A Portmanteau Post Packed With Plangent Yet Pointless Peroration. And It's Not Even Friday.

It would be nice to be able to post about something other than New World but since that's about all I'm playing right now it might be hard to come up with anything much. I suppose I could give it a try, though. Let's see...

Well, I did log in to Neverwinter Online a couple of days ago. Shintar posted a PSA about some great freebies there that sounded too good to miss. 

There was a bit of patching but it didn't take too long to get in. I found the window where you claim stuff without too much difficulty. Naturally there was a lot waiting there because that's what happens in every Free-to-Play, when you step away for a while. Makes you scared to come back, sometimes.

I had plenty of bag space for once, so I took a risk and claimed everything. To my considerable surprise I still had plenty of bag space afterwards. Then I spent a while looking at those legendary mounts Shintar mentioned. 

That was white space
until I clicked on the blasted box!

There were five to choose from, three of which were either hideous or nightmare-inducing and one of which I thought looked a bit dull. Shintar says it's a "classic" but I don't have the Neverwinter background to know why. 

There was one I did like the look of, a kind of translucent stag with constellations under the skin. I picked that one. It definitely seemed worth having logged in for. 

Then I had to go and push my luck.

There were quite a few unopened chests and boxes and suchlike in my bags and as I said, I had plenty of inventory space, so I made the mistake of opening one of them. After that I didn't have any inventory space at all. 

There was so much packed into that one little box it filled every last slot I had and probably then some. I don't know what it all was. I was so annoyed I logged out without looking at any of it. See? I told you there was such a thing as too much free stuff!

 

Give me a second. I'm going to take a deep breath and log in again so I can get a couple of screenshots... 

... make that half an hour, three Reddit threads and two forum posts. I was just about to watch a YouTube video, when I finally found someone capable of explaining clearly and succunctly how to swap one mount for another. You wouldn't think it would be that difficult.

Worth it in the end, though. It's a nice-looking mount, even if it does look as though it's got a goiter. You can't really see its head, just one long, fat neck. The stars are pretty, as I hoped they would be, but the stag also changes color continually, cycling through a range of blues and greens from indigo to pale jade. Certainly an upgrade, visually, from my Marbled Stallion and it goes without saying the stats are far better.

None of which is going to make the least difference if I can't play because my bags are full. I think it's mostly new gear from the recent levelling revamp but there are at least another eight unopened boxes in there, too. It'll be a while before I dare open any of those.

As well as dropping into Neverwinter I did make one, desultory attempt to take a first look at Gloria Victis, the game I got for free when MassivelyOP dropped some Steam keys for it a while back. I got as far as installing the game but when the login screen opened it wanted me to go register an account somewhere and I so didn't want to do that I logged straight out again and haven't been back. 

Clearly that says everything that needs to be said about how genuinely
interested in playing GV I must be. I've made dozens, maybe hundreds of accounts for games over the years, some of which I had no intention of playing for more than a hour or two.

Even so, it's not really that I'm not curious to try the game. It's that I do get very irritated with games that are on Steam but also insist on separate accounts with a third party before you can play them. Make up your minds, guys! Either it's a Steam game or it's not. If anyone's taking notes about barriers to entry, that's quite a high one for me.

There was no such double-dipping when it came to the Lord Winklebottom Investigates demo. That, if you remember (I'm sure you don't. Why would you?) was one of the handful of games I downloaded during the last Steam Next Fest. Also, so far, the only one I've played.

Is it any good, I imagine you're asking. I have to imagine because I'm pretty sure no-one's asking anything of the sort. With a name like "Lord Winklebottom Investigates" everyone's mind must surely be made up already.

Actually, it's not bad. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was good but for a game in the relatively early stages of development (It opens with a warning that just about everything from the voice acting to the puzzles is likely to change before release.) I found it quite entertaining for about half an hour.

