or faction left. I might be at that point alread or I might not.

After that, I guess it depends how much fun closing the rifts is and how good the rewards are. I'll get back to you when I know more. 

All in all, though, a very solid start to this year's expansion cycle. 

The Winds Of Mysterious Fortune Blow Me Back To WoW

As I suggested yesterday, I'm not invested enough in any particular MMORPG just now to have a reliable, ready-to-use supply of incidents, ideas and opinions on hand to fill three or four posts a week. It's happened before and no doubt it will happen again. Luckily, I have a well-tested workaround for times like these. 

Actually, I have more than one, this not being my first rodeo as the saying goes (Although if it was really a rodeo then it most definitely would be my first, so that's a weird thing to be benchmarking against...) For today's post I'm combining two methods in a belt-and-braces stylee (And again, who even wears braces these days? Clowns and Jacob Rees-Mogg and that's about it.). 

First, there's the good old "Copy what everyone else is doing" plan, sometimes given a positive spin as "building community" but just as easily defined as pinching ideas from other blogs. In this case, though, the idea I'm pinching is so old that, if it was a folk song, it would have (Trad.) after the title. It's picking up an old game and complaining about how it's too hard/easy/annoying or just plain not as good as it used to be. That one always delivers.

"Incompatible" with what?

There's not really much point trying to build up any suspense by waiting until paragraph four to reveal the name of the game because literally everyone who ever reads this will already know from the picture at the top of the post that it's World of Warcraft. I hadn't really been thinking of going back until I read two posts in quick succession, where Shintar and Redbeard both happened to be talking about their recent experiences in Retail, playing low-levels after being away for a while. 

I won't lie. It was actually Shintar's mention of a levelling event that swung it. I am very much not one of those people who find leveling in Retail too fast. I generally don't find it fast at all, probably for exactly the reasons Shintar outlines (Try it on a character with no Heirlooms and no help from any other characters on the same account some day and see how fast you find it.) Plus I always like events where good loot drops like leaves in the fall.

Both of them play WoW regularly although Redbeard pretty much sticks to Classic these days and Shintar, by her own account, bounces between Classic and Retail. I can't actually remember when I last played either. 

Okay, that's not strictly true. I do remember when I last played Classic, or I can soon look it up. It was right when the big scandal broke and the boycott started. I know because that was what decided me not to renew my sub.

When was that, anyway? My God! It was July 2021! Four years ago! Seems like... well, two years ago, at least. And it turns out I have played Classic again since then because there was a free weekend  almost exactly a year ago and I had a go at that. I'd totally forgotten about it.

As far as I can tell, though, I really haven't logged into Retail for nearly four years. My Battlenet client was obsolete. Had to download a new one. Then I had a 56GB patch to install, which I was hoping was going to be one of those new-fangled ones where, after the digital dust settles, it turns out only a fraction of it was new data. 

Don't look at me like that. I don't know who you are!

Sadly, not this time. It was the full fifty-six gigs and now the drive I have WoW running on is in the red. Probably going to need to do something about that so thanks for that, Blizz. (Mandatory unjustified sarcastic remark quota fulfilled - minimum one per comeback post; no maximum.)

I had lunch while that was going on and it was all finished when I came back so I logged straight in, expecting confusion. I was confused for much of the time I was playing (Just over an hour.) but I also had quite a lot of fun.

WoW is very playable There's no point pretending otherwise. I do think the developers go out of their way - often several miles out of their way - to make it less playable than it could be but the basic structure is so robust it's almost impossible for them to fuck it up completely.

I will take a small portion of the blame for such confusion as there was. It was my choice to play one of my few Horde characters, which was already taking me out of my comfort zone, but even worse I picked one who was camped in Orggrimar.  

I have a love-hate relationship with the Horde capital. I love what it looks like and the general ambience but I hate trying to find anything there. Or even just trying to get from one side of the city to the other. It's not just a maze, it's a chaotic, unstructured mess. It's full of dead ends, there's no line-of-sight and the map is seven shades of totally useless. 

Warband-related perk. I think?

I was confused even before I got to Orgrimarr, though. I knew Warbands were a thing and I had the vaguest idea what they were but it turns out I know nothing about them that's of any practical use. After some trial and error I managed to get some of my characters sitting around a cheery campfire, like a bunch of sitcom characters on an ill-advised camping trip, but only about half of them made it (So maybe it was a horror movie not a sitcom...). 

I couldn't figure out why the rest were only listed on the drop-down list at the side of the screen. I never did manage to get any of those into a campsite. Whether that means they're not in the Warband or if they're in a Warband of their own or if they are all in the same Warband but just aren't showing up, I have no idea. 

I suppose I could go look it up but a) I don't have a lot of faith in the accuracy of online information about WoW, thanks to too many out-of-date or just plain wrong readings in the past and b) I don't care.

Since I'm a cheapskate, playing on the endless free trial or whatever it styles itself these days, none of my characters over a certain level were available. I think the cap for free play is still 20 but 20 is like 50 in old money now, or something? Not a problem anyway. I have plenty of lower-levels who are still allowed to log in and do stuff.

