I'm Currently Out Of The Office (And Sleeping In A Bus)

  

I realize now a picture of the bus would have been good but it's night and I haven't taken one. Hang on, maybe I can steal one... Okay, that's it, up there.

It's late, I've the drink taken (First time in many months.) and I'm sitting in the dark, typing this on the laptop in a converted double-decker bus, in a field, in the middle of nowhere. 

Yes, I'm on holiday (Or vacation if you prefer.) although only for a couple of days because with Beryl (Who's asleep beside me.) that's about all we can manage these days.

I just thought I'd pop up a quick post to say there may not be another for a day or two. I'm certainly not about to write anything, so let's just settle for a somewhat appropriate tune.

If that's not what this is then I don't know where we are.

Normal service may be resumed at some indefinite point in the future. 

Snow, What's New?

I'm barely managing to keep all my games updated just now, let alone actually play any of them, but yesterday I did somehow contrive not only to patch Nightingale but to spend an hour or so in the game, checking out the latest build. It includes several significant changes but the main thing I wanted to see was the snow.

The update, snappily entitled "Winter Update", adds something I'm sure a lot of people will be happy to see - the ability to run the game on "Player-hosted Servers". I'll skip that part, since it has no use or meaning for me, but for anyone that cares, there's the skinny on how it works to your left. You'll need a magnifying glass.

Considerably more interesting, to me, anyway, is the new ability to recruit NPC "Survivors" to work as slave labor unpaid volunteers on your Estate. Interesting but not necessarily welcome.

Frankly, even the use of the term "Estate" for what I had previously thought of as my character's home creeps me out a little. If I have an Estate, I must either be the Lord of the Manor or the Estate Manager, neither of which really appeals. Having a bunch of silent serfs scuttling around picking up logs and growing crops makes it feel too much like feudalism for comfort.

This, unfortunately, seems to be a growing trend. I'd like to blame Palworld, which was where I first encounterted this ethically challenging mechanic, but I know it was preceded by a far, far worse iteration in Conan Exiles. There's a version in Enshrouded, too, I believe. Indentured labor seems to be the fashion everywhere, these days.

For my mental and emotional peace of mind, I'd be glad if developers put a stop this sort of thing before it goes any further. I don't play fantasy adventure games so I can spend even a portion of my time role-playing an Overseer or a Feudal Lord or some kind of animal-abusing zoo-keeper. Even playing a fair and equitable Estate Manager smacks of tedium. What next? Fantasy chartered accountant?

Still, I had to take a look the new mechanic for the sake of science and I can say that so far, the part I've seen feels half-baked and lacking any polish. Coming back to Nightingale after a lay-off really points up just how much of an Early Access title it is, something I found very easy to overlook in the white heat of discovery a few months ago.

I was able to recruit several workers through the uninspiring process of speaking to each of them individually and running through the exact same dialog every time to get their "Calling Card", which I then had to add manually to my Cairn, the device that marks the area of land you've claimed for your Estate. That's as far as I've taken it because to set them to work you need the upgraded Cairn Mk. II and I haven't yet found the time to make one.

I didn't want to get side-tracked on that because my main reason for logging in was to check out the (Once again.) unimpressively-named "Winter Event". Seriously, couldn't someone have come up with something a little less generic? I mean, I'm not asking for the Winter Convergence Festival but at least we could have had Festive Frolics or It's Snow Time!

The Winter Event includes all the usual holiday tropes: snowballs, outfits you wouldn't be seen dead in any other time of the year, festive food (Although wouldn't Pumpkin Pie be more appropriate for Halloween?) and, of course lots of snow. 

There's also a pet (Pets aren't just for Winter Event, remember!) and decorations for your home Estate. I have yet to obtain any of those.

The first thing I did was get the snow falling. For that you have to find the thingamajig that sets the rules for the zone you're in and slap a new, minor card into it. 

There are three of them: Cosy Winter, Winter Wonderland and Naughty and Nice List. The first just changes the weather to snowy, the second makes the ground slippery with ice and also makes you move faster so you can fall over more easily (Probably...), while the third changes the local loot table so it includes coal and presents.

You have to make your own cards, something that took me a moment to remember how to do. Since I wanted snow, I made Cosy Winter and I'd like a word with whoever came up with the name. In my book, "Cosy" does not imply any kind of low temperature debuff. I'd just about had enough of those with Once Human's Way of Winter so I was not best pleased to see the little snowflake icon pop up when the weather changed.

Luckily, whatever the debuff does, it seems to be very feeble so I was largely able to ignore it as I figured out what I needed to make the new outfits. When I found out, I wasn't best pleased. It reminded me of another annoying mechanic in another game I've been playing, or rather play-testing, namely Stars Reach.

