What Are The Chances?

It's going to be slim pickings here for the next few days because we have a lot going on, one way or another, but I'll try and get something together. Don't be surprised if there are gaps, though.

One thing I was going to do was record another success in the lottery that is adding a new character to the roster in Neverness To Everness. I have had a modicum of luck with gacha draws in the past. In Genshin Impact, back when it started, when the fist banner arrived I got Diluc, a highly desirable five-star character (Although not, according to the search I've just done, an S-Class.) almost on my first roll, which certainly gave me the impression it was going to be easier than it was.

I didn't stick with Genshin long enough to see my luck change and in Noah's Heart, the gacha I played the longest, they gave so many free rolls all the time I still had hundreds left when the closure of the game was announced. I think I had pretty much everybody by then. And even if I didn't, I certainly had far more characters than I needed.

 I can't remember who I rolled on in Wuthering Waves. Whatever was going on there, I don't seem to have made a big deal of it. There are 43 posts labeled "Wuthering Waves" here and the only one that seems to be about a successful roll is the one where I say "I only had to spend a fraction of the tokens I already had to get a couple of new Resonators, one of whom, Encore, was my first five-star pull."

At that point I was clearly still figuring out how it all worked, which is odd considering it was the third gacha game I'd played. You'd have thought I'd have known by then. 

Part of the problem, if it can be called a problem, is that I don't much like swapping teams around for combat. And in the open world I almost always want to play the character I started with. That's "my" character. None of that fits very well with a game design that assumes you'll constantly flip between characters, always looking to play the best one at any given time. Although it is interesting that, in cut scenes and quest dialog, the game usually shows the player-character as the Appraiser, regardless of who was being played before.

 It's a little bit different in Neverness To Everness in that some of the characters seem to have more obvious roles than I noticed in previous games, both in and out of combat. I was keen to get Iroi, for example, because I thought she'd make a good team healer. I wanted Hotori because her time-stop outside combat looked like it would be fun. I wanted Lacrimosa because she's fricken' vampire. And Nanally can run up skyscrapers...

Hotori, and Lacrimosa, I got extremely cheaply. Nanally, I haven't yet rolled for. Iroi, I tried to get and failed.

Then there was Linko. I wanted Linko because... I have no idea why I wanted her. Because she has a backpack? Because I found her conversations with her devil-doll funny? You tell me. I don't even know what she does. 

But I wanted her anyway, so I skipped rolling on Zankou, the first character in the current update, who I had no interest in and waited for Linko.

 I did not get Linko. Not on my first roll. Or my tenth. Or my twentieth. 

I wasn't keeping a close count but it probably took about thirty goes before i got her. I went in with a tally of about forty unsuccessful rolls behind me, following my unsuccessful attempt to snag Iroi. I used ten Fabricated Dice out of the thirty-five I had, then I bought another twenty-five or so with various currencies I had saved up.

Before I'd used all of those, I hit the threshold at seventy failures, where the chance of winning increases substantially. I won Linko on my first roll after that. 

It was very exciting but once the thrill wore off I realised I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with her, now I've got her. For now, I'm just working on building a bond of affection between us so she can come and live in my apartment, along with Lacrimosa and Chiz. Mint is still living in my old apartment.

The more I think about this, the less sense it makes. But I'm doing it anyway. 

Next time a character turns up that I want to roll on, I won't have a feather-bed of forty failures to fall back on. But if I don't get that one, I will for the one after that. It looks like every other character is an odds-on win. 

Seems like decent odds to me. 

Hethereau Across The River - New District Or New Backdrop?

Malvaltar mentioned in the comments the other day that the inaccessible part of the city of Hethereau, to the east of the river, had been redeveloped. It's a large area, easily as big as any of the existing districts, and it's been there since the game started but we've never been able to go there.

It supposedly can't be visited by NPCs either since the two bridges are closed, although only one is physically blocked to traffic. I guess an NPC could walk across even if none of them seem to be doing it. There are a couple of small boys watching the construction workers but that's all.

Flora can't cross the bridge or the river. She's tried but a big, red barrier pops up to tell her there's No Access. There are clearly people living and working over there, though, because you can see vehicles moving around the streets. No people but maybe they're just too far away to spot.

Since I'd heard something was apparently happening over there, I thought I'd go take a look from as close as I could get. I started off by porting into one of the ReRo Boxes to the south-east and from there Flora did her usual jog-scramble-glide to get to the coast. I still find it much faster to get around that way than to drive. When you can climb over any fence, scale even the tallest buildings in a few bounds and then throw yourself off to glide across the rooftops, who needs a car?

I came out opposite the huge funfair on the southern promontory. That's been a tease since the start. You can see the rides but you can't get to them, let alone get on them.

This time, as I was looking down on the fair from the clifftops, I noticed a huge dirigible in the sky that I didn't remember seeing before. As I got closer, I could see lots of large balloons and other aerial decorations that didn't seem familiar either. 

 "New" fairground, with balloons.

 

Who knows, though? For one thing, my memory is extremely unreliable and for another I'm playing on GeForce Now's servers, where the GPUs are a good deal more powerful than even my good graphic card, let alone the onboard graphics I'd been reduced to using until playing at all nearly killed my PC. There might always have been balloons and I might just have forgotten them or they could have been there all along, just not showing up on my graphics settings.

That latter possibility also makes any comparison between screenshots I took on my own machine, weeks ago, and ones I took today somewhat suspect, at least when it comes to the finer details. It's a moot point where the funfair is concerned anyway because although I remember taking some shots, I can't now find them.

That's not surprising. I have multiple folders of screenshots from Neverness To Everness. The game itself stores shots you take using the in-game camera in a folder in its own directory, while screenshots I take with Win+PrtScr go into the general "Screenshots" folder. I've also had to copy the folders off my old C drive that I'm no longer using, so I have a different location for all the old shots.

Meanwhile, for the new ones, I can't just use the in-game camera any more because those shots go to GFN's servers and get deleted at the end of each session. I'm now using Win+PrtScr for all my shots, something that's been made an order of magnitude easier by the addition of the F7 "Hide UI" command in the last update. (If I do use the in-game camera for the various features it offers, I then have to take a Windows screenshot of the image, which is a bit of an awkward workaround.)

Old fairground, no balloons.

 

Just to add another level of uncertainty over whether I did or did not take any particular shot, NTE doesn't automatically save your screenshots on your hard drive. You do have to remember to use the local download function, when using the in-game camera because NTE only keeps the shots in your in-game Gallery for 15 days. After that, they're automatically deleted. 

With all of that, it's hardly surprising I can't always find a specific shot from the past. I haven't been able to find the ones I thought I took of the fairground so I can't say for certain that it's been redeveloped but my feeling is that it has.

Looking across the river to the east, I wasn't sure anything had changed. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't been clued into it by Mailvaltar, I wouldn't have noticed. One thing that did strike me immediately was that there didn't seem to be any cranes over there. I did seem to remember some construction going on before.

I spent about fifteen or twenty minutes jogging along the riverside, peering across to the far side and trying to see if I could see anything different but it all looked much as I remembered. The bridges were still closed. There were still vehicles moving through the streets.  

After a while, I thought of checking my old screenshots and with some diligence I was able to find a few of the eastern district. I went up and down the riverside, trying to find the exact spots where they'd been taken, so I could get a clear comparison. That took long enough that Flora decided it was worth getting her scooter out, much to the dismay of people walking along the sidewalk.

Old district with forested hills and over-road walkway.

 

After a great deal of trial and error, I eventually managed to isolate two locations that seemed to be the right places. One was looking south-west, back towards the fairground, the other north-east into the hills. And both looked substantively different in game to what I was seeing in the record.

The whole of the cityscape on the far side of the river has changed. It's very interesting that I couldn't tell without the evidence in front of me because it's not a subtle change. It's a fairly radical re-interpretation. 

The buildings that used to be there were, now I come to examine them critically, really quite old-fashioned. They have quite a lot of the 1960s and '70s about them, the sort of pre-stressed concrete neo-brutalism that used to be so popular with local government architects when I was growing up. 

In the shot looking over the bridge, for example, you can see one of those completely enclosed over-the-roadway walkways that were a feature of the city nearest to me when I was in my teens. In fact, that whole square, boxy office-block waterfront could almost literally have been copied from a photograph of that town back in the seventies.

I'm very fond of that style of architecture, partly because it feels quite nostalgic but also because I find its clinical austerity quite soothing. The muted color and smooth-but-rough texture of concrete has a pleasant, tranquilizing effect, especially in the rain. 

I can see, though, why it might not be quite the right style for a near-future metropolis like Hethereau. The revised district is much more modern. The skyscrapers are much taller and the tallest have that edgy, knife-like look so familiar from the skylines of Dubai or even modern London. There's a lot of glass and the late afternoon sun glares back at you balefully as it sets. It's a mood.