My favorite race in WoW is probably Goblin but I've done a lot of low-level goblining.  My second-favorite is Vulpera and I haven't worn them out yet so I picked on Odelie, a Level 10 Vulpera Warlock and woke her up.

When she arrived in Orggrimar (After the mandatory viewing of the visually impressive but otherwise almost wholly meaningless cinematic for The War Within, the current expansion that I can't play, not having bought it, so why even show it to me?) my first thought was  naturally to get the hell out of town. I would have, too, had Odelie not been standing right next to someone with a quest.

That quest turned out to be the start of a short breadcrumb trail to the expansion before last, Dragonflight. I didn't know Dragonflight was even available to players who hadn't bought it, although now I think about it I do vaguely recall reading something about old expansions being rolled into the current one for nothing. 

And this is one of the nicer views...

Anyway, it seems to be true because after I'd rounded up the scientists and scholars I was asked to persuade to go on the trip (And caught a bunch of stray balloons for some random kid because that's the sort of thing we heroes always have time for.) it was off to the Dragon Isles in a rather impressive zeppelin. The Horde do know how to travel, gotta give them that.

Arrival in the new lands was a lot less impressive. I swear, if I was the Executive Producer of a new MMORPG or the latest expansion for one, my very first ordinance would be "Put the best-looking zone right at the fricken' start". Why do they almost never do that? Why is it that the zone you see first is always a barren desert or a swamp or, as in this case, a filthy grey pile of rocks whose bleak ugliness is only made more depressing by dull, barely-glowing pools of lava?

Horrible place, made worse by horrible lighting. And it's not because the game is old or the engine isn't up to anything better. I have plenty of screenshots of delightful Azerothian scenery, all filled with color and vibrancy and interest. Didn't take any like that today.

Never mind. I'm sure it gets better. I just don't get why anyone would want it to be the first impression players get.

By this point I'd been playing maybe half an hour and I'd made next to no experience at all. I thought I probably ought to make at least some effort to progress so I grabbed what quests I could find and ran around doing them. Or trying to do them. It's quite hard to kill proto-dragons when you don't have any spells on your hotbar.

I'm not sure when or why but it seems while I was away something so significant must have changed that they had to wipe everyone's hotbars. All six of mine were completely empty, except for a single icon that had something to do with Warbands. Yes, them again.

Luckily for Odelie there was a guard nearby and he dealt with the proto-dragon while she sorted out her spellbook. Otherwise that would have been her second death of the session. I know everyone says Retail is so easy now you couldn't get yourself killed if you tried but I assure you that's an exaggeration. Just try running across those canvas roofs in Orggrimar and see what happens.

Once I'd got that sorted out, the rest went quite smoothly. The starting area in the Dragon Isles feels like it might have been designed by the same people who worked on the town planning for Orggrimar but other than that I enjoyed it. 

The gameplay, that is. The story, not so much. I will say, yet again, I find questing in WoW very dull compared to just about any other game I can think of. The quest text is dull both to look at and to read, which makes it hard to get invested in the narrative, such as it may be. 

Functionally, though, it's fine. The kill numbers are low, the drops come fast, the mobs die even faster... what's not to like?

As for the xp it was decent. I played for just over an hour and Odelie went from the start of Level 10 to just into Level 12. Two levels in an hour sounds quite fast (Although, honestly, not that fast by modern standards.) but bear in mind I had full rested xp and there's supposed to be an xp event on. I wonder how fast it would have gone if neither of those was true?

I finished up in the big clearing in front of the Embassy building. There were loads of players there. There were quite a few in Orggrimar, too. For mid-afternoon on a weekday, I thought it seemed pretty busy, especially since it wasn't even current content.

And as I said, I had fun. The xp was nice but the real treat was the loot. I got a couple of the Mysterious Chest drops from the event and while the gear in them wasn't game-changing (Still an upgrade, of course, though.) the 30-slot bag I found in one certainly was. Add to that the 20-slotter I got from a quest and I more than doubled my slots. When I logged in all I had was the default inventory and one ten-slot bag!

The event only has another week to go - I started late - so I'll need to get a move on if I'm going to make the most of it. Whether I have the motivation to keep logging in is a good question but if anything's likely to spur me on it's free bags.

The Dream Is Over

What did you do after lunch on Christmas Day? I played video games! 

Well, one video game: Wuthering Waves. I managed to get in a longish session, right after we finished Christmas lunch and Mrs Bhagpuss and Beryl were both comatose with food exhaustion. We'd done all our socialising before the big day so it was just the three of us, which is how we like it. 

We'd opened all our (Many!) presents, taken Beryl for a walk, cooked and eaten lunch and done everything except pull the crackers which, once again, we forgot. Seriously, we've had the same box - a dozen Moomin-themed crackers - for at least three years now and I think we've maybe pulled four of them. I even said on Christmas Eve that we mustn't forget again. And then we forgot!