Here's another irritating trend I'd like to see the back of: having to go kill stuff just so you can craft things. 

I don't mean to get materials. That makes sense. You want a bearskin rug, you have to kill a bear, I get that.

If you want to learn how to sew a Jolly Dress, however, I cannot for the life of me see why you need to kill a random creature with a snowball first. Or why making a wooden push-along horse needs you to hit the same creature ten times in a row with a snowball before you can figure out how to do it. Maybe it's just me, but I really would prefer to see some faint semblance of a logical connection between action and consequence, even in the Fey Realms.

You have to do what you have to do, though, so I made some snowballs. Far, far too many snowballs. I didn't realise the recipe produced them in batches of 20. Now I have hundreds. I had to pile them up in storage chests just to make space in my backpack. 

I needed a few, though. Killing a creature with a snowball means exactly what it says. No throwing a snowball to get its attention then swapping to your axe and hacking it to death. Since the snowballs don't do a lot of damage, that means pelting something that won't run away with snowball after snowball until one finally takes the last few remaining hit points.

After a couple of failed attempts (Deer: ran away; Bear: wandered off while I was working out what key to press to "throw".) I found a boar that was willing to play. While my assistant kept the pig occupied, I piked about a dozen snowballs into it until eventually it keeled over. Voila! Three free recipes - Jolly Coat, Boots and Hat.

If that doesn't sound ridiculous then I don't know what to tell you. Maybe I've been playing these games too long but I feel like I've come full circle. When I started playing EverQuest in 1999 it used to infuriate me that wolves dropped rusty weapons. I got over it after a while but I feel the same sense of outrage creeping back.

I'll skip over the next part, the bit where I filch around in my chests for old bits and pieces to make Augmentations to enhance my crafting stations. I didn't have to do it but I felt I ought. The devs have done a lot of work on that aspect of the game, making it much easier to see and understand what effect these things have. It's good but it also makes it less acceptable simply to ignore the mechanic altogether, as I mostly hasd been doing. It's a bit of a mixed blessing, now I come to think about it. 

Once I had that finished (Or barely started, if I'm honest. A lot of work still to do there...) I made myself a set of the red holiday gear. There's also a blue set but that requires an entirely different and more arduous combat-based achievement, one I may or may not be able to bring myself to complete. The blue does look better though, at least in the pictures.

It would pretty much have to because the red is hideous. Most outfits in Nightingale are unpleasant to look at so I shouldn't have been disappointed but I was, a little. And then there was the issue of the stats.

You have a choice in Nightingale: you can wear clothes with the stats you want and put up with looking like the Before on an extreme makeover show or you can Glamor them to look like something halfway tolerable. I have the Glamor Station to do the glamoring with but it costs tokens every time you use it and they aren't that easy to come by. I only have nine so far.

If you decide to change the look of something, the receiving piece retains its own stats, so I could glam my good gear to look like the horrible Jolly set, something I'd consider doing just for the season if I could then glam it back to the original look. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, I can't. Glamming it will destroy the original appearance for ever and it just happens to be one of the few looks I have that I actually like.

There may be ways around this or I may be misunderstanding how it works but until I find out for sure I am not minded to risk it. For now, I'm just wearing the low-level Jolly gear for the purpose of taking screenshots then swapping back to my good gear when I want to do anything else. It's annoying but it'll have to do.

There's still plenty in the Winter Event I want to try. I'm not sure how long it runs for but I imagine it will stretch into the New Year. I'll try to fnd time to get the rest done and report back.

If anyone cares.

Wishes Come True In Wuthering Waves

Last week, Kuro, developers of Wuthering Waves, dropped the game's second major update since launch, taking the game to Version 1.2. It's called In The Turquoise Moonglow and as you'd expect from a gacha game it adds several new collectable characters - Resonators in the jargon. There are also new weapons to roll for and some login rewards you can get without doing anything. Well, you'd have to log in, of course.

That's all par for the course for a game of this kind but this update offers much more.  For a start, it includes what I imagine might become an annual holiday event, the Moon-Chasing Festival, already going down well with players, if Reddit is any guide. 

Then there are two more action-oriented activities, both with really great names: Carnival in Slumberland and Do Echoids Dream Of Electric Sheep? In additon to those, there's a full Companion storyline for one of the new Resonators, the deeply charming Zhezhi, and an "exploration quest" evocatively, if scarily, entitled Vigil of Endless Night.

By any standards, this is a lot of content and to be truthful that's not even all of it. I left out some of the more routine bits. Altogether, there's far more than I've had time even to take a first look at yet. All I've done so far are the first two parts of the four-part festival storyline, which I've found to be both excellent entertainment and surprisingly thought-provoking.