The pictures are moderately charming, if a bit rough and ready. The writing is mostly solid, raising a slight smile at the appropriate moments. The puzzles are comfortably logical within the paramaters of the genre (i.e. Utterly ludicrous but no more so than usual.)

Perhaps worryingly, given the warning, the aspect I most warmed to were the voiceovers. The two main characters come across as pleasantly understated, the line readings are accurate, there's a wry sense of humor in the performances and the two actors are convincing in the roles of lifelong friends and colleagues. Some of the other characters are a little accenty but again no more so than you'd expect in something like this. I've heard a lot worse and in games with a much bigger budget.

 

Despite those mildly positive opinions I didn't stick with the game for long. I've played a lot of point & click adventures over the last couple of years and it's gradually dawning on me that there are some serious structural problems with the genre itself that the better games manage to conceal behind great graphics, voice acting and writing.

Put simply, I like the adventures but I could do without the pointing and clicking, which does cast a shadow over the whole concept. By far the most enjoyable games involve much more talking and much less "click object A on object B". Broken Sword, Disco Elysium, Neo Cab, Kathy Rain, the whole Blackwell series, they all involve far more conversations than they do clicking one thing against another and honestly they're better for it. I'm beginning to suspect the optimum number of actual puzzles would be zero.

Come to think of it, I don't believe there are any in Neo Cab so maybe that one shouldn't even be on the list. Just demonstrates how confused I am over where the boundaries lie with these things.

Other than that, I ran around in Guild Wars 2's World vs World for an hour after I got home from work on Saturday because I was too tired to deal with the evening lag in New World. I can always play WvW. It's so relaxing, which I know is a strange thing to say about what is effectively open-world PvP, but it's true.

I still haven't found a moment to log into EverQuest II since New World arrived. I know there are a couple of panda quests backed up there, waiting for me, but those aren't going anywhere. I'm also missing the Nights of the Dead holiday, which is a bit more time-critical. I haven't even looked to see if there's any new content for that one. I really should do that.

Today, though, with the whole day to do whatever I wanted, I spent the entire morning playing New World. For me, it's a different game on a weekday morning. No lag, no frame-rate issues, no competition for anything, anywhere. Out in the countryside I could be playing a single-player rpg for all the players I run into and even in towns I only see a handful. 

In the evening, though, at times it's a slide-show, which could be a problem, not least if the server merges pack in even more people. It's seriously affecting my choice of where to live. 

I hit Level 20 Standing in Everfall last night, meaning I can now buy the house there I wanted. I even have the ten thousand gold to pay for it, although then I'd be broke. Trouble is, as I said a few posts ago, I'm having serious second thoughts. No other settlement feels anything even close to being as laggy as Everfall. I haven't bought the yellow house at the top of the hill yet and right now I'm minded not to.

There are a couple of upsides to the rethink. One is it was really easy to get to 20 Standing and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it. It only took just over a week, too. I feel confident I could do it again for any settlement. In fact, more than that, at the moment I kind of feel that raising faction with the various towns is my main motivation in the game, something I like doing more than just about anything else. Maybe I'll get to 20 Standing in a bunch of them before I decide on where to buy that crucual half-price, half-taxed first home.

The other is that I dinged 35 this morning and the perk for that is the right to own a second house. I had that plan I mentioned of maybe buying a big house at the first-timer discount but not living in it immediately so as to avoid the rent. Instead I'd buy a cheap home somewhere quieter, where I'd live until I was much higher level and presumably richer. 

That's a realistic possibility. Or it will be when I've made some more money. Right now I can't afford to buy two houses, big and small, even with the discount.

Making money; that is my next goal. Not sure how I'm going to do it yet but I imagine it will involve selling stuff to people who are too powerful and important to go get it for themselves. That's usually how it goes.

As for posts about New World, which I notice this has somehow managed to morph into, there will be more. I made some notes while I was playing this morning and there's at least a post and a half in there. Oh well, I'll get it all back in spades from everyone else in the blogosphere when Endwalker arrives, I'm sure.