Anyhoo... getting back to the point and without any more uneccesary biographical detail, what happened was I sat down in front of the PC, wondering what to play and decided it ought to be Wuthering Waves. There was an event I wanted to do.

It's called Depths of Illusive Realm and it's been running for weeks. I mentioned it in the last post I wrote about the game, which was all the way back in November, when I said I'd done the first chapter. Back then, it seemed like there'd be more than enough time to get it all done but time has an unfortunate habit of passing and it was dawning on me that there might not be all that much of it left, at least where this particular event was concerned.

The "Caution- Wet Surface" sign's a nice touch - but shouldn't it be on the ceiling?

Even though it's there or thereabouts my favorite game of the year (There may be a post on Favorites of the Year if I can get it together to collate the lists and write it.) I hadn't really played much Wuthering Waves since mid-November. I did get in a couple of unreported sessions, taking me well into The Black Shores, but as I keep mentioning, my game-playing is at an historic low in the lifetime of the blog just now. My spotty attendance record is no reflection on Wuthering Waves itself, just more evidence of a general decline in gaming activity (Whatever Steam says to the contrary.)

Even so, my attitude to Wuthering Waves is puzzling. I've been pondering on exactly why it might be that I play the game in such a sporadic fashion, given it's supposed to be my gaming crush of the moment.  I think I've figured it out (And I know I've said it before.). It's because it doesn't actually feel like playing a game at all. It's more like watching a movie.

Every time I play I have a really great time but most of it is watching cut scenes and enjoying the story. There's a fair amount of button-pressing to keep the dialog moving and there are always a few fights sprinkled in, along with some puzzles to solve, all of which tends to be quick and easy enough not to interrupt the narrative flow. Once in a while there's a Big Boss Fight, which can put a bit of a damper on things from my perspective but even those generally aren't too off-putting. I could do without them, personally, but I've experienced far worse in lots of other games.

In a two or three hour session, though, it feels like at least two-thirds of the time is spent watching other characters do stuff and listening to other characters talk to each other. That makes it feel distinctly like watching an anime TV show or a movie, albeit with interactive elements.

Not for the first time, I sense someone's personal experience leeching into the plot.

The sensation is enhanced by the enigmatic portrayal of the player-character. The developers went for a peculiar design aesthetic: a weird see-sawing between a silent protagonist and an almost omniscient narrator. 

At times, my character just nods, makes gestures and looks vague. At others, she has full, voice-acted dialog. When she does speak, it's often in voice-over, revealing her private thoughts and giving her interpretations on what's happening. It feels like the actor's commentary in the extras on a DVD.

The overall effect is that if I get stuck into the storyline and finish a standalone section, like a chapter or even a whole event, I come away feeling more like I watched a movie than played a game. It's satisfying but it take a while before I feel like doing it again.

Alternatively, if I just potter around, doing shorter side quests and dailies or just exploring the gorgeous world, then it feels much more like playing a game. That's fun but it doesn't progress my character anything like as much as the main storyline quest would. It's a bit of the old Catch 22.

All of which is really much more my problem than anything the game is doing wrong. I'm also aware that I'm not approaching the whole enterprise in the way the developers would expect. I think I'm supposed to press on through the story tothe end and then do a lot of repeititive "content", like in every other live service game. I just never seem to get the hang of it.

They do keep an eye on this sort of thing, fortunately. There are frequent surveys and questionaires you can opt in to complete and many of the questions revolve around playstyles and preferences. I get the feeling they're doing what they can to accomodate everyone.

Suure... until you murder me!

I'm veery happy to give my input. I completed a survey just recently that had multiple questions concerning how much combat there should be in story quests, how hard it should be and so on. Naturally I expressed a preference for the minimum possible interruption to the story but I fear it may be a minority opinion. 

Based on past experience with multiple games, my impression is that the more hardcore players think they are, the more they complain and those who make the most noise are likeliest to have an influence on how the game develops. In-game surveys at least make some attempt to garner a range of opinions although there's still a strong element of self-selection.

With that in mind I always expect things to get more annoying rather than less as a game ages but after my time with the current event on Christmas Day I'm mildly optimistic my fears may prove to be unfounded, at least in this case. I was able to finish the whole of the event storyline, which is substantial, in a couple of sessions, mainly because it turned out it had been tuned to make it impossible to lose any of the significant fights, even the big finish with the final boss.

It took me a while to figure that out. A while back, I did some very necessary work on upgrading my combat capabilities and it paid off to some extent. Even so, I'm still extremely bad at this kind of action combat so having better gear is only ever going to get me so far.

Nevertheless, I was winning all my fights quite handily - until I ran into one opponent who seemed to be determined to give me a really good thrashing. I kept expecting to die but somehow I never quite did and when the victory finally came, it was by the slimmest conceivable margin - my character had just a single hit point left.

It all happens so fast , it's only in the screenshots I get to see who we were fighting.

I was so surprised, I took a screenshot to prove it, although I can't find it now. It just wasn't, as I thought, amazing good luck. It was because, as I eventually figured out, the event has been designed to make it literally impossible to lose. 