New district with bare escarpment and completely revamped architecture.

 

Even so, there's still a surprising boxiness to it all. If the old version looked extremely mid-20th century, the new one hasn't quite shaken off its past. 

What it has done is grown. As you can see from the view behind the buildings, looking out to the countryside... well, there's not all that much countryside left. Where there used to be low hills covered in trees with higher, forested hills rising behind them, now there's just one escarpment, topped with trees but bare where there's clearly been felling and quite possibly quarrying.

To the east of that there are a couple of large blocks of offices or apartments. Below the rise, the valley floor is filled with what definitely look like apartment blocks. The city is growing.

In his comment, Mailvaltar hoped the redesign meant a new playable area on the way, not just a cosmetic uplift. Before I'd been to see it, I thought it would have to be the former. Surely no-one would waste resources on a changing the appearance of a part of the city players would never be able to visit?

Having seen it, though, I'm not quite so sure. The screenshots of the former version point up just how out of place it used to look. Or, perhaps, it makes me wonder just how old the rest of Hetherau is, if you stop to look at it properly. 

Old Hethereau, as we remember it. Fondly, even though we were never there.

 

It also makes me realize that one of the reasons the city has always felt so convincingly like a real place, right from the start, is that it has more than just a patina of age. Architecturally, culturally and aesthetically, Hethereau gives a very solid impression of a city that's developed organically over time. The center is very modern and slick but as you travel further out, you find yourself in what can only be smaller towns or villages that have been assimilated by the urban sprawl. Different districts, even streets, have a very different feel to them, just as they would in a real city.

It's extremely effective in evoking memories of actual places I've been and I haven't even been to the part of the world from where the designers are most likely drawing their inspiration. Nevertheless, I can all but name places I have visited in real life that parts of Hethereau remind me of, quite specifically.

In that context, it makes a great deal of sense for there to be an older, slightly more run-down district across the river. And the new version doesn't entirely dispel that impression. The buildings are newer, yes, but only some of them are flashier. Alongside those cutting-edge skyscrapers that have just appeared, there are ranks of more modest, more utilitarian buildings. 

From across the river, the eastern district looks like where the urban workers live, studded with enclaves of the rich, who look out from their massive windows, high above the gritty streets to the forested hills that they can still see but which the workers beneath them can now enjoy only in memory.

There would certainly be plenty of stories to be told in a place like that. We can only hope we get to hear some of them. 

Out Of The Fogden

The big finale of Fogden Game takes place in some kind of derelict coliseum. At one end there's the Fog Coffin and in front of it stands Inanna, flanked by Zankou and Poinsette. At the other, there's everyone else.

I took screenshots of each group as they appeared and then another of the full complement. That's the whole crew up there at the top of the post. From Right to left: Adler, Daffodil, The Appraiser, Hotori, Linko, Chaos and Thyme. It's such a classic stand-off. I loved the drama of it all.

There's a couple of things to say about the line-up. Firstly, Adler. I didn't even mention him in the previous post. I'd completely forgotten he was there and even now I can't remember who he was with or what he did. I try to find him interesting because on paper he ought to be but the way the character is written and voiced makes it hard.

Secondly, there are seven people on our side and only three on the opposing team, assuming the Fog Coffin is the referee, not a competitor. Eight, in fact, because although Nitsa isn't in shot, she came in with Adler and Linko so she must be there, somewhere. Maybe she's behind Hotori. With those numbers, surely this fight can only go one way?

Yeah, well, about that. When the fighting starts, you can only have four in your team. And you don't get to pick who they are. In the first phase the team is yourself (Zero/the Appraiser), Linko, Chaos and Adler and in phase two Adler tags out in favor of Hotori. Daffodil, Thyme and Nitsa are somewhere else, presumably fighting Zankou and Poinsette.

First, though, let's backtrack just a little. The final two set pieces in the prelude to the big fight are both quite strange, one in a much more meaningful manner than the other. 

Linko and Nitsa's adventure, which has always felt like the lighthearted end of the story, changes from a homage to the Indiana Jones movies to a spoof of the Kaiju genre. The two girls find themselves stomping through a 1/50th scale version of Hethereau like Godzilla's cuter little sisters. 

That was pure fun but Flora's sliding doors trip to a variety of future versions of Eibon goes much darker. In a series of bleak tableaus, presented in washed-out sepia like a badly-stored celluloid movie, the Appraiser gets to see what might happen if she wins. Or loses. Or merely survives.

None of it is good. In one scenario, three months after the Fogden Game, Alphard has been forced to resign and Eibon is closing down. In another, the Appraiser is the only one left in a still-functioning Eibon a hundred years after the end of the game. And in a third everything seems to be going splendidly and Alphard has just given her blessing on the Appraiser remaining at Eibon permanently.

All of these turn out to be either possible futures or imaginary ones conjured up by Poinsette via her somewhat vaguely-defined ability to create doorways through dimensions and/or time. Poinsette appears and a lengthy discussion takes place between her and the Appraiser during which some thought-provoking observations about the nature of reality, predestination and fate are made.

Poinsette, it transpires, hasn't specifically raised these phantoms to freak Flora out. She's been tasked by Inanna with revealing Flora's future to her but Poinsette, having rifled through a lot more futures than she's shown the Apprasier, is herself freaking out that she can't find a single one in which she survives the Fogden Game.

I found this sequence particularly enjoyable. It revealed a bit more of Poinsette's character and in doing so augmented the impression I'd already formed that the girl wasn't entirely beyond redemption, unlike her so-say sister, Zankou. 

Given the tone of the writing and the direction, I was fairly sure we wouldn't be killing Poinsette. I certainly hoped not. She has potential both as a character and a colleague. It would certainly be handy to have a team-mate who could open doors you could walk through to appear in another place or time.

So much for the philosophy. On with the fighting.

The big battle with Inanna is suitably spectacular but if I said I could remember much about the details, I'd be lying. It's all a bit of an impressionistic blur after a couple of days. I remember she levitated and grew extra legs like a spider. There was a lot of swooping around and some massive light-show explosions. 

We killed her once and she got back up, as arch-villains all too often do. The Fog Coffin, with whom Inanna has an Anomaly Contract, which seems to be the Hethereau equivalent of a deal with the devil, came clambering over the rubble like a titanic golem and I was just thinking "Oh FFS! Do I have to fight that thing now?" when Code Zero, the ultra-mysterious Rules Anomaly from a previous episode, turned up out of nowhere and started a King Kong vs Godzilla style battle with the Fog Coffin.

I was very much hoping that would be the end of it but Inanna underwent another transformation into an even more distorted arachnid form and we had to kill her a second time. I'd lost track by then of what the two giant anomalies were doing. It was hellish.

Just as I thought we had her beaten for the second time, she somehow grabbed Daffodil and held her trapped in her tentacles as she monologued something extremely disturbing about taking her eyes. Hotori went in for a rescue but before she could get there Zankou dropped out of the sky and skewered her so-called Mother, yelling "I told you! Daffodil. Is. Mine!"

Inanna finally goes down for a second time and we all stand around, wheezing and gasping and bleeding, while the whole Fogden starts to collapse around us. Chaos somehow gets a connection to the outside world on his magic phone that's been out of service the whole time until now. He calmly starts making a report because he's cool as hell and we all need to know about it and as all that's going on, Zankou moves over to Poinsette and tells her it's time to go.

Then the Helm of Odysseus drops out of the sky, bounces a couple of times and ends up in the middle of the arena. Everyone looks at it. For a second, no-one moves, then Code Zero reaches for it with its fifty foot long arm but Thyme gets there first and next thing we're all on the ghost ship somehow, with Thyme steering and Flora hanging over the side and Hotori trying to haul her onboard and Code Zero is trying to grab the stern and letting loose some sort of doomsday attack and then Hotori counters with something even more powerful and then the ship goes through a portal and the Appraiser slumps to the deck and...

It was all very exciting. I'd be lying if I said I remembered it as clearly as I've just described and I'm aware I haven't described it clearly at all. What I actually remembered were lots of fragmented images and moments. I had to go watch someone else's recording on YouTube to put all the pieces into the right order.

Here it is, in case you want to watch it, too. The big fight's at the end. Or watch the whole thing. It'll only take you two and a half hours.

I remember the coda well enough. It's so much calmer and less frenzied. One of those silent cinema intertitles so beloved of video game designers pops up, saying "A Few Days Later", and next thing I know, Flora's waking up in the dormitory at Eibon with everyone crowding around to see her because she's been asleep for three days straight.

It turns out everyone got home safely. Nanally's fully recovered and all's well until Daffodil turns up and goes on an apology jag that ends with everyone in the room in floods of tears. That was the weirdest part of the whole storyline for me. After everyone gets it together and stops emoting, there's one of those bits where you get to have a private chat with some of the others, one on one. If anything significant was said I've forgotten it.