So much so, in fact, that I wanted to post about the new questline immediately after my first session  because I found both the subject matter and the way it had been handled so unexpected. Circumstances intervened, which was probably just as well, since it's never a great idea to rush to print before giving these things time to settle in the mind. Who knows? Maybe the first part of the questline was an exception, unrepresentative of the rest.

I guess it still could be but I've now played through the second section as well and I can at least say the quality absolutely holds up thus far. I'm pretty confident it'll continue that way until the end, at least if it's all been done by the same team, because this is some fine video-game writing. 

It was so good, I took forty screenshots across the two sessions, all of them of dialog. I was thinking of using them for the post I wanted to write and honestly even at forty shots, that was me trying to restrain myself and not just clip everything. The dialog is that strong, from start to finish, any of it would have done to make the point.

Since it's apparent this thing will get away from me if I don't impose some structure on it, I'm not going to touch the whole Moon-Chasing Festival mini-game, other than to say it's hella fun and extremely well-done. I might get to it in a separate post sometime. Ditto all those other quests and activities I mentioned up above, none of which I have even got to yet, so why speculate? Their time will come.

Here, I'm just going to stick to the main questline. There will be spoilers so you've been warned. Not, I imagine, that anyone reading this is currently playing the game. But just in case...

Okay, here's a synopsis of the plot so far, all from memory. Apologies if anything's not quite perfect. My memory certainly isn't. Plus there's going to be commentary as we go because I just can't help myself.

The player character, Rover or whatever you've called them (Let's not get into all that again...) gets talked into going to the Moon-Chasing Festival by her girlie chums. Boy, these girls can talk!

Once they get there, Rover runs into a strange little robot called Patty that seems to be having some technical difficulties and ends up chatting to a hot-looking guy (That's my take - there's nothing about it in the dialog!) who turns out not just to be in charge of the bot but who also built it and another one like it.

The bot-builder, Xiangli Yao, moonlights (Heh!) as the secret hero who makes everyone's wishes at the fair come true. How he does this is unclear but we are in a magitech setting so it seems fair. Plus most people seem to be wishing for nice things like having fun at the fair not for a million dollars or eternal life so mostly he probably has to just stand back and let it all happen. 

The second little robot, cutely named XiangLEE after its creator for cute reasons of cuteness,  has the job of collecting and collating wishes for the Fair but is having a melt-down because something in the wishes has glitched its programming. And we're going to fix all that, right? Because that's what we do.

So far, so RPG. The twist is in what, very specifically, the problem turns out to be. 

And now, having issued a spoiler warning, it falls to me to add a trigger warning as well. The problem that's freaking the little bot out, it transpires, revolves around wishes that touch on depression, grief, guilt and similar difficult mental states and the anonymous individuals making the wishes more than hint at suicide being their wished-for solution. 

For Patty, it's a classic Does Not Compute situation.To grant such a wish would breach the robot's Asimovian programming, hence its confusion.

I know! Cheery, fun little mobile game, right? 

Yeah, not this one, or not so much, at least, when you aren't getting kittens out of trees. Multiple previous questlines I remember revolved around similar subjects like dementia and racial prejudice but this new set strikes me as even more challenging, thematically. 

To a considerable degree that's because the translation and voice acting is so good. In the game in general, translation can be variable - some of it is excellent but, for example, the long quest involving an old man and his failing memory was nowhere near as emotionally affecting as it could have been because the dialog didn't read at all naturally. Also, from memory, I don't believe that one was voiced at all. Good voice acting really does add a lot.

It definitely does here. The whole thing is fully-voiced and the readings are both accurate to the text and carried off to perfection with a good deal of understatement and gravitas, a take which really suits the subject matter. 

One thing that is weird about it is the way Rover sometimes speaks and sometimes doesn't but that's almost becoming a trope of the game. I'm used to it now. When she does speak, though, the actor who voices her is really convincing. Normally I prefer my characters to be silent but I'll happily make an exception for line readings like these.

Back to the plot. Xiangli manages to isolate the problem to four specific wishes. After a good deal of discussion and some detective work, which mostly consists of analyzing the prose style of the wishes then sidling up behind people and eavesdropping on them, we pare the possibilities down to the shy, nervous artist Zhezhi or a young scientist by the name of Shifan. 

I'll give you a clue: it's not Zhezhi.