In the finale, you have to battle the main villain, who summons several boss mobs from earlier in the game, resulting a string of explosive, confusing and spectacular fights. I spent some considerable time in a couple of rounds hanging on by just a single hit point. But I never died. As far as I can tell, the player character can't die.

If I've gotten that right it's a very welcome design choice. It meant that I was able to enjoy the fights for once, instead of constantly worrying about having to start over. I don't mind relatively long boss fights so long as I'm certain I only have to do them once. 

I'm not going to go into too much detail about the story or gameplay in the outgoing event, save to say that I found it all excellent. The dialog was well-written, the voice acting was convincing, the plot was intriguing and the action was enjoyable. 

The story revolves around an attempted incursion of the Somnoire dreamworld into reality. Either that or it's a stare-down between a two cats. One or the other. Over several chapters we get to see the dreams of some established characters as well as those of a couple of newcomers, both of whom seem like fine additions to the ever-growing cast. As each dream is resolved (They all feature anxiety issues or something similar.) that character takes a place in the deserted railway cariage until finally there's a full team, ready to go take on the villain behind the whole thing.

Camellya: Rover's flirty frenemy, the one who ends every fight dangling from some kind of sex-swing. Or that's what it looks like. Maybe it's just me...

It's an excellent conceit and structuraly I found it very satisfying. Who doesn't enjoy getting the team back together? 

I had a lot of fun. It made for a highly entertaining Christmas afternoon and a first-class alternative to watching The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which is what I'd have been doing if we'd followed our usual pattern and slumped on the sofa in front of whatever animated movie the BBC had programmed for a stupified nation to sleep through after Christmas lunch

I'm not sure if the Illusive Realm narrative content will disappear from the game entirely, when the event comes to an end a few days, or whether it's just the ancillary content that will go. I hope it stays. It's much too good to waste on a one-off apppearance.

Coming after is something much bigger than a mere event. According to the official Wuthering Waves website, 2 January sees the launch of Wuthering Waves Version 2.0.

I'm still a bit vague on exactly what that entails. I'm hoping it's just a hyperbolic way of saying the game is getting even bigger, not that the current game is going to change. In my opinion it doesn't need to be mucked about with. It's more than fine as it is.

Having watched the trailer and skimmed the promotional material, it seems we'll be getting a new continent, Rinascita, along with something called the Echo Fiesta and something else called All Silent Souls Can Sing. The website is so much style over content, though, I can't be sure what any of it  means.

Whatever it turns out to be, I'll most likely get to it in a separate post, nearer the time. For now, I'm just reporting that I'm done with Depths of Illusive Realm. It was great and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Can't ask for more than that.

Currently Playing...

Time for a quick update on what I'm playing, I guess. Because that's what we do here, right? 

Not sure I could explain to a space alien why it's what we do, even assuming it's anything a space alien would want to know, which seems unlikely, now I come to think about it. You'd imagine, if they'd come here all the way from Alpha Centauri, which always seems to be where most of them come from, any self-respecting space alien would have better things to do with their time than quiz random bloggers on why they keep telling everyone what games they're playing.

Or not playing, come to that. It's not like I'm keeping a tally but I'd have to guess I've read as many posts about what games someone has stopped playing as I have about those they still are. And that's not even getting into the count for games we're all thinking of playing!

So, what started all this introspection, if that's the word? ( I was going to say "nonsense" but I think Belghast has that one trademarked.) Well, if you really want to know it was Jeromai.

Jeromai's signal blinked back to life yesterday after a couple of years of silence, proving yet again how crucial it is never to remove anyone from your blog roll. Well, not anyone you would actually want to hear from again, that is...

The name of Jeromai's blog is Why I Game, which seemed exceptionally appropriate for his post on coming back to Guild Wars 2 after a long layoff. Among other things, he talks about coming home to a former MMORPG and indeed back to the corner of the blogosphere where he used to chat about such things. His conclusion is that you can't really come home to somewhere that was never really home in the first place, which really puts another layer on that overused line of Thomas Wolfe's. 

I have a seasick feeling I covered all that stuff here once before and anyway it's not what I wanted to talk about today. I'm a lot more interested in something I said in my reply to Jeromai's post (Well, there's a surprise...).

Looping around to those blogging about blogging discussions that always come up during Blaugust, I've mentioned a few times how I tend to just sit down and type to get a post going and how that sometimes means I end up writing something I wasn't planning. Like this, in fact.

It goes further than that.

Writing the way I do, not just in posts but in comments as well, sometimes means I hear myself saying things I had no idea I thought. It's not that unusual for me only to find out what I think about something when i read back what I've written. It's even more common for me to think I think one thing, only to discover, as I try to put it down in words, that I don't quite think that at all but something else entirely.

In this case, what I discovered when I replied to Jeromai is that right now I prefer not having a "main game", as I did for more than twenty years from the late 90s onwards. It's liberating. And relaxing. And more fun.

I remember how important it felt to have that one game, always an MMORPG, naturally, as the spine of my gaming anatomy. How unmoored and at sea I felt whenever I reached the end of my time with my game of choice at the time.

