Recursion To The Max

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I kinda like it...

Have You Done That Little Job I Gave You Yet?

A couple of days ago, I mentioned in passing that Panda Panda Panda was back. The event, which used to be known as Days of Summer, when it started a litle earlier in the year, is a series of weekly quests in EverQuest II that, at least on the face of it, offers a huge boost in power for casual players at the cost of very little effort indeed.

At least, that's how it appears until you take a closer look at the way it works. I had the opportunity to do just that yesterday, when I went to pick up the first of this year's quests and found I hadn't finished last year's yet. Or started them, either.

Technically, I had started the 2024 set of nine quests, but only in that I'd visited Bao Bao, the current Panda-in-Residence, and taken the first one. It was in my Journal but I hadn't actually done anything about it in twelve months. Bao Bao was not interested in giving me this year's quests until I finished the job I was already on.

I had thought you could skip the ones you hadn't done. You'd probably want to if you were a new or returning player because the event has been running since 2017, meaning there are now seventy-two quests in the full sequence, not counting the new ones this year. There are a lot of rewards from previous years that still have some currency, not least the huge number of house items, but the main thrust of the event has always been to gear up and who wants a load of outdated armor with inferior stats?

The wiki is somewhat confusing on whether you can skip the years you don't want to do: "Each of the quests must be completed in the order they were released, starting with the quests from 2017. You cannot skip ahead to later points in the quest series. *2023 can be completed without previous progress in this questline." (Emphasis theirs.) Why 2023 is different from the rest I couldn't tell you but it doesn't seem to have been the start of a new, more relaxed ruleset because this year's starter quest looked to be firmly gated behind completion of last year's.

I imagine the reason I thought you could skip was because in 2023 you really could. Maybe I did. I haven't checked. I vaguely remember deciding last year that, since I wasn't going to use any of the gear, I wouldn't bother doing the quests. Or maybe that's post hoc rationalization. It's entirely possible I just forgot.

There were nine quests in the 2024 set. There are nine every year. It takes us through the autumn to the arrival of the annual expansion, one quest dropping every week after the regular update, usually, on a Tuesday. It's a pleasant weekly ritual to get the new one, fly around for a few minutes ticking the necessary boxes, then come back to see what new stuff you can grab off the store-panda.

If you let yourself fall behind, however, it all feels a bit less amusing. Last night and this morning I did all nine quests. I did it the fastest way possible, using my All Access Membership for instant travel to and from the various zones, moving between the various locations within those zones on my very fast, max-level flying mount and using the detailed walkthrough, complete with copy-and-paste waypoints, from the Wiki.

Since I was on my Level 130 Berserker, all mobs in every required zone were grey to me and non-aggressive. All I had to do was port, fly, gather and return. It still took me two hours to finish all nine quests.

The quests themselves were exactly as they always are: gather some samples from various parts of Norrath so some lazy/greedy/cowardly panda can satisfy their curiosity/stuff themselves stupid. Bao Bao is quite an endearing panda as these things go and the quest dialog was amusing enough but the most interesting part to me is how long the dev team can keep the whole thing going. 

There's a whole gang of pandas standing around in Sundered Frontier now. I think there are three questgivers and two vendors at least. When the thing started in 2017 there was only Yun Zi handing out the quests and he did his own storekeeping.

Thanks to the wiki, I had very little trouble finding everything. Almost all of the items were there in profusion. Most of them sparkled and some were oversized. A couple were none of those things but the wiki warned me about that and told me where to look, with accompanying screenshots. 

The only part that gave me any real trouble was the quest that asked for some foliage from Lesser Feydark. Lesser Fey is and always has been a total pain to navigate. It has no portals at all accessible via map travel. The best you can do is map to either Butcherblock and take a griffin from the cliffs above the dock or port to Greater Feydark or Steamfont and fly to the zone-in.

I went via Butcherblock first, only to find that the BB entrance brings you in on the opposite side of the map to where you want to go. I figured it would be faster to map-travel to GFey and come back in from that side than to fly across the whole of LFey so I did that and it wasn't. 

I'd forgotten that you land in Kelethin and Kelethin has its own map and I got myself lost coming out of the dumb elf tree city and ended up wandering about for ages before I finally worked out where I was supposed to be going. 

Once in LFey it wasn't much better because the whole place is constructed from a bunch of separate valleys with invisible walls preventing you from flying between them. You have to follow rivers and go through tunnels and you can't fly through most of the connections so you have to go on foot. The whole place is a confusing, annoying mess and flying really doesn't make it any easier.

So that was fun. I got it done eventually, anyway.

With all of that out of the way, I was finally able to get the first of this year's quests, for which we will be collecting rocks, just for a change. It turns out Bao Bao, who demonstrated his lack of self-control when it comes to stuffing things in his mouth all through the 2024 questline, ate his way through his grandmother's entire vegetable garden and now he needs to give her some pretty rocks for her collection to get back on her good side.

Guess who'll be doing the hard work lugging those rocks about. Muggins, that's who.

And that brings me to the question, once again, of whether it will be worth it. I looked at the first set of rewards, which include a bunch of purple Augments, some weapons and the inevitable bags of decorating items and... that's it. 