The final scene takes place in Alphard's office at BAC HQ, where the Director and Chaos debrief the Appraiser. That's when we find out what happened to Zankou and Poinsette. 

I thought they'd vanish for the time being, to return at some some future turn in the storyline. That may well happen at some point but not yet a while. As Alphard explains, they're both now in custody, having failed to make a clean getaway.

Apparently, Poinsette gated all the surviving competitors from the Fogden Game to safety and in doing so drained most of her esper ability. She went to ground in a Scarlet Letter safe house but the BAC tracked her down and she gave up without a fight, since when she's been co-operating with the authorities and hasn't been any trouble..

Zankou was a lot less less co-operative but she too was taken into custody by Chaos after what he describes as a tough fight. Alphard says Zankou will be going to Ghroth Island for a lengthy spell of incarceration. Poinsette, however, has earned some credit with BAC thanks to saving the competitors and being so very docile after being arrested. She's also deemed to have acted, at least in part, under duress while she was with the Scarlet letter.

Poinsette is now going to be trained at the Esper Academy "under supervision". When she passes a series of special tests designed for her, she'll be given the choice of either becoming a regular citizen of Hethereau or joining BAC. I'd bet on the latter.

And that was that. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, confusing though it was at times. I thought it moved the plot on nicely although, since I'd expected the Scarlet Letter would become the main opposition for some time to come, it was a bit of a surprise to see the whole organization broken up and rendered obsolete so quickly.

It's quite hard to define just what the central plot is in Neverness To Everness. I think of the MSQ being clearer in other gacha games I've played but then, when I think back, at the stage we're at, I'm not sure I had a clear idea what was going on in any of those either. Telling long, complex stories in movie-lenght episodes every six weeks is an odd format for a narrative. It takes a while for everything to come together.

It seems like the real concern is Rules Anomalies in general and Code Zero in particular. That's the kind of extinction level existential threat that most video games like to have running in the background as they task you, the player, with sorting out a whole lot of more manageable problems. As I said last time, I think Rules Anomalies are an extremely scary and highly original concept and the potential certainly exists for an apocalyptic climax to the storyline at some future time.

I suspect, though, that what we'll get for a good while are a lot of smaller-scale crises on a more human scale, at least while the game beds in. I hope so. I'm never entirely at home when the conflicts my characters involve themselves in verge on the mythical.

Clearing The Fog From The Fogden Game

 

Yesterday I mentioned I'd played through the latest story episode in Neverness To Everness but I didn't say much about it, other than that I enjoyed it. Let's fix that.

The episode goes by the name "Fogden Game" and when I saw that I did wonder for a moment whether it was going to be a second game-within-a-game, like 999 Nights. That was a worrying moment. I think they got away with it once but...

Luckily, it's nothing of the kind. The story carries on from exactly where it left off, at the end of Dreamwalk Corridor, almost three months ago. Only, as we learn, in the game not much more than a week has passed. Nanally is still very much not herself, as anyone wouldn't be, if they only had half their soul. It's past time for us to do something about that, instead of playing 3DD&D with Mint!

A note left by Hotori tells us she's going to be away for a while and we should all look after the store while she's gone. Obviously she's up to something and equally obviously she's going to need our help. Otherwise why would it be in the story? 

Do you have trouble keeping your metadata straight in these situations? I know I do. What do I know? What does my character know? What have I read outside the game? It's a narrative minefield.

Luckily, somehow - I forget exactly how - the Appraiser knows just where to find Hotori, who for some equally unknowable reason, Flora (And everyone else.) has suddenly decided to refer to as "The Shopkeeper". This brought me up short the first time it happened. I wondered if I'd missed something but no, apparently it's new to this chapter. 

 

Whether it'll stick remains to be seen. I quite like it. I also like the idea that everyone at Eibon gets a job title. There's the Appraiser, the Shopkeeper, the Butler (Adler), Eibon's Handyman (Taygedo), the Bodyguard (Daffodil) and the Ichi Daimi (Nanally, although that one's very much a self-appointed title rather than something that describes her role in the shop.) 

Edgar could be the Researcher, which just leaves Sakiri. I have no idea what her official title would be. She fights and she sets her pet anomaly, Kiroumaru, on people. Apparently she also posts lists of rules on the fridge. I guess we could call her the Enforcer. 

As it transpires, Hotori is about to go rescue Daffodil from the Scarlet Letter along with a team from BAC, specifically from ETD6. This plays into the part of the game I find the most fascinating - the enmeshed, interlinked networks of professional and personal relationships that suffuse the world with both nuance and confusion. I purely love it when I don't know what's going on but I know it's something.

Hotori has some kind of history with the Director of BAC, Alphard. That's how come the Appraiser, the player character, ends up at Eibon in the first place. Alphard has a very heavy professional rep while Hotori is barely ever sober, so they seem like a total mismatch but they're both exceptionally heavy hitters when it comes to a fight and they go back a long way. Theirs is a history about which we know next to nothing. Catnip laced with cocaine to me.

 

The ETD6 team is Chaos, another character I find increasingly enigmatic and intriguing, Nitsa, who I can't remember much about except she's quite sweet and Linko, who we haven't met before. Linko is a pathfinder of some kind. She has a huge backpack and she gets hunches that the game signals by having a lock of hair on the top of her head wiggle about. She's cartoonish and cute and - surprise, surprise - she's one of the two banner characters in this episode, the other being Zankou, one of the villains.

I'm going to jump out of chronology here to question that last part. We can roll for Zankou right now and if we win her, we can add her to our team. How, exactly, is that supposed to work? I already have enough issues with the way the team-building mechanic allows characters who aren't present and have nothing to do with whatever it is you're doing to magically appear and fight with you, wherever you happen to be, but at least so far they've all been friends or colleagues.

Zankou is an enemy. Granted, she's conflicted in her loyalties but she's very much not any kind of friend or ally. But putting even that aside, at the debriefing at the end, Alphard tells the Appraiser Zankou's crimes are so heinous there's no deal to be cut and she's going away for a long, long time. 

If she's in prison, how does she get to pop up whenever she's called to fight alongside the player? Does she get day release? It's a step too far for any kind of hand-waving lore explanation to wish away. It's just Game Logic and we have to accept it and ignore the implications, the way you can swim in plate armor in every MMORPG ever made, I guess.

Getting back to the plot, the Appraiser invites herself along and because she's universally considered both a wild card no-one knows anything much about and a Good Egg, of course that's fine. I mean, who knows what she mightn't be able to do? Everyone goes into a disused industrial facility out in the woods somewhere and a lengthy puzzle sequence follows. 

I like the puzzles in NTE, for the most part. They're easy enough to understand, not too fiddly to execute and don't outstay their welcome. This one involves a lot of running along derelict corridors and up stairwells, looking for messages and being taunted by Inanna, the really nasty boss of the Scarlet Letter, who appears in television screens all over the place.

This was one of my favorite parts. I could write a whole post about the way every game goes straight to old, boxy cathode-ray television sets whenever they want some way to present a sinister, remote presence. Flat-screen TVs might as well never have existed. 

They all do it but NTE is the first I've ever seen dig into that trope and open it up. There's a whole conversation about how Inanna had to scour second-hand electronics stores all across Hethereau to source enough old but still-working TVs for her dramatics. I think she says she could only find a dozen in the entire city. (Six, in fact...) That's the kind of commitment to the bit that really sells it for me. 

Eventually, we find our way to the top of the building, deactivate the final, taunting TV, get in the elevator and go all the way back down to the lobby and go through the door in the tree. (Didn't I mention there was a tree with a locked door in it? Well, there was and now the door is open.). And on the other side of the door is the Fogden. Where the game happens.

So, what is the Fogden Game? Ah, that's the question. Here's how I remember it without looking it up. It might not be accurate but it'll be an accurate impression of what I got from it. Very much not the same thing. The more important thing.

The Fogden Game is a game that takes place in the Fogden, an anomalous realm under the control of a Rules Anomaly called the Fog Coffin. A Rules Anomaly is an entity that both sets and enforces rules within its sphere of control and is one of the most terrifying concepts I've happened on in the whole of my gaming career. Seriously, these things would give Harlan Ellison nightmares.

Every so often the game starts up. I don't know the cadence  but it's apparently been happening for at least two hundred years. This is telling. It's easy to think of anomalies as only having been in the world for a few decades but the Fifth High-Level Anomaly Outbreak that occurred forty years before the time the game is set was only the trigger for anomalies becoming widely known to the general public. Prior to that they were a government secret, controlled by the agencies. Inanni tells us she has a couple of hundred years history with the Fog Coffin so she's clearly an insider. 