Shifan does his best to disguise his suicidal tendencies but fails to throw us off the scent. By way of some highly dubious rifling through the record of his online activity (To which he objects and we just ignore him, because that's what heroes do.) we soon establish that he has a history of posting his negative thoughts on the forums of the institution where he works. It seems he may be suffering from something that's becoming an endemic problem in the city, a maliase commonly referred to as Nighttime Blues Syndrome.

Much more investigative work follows. We discover Shifan was the instigator and leader of a project that resulted in the injury of his colleague and best friend, Jiuli. The project was shut down but Shihan still blames himself and has slumped into a suicidal depression as a result.

Up to this point, getting to which has taken the best part of an hour, there has been no combat at all but the abandoned project, which represented Shifan and Jiuli's life's work, more a calling than a job, involved working with the "Echoes" Tacit Discords sometimes leave behind when destroyed. Naturally, Rover offers to gather a few to get Shifan back on track. That's going to mean a battle, surely?

It does. Kind of. The fight takes about a minute and that's all the fighting you get. Other than that, the entire quest is conversation, interspersed with a few changes of location. 

I found it compelling from beginning to end. I never knew exactly what was going to happen next. The part where Jiuli shows some tough love for his friend by punching him in the face came as a particular surprise!

In the end it all comes right. We don't grant Shifan's wish for self-oblivion but we do deal with the underlying cry for help and everything ends with the project back on track and the two friends re-united. Plus Patty is working properly again, meaning we can crack on with the next glitchy wish.

I completed the second part today and it was possibly even better-written and voiced than the first, although I didn't find it quite so surprising. I won't subject anyone to another fifteen-paragraph summary but I will say the narrative revolves, once again, around an elderly person and their sense of isolation and powerlessness following a personal loss. 

There was also a sub-plot with another, young, character that revolved around more issues relating to overwork and not being able to achieve a good work-life balance. The themes in this game are consistently adult even when the presentation comes from the perspective of youth.

I didn't have a timer on the first part but I know it took a good while longer than the second, which I clocked at almost exactly an hour. That hour did include some business with the new mini-game, progress in which is required to move the main quest along, plus a few minutes when I got distracted by other things that were happening in the game around me. Wuthering Waves reminds of Guild Wars 2 in that it's very easy to find yourself caught up in events when you're out and about in the world.

I think I'm half-way through the quest now. I've done two of the four wishes, anyway. Assuming they're of roughly equivalent length, this one quest could take me three or four hours. Having mentioned GW2, I can't help comparing this update with the old Living Story chapters, most of which infamously had storylines which, minus the intentional padding of pointless and drawn-out fights, generally lasted no longer than a couple of hours, tops.

This story I'm enjoying so much here is just a smallish part of the full update. It's also considerably more solid and satisfying as a story than those old Living Story segments, with a lot less cruft and considerably tighter focus. I'm used to my fantasy MMORPGs slipping some heavier themes in through the back door - the Living Story certainly covered plenty of emotional ground - but not to having those themes placed so squarely front and center with no crunchy action-adventure coating.

And then there's the specific nature of those themes, surprisingly common throughout the game so far. There seems to be a highly unusual concern among the writers for the mental health and well-being of the characters, something I can't help but feel has to be drawn from personal experience.

Every new character introduced in this update that I've encountered so far expresses concerns about work-life balance. Over-working, not making time to relax and recharge your energies, not trying to do everything yourself, listening to other opinions and recognizing your own limitations - these themes come up again and again, as do understanding your duty and carrying it out in difficult circumstances. 

These are the kinds of things that make me feel this is the most "Chinese" game I've played. The cultural expectations to which these storylines refer and from which they arise feel noticeably different from what I'd expect in an American or European title. There's less of an automatic assumption that individuality is the apogee of human behavior, more of an expectation that players will react with emotional familiarity to scenarios involving parental pressure and social obligation - and not react with outright rebellion, either. 

All of that makes the repeated attention paid to maintaining good mental health by way of self-care all the more impressive. The tone manages to be supportive rather than directive and the feeling I'm left with after completing quests in Wuthering Waves is frequently one of warm satisfaction. It's a very positive game without being in the least bit "cosy" in the current, often uncomfortably twee, gaming sense of the word.

In terms of game mechanics, the second part of the quest has no more combat than the first. Possibly less. So far, it's been something like three hours of gameplay with maybe five minutes action, if that. And yet I've found it riveting. 

I think it helps a great deal that the long dialog sequences are handled not in cut scenes per se but in something of the style of an interactive novel. Having to press "F" frequently to choose between two dialog options works well to maintain a sense of involvement, even if there doesn't appear to be any material difference in which of the two you choose. The simple fact of being able adopt a variety of tones to move the story along does manage, somehow, to feel like agency.