Usually there are full sets of armor for all weights and dozens of Augments, along with a few other odds and ends, utilities and so on. I'm not sure if that means none of those things are going to be on the vendor this time or whether they'll only appear week-by-week. And if they aren't going to be there, does that mean there's going to be a substantial change to the way gear works in the new expansion?

Or does it just mean someone has finally admitted that handing out three full sets of gear in three months, each of which upgrades the one before, is taking generosity beyond the bounds of reason? If so, you can bet there will be howls of complaint.

Not that the dagger I took does upgrade the best one already available to me, anyway. I took it because it's an upgrade for the weapon I was using but I wasn't using the best weapon I own. I haven't claimed the weapon from the Anniversary crate yet. The panda dagger won't upgrade that and if there is panda armor this year and it has the same Resolve as the weapons, that won't upgrade the anniversary gear, either.

In fact, it will be much worse. The Anniversary stuff is 525 Resolve. The new panda weapons are 505. 

Even if we discount the Anniversary gear, which you only get for one character on the account, Resolve 505 isn't going to cut it for long. As a casual soloist I already have lots of 495 pieces so it's a minimal upgrade and it will be instantly rendered redundant the day the expansion arrives. I don't know what the Tishan's gear will come in at but you can bet it will be at minimum 505 and come with Augments that work in the new zones, which none of the old ones will.

Some of that is speculation. This is, or should be, a level cap increase year. Those are usually when things change the most so anything could happen when the expansion arrives. As must be plain from everything I ever write about EQII, the game is ferociously over-complicated, especially when it comes to gear and stats. The team have been trying to strip away some of the accrued cruft for a while now but every time they remove anything there's an outcry, not least from the crew that claims to play EQII specifically because it's complicated and difficult to understand.

I'll be doing the panda quests anyway. They're a fun little diversion and don't take too long (Lesser Feydark always excepted.) and they unlock the vendors for the whole account so it's a useful option for some of my sub-max-level characters. Most of all, though, I don't want to fall behind again. 

Who knows, next year the pandas might come up with something different. If they do, it'd be nice to be able to grab it right away instead of playing catch-up first.

It's All In The Preparation

There are often rumblings in this part of the blogosphere about how tough it can be, going back to an MMORPG you haven't played in a year or so. It's true, too. And I'm here to tell you, it's not a lot better going back to one you were playing as recently as a couple of months back.

Scars of Destruction launched for EverQuest II just over a week ago and I've played quite a few sessions since then but it wasn't until a couple of hours ago I finally got as far as starting the first quest in the Adventurer Signature Timeline. Even though I had a character just a level and a half below the access requirement when I logged in eight days ago, it's taken me this long to get to the point where I could finally start in on the new content.

As I've posted already, a lot of that time was taken up figuring out how to get that last level and a half but even when I got to Level 130, I still had quite a bit of prep to do. 

The first and most important thing was to clear some bag space. I do realise this isn't entirely something the developers can do much about, what with it having more to do with my personality, psychology and playstyle than any particular flaw in game design. The name of this blog is a bit of a giveaway there. Still, I've read enough other bloggers complaining about the problem of coming back to a game only to find all their bags full of stuff they don't know whether to keep, sell or junk to know it's not just me.

The temptation is always to clear just enough space to get by and pretend the rest isn't there. I tried that. It didn't work. And even doing that little housekeeping took me an hour or more.

It left me with half a bag empty, out of six in total. Not much but I figured it might be enough to take all the free gear I knew was going to have to deal with the moment I arrived in the new lands.

It wasn't enough. Not even close.

Free stuff. It always brings the crowds.

The upside is that Darkpaw have largely perfected the onboarding process for new and returning players, at least to the extent it's possible to speed the lengthy process to a satisfactory conclusion.

Once upon a time  you were left entirely on your own when a new expansion arrived to invalidate every piece of equipment you owned. Then they moved to leaving hand-outs lying around in boxes without telling anyone where they were or what was in them, expecting players to figure it out for themselves.

Now, you get a an actual quest as soon as you become eligible for an upgrade and there's a quest-giver waiting right next to the box to talk you  through the entire process. This year, you barely even need to look in the box! The guy gives you a crate that unpacks straight into your inventory, giving you a full set of armor for your class and every piece has the correct Adornments already installed!

I optimistically opened that crate hoping for the best and it filled every available slot in my half-a-bag and carried on into Overflow. When I put the armor on, all my old gear popped off, right into the vacant bag slots, leaving me back where I'd started. So much for trying to do it the lazy way.

I gave up any idea of adventuring and ported back to Freeport, where I spent the whole of  yesterday evening working on a proper clean-out. I went to two of my mansions to place every house item I could find, put a bunch of stuff up for sale on the broker, emptied all my mats, collection items and Lore and Legend parts into the hoppers outside my crafting hall and did a few other things as well.

All of that got me one empty bag. I could have worked with it - it was sixty-six slots - but I knew I could do better so this morning, when I came back from walking the dog, I settled down for a proper clearance session. I went through five of my six bags - several hundred items - sorting everything into three piles - Keep, Sell, Trash. Then I sub-sorted the Keep pile into Bank Vault, Shared Bank, Guild Bank and so on. I have a lot of storage options.