There were many times when I felt the urge to move on but it always seemed extremely important to have a new game to go to whenever I considered leaving an old one. Gaming was like serial monogamy back then. You stayed faithful to one game until you broke up, then you either began a new relationship with some other game you'd been eying up for months or you thrashed around desperately until you either swallowed your pride and went back to what you knew or somehow managed to convince yourself you'd fallen in love all over again with something else - anything else.

The life of an MMO gamer could all too easily descend into a series of intense, increasingly short-lived relationships or, if you prefer a less emotionally taxing metaphor, an endless skip across a line of ever-decreasing stepping stones, heading always into deeper water, farther form any safe shore. OK, that wasn't much more re-assuring.

It absolutely wasn't just me, either. It was the way it was for a lot of people. Leaving one MMORPG for another was reckoned a Big Deal. There used to be all kinds of talk about loyalty that seems positively delusional now: loyalty not to the people you might have been playing the games with but to the games themselves. As though they knew or cared.

Some of that still clings to the periphery of the hobby but the zealots and loyalists eem ever thinner on the ground. No-one cares as much and ironically that feels like progress to me. Or  perhaps I mean persepctive.

Even calling it a hobby is telling. No-one ever called it a "hobby" back then. It was a lifestyle as much as anything. Maybe even a calling, a vocation.

Now, it's a hobby. Maybe even a pastime. A bit of fun. If we're lucky, a lot of fun. Just not anything that really matters any more. That has to mean some kind of emotional growth, doesn't it?

It feels that way, to me, anyway. Or it does at the moment. In that comment to Jeromai I surprised myself when I said "I tend to get heavily into each as it comes, play for 50-100 hours then get caught up in the hype for a new one and move there instead to do it all again. I think it’s a vastly more healthy way to play games than getting stuck with one and just trying to keep convincing myself I like it because it’s familiar." 

It's true, though. And now I point it out to myself, I realise I've been doing it ever since I stopped playing GW2, which may have something to do with how loathe I am even to consider going back. I don't want to become one of those bitter vets who can't leave their old game alone even though they haven't played for years but sometimes the metaphor that comes to mind is less one of a relationship that soured than of a substance finally purged from the system. And you know how careful you have to be about those.

This blog has always been a record of my gaming infidelity, of course. I've played countless games, gotten excited by them, posted frenetically about their pleasures, then dropped them and moved on to the next. And often I've gone back, again and again. As with romantic relationships that turn into friendships, it's always good to keep in touch and hang out together occasionally. Sometimes, though, you have to make a clean break.

All of which is an extremely long and uneccessarily introspective introduction to a post that was going to be about my having completed the main questline and all the sub-quests added to Wuthering Waves for the Moonchasing Festival, about having done as much of Solasta as I think I'm ever going to and about why I'm not playing Once Human at all at the moment

I was full of praise for Wuthering Waves' first major update, when I wrote about it almost three weeks ago and I'm very pleased to say the high standard was maintained throughout. There's hours of content in the event, all of which I found involving and entertainning. The storytelling is solid, the characters are engaging, the voice acting is convincing and the mini-games are fun. 

I didn't run a timer but I would guess the whole thing took me six or eight hours to do, a great deal of which was watching and listening to scripted narrative of sufficient quality to hold my attention throughout. There was hardly any combat at all and the couple of set-pieces that did pop up were quite manageable even for someone as bad at the fighting part of the game as I am. (I'm really bad.)

The whole thing ended with an excellent, lengthy cut scene of the quality usually reserved for promotional trailers. Don't take my word for it, though. Take a look for yourself.

Of course, without the kind of parasocial relationships built up between player and NPCs over dozens of hours in game, the emotional impact is lost, but the production values still shine through. Wuthering Waves is a quality game.

So is Once Human as far as I can see, although even people who like it insist on describing it as "janky" and "full of bugs", neither of which has been my experience. I was fully intending to carry on with OH once the Season system came into operation but I just haven't and I can't even say why, for certain.

It would be neat to claim it had something to do with the way the Seasonal process derails progression but I'm playing Wuthering Waves still and that has absolutely the worst "progression" system I've seen in years. I probably ought to do a whole post about that but the tl:dr is that almost every reward and drop is some kind of consumable used to upgrade your character but as yet I haven't felt that upgrading any of them is something I much want to do. I just do the bare minimum I can get away with and then carry on enjoying all the excellent narrative content, most of which doesn't seem to care whether I've upgraded or not.

At the moment I'm sort of thinking about letting my server in OH expire, forcing me to Eternaland, then waiting for the next PVE scenario, whenever that is, before picking the game up again. By doing that, though, I feel there's a real danger I might just never get around to going back in any serious fashion at all. Once Human would then become yet another in my large pile of games I used to like but don't really think about any more. Which would be a shame.

And yet, I can't say I really care. That old loyalty to individual games that used to come so naturally is a lot harder to find, now. It burns hot still when the games are new but allow it to cool and it gets harder and harder to fan it back to life.