And that's my queue to finish up here and go play New World some more before the roads start to fill up with jogging harvesters and levellers and the towns turn into slow-motion jitterfests. I think I had some ghouls to kill and a painter's easel to place by a waterfall. Don't ask.

Also I seem to remember I had some bags to empty. Pretty sure there was that. 

There's always that.

I Want My Stuff

Super-short post. For real. 

There's so much going on right now, stories I'd usually try to cover (...wait, do I think I'm a reporter now?) are getting a pass and that's even if I remember they're happening. If it hadn't been for Shintar's mini-post on Neverwinter's burn-it-all-down revamp I'd have missed it altogether.

There's a FAQ that covers the big changes that came in the snappily-named M21 update. There's a new class: Bard. A whole bunch of zones got canned... sorry, vaulted. Level cap is now 20. There's a new new player experience. Yes, it's one of those deals. Everyone's doing them.

Looking at character select, where Perfect World (or maybe Cryptic) handily note the last day you logged in, I see it's been just over a year since I last played Neverwinter. I would have guessed less. 

Also, who came up with those character names, eh? Me, presumably. What was I thinking of? Magmia is a name I often use but Feldspar? And Lenara Greymark sounds like I took it from a book because I sure as heck wouldn't have come up with it myself. Oh, well. I  guess they'll have to do.

Let's be honest for once. I was motivated to log in because Shintar said she got "dozens of new rewards" for content she'd already completed. I'll patch for free stuff any time.

The patch didn't take long. I guess it's quicker when you're making the game smaller. For some reason the game wanted me to re-calibrate my monitor which, if you knew my monitor, you would know was never going to happen. I lied and told it I had so it would let me in.

 

A large pop-up window appeared. I waited for the shower of free stuff. There wasn't one. Then the window disappeared. I hadn't pressed anything or I didn't think I had. It was hard to be sure. There were a lot of people yelling in chat and something seemed to be exploding close by. I think I might have pressed the "Claim Valuables" button but the window may have closed before I could see what was in there.

I opened my inventory to see if the stuff had gone straight in. Maybe it had, but before I got to find out I noticed a couple of things flashing in the HUD so I clicked on those. Seems that being max level now meant I needed to spend a bunch of points on stats. Twenty-two of them, covering a range of levels from three upwards.

I got halfway through spending them, mostly on Wisdom and Constitution, when I realised I was on my
Warlock not my Cleric. Luckily you get one free respec. I used it because chances are low I'll ever need it more. It's not like I play this game often enough for it to matter.

I respent the points properly and then the game wanted me to pick a Paragon class or some such. Ironically, it turns out there's a healing role for Warlocks so I could have stuck with the wisdom and saved the respec. Since I hadn't I picked the DPS role instead.

That completely replaced all the icons on my hotbars with new abilities, none of which I recognised or understood. I waited a bit longer to see if any free stuff was coming. It wasn't, so I thought I'd just see if much had changed from how things played for me a year ago.

Short answer? They hadn't. With no idea what I was doing I just followed the sparkly trail for the quest I'd been doing last time. I'd been level 30 then. Maybe 31. Not 32 because I still had an unopened pack of goodies marked "To be opened on your 32nd birthday". Not literally but, yes, that.

I did the whole quest - crossed a couple of open maps, went down a tunnel, across another open area, into a dungeon. Lots of kobolds tried to stop me so I killed them all and got an achievement for killing kobolds.

The only thing that happened the whole time that seemed different was that every time I picked up some gold a kobold had dropped it was the exact same amount, which just happened to be the exact sum total of all the money I had. That seemed unlikely. Also, I never got any of it. Might be a bug, might be a currency cap for free players. No idea. Annoying though, either way.

Hmm. Now I think of it, I wonder if the kobolds were stealing all my money during the fight and I was just taking it back! No, that couldn't be it. Could it?