I hung those lights, you know. The round ones. Not the lanterns.

That told me what to do with it all but before I could make any actual room I had to go check all the places I was planning to put things to make sure there was room. Of course there wasn't. So I had to sort those as well.

All that took a few hours and even when it was done I still only had two empty bags plus a few slots in the third. Everything that's left is either something I want to keep close at hand or a quest item of some kind.

Quest items are the real problem. My Berserker has a lot of them in his bags - likely more than a hundred - and hardly any of them mean anything to me. Or, presumably, to him. His Quest Journal is all but full and that's after I purged it of all repeatables and anything I hadn't actually started. I'm always very loathe to delete a quest where I've already made some progress, just in case it turns out to be needed for something later on.

It'd be easy to wipe the lot and start fresh but only this week I wrote a whole post about how useful it turned out to be to have a bunch of quests in my book from four expansions ago, so I don't see scorched earth as the best policy here. Experience tells me I tend to regret getting rid of stuff a lot more than I ever regret keeping it. That's a general principle of life, not only gaming.

Still, I know I ought to go through all those quest items, one by one, to find out what they're all for and whether I really need them. Developers in too many games I've played have not always been as diligent as they could have been about making quest items auto-delete themselves when they're no longer needed. That has gotten better but some of these go back many years, to when practice was often lax in that regard.

It wouldn't be difficult to check. The huge majority of quest items say exactly what quest they're whern you mouseover them. All I'd have to do would be cross-reference the information on the item with the quests in my Journal and the steps on the Wiki... Does that sound like a good time to anyone? 

I don't know. Maybe? I'd have to be in the mood...

Do you know who I am?

I'm not doing it now, anyway. I may only have a third of my Berserker's potential onboard storage capacity available but those are two big bags. Over a hundred and fifty slots ought to be enough, provided I clear as I go from now on.

Having leveled up and cleaned up I was finally ready to start adventuring after lunch. Well, after I sorted my new Mercenary out, that is. That's part of the process that could still do with some work. 

It's great that you get a new Merc as part of the Welcome to The Expansion quest (Not the actual quest name.) It's even better that he comes fully leveled up. It's weird you still have to dress him yourself, out of the box on the floor. How primitive!

Plus there's no specific Mercenary gear in there other than a whole bunch of Accolades. For the armor slots, Mercs can wear the same, free gear as player characters, only no-one tells you that. I nearly didn't think of it and I've done it a few times, now.

All of that and a few other things took me until mid-afternoon, at which point I was finally - finally! - ready to do some actual questing. And what did the devs have me doing, now I was all kitted out in my spiffy new gear with a new mount, merc and familiar and a bunch of special buffs? Swimming around the bay, grabbing leftover fishing floats, that's what. I could have done that in my skivvies!

There was some fighting, to be strictly fair to whoever came up with the quest. I fought some fish. Quite small fish. But feisty!

My characters routinely hob-nob with demi-gods and get called in as special consultants by the likes of Firiona Vie and the Duality but here I am, treading water, stabbing pike with a dagger so I can string up some fairy lights in the hope of getting a bunch of downtrodden orc vassals  to give me the time of day. (That's vassals of orcs, by the way, not vassals who happen to be of orcish descent.) I guess it's a living.

Anyway, I'm up and running at last. We'll see where it takes me.

Be Careful What You Wish For: Gacha Mechanics In Once Human

It's been a while since I last found myself playing a new game that others in this part of the blogosphere were also playing - and writing about. I'm going to have rate the experience "Mixed", as Steam would have it. On the one hand, it's great to read other peoples' takes on the gameplay, the story and the setting but things can get way too spoilerific for my taste, even just in screenshots.

Every time someone posts about Once Human I'm torn between wanting to know what they think about the stuff I've already seen and not wanting to know what they've found that I don't know about yet. I haven't even opened Heartless Gamer's post on Once Human Surprises because I know he's much further into the storyline than I am and I'm scared of what I might learn. 

Ditto Scopique, who I'm sure has also progressed much faster through the storyline than me. Also the title of his latest post on the game - Once Human, Twice Shy, makes me think he's going to tear it apart and I don't really want the negativity. (Apologies to Scopique if that's a misinterpretation but titles are there to do a job and that's the job that one did on me. Great title, though.)

I did read Azuriel's Impressions post because I figured - it's a first impressions post! How spoilery could it be? Well, quite spoilery as it turns out, although in an interesting and useful way.

In the post Azuriel compares the game to the Fallout series, specifically Fallout 76, an impression shared by Nimgimli in a comment here. As I've said, I've never really gotten on with the Fallout games for a variety of aesthetic, conceptual and gameplay reasons but the similarity is fairly apparent just from what I've read. 

That didn't surprise me but something Azuriel said in a reply to a comment I made did. He referred to a "gacha arcade game" within Once Human, which I initially misread as a description of Once human itself but by which he was actually referring to the Wish Machine, something I'd encountered in beta but completely forgotten.