The game itself involves a whole load of people entering the realm and hunting each other until only one is left alive. Whoever wins gets to ask the Fog Coffin for any one thing that's in the Fogden. It can be material or immaterial.  

 

As we learn later, Inanni has set the whole thing up to get Hotori into the game so she can win and ask the Fog Coffin to give her Hotori's esper ability to manipulate time. Inanni believes this will make her truly immortal instead of whatever bargain basement version of living forever she has now. I mean, she's the one who tells us the Fogden Game was happening two hundred years ago, which she knows because she was there, so her current immortality mod can't be that shoddy but arch-villains never will settle.

That's the plot in a nutshell. Obviously, we have to make sure it doesn't happen, especially because only one person can leave the Fogden alive once the game starts and even though we didn't sign up, we're in it now. 

We get introduced, visually at least, to the other competitors, a motley crew ranging from small children to an old guy in a wheelchair. In theory, we're going to have to kill all of them but of course that's never going to happen. They can sure kill each other, though, and they do, although mostly off-camera. 

Or maybe they don't. It gets very confusing from here on in. Up to the point where the actual game begins, I'd been able to stay on top of the plot quite comfortably but once it all starts, it's everyone for themselves and it's hard to know just where you are. 

Or who, because Fogden Game is one of those episodes where you spend a lot of time not playing your own character. I used to dread those in MMORPGs but they make a lot more sense in gacha games, where you play a gestalt a lot of the time anyway. And I'd have to say that, in the gacha games I've played, which is, like, three, so I'm no expert, the whole body-swap deal is much better-handled than in any MMORPG I ever played. 

 

In this episode you get to play as the Appraiser, as Daffodil and as Linko. I think that was all. There's not a huge amount of fighting although there are several boss and sub-boss fights. Mostly it's talking, running, collecting and puzzles.

Anyone can do all of those. Doesn't matter if you never saw the character before. You can run, talk, pick stuff up and figure out puzzles just as well as if you were on your main. Usually the problem with having to play unfamiliar characters is having no chance to figure out what their abilities are, something that matters a lot in most MMORPGs. In gacha games, though, there's a good chance you'll have the character on your team already so you'll know what they do and even if you don't, button mashing is going to get you through. At least, it will in NTE.

It got me through just fine, anyway. Daffodil felt overpowered and Linko and Nitsa did more running away than they did fighting. In their big, set-piece fight with a giant, flying, skeletal snake, I barely ever managed to target the damn thing, let alone hit it and we still won. 

In fact, I never died once in the whole thing. Didn't even come close. Some of the fights looked hard going in but turned out not to be. I don't think they're actually scripted so you can't lose but there seems to be a big margin for error and a lot of "sit back and watch and let the characters show you what they can do" moments. I found it all very well-paced. 

 

Daffodil's segment mostly involves her travelling through a seemingly endless series of bleak, wet caverns, taking Lumen Circles from the petrified corpses of failed competitors from previous games. I never did figure out what the Lumen Circles were or why Daffodil wanted them, except that they somehow figured in getting her to where she needed to be, namely facing down Inanni.

Along the way, Daffodil fights a pair of siblings or lovers or friends or business partners (Missed the relationship but they're a couple.) and the guy in the wheelchair. The couple are bittersweet. The old guy is obnoxious. Both were memorable. She also spends some time talking to a girl who, I think, is a contestant in the game who's given up to protect her injured sister. Then Daffodil meets her own "sister", Zankou.

Daffodil's history with the Scarlet Letter is fascinating. I don't believe she and her sisters are blood-related. Ananni adopted them, presumably without benefit of paperwork, and brought them up to be assassins, murderers and all-round villains. Daffodil escaped. Zankou and Poinsette stayed. 

Zankou is not happy about Daffodil's defection. Poinsette is conflicted. I found both their stories quite affecting. I was pulling hard for Poinsette to switch sides and eventually she kind of does. It was very satisfying.

While all that's going on, Chaos, his team and the Appraiser and Hotori are heading through a different part of the Fogden. Chaos, the Appraiser, Hotori and Thyme, the enemy-turned ally from the Dreamwalk Corridor episode, who's also turned up somewhere along the line, all get separated from Linko and Nitsa, who spend most of their time trying not to be squashed by falling boulders and edging along narrow ledges with their backs to the cliffs as the entire part of the Fogden they're in tries to kill them. It's intense!

Eventually, after a great deal of exploring, emoting and fighting, everyone ends up in the same place for the final battle. But I think that's enough for one post. 

Let's make it a two-parter.

Something Of The Night

Joar of MMO Casual has a post up about tracking gaming hours. As I was saying only the other day, it's not a thing I've ever done, or not with any precision or intent, at least. I've always been happy enough with a rough estimate. 

It used to be very easy, back when I was working something close to full time. I could add up evenings and weekends and come to something pretty close. Playing mostly one MMORPG at any given time made it easier to keep track, too.

Sidebar: I've actually not worked fully full-time for most of my life. I did two or three years of full-time work in the mid '80s, then maybe five years in the 90s and perhaps as many again in the twenty-aughts going into the teens. I did a longish stint of four days a week after that, all the way through until I got sick in 2019. That came close to being full time but it doesn't count if you think of a working week as a minimum of 35 hours across five days. Since the pandemic I've never done more than three days a week and now it's just two, which I count as being semi-retired. 

Mostly, though, I've done all I could to avoid working full time. One of my life goals that I set myself, when I was still at school, was to work as little as possible and think I've made a fair go of it. And in about six weeks I won't be working at all, which was always the dream.

The less structured my days become, the harder it gets to be certain exactly what I've been doing. The days blur a little and run together, especially across a long, extended period of sunny, hot, dry weather as  we've enjoyed this summer. So it did come as a bit of a shock to find I'd been playing a lot less than I thought.

I know a lot of people worry about how much time they're spending on games but I'm somewhat the opposite these days. I worry I'm not playing enough. I quite often don't even think of logging in to a game until quite late in the day and then, when I do, I often find myself feeling like I've been playing for long enough after what I can now see from the record is likely to be less than half an hour. That's incredibly lightweight. Barely even counts as casual gaming!

But then, I've never been one for really long sessions. Even when I was in the deep snows of my EverQuest obsession, it would have been rare for me to play for more than three hours at a stretch before taking a break. I'd never have needed GeForce Now's six-hour sessions, which would have seemed disturbingly generous to me even then.

Less than half an hour a day, though... that's disturbing. That suggests a drifting away. With the prospect of gaining two more free days in October, it seems like a poor time of life to be shedding interests and hobbies. 

 

So, after I wrote that post, I gave myself a good talking to about not playing enough video games and I'm pleased to say it's had an immediate effect. The very next day I buckled down and finished the latest story episode in Neverness To Everness. That took me just over two hours (The whole thing took just over four.) There will, no doubt, be a post about that soon enough. It was very good.

That was in the afternoon. By evening, I was ready for more. But not more NTE. As I've said before, my main issue with the gacha games I've been playing is that the story is too good. Too intense. Too involving. Too emotionally demanding. 

Whenever I play through a section of the story in one of these games, I feel very much as though I just watched a particularly immersive and powerful movie. I need time to process what I've just experienced and I need a break before I do it again. Obviously, the six-week cadence allows for recovery time more than adequately but equally obviously, the NTE story session put what might otherwise have been my first choice, Wuthering Waves, right off the table, as far as a same-day follow-up went.

But for that, Wuthering Waves would have been my preference because I really want to see that Edgerunners content. I'm almost up to it as a skip-forward but overall I'm way behind in the main storyline. I'd guess there's something like fifteen to twenty hours of narrative I need to catch up on. At the rate I'm able to handle it, that's going to take me a few weeks, even if I push my own limitations as far as they'll stretch and of course more story keeps coming all the time.  

There's another limitation, too. One that's only started to affect me relatively recently and only since the games I play began to rely much more on fast mouse action for combat than the stately tab-target of the MMORPGs I played for so long. 

It's not that the fights are hard. I'm very happy that combat in Neverness To Everness remains mostly unchallenging. Iused to say I'd prefer there was none at all but that's an exaggeration. I quite like there being some fighting. It breaks up the very frequent and very lengthy cut scenes and does quite a lot to add to the feeling of personal involvement that makes playing games a different experience from watching movies. If it was all cut scenes then there really would be no difference at all.

Hard fights, though, and especially fights that have to be repeated because they were too hard to beat in one attempt, have the exact opposite effect. I blame the terrible, abrasive, attritional, repetitive, wholly unwarranted boss fights in Guild Wars 2 for my eventual disenchantment with that game. Well, that and the story being consistently so very bad, something that made the interminable fights you had to go through to see it seem like a sadistic joke.