The nature of both the gameplay and the subjects under discussion means I don't much feel like burning through the whole thing in a single sitting. I was happy to take a break of a day or two after the first part and I'm not planning on moving on the next until tomorrow or the day after. There's no hurry. The event runs almost to the end of September. 

With luck I'll have finished everything I want to do in it by then. With the game being as successful as it is, I'm sure there'll be more to come. If subsequent updates are anything like as good as this one, we're in for a treat.

Spring Cleaning In Reverse

There's just one more day left for New World's Springtide festival, after which any event currency left unspent will melt away like the morning mist. So I thought I'd better get on and use mine, while I still had the chance. No sense leaving right to the last minute then forgetting about it.

Of course, there was the slight problem of what to buy with the fifty or so tokens I'd collected. I'd been logging in to grab them most days while the event was going on but I didn't really stop to ask myself why. Free stuff, y'know?

I did take a quick look at the holiday vendor right at the start and I could see there were a lot of armor skins, plenty of house items and some consumables but I didn't bother to look much further than that. I figured, when the time came, there'd be something I could buy. I mean, clothes and furniture are always welcome, right?

Well, the clothing was all pretty horrible. New World has some very odd aesthetics when it comes to appearance gear. I used to think it was because the good stuff was in the cash shop but now I think there just isn't much good stuff at all. 

The heavy armor looks like armor, which is just not how it's done in MMORPGs, while the medium and light look like someone had a lot of old curtains and sofa covers lying around and thought they might as well make something out of them.

Too-bright light, slightly scary plant.

The Spring Collection includes a Beekeeper's outfit, which appears to be historically accurate, more's the pity, plus a Springtide set that might do service for a touring company production of Julius Caesar.  There's an in-game Preview feature that lets you see what you'd look like wearing this stuff and I'd include some screenshots, only it uses a peculiar mechanic I couldn't get to grips with.

Instead of showing a separate image in a window, like almost every other game, New World shows you wherever you happened to be when you used it, only now you're wearing the item you selected. Since I had to be at the vendor to see the gear, that's where the Preview put me. The problem was, every time I tried, someone came and stood right on top of me, obviously also using the vendor.

What with that, the terrible lighting and no way I could find to move from the spot I was on, I pretty soon gave up trying to get a good shot. I couldn't even see the gear well enough to decide if I liked it or not. I had to tab out and look it up online to find out I didn't want it.

As well as the skins, you can buy patterns with which to make your own gear, the real thing, with stats. For ten tokens a pop you can get a pattern to make 700GS items, which would be great if I could wear them. Since I'd have to buy the expansion to be able to equip anything that high, I didn't bother.

Aerial Pinwheel. How does it stay up? Magic!

I did grab a few of last year's patterns, which make 600GS gear. Those were very much cheaper and most of my gear is well below 600, so it would be a decent upgrade. Of course, I'd need to be playing the game properly for that to matter but still. It could happen.

The consumables I didn't really look at. I'd been getting a ton of them from the daily gifts anyway and once again they weren't going to be much use if I wasn't out there fighting Corrupted and Lost and the rest of the crew. There were also a few one-off items but I didn't know what they were for and I couldn't imagine I'd ever find out so I struck them off the list, too.

And that just left housing items. Fortunately I love decorating so that was just fine with me. The only problem was going to be where to put them all.

I bought a big, four-poster bed and a chaise-longue, which were clearly going to take up a lot of space. There was a surprisingly wide range of lighting, wall and ceiling lights, table and standard lamps, more than one kind of each. I bought all of them. 

Naturally there were baskets of flowers. There were also a couple of oddities, like some large bags of "pigments" and a hovering device called a Pinwheel. I loaded up on those too.

I can't help thinking these would look better in a palace. Or a cat-house.

I think the only house items I didn't buy were one of the flower baskets and a banner. I thought the banner would be a wall hanging but my next-door neighbor in Mourningdale has something on their porch that I think might be one and it's actually a big pole with banner at the top and some flowers growing up it. It looks good. I wished I'd bought one once I saw it. might do one more round of the camps before the event ends tomorrow so I can get one for myself.

By the time I'd finished placing everything I could barely get up and down the stairs. My bedroom looks particularly cramped, even after I took out one of the beds that was already there.

I know I complained last time about the size of the rooms but it's not so much that - it's more that I seem to have acquired a hell of a lot of furniture for someone who hasn't actively played the game since a few months after launch. It's partly because Amazon keep giving house items away with the Prime Gaming deals but mostly because the one thing I keep coming back for are holiday events and New World seems to have those pretty regularly.