I thought I'd posted something about the Wish Machine back then but if I did I can't find it now. Just a picture in the Mid-Beta Review to prove I knew about it. From memory, at that time the machine was just a fun mini-game that gave trivial rewards. I seem to recall trying it a couple of times then not bothering any more.

From things I've read since, it appears the functionality changed in later testing until we get to the current Live situation, where the Wish Machine becomes a very important tool of progression. As Azuriel puts it "the Wish machine unlocks gun blueprints that are absolutely stronger than I have access to currently."

It certainly does and a lot more, too. It unlocks Legendary weapons and Armor sets. The machine is very clearly not a toy any more. Is it a gacha game, though?

Hell yes! It is precisely what Azuriel said it was: a gacha arcade game. I'm so used to hearing the term "gacha game" used to describe a specific genre of online video games, largely popularized in the West by the enormous success of Genshin Impact, that I didn't realize he was being entirely literal.

For the one or two people reading this who might not know (Actually, I did know and could swear I'd written about it already...) but had forgotten, the term "gacha", as used in online gaming, is a loan-word borrowed from Japanese, where it refers to those machines you often see outside supermarkets, (Where I live, at least.) that dispense small toys randomly when you insert a coin and turn a handle.

Apparently you can also get arcade versions, where you play a simple game and the same thing happens, although I have to say I'm finding that surprisingly hard to verify. None of the photos or descriptions I've found shows toys being delivered by those kinds of devices.

That's exactly what the Wish Machine is like though. It's a Whack-A-Mole game in a classic arcade cabinet that you can get through a quest in Deadsville or simply craft by spending the necessary mimetics to open the option on the tree. I made mine last night and almost immediately, in fact possibly as a direct result, also received the quest, the main purpose of which appears to be to give some lore-related context to the whole thing.

The Wish Machine in the quest is a Deviant by the name of Mr. Wish, who turns up outside Deadsville and freaks out the guards. As the local Mayfly, a status extraordinarily similar to being one of the A-Team, namely an itinerant do-gooder recognized by those in the know and called upon to fix pretty much any local problem, naturally the guards want you to go talk to the thing because, yes, it can talk...

I quite like the lore element although like most things in the game (And indeed most lore in most games...) it's hand-waving nonsense. There's a lot of stuff about Space and Time but in the end it comes down to loot, just like always.

And it's good loot, too. I'm not up to speed with all the color-coded qualities in Once Human but I've played more than enough games to know Purple is always good and Orange is usually even better. There are lots of purple and orange items you can win and that ought to be encouragement enough for anyone to drop some coins and pull the handle.

At this point I ought to make it quite clear that no actual money is changing hands here - or at least not necessarily. This might be a gacha machine but Once human is not a gacha game per se. The Wish machine takes an in-game currency called Starchrom and there are numerous ways to get some. I'd list them all but GameRant already did an exemplary job of that, along with a very clear description of how to spend it in the Wish Machine, so I'm just going to link to their excellent guide.

As they explain, if you have the patience of a five-year old and the disposable income of a trust fund brat you can just pony up for the inevitable Battle Pass, which comes with a Starchrom stipend. Otherwise, just play the game and the necessary coins will rain down. I didn't even know what they were for and I certainly didn't go looking for them and yet, by the time I made my Wish Machine, I already had over three thousand of the damn things.

After my first pull I had a thousand fewer. Not because it's a thousand a pull (I think it's 500 but I got a 90% discount for my first ten pulls. Or something) but because I had no clue what I was doing so I just picked what looked like the most obvious buttons to press and that's what it cost. I've read several guides since and frankly I still don't really understand the intricacies but the gist is spend Starchrom, get blueprints, get more Starchrom, repeat.

First time out, I got a Purple rifle (In more ways than one.) along with a bunch of lesser items. Then I went off to do something else, ran into a world event, had a couple of people join me, beat it and ended up with more Starchrom than I started with - so I immediately went and had another go.

If I had the patience I was taking other people to task for not having earlier, I'd stop playing the gacha game and just save my Starchrom for the things I really want. Always assuming I had any idea what those might be. That's because, if you prefer, you can opt right out of the gacha part and just buy what you want straight from the machine.

The Wish Machine is really just a gacha skin for a game system much more familiar to Western players: a Token shop. The Blueprint Store, accessible from the Wish Machine, contains all the same items you can win, at prices that, while fairly steep, are by no means unaffordable, especially given you don't have to waste any currency on things you neither need nor want. 

I have to say that for me rolling the dice and seeing what comes up is usually more fun than just buying stuff from a storefront, something I remember first seeing introduced in Dark Age of Camelot, much to my displeasure at the time. I'm a long-standing supporter of most kinds of randomized loot systems provided they only require in-game resources and getting to hit things with a mallet while I'm spinning the wheel just adds to the entertainment. Still, it's always nice to know you have the choice.

Once Again Human

As previously noted, the summer of '24 is going to go down in MMO history as one of the busiest ever. There's so much going on it's hard to keep up and I certainly haven't helped myself by buying a highly addictive offline game in the Steam Summer Sale. 

Luckily, one of the good things about wishlisting forthcoming titles on Steam is Valve sending you an email when they go live. I received my notification that Once Human was "now available" at 9.48 last night, twelve minutes before the global launch at 10PM UK time. I guess you could argue the game was available already since you'd been able to download it for a while by then. 