It seems much easier and a great deal more enjoyable to get excited al over again about something new. If there was a shortage of good games to try (Or, indeed, old ones to revisit.) then cultivating a loyalty to a specific title might make more sense. As it is, though, I feel the problem revolves more around finding the time to try all the interesting new possibilities than finding something to hang onto like a life-raft.

Which brings me to Solasta, about which I haven't really posted anything and now most probably never will. I've been playing it somewhat obsessively and with considerable pleasure for what Steam tells me is more than fifty hours but now I'm all but certain I'm done with it. 

A couple of nights ago I found myself unexpectedly in the midle of what felt like it had to be the grand finale, the big battle to decide the fate of the world. I was completely unprepared for it, both in terms of where I'd thought I was in the game and in the sense of being in a position to have any chance of succeeding. 

After the first couple of catastrophically unsuccessful attempts I did some googling and found that, yes, it was indeed the very last fight but also that, if I somehow managed to win, the game would literally flash up a Game Over screen and that would be that. I wouldn't even get to loot the corpses of my enemies.

That put a pretty large dampener on the prospect of completing the game at all but I still might hve tried because the comabt in Solasta is a lot of fun and I would quite like to have finished that last fight. When I found out through trial and error that there didn't even seem any way to back out of the whole thing and start over, having prepared myself a bit better, short of going back to a save that was several hours of progress in the past, it seemed to me that the rational reaction was simply to treat the game as over and move on. So I have.

An that's a good thing. I was never a completionist. I never felt I needed the closure of a Game Over screen in a single player game and I'm happy to say I no longer feel the need of a "good reason" to stop playing an MMORPG. 

Now I think when it's time to stop, you know. And if you don't know why you're still playing, then it's time to stop. At least, that's what I think now. I'll know what I think tomorrow when I read what I've written about it then.

Bless Me! Are You Playing That Old Thing Again?

It's Friday! Why not make it Log Back In To Games You Haven't Played For A While Day? Might need a catchier title...

Seriously, though. So many games, right? Hard to keep up. Just this week I saw posts or press releases about updates or content drops or free giveaways in DCUO, Lord of the Rings Online, AdventureQuest 3D, EverQuest II, Once Human, Palworld, Blade and Soul, Bless Unleashed...

Hang on a mo... what was that last one? Bless Unleashed? Is that still going? Didn't it sunset like... years ago?

No, actually. It did not. Bless did. Which was a different game. Kind of.

Then Bless Unleashed went through some crypto/NFT nonsense that meant anyone who ever cared about it even a tiny bit wrote it off as might-as-well-be-dead, just like Riders of Icarus and some other games I can't even remember that went down the same blind alley. 

But then crypto crashed and NFTs turned into just one of those things like deely-boppers and shag-pile carpets that turn up on "Weren't Your Parents' Generation Crazy? shows a couple of decades down the line and the games that jumped that bandwagon jumped right off again pretty darn smartly and carried on rolling along as though none of that ever happened.

As I may have mentioned before (Just kidding. I know I mention it all the time.) Bless Unleashed is still in the top row of my Most Played Games on Steam. It is just hanging on now at #6 , having been pushed out of the top five earlier this year when I was on a run with Nightingale (Oh, hey, another game I need to patch up...) but Steam defaults to six games per row so BU hasn't technically "dropped" yet, although Once Human is breathing down it's neck so its only a matter of time. 

Okay, that was a dumb thing to say. It's a list ordered by hours played so what else could it be a matter of?

Anyways up (Is there such a thing as regional appropriation?) the point is, I somehow managed to play eighty-one hours of Bless Unleashed. I think there may be some padding in there, where I left it running while I was doing something else once or twice, but it's true I did play it a lot for a while. And enjoyed it. 

No, really. I swear!

I must have because I managed to get to level 29 when the cap was 45 although now I think it might be as high as 100. And now, as of last night, I'm level 30!

Oh, yes. I did it! I not only logged in, I played! Not for long but that eighty-one hours is now eighty-one and a half. So I played for half an hour. Could just have said that. No need to be so dramatic.

Ah, but there was a bit more too it than that. Back when all that crypto crap was happening I was running short of disk space and searching for things I could do without. It seemed plain I wasn't going to play Bless Unleashed again, not now it had turned to the dark side, so I uninstalled it and moved on.

Except that I'd been playing it on Steam and Steam doesn't like you to get rid of anything. Even though I didn't have the client on my hard drive any more, I still kept getting the notices about updates. And the game still sat there in my list, looking at me and smiling enigmatically, once in a while.

For a long time all that was no more than a curiosity. I always glance at the news items that scroll past on the top of the screen when I enter The Library and I had noticed that Bless Unleashed had mostly stopped getting what you might call real updates, just server restarts and the occasional cash shop deal. I figured the crypto swerve had dealt the death blow and now the game was just waiting to expire.

Then yesterday I happened to see this. To save you the click, it's The Battle for the Western Prairies: Rise of the Harpy Queen. An actual event, albeit one that piggy-backs off an existing fight. 