Eventually I found the woman I'd been looking for, right at the back of the dungeon. She congratulated me on killing everything and said she could get out on her own. I left her to get on with it and followed the sparkly trail back to the camp where I'd started. 

I spoke to the guy who'd sent me and he gave me a ring. It was a sidegrade. He gave me another quest. Another person gave me a quest. I could see the rewards I'd get for doing them and they were huge upgrades. I have no idea whether that's because of the update or because my gear was so bad to begin with.

I looked through my bags for the ring and I noticed a ton of stuff that might be free stuff you get for being de-re-up-down-levelled to twenty. Since I didn't know what I'd had in there when I started, I couldn't be sure but anyway, based on the extreme lack of challenge I'd faced doing the quest, it didn't seem like it mattered. I was clearly fine as I was.

And that's where I stopped. Not because I wasn't having fun. I was having fun. I almost always have fun when I play Neverwinter. It's kind of a knockabout fun game, at least the way I play it. I just don't have time for that particular fun right now, not when I'm having so many other kinds of fun thrown at me from all directions.

I do want to know exactly what's changed and how it affects new players. I am interested. Unfortunately, I don't believe I'm the one whose going to be able to tell that story. Even if I had the time I don't have the understanding. I strongly suspect that from my perspective nothing much will seem to have changed even if plenty has. 

I'll just be doing quests I've never done in places I've never seen, using abilities I'm not familiar with and getting stuff I don't recognize. Same as it ever was. I can at least say I didn't immediately think things had gotten any worse!

If anyone wants to know any more than that, they'd better ask someone else. Maybe Shintar knows!

Start Over: Neverwinter's M21 Update

We certainly seem to be in the midst of a frenetic mmoprg news cycle right now. Every day seems to bring some new, surprising or unanticipated announcement but I don't think I've seen anything in the last few weeks quite as left-field as Cryptic's revelation than they plan on completely re-writing the entire concept of Neverwinter Online and taking the changes live next week!

I first read about it on MassivelyOP, where I had to go back and read it a second time to make sure I wasn't seeing things. Shintar at Neverwinter Thoughts, plays NWO a lot more often and at a much higher level than I ever have and is therefore far more likely than I am to know what's going on there, seemed just as blind-sided as I was, describing the upcoming changes as "completely out of the blue".

The headline change is a level squish that makes World of Warcraft's recent re-alignment look like a mere course correction. When the M21 update lands next week all existing characters will be equalized at Level 20, the new maximum level. That's a dizzyingly steep drop from the current cap of 80. 

As the FAQ at the Arc website explains

"If you are at endgame currently, you will see your level become 20 but everything will play as it did when you were 80. If you weren’t yet at level 80, you will become level 20." 

There's no stat squish to accompany the level squish. I don't remember enough about how NWO stats work to make any sense of that but the explanation of the reasoning behind the change does mention that "when reaching endgame, the focus turns to item level", something which supposedly confused players. 

The new baseline would appear to be Item Level 20. Current level 80s keep whatever Item Level above that they already have while every character that hadn't made cap before the squish gets a care package "to help get your item level to 20k which is where endgame starts now". Brand new characters made after the patch will still have to do their twenty levels the hard way before they can join in.

We'll have to see how this works in practice but on the face of it it doesn't sound obviously less confusing than doing eighty levels then shifting focus to your gear. That would seem to me to be the way most level-based mmorpgs work and I'd have thought most players would be familiar with it by now.

With a change this sweeping you might wonder what the point would be in keeping levels at all. The ostensible reason is "to connect better with D&D while also helping players understand what to focus on to improve their character", an argument I find less than convincing. Reading the details of how those twenty squished levels are going to work, it seems clear they'll be little more than an extended tutorial.

The unfortunate truth, at least as I see it, is that the underlying, organizing principles of the mmorpg genre are almost completely at odds with those of traditional Dungeons and Dragons. Mmorpgs are open-ended, exceptionally repetitive and need to be able to provide activity and entertainment for players 24/7/365, possibly for decades. 