Neither NTE nor Wuthering Waves currently suffers from that kind of hubris. The stories are great and the fights are fun. There are very few "trash"  fights and when they do pop up they're barely an inconvenience. The set-piece boss fights, which are also well-spaced, are exciting, explosive, visually stunning and, crucially, short. 

Best of all, they're tuned to my extremely limited capabilities. I'm not a complete duffer. I do a little better than pure button-mashing but not much. And yet, I can't remember the last time I lost a boss fight in a story segment of either NTE or WW. They're that well-judged.

Not infrequently, as the player you don't even need to do all the work yourself. It's quite common for the fight to switch to a cut scene, when you've reduced the boss's health to, say, thirty per cent. Then you get to sit back and watch your character execute a series of stunning, balletic moves to bring the baddie down.

I really love that. It's so much better than doing it all myself and yet, because I've done the prep for it, it still feels satisfying. It also gives my wrist a chance to recover.

That's the real problem with combat in NTE and WW. I'm in my late sixties. My hands and wrists aren't really up to the kind of physical punishment they're getting from hammering the mouse buttons non-stop for minutes at a time in frenetic bursts across a couple of hours. After that last session in the Fogden, I was really feeling it.

So, for both physical and emotional reasons, an evening session in Wuthering Waves that same day was out. But those aren't the only two games I could have played. I have a raft of unplayed games on Steam, many of which are available to play on GeForce Now. 

Let's see. Earlier this year I was playing Road 96 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Both of those are on GFN. I started afresh in Palworld when it launched officially a few weeks back. I bought Brok the Investigator, Kathy Rain 2 and Mutant Year Zero this year, with the intent of playing them immediately, and I haven't started any of them. 

Going back further, I have unfinished games of My Time At Sandrock and Sable waiting to be picked back up. I was even playing The First Descendant for a while. All of those are on GeForce Now. Plenty of choice then. So what did I play?

New World. Or should I say New World Aeternum. Let's not forget the rebranding because that was so successful. Sure. Why not go back to a dead game walking? That makes sense.

But it worked. On Thursday evening I played New World for an hour and eighteen minutes, meaning I played video games for almost three and a half hours in one day. And then I played New World for another fifty-five minutes yesterday and we didn't even have the internet until lunch time.  

Operation success, I guess, or so far at least. Now I just have to keep it up. And in that regard, I have to say New World is helping quite a lot. I want to go play it right now...

It's always been such a comfortable game. I've always been able just to log in and potter around and find things are getting done in a satisfying fashion without me really needing to plan anything. 

Everything gives xp of some kind so you're always making progress. Nothing's very difficult unless you want it to be. You can spend a whole session not fighting anything and come away feeling you've been well entertained. And there's always something interesting to look at. It reminds me a lot of Black Desert Online in that respect. 

(Hmm. I wonder if Black Desert's on Ge Force Now? I wouldn't mind playing some of that again and it might make a good alternative when New World goes away next year.)

 

I'm not that much of a goal-oriented player but I do like to have some vague plan in the background, just for the sake of structure. Last time I played New World, back in December, I was working on mount progression. From memory, I had to stop because the next part was in Nighthaven and you have to be Level 65 even to go there. 

The first thing I noticed when I logged in was that there's double XP across the board. I'm guessing that's a permanent addition until the sunset. Since I hadn't played for months, I also had full rested XP, which, combined with that server bonus, put a x4 modifier on xp gain. That seemed like a gimme for getting to 65 so off I went.

First off, I went to Brimstone Sands which, at 63, seemed like it was level-appropriate. It was, but it was also a bit more like hard work than I was keen to get involved with, so I looked on the map for somewhere a little softer and came up with Great Cleave. 

I don't remember a lot about Great Cleave and my suspicion is that that's because there didn't used to be a lot there to remember. As I was later to discover with Edengrove, quite a bit of content seems to have been added to New World since I played regularly. Both zones seem to have a lot more going on than I remember. I had no trouble picking up a slew of new quests, ones I didn't remember seeing before. 

I roamed around the snowy mountains of Great Cleave, following quest markers, picking off the required mobs or opening the necessary chests as I came across them. The questing was fun, even if the quests themselves weren't. 

I'd forgotten that every quest in New World is fully voiced. That's a place Amazon could have saved some money. The quality of the voice acting is, to put it politely, variable. As, for that matter, is the quality of the writing. Some, I read and listened to with pleasure. Others, I had to skip through as fast as possible. And I hardly ever skip quest dialog. It has to be pretty bad to make me feel bad for whoever had to read the words out loud. A couple of these were that bad.

The best of the bunch by a long way was a multi-part quest involving a woman who wanted me to find some bits and pieces for her so she could put them together to make a poppet that she thought might then turn into a real child. If this wasn't Aeternum I'd have assumed she was deranged but in that cursed place you can never be sure. Reality is malleable there. 

The quest ended with nothing having happened but when my character expressed disappointment that no child appeared, the woman said it was too early to tell if it had worked and we'd just have to wait and see, which I thought was an excellent conclusion. The quest may or may not continue at some point, possibly with the spawn of some kind of devil-child but it'll work for me whether it does or it doesn't.

A few quests and a lot of random slaughter along the way took me through 63 to 64 pretty handily. I logged out on Thursday evening half way through the level and the next evening I dinged 65. All quite painless and indeed quite enjoyable. New World is a weirdly cosy game for something that's probably situated somewhere in the horror genre.

Since the whole point of the exercise was to get to Nighthaven, before logging out for the night, I got on my horse and followed the twisty, winding, confusing sand-trails across Brimstone Sands to the unlikely border with the cold, dark forest next door. From there I cantered down the better-kept roads of the Mittel-European province to the main settlement, where I camped for the night.

I'm quite looking forward to getting back to find out what the story is there. And to carry on with whatever it was I was doing with those mounts back before Christmas. There are another five levels to the cap so I might time it so I only play while I have rested xp. The game has another six months or so to run so there's no hurry. I'd like to have a character at the cap when it goes.

Why? I don't know. So I've done it?  So it feels complete? Closure? 

No, not really. Mostly just to have a vague direction to be heading, I guess. I suppose I do need some kind of goal to keep me moving in the right direction after all. Otherwise I'm likely just to wander off and find something else to do instead.

As with all these returns to games I used to play, it's bound to be fleeting but that doesn't make any of those brief visits less than worthwhile. If nothing more, it's worth spending a little time with old friends who you know won't be around much longer.

Okay, that went a little darker than I was expecting. I'm just saying New World was always a fun diversion and that's not going to stop until the servers go down. 

And it doesn't really feel like a dead game yet. There were plenty of people playing when I was on. A steady hum of conversation in general chat. People passing on the roads and doing things in the settlements. The Steam Charts have numbers holding steady at an average of around five hundred concurrent all year. There are MMORPGs that have been running twice, three times as long as New World that would be delighted with those numbers. It's a shame it has to go.

How long I'll keep playing while it's still around is anyone's guess. History suggests not much more than a week or two. But that should be enough to get me to 70. 

After that, I'll probably be done. 

Duskwood By Night

 Since I knew I was going to be working on Sunday, on Saturday evening, after I'd come home from work, had tea, played with Beryl and caught up with my bloglog (That's a portmanteau I just now came up with for a backlog of blogs. Think it'll catch on? No, me neither.) I figured I'd better at least make a start on preparing a post for tomorrow. That's today if you're reading this on the day I'll be posting it. I think those are the right tenses. Don't you just love grammar?

I'd already decided on a screenshot post showcasing the new region, Duskmoor, the one got added to Neverness To Everness with the most recent update. I was thinking that, thanks to the miracle of GeForce Now, I could run around Duskmoor in bed on my laptop, a sentence wide open to misinterpretation, I know, but we're all gamers here, aren't we? I'm sure everyone knows what I mean.

  Once I got into the game and opened the map to figure out where to go first, it occurred to me right away that the obvious thing to do would be to visit all the Rero Boxes (Red phone booths.) and open up the teleport system for the new map. There are only three of them so it oughtn't to have taken long. (There go those tenses again...)

Except, as noted, Duskmoor is fricken huge! I started jogging towards the first box from where I left Flora last time, which was  at the entrance to the Fogden instance, then I realized it was a kilometer and a half away.

 I'm in the habit of running everywhere in Hetherau, by which  mean I open the map, locate the teleport location nearest to wherever it is I want to go, port there and jog the rest of the way. You can teleport to all sorts of things in NTE, not just the Rero Boxes, so there's usually something close by.

At least, there is in the city. Duskmoor is very much not in the city. Duskmoor is out of town and it's about 90% forest and lake, as far as I can tell, with a tourist and resort strip along the coast and not a whole hell of a lot of civilization anywhere else. 

But it does have highways. And I do have a car. I don't use it much but I have one. And I can drive it. Not very well, I'll grant you, but well enough to get around.