 "The Western Prairies are in grave danger! The Harpy Queen has unleashed her minions in a massive invasion, attacking farms, capturing villagers, and disrupting trade routes. Driven by an insatiable thirst for power, she poses a significant threat to our lands.

The people cry out for help, and we must answer their call. Brave adventurers, it’s time to take up arms against the Harpy Queen's tyranny. Unite with fellow heroes, devise strategies to counter her abilities, and prepare for an epic battle that will determine the fate of the Western Prairies."

Doesn't that sound dramatic? I believe the Harpy Queen is a world boss that, back when I was playing, tended not to get beaten very often. As I read it, this is an attempt to rectify that, a one-off, live affair to which all are invited, although whether it's being organized by players or devs is unclear:

"Event Date: August 31, 2024

• EU: 7:00 PM to 8:00PM CEST (UTC+2)
  
• NA: 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM PDT (UTC-7)
  

Location: Navarra's Western Prairie (Harpy Queen's Nest)"

I guess it's going to be a big one because

"Victory will require skill, teamwork, and a commitment to protect our home. Together, we can end the Harpy Queen's reign of terror. Who among you will rise to become the heroes of the Western Prairies?"

Well, yes indeed. Who? You may well ask. As a well-known Google search term might put it, does anyone still play Bless Unleashed?

Thanks to the ever-popular Steam Charts (Popular with me, at least, for the actual, factual, undisputed population data they provide.) I can confirm that, yes they do. Not as many as a year ago, sure, but still an average concurrency somewhere around five hundred, which may not sound like a lot but is plenty better than many MMORPGs and probably enough to keep the servers up in maintenance mode for a while longer.

Being a big fan of one-time, be there or miss out, live events in MMORPGs, I thought I might at least take a look. I mean, I'm probably going to forget to log in and even if I remember I'm probably not going to be able to find the spot where it all happens and even if I somehow manage to get there on time I'm sure there won't be anything a lowly level 30 will be able to do, especially one being played by someone who can't even remember which button does what.

Still, I thought I might make the effort. That's actually about as convenient a time as I could ask for - six in the evening on a Saturday. It'd be rude not to at least think about it. I'll see what I can do.

So there we go. Another game no-one cares about and that even I don't pretend to be playing any more that I've posted about and might post about again, although if we're realistic, probably won't. As Wilhelm so cogently inquired yesterday, who even reads this stuff?

Well, you just did!

That Crazy Feline

Here's an existential question for a Wednesday: why spend time and energy on a character in game you know you have no intention of playing? Why do they need to look good, when absolutely no-one, real or fictional, is ever going to see them?

Don't look at me. I don't know either. But we all do it, right?

Okay, some of us do it. It's not just me. 

I'm pretty sure it's not just me...

It's not like I'm even a cat person any more. Well, I am, I'm just not only a cat person. I was a cat person pretty much exclusively for half a century or so but then, for reasons we won't go into right now, I turned into a cat-and fox person and then fox took over for a while.

Latterly, since we got Beryl, I have also become a dog person, something I never expected, although that's a different kind of "person" altogether. I like dogs a lot now but I don't identify as a dog. Ew!

Expanding a little on that, I find it very easy to imagine having a dog pet in a game but very hard to imagine dressing my character up as a dog. As a cat, though? (Or a fox.) Just try and stop me!

As I think I mentioned a couple of times, Once Human has been eating every other game's lunch around here for the best part of a month now. Before it arrived I was playing Wuthering Waves every day but I was also logging in to AdventureQuest 3D, purely to open my three, free daily chests. 

The reason I was doing that was because AQ3D added housing a while back. Because I have a Pavlovian reaction to housing in games, the  moment I learned I could have a house in Battleon, the capital city, I had to have one. Never mind I don't play AQ3D more than a few minutes a year. Never mind I will never hang out in that house or show it to anyone or probably even write another post about it. Still had to jump through all the hoops to get one.

Once I had it, of course I wanted it to look good. I imagine there are plenty of ways to work on that by playing the game but I've tried playing AQ3D and honestly, although it has a ridiculous amount of content, none of it ever grabs me. The combat is very slow and the graphics aren't really to my taste so even exploring isn't all that appealing.

You don't actually need to play the game to decorate your house, of course. You can buy housing items in the cash shop because why else have housing in a F2P game at all? 

I hope it goes without saying that I am not going to pay actual money for pixel furniture in a game I don't even play. I may be whimsical but I'm not crazy. Well, not completely, althogh apparently I am sufficiently dislocated from reality to consider it worth my while to log in every day to see if I can grab a few coins to put towards a rug or a lamp one day.

The daily log-in reward gives you three chests to open, the first of which always contains some cash shop currency. Usually it's a pitiful amount. Single figures in a game where basic items are priced in hundreds. Once in a while you can get a bit more. I had thirty or so one time. Mostly, though, it's peanuts.

Still, peanuts add up, as any mathematically-inclined elephant will tell you. After a few months of logging in religiously I had about 1600 of whatever the currency is called. 