I'd already done that. I was sitting there, waiting for the servers to come up. It wasn't that I'd remembered 9th of July was launch day. I'd just happened to notice something about it in one of my news feeds that afternoon., when my first thought wasn't "Yay! I get to play a great game today!", which is what it ought to have been, but something more along the lines of  "Oh crap! I forgot about that one. How the hell am I going to fit it in?"

"Somehow" has to be the answer. As has been very plain in all the posts I've written about it, I really like Once Human. The main reason I backed off and didn't bother much with the later playtests and the open beta is that I'd already played something in excess of thirty hours in beta and I was wary of burning out before I got started on the real thing.

There's always the disturbing possibility that, no matter how much you think you're going to enjoy a game, when the time comes you'll find it just isn't grabbing you the way you thought it would. That's already happened to me twice this summer, with EverQuest II's Anashti Sul and Tarisland. I fully expected to put a significant amount of time into both of those but when the day came I just wasn't feeling it. I don't think I've logged into either of them more than twice since launch day.

I'm very pleased to say that is very much not the case with Once Human. Ten o'clock was too late for me to do much last night. I'm old and I go to bed early. Still, I managed to spend fifty minutes making a character and getting through the opening section of the tutorial. Then this morning I played for another hour and a half until I'd finished the instanced introduction and made my way across the open world to Deadville, the starting town. 

The only reason I'm not playing right now is that I wanted to write this post covering some of what I'd done so far, while it was fresh in my mind. I'm not going to rehash what I said about the opening of the game back before Christmas, other than to comment on how interesting it is - to me, at least - that I seem to have made almost exactly the same character again. 

Character Creation in Once Human is immensely detailed and sophisticated. There's absolutely no need for me to have ended up with someone virtually identical to who I made six months ago. That's entirely on me. I definitely have a type when it comes to human characters in games and it's a waste of time pretending I don't.

Other than that, the main thing I wanted to talk about is how easy it is to get drawn along by the narrative like a donkey following a carrot hanging off a stick attached to the straw hat the farmer just plonked on his head and how that's probably not the smartest thing a player could do in this or any game. I did exactly that the last three times I went through the opening stages of the tutorial but for some reason, probably because I knew it was "for real", this time I didn't.

There were two reasons why I behaved differently the fourth time around. The first and most obvious is that it was the fourth time. It's almost like repeated exposure had innoculated me against the tutorial's charms. 

Once Human has one of the strongest opening sequences I can remember. It's compelling. Getting caught up in the unfolding narrative, doing what the game tells you to do, feels not just natural but necessary. Until today, I hadn't even questioned it. I'd talked to all the ghosts, picked up all the things, killed all the monsters and when it was time to leave, I left.

What I hadn't realised was that I didn't have to leave. Not right away.

The second half of the introduction takes place in a pocket dimension, an instance you have entirely to yourself. Once Human is a true MMO so that's not a situation that's going to continue for long. If you follow orders, it'll probably take you maybe ten or fifteen minutes, even if you read all of the quest dialog. Then you'll be out in the world with everyone else.

I spent a lot longer than that in there this morning. I found plenty to see and do that the tutorial doesn't tell you about. The part of the pocket dimension the game asks you to pay attention to is very small but the whole thing is huge. It's a sizeable chunk of the same environment you'll end up sharing with up to four thousand other players, the capacity of a Once Human server, but for as long as you can resist the temptation to join them, you'll have this piece of real estate all to yourself.

Chances are you won't even think of hanging around. The plot tells you there's a Big Bad coming and you'd better hurry up and stop it. There's a terrific sense of urgency but it's illusionary. There's no timer ticking and no need to hurry at all. The fight doesn't even start until you press a big button marked "Fight". Yes, literally.

If you hold off on that you can go exploring. And, more importantly, scavenging. The pocket dimension comes fully equipped, not just with trees and rocks and water, all of which the tutorial has you gather so you can learn the mechanics, but with numerous abandoned buildings and vehicles, filled with a wide range of materials and resources, all of which you're going to need later.

Of course, you can and will pick these up by the thousands in  normal play but by then a hundred different mobs will be trying to kill you and a dozen players may be after the same nodes. Why not fill your bags now, when there's no-one around but you and a few dozen harmless deer?

Or that's what I thought until an alligator waddled up to me and try to bite my leg off. A Level Five alligator. It was a pretty tough fight at Level One. I very nearly died. But not quite. 

There's no map available so I wasn't entirely convinced I'd seen everything there was to see and scavenged everything there was to scavenge. Visual range extends far into the distance but when you get to the edge of the explorable area the air goes all wobbly and hardens into an impenetrable barrier. Using that as a guide, I did my best to cover the whole area but it's very possible I missed something.

What I didn't miss were several lore items lying around on desks in derelict office buildings. There's an extensive collectible lore element to gameplay in Once Human and I don't know if these pieces are available outside the tutorial. I do know that in other games I've played in the past, that has not been the case, so if that's the sort of thing you're interested in, I wouldn't risk it. I'd go get them when you can. You might not get another chance.