 I whistled for my trusty steed and along the road it came. With no-one at the wheel. How does that work? An Anomaly, I imagine. If anything odd happens in Hethereau, there's always an Anomaly behind it.

I got in and started to drive and in about ten seconds I realized why it is that Flora goes everywhere on foot. If only that unseen Anomaly could drive the car when she was in it, too. 

But wait! Maybe it can!

There's an auto-drive option. I've tried it before and never got it to work but there's always a first time. 

I hit the key to put the car into auto-drive and for the first time it I didn't get an error message about not having a target. The car set off down the road without Flora's hands on the wheel. It was night and we were careening along at top speed but fortunately traffic was light, although not, as it turned out, nearly light enough.

 I learned a few things on my trip through Duskwood.

1. Autodrive requires you to set a target destination before engaging. That's what I'd been doing wrong all those other times. 
2. Having the car drive itself does not mean you smash into other vehicles. In fact, on this evidence, I'd say it's even more reckless than Flora.
3. If you get out of your car and leave it in the middle of the road, a huge traffic jam will form behind it, even if it would be easy and legal for them all just to pass. Also, NPC drivers get really cross if you do that. 

 Even using auto-drive, which was a lot more efficient than having Flora take the wheel, even allowing for the collisions, it still took quite a while to drive the route that took me past all three Rero Boxes. I wasn't timing it but I'd guess it was something like fifteen or twenty minutes, counting the time Flora spent getting out and going to the boxes, all of which were very close to the road.

There was surprisingly little to see other than some very lovely scenery. Even the spots where the boxes were didn't seem to have a lot going on. It wasn't entirely clear why someone would have taken the trouble to place them there in the first place.

 The oddest thing I found was a ramp, clearly designed for a car to run up at speed so it could launch itself over a cliff. Flora walked up it and peered over the edge and decided it looked like a sure way to kill yourself in  blazing car wreck so she declined to do a solo Thelma and Louise and moved on.

I'm guessing it had something to do with the racing circuit that came with the update. Indeed, the whole of the extensive Duskwood highway system, which appears to be serving no-one and nothing, might be there just for the purpose of giving people somewhere new to race. It certainly seems a more realistic plan than setting up new courses in the city itself.

 And that was all I had time for, other than to jog through the woods to take a look at a tall steel pylon, which turned out to be frustratingly just beyond the limits of the explorable area. It immediately made me wonder if further expansion in that direction is planned because if not, why put the damn thing there at all?

All of that took place at night, as you can see from the pictures I took (The new "Hide UI" toggle, now available on F7, makes it so much easier to take quick snapshots.) so it's highly likely I missed something. I could have changed the time to make it daylight but I was so involved in what I was doing (You can call it immersed, if you must.) that I forgot it was an option. 

So far, I can't say I have a very clear idea what Duskwood is for. It's big and it's beautiful but what does it do? Then again, maybe it doesn't need to do anything. Maybe it just needs to be. 

Good advice for us all.  

She's One Smart Cookie

Is it still Creator Appreciation Week? I think it might be. Or if it isn't, it was on Friday, which was when I started this post.

I'm going to throw a little appreciation at Neverness To Everness but not to the whole team, much though they deserve it. I think it's already apparent how much I appreciate their work from all the highly complimentary posts I've been writing about the game since it started.

No, I'm going to be a little more specific, although by no means as specific as I'd like to be. I want to say how much I appreciate both whoever it is that writes the dialog for Zero aka The Appraiser aka Coco aka the Player Character aka Flora (In my case only, that last one.)

Gacha games are unusual in that they have a central character that's simultaneously very clearly the avatar of the player, in the way a character in an MMORPG would be, but also a scripted NPC in terms of the main storyline. PCs in MMORPGs can do pretty much whatever they like, central characters in RPGs have to operate within very specific parameters but gacha leads get to walk a middle path.

That puts them in a very awkward place when it comes to relatability. They can either go the Silent Protagonist route, all nods and eye rolls, or they can be fully scripted. Both choices have their attendant risks. Both risk alienating the player if the balancing trick doesn't come off.

I used to be very firmly in the Silent Protagonist camp. I felt quite strongly about my characters having words put in their mouth. I'd much rather only hear them talking in my imagination than have to listen to someone else getting it wrong out loud.

In a fully scripted RPG, it's only a problem if the writing or the voice acting is really bad. There, you know you aren't playing your own character. You're not really "playing" a character at all. You're just steering one around the screen. You're borrowing them. You don't own them. You're not them. They have their own agenda. Your job is to facilitate them in achieving their goals.

 

In an MMORPG, conversely, even if the character you're playing is given lines to speak, you're most likely going to ignore them. Your character is either yours or it's you, depending on perspective. The great majority of the time, you won't be interacting with NPCs in conversation anyway, nor choosing responses in cut scenes; you'll be killing monsters and chatting to your friends and guildmates.

Gacha open world rpgs, though, kind of straddle the fence. There's a strong, linear storyline that's going to take up a good deal of your time but there are also countless other activities in which you'll be either alone or with NPCs. A lot of those won't involve much talking but some will and the ones that do are likely to be the more interesting ones, like the ones where you get to hang out with your imaginary friends and just chat.

It gets even more confusing when the game uses the peculiar convention of the genre that sees you naming a character in Character Creation, only to find all the NPCs calling them something completely different. This is an annoying but supposedly necessary function of many voice-acted games, where clearly the voice actors can't magically enunciate the names of thousands and thousands of player-made characters so a generic substitute (Like "Commander" in Guild Wars 2.) has to to stand in for whatever the character calls themselves. 

I'm surprised, all the same, that with modern technology that can't be improved. Maybe that would be an acceptable use of in-game AI: to slot the player character's name, correctly enunciated, into pre-recorded dialog.

It already happens with text dialog, of course. Occasionally NPCs will even ask you what you'd like them to call you. And then sometimes they forget and call you something else anyway!

The whole thing is prone to both confusion and frustration. If you find yourself stuck playing a character who keeps saying things you can't imagine "your" character saying, it not only breaks immersion, it can break your relationship with your own character, too. It's probably even worse when you have to listen to "your" character talking in a voice that sounds absolutely nothing like the voice you hear in your head.

 

I'm extremely pleased to say that not only does none of that happen for me in Neverness To Everness but that everything that Flora says and everything about the way she says it rings completely true to her character, as I imagine it. 

The Appraiser, a job title I have come to like very much in the past few months, since it really does seem to describe what she does, maintains a deliciously dry, skeptical attitude to pretty much everything. She's never cynical or dismissive but neither does she take anything at face value. She's always alert for nuance and subtext and she can spot it lurking in the floweriest language. 

People do not easily fool The Appraiser. Appraisa  l isn't just her job; it's a core aspect of her personality. She can spot a scam or a con almost before it starts and she's ever alert for someone presenting themselves as something other than what they really are.

Some of this is expressed in the kind of mildly questioning response you might give to a friend who's telling a story you feel might be a little exaggerated. You can imagine her raising one eyebrow as she does it although I'm not sure NTE's animations quite run to that yet.

What really reveals the depth of her skepticism, though, are the internal monologues. The Appraiser frequently runs what someone has just said through her internal monitoring system and we get to hear her thoughts. That's when I sometimes laugh out loud.

All of that is in the writing. I don't know if the same person handles all the main character's dialog or whether duties vary but however it's done, so far it's been extremely consistent. I would absolutely love to be able to offer my appreciation to the individual writer or writers responsible but as is almost always the case, there's no direct accreditation. 

I just tried googling it and Gemini tells me "Specific individual writer credits for the player character's (the Appraiser / Esper Zero) dialogue in Neverness to Everness have not been publicly named by Hotta Studio". Exactly as I expected.

 

If I could make a single change to RPGs and MMORPGs it would be to add the writer's credits to the text that shows up in the quest journal. It would be so easy to do and it would allow players to follow writers in games just as they can in other media. If any game does it, though, I've never seen it.

It's a lot easier to find out the name of the voice actors who bring your favorite characters to life. I'm not sure why that should be, other than that writers tend to be bottom of the heap when it comes to respect in almost all collaborative media. If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, write books. At least there you get your name on the cover.

The voice artist for the female version of The Appraiser is Suzie Yeung and she does a superb job. She hits  just the right tone; confident and yet somehow still a little uncertain, friendly and caring, yet slightly reserved. She gets that "...erm... really? Are you sure about that?" skepticism down perfectly. There's no conflict whatever between Flora's voice as I hear it in my head and how it comes out of the speakers. Suzie Young is Flora now.

There is always a risk in getting attached to a particular vocal rendition of a character in an online game, as I saw - or rather heard - to my annoyance in GW2. Sometimes actors move on to other jobs or can't be booked for certain updates because of scheduling conflicts. Or the studio for some reason doesn't choose to keep using them. It's jarring when a character you're familiar with starts talking differently, especially when it's your character.