In an irritable report on a recent Q&A with the devs, MMO Bomb revealed that "Going forward, the focus will be less on Seasonal narrative content". At first I misunderstood that to mean less holiday content and I actually felt mildly relieved. It doesn't mean that, of course. It's not that kind of seasonal content they're talking about.

Flowers in barrel from this event. Other flowers... not sure.

Troy Blackburn at MMO Bomb also transmitted the apparent annoyance of the NW player-base with Amazon Games' constant harping on about the much-hyped "June Announcement". Even as a casual observer - and even more casual player - I have to agree that whatever it is they're keeping secret, it's going to have to be something truly spectacular now, just to justify the fuss they've been making over it.

Most of the speculation I've seen revolves around either a Console port or conversion to some sort of Free To Play business model, neither of which seems worth waiting months to announce. I guess either would potentially bring in a surge of new players, which seems to be one of the main expectations everyone has for the change, whatever it turns out to be, but plenty of other MMORPGs have either added a console client or gone F2P but none I remember ever chose to make a big secret of it like this.

If it's not that, though, I don't know what it might be, unless they're going to announce that Amazon's next big in-house video project is going to be a New World TV show. That would be a big deal and it would make a great setting for one, too. 

I doubt it's that, though. What I do think is that when we find out, pretty much everyone is going to be disappointed. I'll be happy to be proved wrong but I think it's a safe bet I won't be.

Failing some amazing development that none of us has even thought of, then, I expect my next visit to New World will be for whatever the holiday after Springtide might be. When it comes, I just hope there's something to get other than furniture. My character lives alone and she already has four beds...

Spring Is Here, The Flowers Is Riz

New World has always looked gorgeous, even at lower fidelity, but with the much more powerful video card I bought last summer now able to run it at the higher settings, it's more stunning than ever. That was readily apparent the moment I logged in after a 13GB patch today to take a look at the Springtime Bloom event that just began.

The game generally does holidays well, with events that are accessible, entertaining and visually spectacular, although if there's a "but..." it's that they do tend to stick to a formula. I missed the first Springtime Bloom last year but the current one still felt very familiar, being formally almost identical to the Winter Convergence festival, which I've visited a couple of times.   

Spring lends itself particularly well to the process, though, what with the focus on floral displays. The holiday is celebrated in the central cities of four of Aeternum's regions - Everfall, Monarch's Bluff, Weaver's Fen and Brightwood - or at least those are the ones that hand out gifts. I'm not sure if the rest also put up decorations and if not, why not.

There are also four Springtime Villages, one in each of the aforementioned areas, which is where you can pick up the event questline, spend your event tokens in the event shop and craft your event quest items on the event crafting tables. It's quite the event!

Each of the eight locations has a free package of holiday goods you can pick up once a day or thereabouts and they all have portals attached so in theory you could log in and zap yourself around the lot in a matter of minutes. I'll be doing that from now on but for this first rotation I had to do a fair bit of travelling to open up the portals I didn't already have, which meant it took me about an hour altogether.

I did also do a couple of the faction events on the way. They involve picking some highly suspicious flowers, which sounds simple enough until you find out every time you go near one a bunch of giant wasps appear and chase you about.

That in itself wouldn't be so bad if you could swat them but these are super-annoying event wasps, almost entirely immune to damage from anything other than event bombs. To kill them you have to lay down traps and lead the wasps into them, whereupon the traps explode, damaging but - annoyingly - not outright killing the wasps. 

It took me about four or five traps each time to finish them all off and I was under half health by the time the last one pegged out so it's not a forgone conclusion you'll survive. Game developers seem to love mechanics like this. I'm forever having to lay traps or lead mobs into objects to kill them because somehow they're magically invulnerable to all other kinds of harm. 

I have to wonder if there's anyone playing who genuinely prefers these kinds of dances to just whacking the damn things with a sword or an axe. Sometimes it gets to feel like there's no point even carting a weapon around, you get so little use out of it. And holiday events seem particularly prone to such shenanigans.

One thing about the plant-picking I did appreciate was the gigantic aerial signpost. Over each field hangs a huge rainbow ring you really can't miss. I didn't even know what it was when I saw it but it was so spectacular I headed over to investigate. That's how you bring people to the party.

As is the way of New World, there are plentiful rewards in the way of consumables along the way but the good stuff is gated both by event currency and event faction. Fortunately, both come fairly readily. I'm glad of that because there's some very nice stuff in the event store. Lots of outfits and some very nice furniture.

While I definitely would like the over-the-top four poster bed and the chaise-longue, as well as several of the flower baskets, I have already claimed a prodigious amount of free furniture from Prime Gaming giveaways and I'm struggling to find anywhere to put it all. I went to my house last time I played, which was only a few days ago, and was a bit surprised by how cramped it felt. 