Hang on, I'll look it up...Dragon Crystals, that's it.

I stopped logging in to AQ3D when I started playing Once Human. In fact, I stopped paying attention to any other games for a few weeks but as we near the end of the first season and I wait to find out just how that's going to work, my motivation there has dropped and my desire to play obsessively has diminished. I suspect that may turn into a problem for the game going forward but we won't have long to wait now to find out for sure.

On Monday I actually logged into EverQuest II for the first time in weeks, mostly to collect my free play-money, something you have to do once a month or you lose it, even though the stipend is part of the All Access sub. While I was there I even did some content. I've missed most of the big, summer event sequence that takes in several holiday festivals but the final one, Oceansfull, is still running and I did the main dungeon for that one. It was a lot of fun and quite profitable in terms of upgrades.

I say upgrades... I haven't gotten around to equipping them yet and I'm not sure I will. The big, mid-year Game Update is in beta right now and when that goes live I'm sure the drops and rewards will raise the item level cap yet again, making the stuff I got two days ago obsolete. Then a month or two later we'll have Pandas, meaning upgrades to everything yet again and a month after that the next expansion will come out and...

Well, you get the picture. It happens in every game but in EQII it happens at the very least four times a year, every year. It can be a bit much. I was quite into it for a while - upgrading is weirdly satisfying in its own right, regardless of how useful it is - but I think I might take a break and skip all the interim steps until the expansion arrives in December. 

At least, now I'm coming down off my Once human high, I'm starting to pay attention to what my other options are. Tomorrow there's the second major update to Wuthering Waves so I'll most likely go back for a while. 

I did consider the Guild Wars 2 expansion, dropping next week, for the sole reason that it adds housing to the game but it costs money and I'm not convinced I want what looks to be GW2's typically half-assed version of owning a home enough to pay for it. Which, given my aforementioned housing obsession, says a lot about my opinion of GW2 these days.

But enough about housing (If such a thing could ever be possible.) You may recall, although no-one could blame if you didn't, that I started off talking about cats. 

You may also remember that 8 August was International Cat Day. Or maybe you don't because it seemed to get surprisingly little attention, probably because there are thousands of Something Days every year, all piling up against each other like junk mail on a 1980s doormat.

According to Wikipedia, whch has a very short entry on the subject, "International Cat Day is a celebration which takes place on 8 August of every year. It was created in 2002 by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. It is a day to raise awareness for cats and learn about ways to help and protect them."

I'd have thought if there was one animal that didn't need awareness about it raised it would have to be the cat. Cats infamously rule the internet and are ubiquitous in all forms of popular culture around the world. In some countries, cat-worship appears to be an almost un-ironic national stereotype.

Nevertheless, cats have their day and at least one game I nominally play has decided to honor it. If anyone knows of any others that have, I'd be interested to hear about it because I didn't spot anything else in my feeds this year. I'm surprised Gamigo didn't come up with a quiz about cats for Rift. That does seem to be how they like to pretend they're still invested in the game these days.

AQ3D went all-in on the cat theme with a whole bunch of purchaseable cat-themed items - cat pets that follow you about, sleeping cats for your home, cat-paw-and-claw weapons and the one that caught my eye - Cat Onesies. Some of these can be bought for real money in the cash shop, others require a special event currency - Cat Fur - that can only be obtained by defeating the Cat Day Boss, an Astral Tiger.

There's a Cat Day vendor by the name of Not Alma (I'd explain but life's too short.) and the regular Pet vendor, Aria, also has a lot of new, cat-related stock. In keeping with AQ3D's consistent drive to make everything immediately accessible to everyone all the time, especially if makes them money, you can just click on the event notification in-game to be taken straight to the shops.

Which I did as soon as I logged in this morning. Then I spent an hour (Yes, really. A whole hour.) browsing the cat-wear, trying it on, deciding what to buy, buying it and finding somewhere good to pose for the pictures. It's far too difficult in most games to find a nice, plain wall to pose against.

It wouldn't have taken quite so long if I hadn't had to work out how to clear my bags, which were so full from the free stuff I'd been getting from the log-in rewards the vendors wouldn't let me spend any money until I made some space for what I wanted to buy. I even took a swipe at the big tiger to see if I could snatch some fur. I knew it was suicide but what the heck. There's no death penalty to speak of. It was worth a shot.

I had almost exactly just enough Dragon Crystals to buy the three pieces for the Onesie. Kind of a dumb thing to call it, if you ask me, when you also need a hat and a tail for the full look. Might as well call it a set and have done with it.

I would have liked either the black or the ginger one but both were only available for Fur. For Dragon Crystals you get a choice of either pink or grey. I went with grey, which I think looks very stylish. Pink would have looked... pink.

I would have liked to have bought the cat pet, Skratch, to complete the look but I didn't have the crystals. Maybe next year. I may not play AQ3D but that doesn't mean I won't do all this again next time it comes arouind. Or whenever I see something I like.

Why? Probably best not to think about that too much.