I hope that never happens to The Appraiser. Long may Suzie Yeung keep speaking for her. And long may whoever it is that's putting words in her mouth keep doing that, too! 

6-5 - Mint To Serve...

 Summer's here! No, wait, that's not right... summer's nearly over. But not in Hethereau!

It does seem odd, dropping a summer-themed update in late August, but then a lot of games do it. It seems even odder when you consider that the big Summer Break in virtually all the regions where these games are played is just about to come to an end in a couple of weeks, whereas the beach-themed content is likely to be with us for a month and a half, well into the start of the new school year.

Of course, it's not only kids or even college students who play these games but given the kind of events and activities that feature in many of them, it's hard not to believe that's the target audience. If it was intended to appeal to an older demographic, there'd be a lot more alcohol involved.

The new update for Neverness To Everness brings a bunch of seaside fun, as I mentioned in a post a week or so ago. What I didn't mention then, because I didn't know, is that the seaside resort where it all takes place is in a new part of the city. 

The district is called Duskmoor, which doesn't sound remotely like anywhere you'd go to eat ice-cream and stroll along the promenade. It's described as "a vast mountainous region north of the Miguel District" and they are not kidding. It's gigantic, although I suspect a lot of it is open country.

I'd be a bit more authoritative but I've only taken a quick look so far and that was on the laptop, in bed the other night, so I don't even have the few screenshots I took, near to hand. (And I'm too lazy to go into the bedroom, power up the laptop and mail them to myself...)

 

I didn't do anything while I was there anyway, other than run all the way to the Wertheimer Tower to register the teleport and get the region opened on my map, which was when it became immediately obvious just how big the place is. It's damn near as big as all the rest of the districts put together. I'm very much looking forward to exploring the whole thing.

But first there's a story to get through. I started it this morning although that wasn't my plan. What I was going to do was try out some of the new summer events and I did, for a while, starting with the volleyball because when I logged in the intro quest for it, Jade Star, was already up on my tracker. 

I have no idea why it was there. I must have been looking at it when I was on the laptop, I imagine, although I can't remember doing it. Anyway, Flora was in Duskwood, next to the Anomaly Tower, and the blue quest marker was pointing towards the beach half a kilometer away, so I just went with it. I was curious, anyway, to see how this volleyball thing was going to work.

I did wonder if it might be player vs player. It's very easy to forget, but NTE is a an online co-op title and it seems a four-person sport like beach volleyball would be a perfect fit for four-person co-op. 

It might be yet, for all I know, but that's not how the event starts out.

Sidebar: By a synchronicitous co-incidence, a very odd thing happened as I was running through Duskwood today. A window popped up on screen, asking me if I wanted to accept a request from someone called Jana to join me in my world. This is the first time anything like that's happened since I started playing the game. I had no idea it was even possible. Jana was waiting for a Yes or No but the whole thing took me completely by surprise and I just stared at the pop-up, not responding, trying to figure out what was happening, until the timer ran down and it vanished. Sorry, Jana.

After it was gone I rummaged around in the settings until I found the section that tells you who else is playing and allows you to set parameters on invites. You can have Private, Friends or Confirmation Required. I had no idea any of that was there until this morning. I considered setting it to Private but in the end, considering I've only had one in several months, I figured I might as well leave it as it was. Next time, if there ever is one, I might even accept a request, just to see what happens. It might be someone wanting to play volleyball...

The volleyball event starts with a conversation with someone going by the highly unlikely name of Uncle Loong. I know, thanks to playing the MMORPG Loong many years ago, that a loong is some kind of traditional Chinese dragon. Any time I meet an NPC in a game and they have a name like that, it makes me suspicious. 

I don't think "Uncle" Loong is a dragon in human form but you can never be sure. As to whose uncle he might be, your guess is as good as Flora's. He looks about twenty-two, though, so that makes me even more suspicious...

Whoever or whatever he is, he sets you up for a warm-up match so you can learn how the game is played and show him how good you are. You need a partner but luckily Mint volunteers so fast you don't even have time to finish asking her. 

She's there in a nanosecond, dressed for the part. I had actually been wondering if Flora was going to have to play beach volleyball dressed in her pant-suit. She looked bad enough trotting along the sand dressed that way, weaving between all the beachgoers in their bikinis and cut-offs. Luckily, once the game starts, Flora magically re-appeared, dressed in some suitable beach-wear I had no idea she owned. It's absolutely hideous but that's by-the-by.

The game itself has quite a few controls to master. I haven't yet mastered any of them. By the time I'd played two matches, I just about knew how to serve and that was it. 

The Warm-Up is the lowest possible level of difficulty and I still only won one of the two maches. The first was a close-run thing that Mint and Flora eventually won 9-7. You need to get to seven and then be two points clear for a victory.

 

In the second match we were doing much better. We served to open and I seemed to have gotten the hang of that to the extent that we were 6-1 up by the time we lost serve. Unfortunately, I very much had not gotten the hang of returning serve, so we lost our massive lead and ended up losing 8-6. 

At that point I felt like I'd probably had enough beach volleyball for the time being. It seemed like something I'd probably be able to get to be at least passable at, with practice, but I wasn't convinced I had the motivation. It is fun and it's beautifully animated. I could do without Mint apologizing every time she misses a shot but other than that I enjoyed it a fair bit.

I was very surprised to find, when I spoke to Uncle Loong again, that we'd somehow met with his satisfaction, despite only winning one match. The quest completed and immediately another replaced it, telling Flora she needed to go to Eibon right away. So she did.

That turned out to be the start of the new Main Story Quest. I spent the next hour and a half on it and it was excellent. But that's a tale for another post. 

Rising From The Moonlit Fog... It's... It's... A Bicycle!

Rising From The Moonlit Fog is the next milestone update for Neverness To Everness. Don't you just love these titles? MassivelyOP had a compendium report on three upcoming gacha game content drops yesterday and they all had names that sound like Jon Anderson might have considered them a little too much, when he was drafting the lyrics for Tales From Topographic Oceans.

Alongside the title I just mentioned, there was Tower of Fantasy's relatively tame Dreamland Beyond The Void and Wuthering Waves' frankly bananas Lamplight in Mirage, Sword’s Resolve in Heart. What does it all mean? And what drugs are these people on?

The NTE update comes out in exactly a week, on August 19th. I'm really looking forward to it. Inconveniently for me, since I'm currently attempting to play both of them, Wuthering Waves drops its new content the day after, on August 20th.

It would be a problem if I really was trying to stay up to date in both games but since I'm already about six months behind in WW, it's not going to make much practical difference. I'll be focusing on NTE and plugging away at the storyline I've missed in WW when I either want a change or if I run out of things to do in Hethereau.

Looking at the six-minute YouTube trailer for Rising From The Moonlit Fog, that doesn't seem too likely. There's a lot in there. Let me break it down a little.

First, here's the video. Take your time. I'll wait. 

And now I'll tell you what you would have seen if you'd watched it, which I'm betting hardly any of you did. Top Tip for Blaugust: if you find yourself short of original content, find something someone else has done and summarize it. 

We open with just over a minute of excerpts from the main storyline. I found it extremely confusing. There's some sort of game, arranged by that sociopathic woman from Daffodil's past, which looks like it takes place in some Anomalous Realm. Apparently we may "choose one thing in the Fogden as a reward" but we have to beat out all comers because "the Fog Coffin only allows one victor."

Is anyyone getting this? And if so, would they care to explain it to me? 

It looks like there are lot of people on the Appraiser's team. A whole gang. In one long shot I think I can count seven of them. Of us, I guess that should be. 

Two of them are the new draws, Zankou and Linko. They look like they've been selected to appeal to very different parts of the audience. Also, why do so many characters in NTE have names that make them sound like they used to be in the Marx Bros?

Honestly, you could start putting the characters into teams just by archetype, now. Zankou looks like one of the sultry, grown-up femme fatales in the mold of Hotori and Jiyuan while Linko is obviously Team Cute 'n' Crazy along with the likes of Chiz, Iroi and Haniel. 

Yet again, there are no new male characters. Hotta knows its audience. Looking at the wiki, including the two about to be added, the roster is now five male to fifteen female. A three to one ratio in favor of the girls, although you could subdivide that again into adults, adolescents and children. All we need now are a couple of robots and a few cuddly animals and we'll be all set.

 

Also looking at that wiki list, I see Zankou is supposedly a member of The Scarlet Letter, which makes her a baddie. Can she be one of the bad guys and a playable character? I guess we're about to find out.

So much for the story, about which I feel like I now know less than I did before I watched the video. On to the non-story content. There are a few very interesting additions to the game there.