The other reason I wasn't rushing to get through the story (Remember I said I had two.) was pants. I really wanted some this time.

One of the things people tended to notice about Once Human back in beta was the way that, if you made a female-appearing character (The game doesn't actually name genders in character creation.) you got clothing in the tutorial for every equippable body part except your legs. From memory, you don't actually get given a pair of pants until something crazy like Level 5. I'm guessing male-appearing characters don't get pants early either but oddly I can't recall seeing so many screenshots of that.

What I do remember are lots of shots of shapely backsides in skimpy leotards, even when the rest of the wearer was primly covered in camoflage gear. Comments were made and not just on this blog.

On my second beta run I quickly worked out you could craft
yourself some strides long before the tutorial told you how to do it but that was still when you got into the world with everyone else. This time I thought I might try to cover myself up before anyone got a peek.

And of course you can. It's very easy. The tutorial already has you building a tent and a tent comes with a basic crafting station. The tutorial only tells you to make some clean water and a crossbow but all the other starter recipes are there. If you can find the materials, you can make any of them

I had no difficulty finding the necessary mats to craft myself a pair of Rustic Pants. I felt a lot more comfortable and confident once I put them on, which is probably why I went straight to the "Fight" button and pressed it. In retrospect, I might have hung around the pocket dimension a little longer. I'm sure there were some more things there I missed.

The big fight itself was extremely easy. I'm not sure if that's because I've done it several times before or because they've made it easier or because I was fully fed, hydrated and dressed this time. Probably all of those. Whatever the reason, the walking phone mast fell over long before it got close and the ground troops supposedly supporting it never showed up at all. The visuals were great but the threat was purely imaginary. 

Back in the first beta, all I had was a handgun. Small-bore bullets put the zombies down fast enough but didn't make much of a dent in the big guy. To kill him I had to get knocked out, revive, find a gatling gun that happened to be lying about and use that to kill the monster. 

This time I had a crossbow the game had told me to make and all I had to do was fire it a few times in the general direction of the danger, which was over before it really got started. Whether that's an improvement is a matter of taste, I guess. I've had the advantage of doing it both ways now and I prefer the easy version but then don't I always?

After that it was through the door in the sky and freefall to earth, hanging onto the feet of an eagle. Just another day in MMOdom, in other words, especially since, of course, I have partial amnesia too. 

Well, my character does. I don't. Fortunately, I remember plenty about my many hours in beta, which is why this time I didn't follow the game's instructions to make a base. Instead, I thought about where I wanted to live and decided I'd like a nice beach-front property close to all the amenities so I jogged off to find a good spot.

Unfortunately for me, just around then I had the call to go take Beryl out for her walk so I settled for heading to Deadwood and camping there. That gave me the chance to collect my mail, which included a bunch of compensatory rewards for various launch-day misdemeanors and mishaps. 

Among those were eight "Seasonal Loot Crates", all of which I immediately opened. Some of them had boring old consumables but several contained new emotes and one had a mask. A really ugly mask but even so, nice to have.

If I was playing on the same account I created for beta, I believe I'd have been entitled to a few more freebies. I thought long and hard about that but in the end I decided I'd rather have the convenience of Steam than whatever they were handing out. 

Once Human is a reasonable-sized hit on Steam right now. As I write this at half-past four on a Wednesday afternoon, there are just under 125,000 players in the game. That, of course is only on Steam. The game is also available on the Epic Store and it has its own Netease launcher, which was the default for most of the betas, meaning a lot of people are probably using that to log in, especially if they care more for their beta rewards than I do. 

In due course (The estimated date is sometime in September.) the game will also come to Android and iOS. It seems safe to say that it's going to be quite a big deal for a while.

I think it deserves to be. It's very good. I have some questions and reservations about the Season format, details of which are beginning to come clear but which I still don't entirely understand. Those will, no doubt, be answered in due course. 

For now, though, I'm just going to dig in and enjoy a game I've been looking forward to playing for a while and which, for once, I find myself still excited to play now it's actually here.

One Against Many

I am still playing Nightingale. What's more, I'm playing it more than I expected, now I've come to the end of the story. And I'm not entirely sure I'm happy about it.

Angry Onions left a comment on the recent post about the Steam Sale in which he talked about playing just one game at a time, maybe for hundreds of hours. Most people reading that will relate, I'm sure. 

Wilhelm has been running a series in recognition of and response to EverQuest turning twenty-five, in which, among other things, he's been revisiting some of the key locations he remembers from his early days in the game. He's also posted several times on other topics related to the anniversary. I haven't said much about it here, although I've made up for my silence by leaving lengthy, anecdotal comments at TAGN, in part as something of a sop to my own feeling I ought not to be letting such a significant event pass by unacknowledged.

Not that I was ever going to let that happen. It is, after all, an anniversary year for EQ, and although I often mention that I started playing in 1999, it wasn't until November that I finally logged in and made my first character. 

I did think of waiting until my own twenty-fifth anniversary with the game before marking my time there with some sort of celebration here on the blog but that would clash awkwardly with the twentieth anniversary of EverQuest II, which will also arrive in November. I was there for that one. 