It's not like I bought the smallest one although I didn't buy the biggest either. Still, you'd think a three-story townhouse with a porch and balcony would be easier to furnish than that. 

Gold is a lot easier to come by in New World than it was, rental costs were slashed to a fraction of what they used to be and I believe you can own more than one house. I might have to look into buying a second home, just to have somewhere to put all my free stuff.

I have no plans to return to New World full-time nor even part-time but it always was and still remains a very good MMORPG. I'll at least be sticking around for the rest of the spring holiday, even if all that amounts to is a quick flip around the festival sites every day or two. 

And who knows what I might get caught up in while I'm there? A lot has certainly happened since the last time I played for any length of time, not least a whole, new expansion. I don't think I'll be buying that but I admit I'm tempted when I see someone cruise past me on the back of a lion, while I have to keep trudging along on foot.

Before I finish, I'll just give a quick thank-you to Heartless Gamer for pointing out the recent change from Alt-H to F10 when you want to hide the UI. F10 has been my go-to for that since EverQuest and muscle memory frequently has me pressing it in games where it's not relevant. I used it a lot today and it felt good.

It's amazing how the little things cheer you up sometimes, isn't it? Not that I wasn't cheery enough to begin with but it's nice to have one less niggle to worry about. It all adds up or counts down, whichever way you prefer to look at it.

All The Colors Of The City

After I finished writing Monday's April Fool's post I thought I probably ought to log into EverQuest II to claim my free baby dragon and check out the Bristlebane Day content. I'm pretty much done with Nightingale for now, at least until they add some new content, and none of the other upcoming games I'm interested in are running tests right now, so it seemed like a good time to get back to what I was doing a couple of months ago - playing EQII.

Before I logged in I checked to see if anything new had been added to the holiday this year, which was when I found out there isn't just one holiday running, there are two. Well, three, if you count the Year of Darkpaw. Four, if there happens to be a City Festival on. (One of those runs for the first week of every month.) Or five, if there's a full moon, when the Moonlight Enchantments appear.

That's why it's not that unusual for holidays, anniversaries and live events to overlap in Norrath. There are just so many of them it's pretty much inevitable. Around this time of year we get Bristlebane Day, the April Fool analog, but also Beast'r, whose real-world counterpart is, I'm sure, readily apparent from the awkward pun.

I had a little trouble chasing down the exact details of what might have changed this year but as usual EQ2 Traders came to my rescue. From there I learned there is indeed something new this time. Quite a bit, in fact. As well as the expected new holiday crafting recipes and vendor items there's also a new quest.

A while ago I remember mentioning that in EQII these days, a new holiday "quest" generally just means a new collection with some framing dialog. Not so this time. This is a bona fide story quest that takes place in a brand-new dungeon. Okay, the dungeon itself is made up of re-purposed rooms from previous content and there are only three of them, but that's absolutely no criticism. It's an exemplary demonstration of how to re-use assets effectively to create enjoyable, new content.

I can say that now because I've finished it. The dungeon itself didn't take long - maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Getting a character ready to try it at all, though - that took me about four hours.

The very surprising thing about the new dungeon is that it requires a minimum level of 128 to enter. It's current expansion content in other words, which does seem odd for a holiday event. Usually these things scale.

I'd forgotten until I tried to enter the dungeon from a big book in the Commonlands that you have to click on. I didn't actually have a character that level. My nearest, the one I was playing, was my Berserker. At around three-quarters of the way into 127 he was close but not close enough.

I could have left it at that. It's only a holiday event after all and now it's been added it'll probably be in the rotation forever. I could have left it for next year. As I said, though, this happens to be a good moment for me to come back to EQII, something I've been wanting to do for a while, so I decided it was about time I knuckled down and got on with the Signature Quest from last December's Ballads of Zimara expansion.

Really, I ought to have finished it ages ago but I'd hit a patch with a lot of dungeon play and I hadn't been able to find the necessar couple of dog-free hours to beat down several bosses in a row. Last night, though, it was raining hard and Beryl was keeping her head down in case anyone suggested going outside. It seemed like an opportunity so I took it.

The dungeon I needed to finish turned out to be two dungeons linked together, both of them set in the final zone of the expansion, the Djinn stronghold, Vaashkaani. I was under the mistaken impression Vaashkaani was an open-world, city zone but while it might still be some kind of city, it's actually made up of several combat instances. 

The first took me about an hour to finish; the second double that, so a little over three hours in total, which is quite a run for me these days. Luckily, I had the invaluable EQ2i walkthroughs up for both. Without those I would probably have been there twice as long.