Before I get to those, though, there's a whole racing "Expansion" to get through, if we're following along with the video. I don't think they mean expansion as in Wrath of the Lich King or Ruins of Kunark. I think what they mean is they've literally expanded the course. Made the race tracks longer. Or added more of them. Or both.

I wouldn't know. I don't race in Neverness To Everness. As I've said before, I find steering  four-wheeled vehicles in the game difficult to the point of being stressful and I do absolutely as little of it as possible. I am not the target market for any expansion of the racing side of the game. Although as we're about to find out, I'm not averse to more vehicular options.

After the video's done showcasing the new tracks and challenges it's on to the catwalk. There's almost a minute and a half of fresh fashion, beginning with outfits for the new characters. There's a clear explanation of how to get each of them, which is nice. It's good to be able to set goals. 

Unfortunately, few of those goals will be easily achievable or cheap and never both at the same time. You can roll for them or grind for them or pay real money. Them's your choices.

Fortunately for me, I don't much like any of the new clothes except for Linko's Couch Potato outfit, which is just a sweatshirt and shorts. I really would like some ordinary, unpretentious, casual clothes for my characters; things that don't make them look like they're cosplaying anime characters at an off-brand comic convention.

 

Then again, it could be worse. Much, much  worse. Until my recent return to the game, I'd forgotten - or more probably driven from my mind for the sake of my mental well-being - what the player-character is forced to wear as a default outfit in Wuthering Waves. It's hideous beyond belief. The default PC look in NTE is orders of magnitude more acceptable.

Still, I'd like that sweatshirt. Only there are two problems. No, three. First, I'd have to roll for and win Linko. Second, I'd have to grind to Bond Level 10 with her. And third, I'm guessing only Linko can wear it, so I'd have to be Linko. I don't imagine any of that is going to happen.

The second half of the fashion show is all beachwear. In my opinion, they could have more usefully introduced this with the last update. Summer will be nearly over by the time this one arrives. Not to mention the last update was actually set on a frigging holiday beach resort island! Does no-one think these things through?

The beachwear itself is okay, although it seems odd that it's character-specific. What's everyone else supposed to do? Stay at home? Or maybe sit at the beach cafe and watch while the lucky few have fun on the sand. 

For once, the boys get by far the best of it. The male Appraiser outfit is nicely ordinary but the best of the lot is Chaos's wetsuit, which really does look good. Other than that, I like Mint's big straw hat and that's about it. Oh, and the female Appraiser look is awful. She seems to have put her bra on over the rest of her clothes. Is that a thing, now?

After the outfits comes the first Very Interesting Addition: Beach Volleyball. I have no clue how this is going to work. Since NTE is primarily a single-player game, I assume it's something you play with NPCs but it would obviously make a great co-op game. I seem to remember playing soccer in an MMORPG before (Free Realms, I think...) but never volleyball. I'm extremely curious to try this one out.

 

If you thought volleyball was a left-field choice for a new activity, Hotta would like you to hold their beer. Next up is another mini-game. It's called Brick By Brick and from the video it would appear to involve driving a fork-lift in a warehouse. 

I know what you're going to ask... WHY!!!??? For the sake of all that's holy, why? Did someone fill in that box at the end of one of the surveys, saying "I really like the game but it's lacking one, vital element - repetitive manual labor, preferably warehouse work". Who wants to drive a fucking forklift truck when they could be doing literally anything else in the game?

I bet I end up loving it. 

But from here, I'm a lot more interested in the next section - new vehicles. Yes, I don't get on very well with cars in NTE but these aren't cars. 

For a start, one of them's a jet ski. Which, for some reason, the video doesn't call a jet ski. It just calls it "New Water Vehicle". It even has a name: Tide. Guys, we can see it's a jet ski! 

And it looks great. The big advantage the sea around Hethereau has over Hethereau itself, when it comes to driving a vehicle, is that there are no roads in the sea. And no walls, buildings, bushes, central reservation barriers, buses or zebra crossings. I'm not saying it'll be impossible to crash into anything but it's going to be a lot harder.

Jet skis are not uncommon in video games. I've ridden one or two before. I'll tell you what I've never ridden in any game though and that's a bicycle.

Which is odd, when you come to think of it. Loads of games have motorcycles but I can't think of a single game I've ever played that had pushbikes.The mechanics must be the same, mustn't they? Once you've done the work for the motorbike, it's just a different skin, isn't it?

Well, no, I guess there's the leg animation to consider. You have to pedal a bicycle. They're famous for it. Maybe that's why no-one bothers to add them. 

 

The animation looks excellent. Very convincing. And you can give someone a ride on the back, too. Can you have another NPC ride pillion on the motorbike? If so, I hadn't noticed the option. 

There's also a kind of dune buggy/quad bike deal called Sirocco that looks like it might be fun, especially if you like running people over. Seriously, that thing's going to be a menace, on and off the beach. 

The bikes (There's more than one model.) and the buggy can be bought with Fons but the jet ski comes from "Mystery Boxes", which I assume means loot boxes you buy. If these are a thing in the game already, I hadn't noticed. Since I would like the jet ski, I'm going to have to look into it. Maybe it's like the sports car event. I never even looked at that one.

After the vehicles comes housing. Normally, I'd be all over a new housing option but NTE is one of those rare games that's already too generous when it comes to setting up home. You can get five massive houses now and the only real obstacle is amassing enough in-game cash to buy them. I have two and even that feels like it's one too many.

Consequently, I wasn't very hyped to see we were getting a sixth... until I saw what it was. It's on a completely different scale to the others, by which I mean it's much smaller and more manageable. It's down to earth and best of all it's an actual house, not an apartment. 

Stillmeadow House has a garden and a car-port and a lovely, suburban setting and I want it. It's buyable with Fons so I can have it, too. I just have to stop going to the Catzebo every day.

Finally in the video we come to the "And also..." section, which is really pretty interesting. I had to freeze-frame this part because it all flips by too fast to take in and not all of it has been translated but when I was able to read the tiny English text along the bottom, I saw quite a few things I liked the look of.

Nanally gets optional glasses to go with her Popular Kid outfit. I don't have Nanally's Popular Kid outfit. In fact, I don't have Nanally. If and when I do, though, I will certainly have her wear them. Glasses are second only to hats as essential accessories in games.

 

There's a bonus to speed of city stamina consumption coming with Tycoon Level 16. Until very recently I had no interest in City Stamina and had no idea why people seemed so fussed about it. I still don't really understand how it works but I do know it's a way to make money and as of this update I'm going to need a lot more of that. Anything that makes it come faster is welcome.

Speaking of which, you'll be able to grow crops in your garden in the new house and sell those for Fons. And so farming comes to Hethereau. I am not a fan of farming, as a rule, but it does depend on the implementation. I reserve judgment until I try it.

Also on the money-making trail, Pink Paws Heist is getting a mini-map. That's very good news. I have no idea where I am in that damn bank. Not even with a walk-through. With a map, I might actually be able to grab some cash and get out in time. 

But then, there's an incomprehensible rules change to Pink Paws that now somehow ties it to a weekly volleyeball challenge match... What do beach volleyball and bank robbery have to do with each other? Will I ever get my one million Fons? I very much doubt it.

One coming feature that sounds half-baked at best is "Random Outfits". As of the update "Characters will automatically swap to a random outfit from their wardrobe whenever you log in or change scenes." 

Excuse me? So I spend either time or money or both getting the look I want and then the game randomly swaps it for something else? Is that good business sense? Did anyone ask for it?

It'll be fine if it's optional. It had better be optional! Although at the moment, since I only have two outfits, it's hardly going to be a pressing issue for me. But if I get more, the damn game had better let me wear the ones I want, whenever I want!

There are, of course, a whole raft of limited-time events, some tied to the new stuff I've been talking about. But then there always are. Let's not bother with any of those.

No, I've left the very best part of the entire update to last. Here it comes! Ready...?

 

"A button will be added to the main screen to hide the UI with a single tap"

OMG! That's exactly what I wanted! That one change will make a massive difference to my gameplay. I know that for absolute certain because Wuthering Waves has it and it's been transformative for me there.

The issue is that because I play both NTE and WW on GeForce Now, any screenshot I take with the in-game camera gets sent to Nvidia's servers not to my PC. In order to take screenshots I can use on the blog, I have to use Win+PrtScr, which works perfectly, but which captures the full screen as it appears on my monitor, UI and all.

To get clean screenshots in Wuthering Waves I just have to toggle the UI off using Alt-C but in NTE I have to hit Escape to get to the "Mobile Phone" menu, open Settings, click on the Video tab and push the UI Opacity slider back to zero. And then, when I'm done taking screenshots, I have to do it all again in to put the UI back.

Being able to click one button on the screen instead of doing all of that is going to be so much easier. Huge quality of life improvement.

I'm really looking forward to Rising From The Moonlit Fog just for that.

Okay, not just for that...