I was there before, actually, having been in the closed beta since, I believe, September 2004. No doubt I'll get to the details when the due date arrives but the relevant point here is that back then, when EQ was turning five and EQII had yet to be born, Mrs Bhagpuss and I, along with everyone else in our EQ guild, felt we had to make a choice between one or the other.

And it wasn't the first time. A couple of years before that we'd been through the same thing when Dark Age of Camelot launched. We went through it again with a friend and guild-mate for the launch of Horizons and once more with another friend during the surge in popularity that hit World of Warcraft in 2005. 

In those four examples - and I could quote plenty more - twice we said our goodbyes and left for the chance of something fresh and new, twice we stayed behind and waved goodbye to people we'd spent hundreds of hours with until then. These things happened all the time and although it would have been perfectly practical to keep in touch, even in the days before social media made it hard not to, mostly we never did.

I can't speak for offline games of the period but back then, if you played MMORPGs you tended to play them serially. Very few people tried to play more than one at a time and for good reason. 

Firstly, most required a subscription. That would have been a problem only for the very frugal and those on a strict budget but seeing that a large proportion of the target demographic was made up of players still at school or college, that probably meant most of them. A decade down the line it became quite common to hear veterans boast obnoxiously about their favored financial circumstances but not so much in 1999-2004, even if characters were changing hands on EBay for hundreds of dollars a time back then.

More important than money, though, came time. Doesn't matter how much you have in the bank, you only get the same twenty-four hours in your day as the rest of us. Playing MMORPGs, especially if you took it seriously, as so many did, might as well have been a full-time job. 

It was commonplace for people to play twenty-five hours a week. Forty wasn't considered at all unusual or extreme. I have always tried not to work full-time but for my core EQ/DAOC/EQII years, during which I played very socially, knew lots of people and joined in with all kinds of group and guild activities, I, like almost everyone I played with, was either in full-time employment or full-time education. 

I worked five days a week and still somehow managed to play EQ for 25-40 hours on top. With that level of commitment I was able to hit the level cap on a couple of characters and stay abreast of current group content. Barely. If I'd wanted to kick on and raid or even work on getting my characters into an acceptable state just to to apply to join a raid guild (As Mrs. Bhagpuss did, successfully and, thankfully, briefly.) I think I'd have had to give up sleeping.

The idea of playing two such games simultaneously would have been laughable to most people then, which is why it became such a contentious, emotional issue whenever anyone declared their intention to move to another game. No-one in my experience ever responded to announcement of that kind with "That sounds cool! I'll get it too and we can still hang out!"

You were either on the bus or off it. Guilds made rules about it. Loyalty and responsibility were factors. Even if you were the kind of player who mostly soloed, unless you were a complete loner a new game meant the end of your friends list and back to being the new kid nobody knows.

I was thinking about all of this yesterday, first when I read MassivelyOP's discussion topic about playing MMOs in retirement and later, when I was doing some prep work for the series of posts I'm planning for my aforementioned celebration of the EQ Silver Anniversary. I logged into EQ partly to pick up my Anniversary freebies but also to start collecting /played information on all my characters there.

Both the EverQuest games have a useful function whereby you can see the exact date and time you created your character and how many hours you've spent playing them. Strictly, how many hours the character has been online, I guess. If you were in the habit of going AFK for hours a time as many were, the definition may blur a little, especially if the character was a Bazaar trader.

I didn't even get around to checking the server with my most-played characters so I haven't yet seen the really big numbers. It's probably just as well. The lesser names from the deep past are disturbing enough. Even characters I know I only ever played for a few weeks have /played times measured in days. 

For example, one of my several druids, Cassice, a character I created in 2003 but barely remember playing at all, other than to log her in briefly in recent years to port somewhere and take a few screenshots for a blog post, somehow made it to Level 48, racking up almost five days online.

To put that in perspective, if Cassice was a Steam game, at 116 hours she'd be third on my Hours Played list after only Valheim and New World. It would be one thing if all that time spent came with a fund of anecdotes, amusing stories, or emotional memories but I can't fricken' recall a single time I ever played her! And she's just one minor character out of literally dozens. 

That was how MMORPGs were. Even now, although progress is much faster, they still eat up relatively large chunks of time compared to other genres. It may only take a couple of weeks to hit cap where once it took months but that's only the start. 

The idea that these games are more casual and require less commitment only really stands up if you play them the way I was describing earlier. Where it took me hundreds of hours just to reach the level cap back in 2003, now I could do it in most MMORPGs in a few sessions. Even in EverQuest, provided I could get groups for the last 35 levels. That, though, would just be the start.

Back then, it was entirely possible to make leveling the point of playing. Lots of people never made it to the cap and even those who did often just started over on another character. Modern MMORPGs tend to have all the grind at the cap, not before it, which may be why it's now so tempting to play lots of them, either serially in short bursts or even all at once. 

A big part of the attraction of the genre has always been the sense of satisfaction that comes from progression. The Ding Effect, if you will. That's why Tipa named her blog Chasing Dings, I imagine. Game hopping, now that leveling is so accelerated, gives you those dings in spades but when the levels run out, you have to figure out where the next dopamine hit's going to come from and it can be disheartening to realize it's going to involve a hell of a lot of one kind of grind or another. 