 

D&D is all about scheduled, finite play sessions and stories and campaigns that follow a narrative to a conclusion. No-one grinds the same dungeon fifty times to get better gear in a table-top D&D game.

Whatever fudge developers attempt, that's a circle that's never going to be squared. And I wonder if that's the real motivation. 

My first thought as I read the original news story was inevitably of Star Wars Galaxies infamous NGE - the New Game Experience that fundamentally changed the nature of that game and left thousands of players bereft, angry and determined never to forgive or forget.  

Sony Online Entertainment and its CEO John Smedley took the hit for that but it eventually became an open secret that the change had been made at the direct instigation of the owners of the I.P. LucasArts. As Shintar speculates, it's not impossible that Wizards of the Coast had something to do with Neverwinter's sudden change of direction.

I like a corporate conspiracy theory as much as the next person but it seems a bit unlikely that WotC would care that much at this stage of Neverwinter's life. They seem quite content to let all kinds of peculiar things be done with the license and NWO seems well inside the parameters of what they'd consider appropriate.

Shintar also suggests the always-believable explanation of personal hubris. If true, this would hardly be the first time some high-up's vanity project or bonnet full of bees had led to a major change no-one else wanted or even understood.

I have a third theory I'd like to offer. It occured to me that what this change will do is establish a clear benchmark for a future "Neverwinter Online Classic" server. NWO is a game that's changed more than most and Cryptic is a developer that feels less likely than many to be able to reverse those changes. Except now they can.

The level squish doesn't just remove sixty levels by number, it removes some, possibly most, of the zones where players would previously have gone to gain the experience needed to level to eighty. As the FAQ explains

 "Certain former leveling adventure zones have been “vaulted”, meaning we’ve removed them from the leveling flow and access to players. Vaulted adventure zones may return at a later time in a different format."

That seems very... thoughtful. Someone's definitely looking ahead. But wait, there's more!

"A lot of the rewards were adjusted to make sure the player is geared out well while leveling. Some rewards that were no longer needed were turned off so new ones no longer drop. They still exist and can be repurposed in the future if that is ever wanted or needed."

So the zones are all safely tucked away in the vault and so are all the "rewards" players can no longer get from them. Give it a couple of years for nostalgia to do its work, let demand build up, then ride in on the white charger and bring back "Classic" Neverwinter.

Too subtle for Cryptic? Probably. But I'm starting to notice quite a few clues that suggest a number of developers have noticed just how well WoW Classic has been doing. Maybe EverQuest and Runescape didn't quite have the industry profile for their success to trigger dollar signs and certainly rushed opportunities like Rift or LotRO wouldn't have convinced anyone the past was the future but Classic and now Burning Crusade are a lot harder to miss.

I would guess that retro servers are probably part of the ten-year plan for would-be big-ticket mmorpgs these days. If you're spending millions of dollars and several years building a game you hope and expect is going to hold players attention and loyalty for five or ten years, at least, the kind of genre successes you'll be taking instruction from will already have some form of retro/nostalgia offer as part of the package. 

The developers of those older games had to make the genre up as they went along. They had no idea how long their games would last. They tended to think in terms of three to five years followed by a sequel. Reality for most of them turned out very differently. Mmorpgs tend to hang around a lot longer than ever seemed likely while sequels have tended not to do so well.

It would be almost irresponsible for an mmorpg debuting in the 2020s not to have at least some kind of plan for eventual Classic servers. At the very least you'd hope there'd be a nice, safe, secure copy of the original build tucked away in a safe, somewhere. 

If you're stuck with a game you've been fiddling about with for years, though, one where no-one bothered to keep the bits that fell off, well, you might just feel one, last really big revamp, with the previous version neatly stowed away for later, might just do the job.

It's just a conspiracy theory. For it to work, though, the new version has to be accepted by enough players for the game to remain viable but not so well-liked hardly anyone misses the old one.