The fights, of which there were many, weren't all that hard. My Berserker is prety decently equipped for this kind of  entry-level endgame solo stuff, although there's still quite a lot more I could  - and should -do to toughen him up further. 

Having played EQII for so long now, it's interesting how these things change over time. A few years ago, most of the complaints from casuals like me revolved around time-to-kill on both regular mobs and bosses. It could take hours to grind through a solo instance, with each fight taking minutes and the bosses maybe a quarter of an hour.If you got a "kill ten" quest, and there were some, you could be there all morning.

Then there was a phase when just about everything seemed to drain your power or mana, making every fight take even longer. I remember going afk, leaving my Berserker on auto-attack and going to the kitchen to make myself a coffee because I had literally no buttons to press.

That was not a popular mechanic and I'm happy to say it's largely disappeared. What seems to have replaced it in BoZ is a cute little trick with Heroic Opportunities. 

As any who played EQII when it launched back in 2004 might remember, HOs were once a big part of the game. They are combination attacks that you can do solo or in a group. When the combo is complete they kick off powerful effects that either buff you or damage or debuff the mob.

I didn't much like them then because I was playing in groups much more than I do now and people were constantly yelling at each other, either demanding they complete the HO or complaining they had completed it when they shouldn't have. People were very fussy about the timing for some reason. It got on my nerves and I was glad when it largely fell into disuse.

Some people obviously remembered it more fondly than I did because there have been many requests for the system to be revamped and made useful again. A while ago that made its way to the top of the dev team's to-do list and now HOs are back in fashion.

In the instances I've just finshed there are several occasions when HOs are the only thing that will remove a boss's shield so you can actually hit them. Or you have to complete an HO to blow up some device that, if left unattended, will instantly kill you. There's no real logic to it but it's a lot better than seeing your mana disappear into a black hole. 

It's also a mechanic that requires a certain amount of attention and finesse, which is why I died a few times getting to grips with it. Once I had the method down, though, I thought it was fine. I certainly prefer it to having to chug mana potions, which cost a fortune for the good ones and which I never remembered to pack anyway, let alone the attritional auto-attack grindfest that comes when you run out of them.

The bosses in Vaashkaani also all have the ability to stifle, stun or fear, which would be extremely annoying if there weren't free augments available that negate all of those effects. I had to remember to swap the necessary augs in and out of my belt, the only item that has a slot that will hold them, but that wasn't hard to do - until I found out the hard way you can't change augs in a damaged item.

Eventually I got through the whole instance - both of them - and I have to say it was good fun. The level of challenge was just about right for me. I had to concentrate just enough to feel engaged and I got my timing wrong a couple of times but nothing went on so long it made me dread failure and another try plus I always made progress on each attempt so I could see a way to succeed.

It helped a lot that Vaashkaani is absolutely gorgeous. The screenshots give an impression of how colorful and vibrant it is but you have to imagine all those colors shifting and shimmering as the crystals pulse, clouds drift across the skylights, waterfalls pour down and foliage ripples in the breeze. Once again, you can really see why Darkpaw would like to get new players straight into the current content. The 2004-era graphics of the older zones, much though I love them, really do the game a disservice.

Under current mechanics, you get no meaningful xp for clearing zones. It all comes from quests. When I handed in mine I jumped straight from three-quarters of the way through 127 to five per cent into 128. Mission accomplished!

I also got a lot of drops from all the nameds but I wasn't very lucky with RNG. Most of the gear I got was for other classes. My alts will love it  - if they ever get this far. 

My Berserker didn't much mind not getting stuff he could wear. Everything that dropped was all 155 Resolve, which is mostly what he has now. He got it all from previous holiday events so he's very mildly overgeared for the content he's doing although not for much longer. According to the beta forums for the forthcoming GU 125, bosses in the next update drop 160 and 165 Resolve gear, which will be a nice upgrade.

As soon as I dinged 128, it was straight off to try the new holiday instance. It turned out to be a jolly romp with an amusing story, some good jokes and a lot of fighting. I won't rehash it all here but the gist is that Bristlebane tells you the story of a famous thief and sends you to three episodes from his life, wherein you take various roles, all of which pretty much consist of a massive fight that starts the moment you zone in. It's all action!

The drops were much the same level as the ones I got in the instances, which makes sense since 155 Resolve seems to be about par for current solo endgame gear. I was able to upgrade a couple of 145s I was still uisng so that was nice.

According to EQ2 Traders, if you do the instance three times, you get a silly hat. It's fast and fun so even I ought to be able to manage that before it all goes away in ten days or so. 

If I want the five new Beast'r eggs, though, I'll have to hurry. That event ends in just a few hours.

What am I doing here then?!