Much easier just to jump ship to the Next Big Thing because, after all, what did you commit to? Nothing.

Survival games package up a lot of that progression-satisfaction into tidy packages. Easy to understand, easy to achieve, they just keep on coming. It's very smart design. I suspect if we could see the numbers we'd find people stick around longer in new survival games than they do in new MMORPGs, even if both lose almost everyone in a matter of months. 

Nightingale feels particularly slippery in this respect. I was expecting to be done with it not long after I made it to The Watch and the end of what story there is in this Early Access build. That has not happened. I'm still playing several hours a day and even as I type this I'm itching to play some more.

It would be an exaggeration to say Nightingale has an endgame right now. As far as I can tell, there's no equivalent of raiding or stepped-difficulty dungeons to gear up for and take on. Instead, there's the genuine sandbox of infinite Realms, each different from the rest yet none of them as different as all that. 

That, however, is not what's holding me. It's the crafting. It's tricksy. As I explained a while ago, there may be only quality grades but there are also a number of sets (I don't know for sure how many.) plus some single pieces and as I am only now discovering, the sets have their own baseline stats that put them into some sort of hierarchy. 

This means that if you imagine, as I did, that you're done once you've upgraded all your gear to Epic you are very much mistaken. All you have is the epic version of whatever set you started with. If there's a better set, the epic version of that will be better too.

Since upgrading each piece requires forty essences from each of three tiers and since these essences cannot be recovered by salvaging the item (That just nets you Essence Dust.), every time you discover a recipe for a potentially superior set of gear, you have to begin again from Common and work your way back up to Epic.

That would be time-consuming enough but in Nightingale, materials come with stats that can be passed on to the items they make. It's a confusing process I don't claim to understand in full but I do know that if you genuinely want to have the best gear, you're going to have to acquire some very specific materials and combine them in some very specific ways. At the least, it involves hunting named creatures for Fabled materials and crafting particular Realms with perks that generate rare gems. 

There's probably a lot more to it than that, I imagine, but I'm hitting a plateau in my ability to care. I like the exploring, the gathering, the hunting, the crafting and the general ambience and I get a dingish buzz out of making new items and upgrading them but...

...increasingly I'm finding myself wondering "What is the point?" it's a very dangerous question to ask about any video game but especially about the kind that rely on gear-based vertical progression to hook you in. In MMORPGs, though, there's generally at least a token purpose to it. You need the better gear to do the harder content where you get the better-still gear to do the even-harder content....

Nightingale doesn't have that. And without an appearance system, it doesn't really have much of a stake in the fashion wars endgame, either. Thanks to the The Watch, there is the potential to strut around like a peacock, daring everyone to ask you how you managed to get yourself looking so fantabulous, but even there, in a game with no player economy, no broker, no bank system and no social structure to speak of, the opportunities to catwalk your way to fame are limited.

All the same, it is that minimal interaction with other players that just about allows me to think of what I'm doing as purposeful. Other players can see what you're wearing and everyone displays a gear score next to their name. I'm doing a few Vault runs every day and I feel some small obligation to contribute. I don't mind the occasional carry but it gets embarrassing if it happens every time. To that end, I can convince myself that continuing to upgrade my gear is socially responsible rather than some kind of nervous tick I can't suppress.

Without that fig-leaf, I'm not sure I would carry on playing. The prospect of taking the game offline, as so many have apparently demanded, seems to me to be almost surreally misguided. Other than to speed up zoning and avoid disconnections, something that could presumably be achieved with better network code and hardware, why would you want to remove the one and only objective reason for continuing after the story ends?

I could give a few answers to my own question there but I'm not going to bother. I'm a little concerned that I'm pulling too hard already on a thread that could unravel the entire tapestry. Almost a quarter of a century after I came home from work carrying that original EverQuest box, I'm finally starting to wonder if I'm getting too old for all this.

Not because I can't perform physically. I may be stiffer and slower but I can still handle most of what I ever could in an MMORPG or similar. Not because I've lost interest, either. This length of this post is ample evidence of that. No, the problem, if it is one, is that I find myself thinking more often of what else I could be doing with the time instead.

Ironically, that's less of an issue when I'm jumping between games, uncommitted, searching, scratching around for something that will hold my attention for an hour or two. Then, gaming feels like a perfectly reasonable part of a varied entertainment diet. It's only when something digs its claws in and won't let go, like all those old MMORPGs did once and like Nightingale threatens to do now, that I start to feel uncomfortable.

I never really felt that way when I was playing MMORPGs, even though objectively I spent far longer doing it than I have done or ever will do with survival games. It's because in an MMO, the presence of thousands of other players, many of whom who I can actually see or hear all around me as I play, normalizes things. It can't be so bad if everyone else is doing it, right?

Once you take all that striving and grinding into the private sphere, it becomes a lot harder to see it as benign, I think. Which is why, for my offline gaming, I prefer to narrative experiences with a clear ending. 

If I'm going to be doing something that's a completely pointless waste of time, at least I'd like some company while I'm doing it.