Good luck with that, Cryptic.

So Stick Around : Neverwinter

Time was when games didn't care whether you came or went. If you were foolish enough to let your subscription lapse they'd make you jump through a few hoops before letting you back in and you'd feel lucky your characters were still there. If they were.

Not any more. Not for a long time. There's a farmer somewhere making a killing on fatted calves.

Even by modern standards, Cryptic's welcome mat is primped. Log in after a layoff, there's your name in lights. And "Neverwinter rejoices at your return!"

Yeah, right. Sure it does. Just give me the stuff. You know that's why I came.

It's not even been that long since I last played. The logon screen handily displays the last played date for every character. My last visit was back in March. It may have only been three months or so but I've already forgotten just about everything about the game. These things don't stick.

Doesn't matter. I didn't come to play. I came to claim those valuables. Didn't I just say so? Cryptic's twentieth is the celebration, apparently. I would have missed it only I saw Shintar flag up the freebies a few days back. I didn't want to miss out.

This is what you get:

There are similar offers in Star Trek Online and Champions Online. I could grab those too but even I balk at reinstalling a game just to get free stuff. Although I may still have STO, somewhere, even if it has to be more than five years since I last logged in. As for Champions, I did play once, very briefly, a long time ago, but it's never going to happen again.

It wasn't any of the listed goodies that got me logging in to Neverwinter again, anyway. It was something Shintar mentioned about bag space. She wrote "I was pleased to find... that my character's default bag had been increased by 12 slots". I'm all about the bag space, as is well known.

Only I couldn't find any bigger bags or bag expanders waiting for me. There's nothing listed on the claim screen and reading Shintar's comments carefully I realize she never said there would be. Looking at the wiki, it says the default bag, the Adventurer's Satchel, has 30 slots. My Warlock's has 42 and more than thirty of them already had stuff in when I looked. I guess she already got the upgrade.

I claimed the beholder pet and popped him out. He looked pretty good. I pawed through the various goodie bags. The free outfit looked spiffy so I thought I'd put it on.

The gear came in a Platinum Adornments Fashion Box. For some reason I had two of them. I opened one and looked for my new dress, hat and pants. Nothing. I checked everything in case they were in yet another box. Nope.

I checked all the tabs. Nada.

There's some sort of appearance system in Neverwinter. I vaguely remember it. I found the tab for that and clicked everything in there. No luck.

Well, I had another Fashion Box. I checked what was in it to be sure it was the same. It was. I double-clicked it, this time with my bags open so I could see where anything went. Nothing went anywhere except the Fashion Box, which vanished. Nothing took its place.

The gear's gone somewhere, I bet. I just don't happen to know where it is. Oh well, never mind. Easy come...

At this point I could have logged out. I'd achieved or failed to achieve everything I came for, after all. Only I didn't. I started fiddling about in my bags, opening this and that to see what was in it. For once I had plenty of bag space so it seemed like a good time to try. Although where I got that Greater Bag of Holding from I have no idea...

I spent a good while comparing insignia then working out how to apply them. I found a couple of upgrades sitting in my bags and put them on. After that it felt churlish not to go try them out.

I ended up doing two levels. XP seems to come fast in Neverwinter, not least because one of the insignia I slotted is a 62% xp buff. Also, because Neverwinter is fun. It really is.

Comparing Neverwinter to Elder Scrolls Online, from my perspective gameplay feels really similar. Upgrading is arcane but questing and combat are simplicity itself. All I do in both is click on an NPC and read some dialog while an actor reads it out loud. Then I follow a directional prompt across the map to an objective.

When I get there I hold down LMB until enough mobs die and/or I've picked up enough quest items. Occasionally RMB. If things look rough I hammer some number keys or Q, R or Tab, depending on game, all pretty much at random. That always does the trick.

Then I follow another prompt back, read and listen some more, get the goodies. Rinse and as they say repeat, ad infinitum.

The difference is in the entertainment value. ESO's quests, the ones I've seen, are dour, dull and tedious. Neverwinter's are sparky, sharp and frequently funny. The dialog is better-written, more naturalistic, with a lighter, defter touch and a more immediately engaging prose style. The voicework is livelier and lighter, more enthusiastic, more playful.

The atmosphere rings with adventure, excitement and intrigue. The action, the plots, they're much the same - evil cults, wicked necromancers, imminent threats -  but everything feels more Indiana Jones, less Apocalypse Now.

Every time I play Neverwinter I have fun. I don't know why I keep forgetting to log in. I expect I'll get a few more levels, miss a day or two, drift away once more. But I'll drift back.

And I'll always be sure of a warm welcome when I do.

Harvest For The World

Yesterday's post highlighted just how vague and inaccurate memories can be. I've mentioned numerous times over the years how the way memory works - or, rather, doesn't - fascinates me. I've read a fair bit on the topic. The more I learn, the lower my confidence in anything I or anyone else claims to remember.

I treat most memories as little more than fiction these days unless they come scaffolded by contemporary evidence. Often not even then, since accounts recorded within hours of an event have been shown to bear little ressemblance to objective reality, more often than not.

It's one thing to be taken by surprise. You might imagine repetitive processes, carried out thousands of times over hundreds of hours, might leave more of a groove in the mind. I would. Then again, maybe not. The brain tunes out anything it considers meaningless noise, after all. Why would it lay down records of such trivial, unimportant behavior?

These are some of the thoughts that went through my mind this morning, when I read Telwyn's post on gathering. I wondered whether my memories of doing that in the same games I mentioned yesterday would be any more accurate. After all, I really enjoy gathering in almost all MMORPGs. I'd put it very high on any list of things I like about the genre and I spend an inordinate amount of time doing it. I ought to be able to remember something about it, shouldn't I?

We're about to find out. Let's see if anything's made a lasting impression.

WoW Classic -

• Should be on safe ground here. I spent a lot of time gathering in Classic just a few months ago. My memories feel fresh. 
• Gathering comes in the form of several skills. There's a limit, shared with crafting, on how many gathering skills each character can have.
• You can see nodes on the mini-map provided you have a particular level of skill.
• Nodes are relatively rare and often not in safe places. 
• Gathering is competitive. 
• Distribution follows a semi-logical pattern. 
• There are few pulls per node.
• Respawn time is substantial. 
• I believe certain nodes, specifically herbs, have some other nuances but I can't remember what they are. 
• For some whole classes of materials, e.g. cloth, "gathering" takes the form of combat. I spent a great deal of time killing mobs for various types of silk last year. 
• A lot of rare or special materials can be gathered from mobs.
• When I say "gathered from" I mean "looted from their dead and broken bodies".
• For some materials (skins come to mind) mobs are the only source and you also require the relevant gathering skill.

World of Warcraft -

• My gut feeling is that gathering in WoW Retail hasn't changed all that much. When I played during Wrath of the Lich King it was about the same as Classic is now. When I've been on the sub-20 endless free trial I haven't noticed any significant changes. What it's like at endgame levels, though, I have no clue.

EverQuest -

• Hmm. This is a poser. Let me think. Does EQ even have gathering? 
• Whether it does or not it sure has crafting materials. There are so many mats it quickly becomes overwhelming.
• I remember, right back at the beginning, there were a few what we used to call "ground spawns". Iron oxide, russet oxide, some sort of mushrooms...
• The vast majority of crafting materials were dropped by mobs, when you killed them. Our guild used to form up specifically to kill clockworks in Plane of Innovation so our resident Tinker could get mats. Does that really count as "gathering"?
• Given the way my Magician's bags fill up with crafting mats every time she goes on a killing spree, I imagine drops are still the main source of mats.
• She has special, huge bags that only take craft mats. They auto-fill with mats she loots, so there's some element of gathering gear involved. 
• And that's about all I can remember. Not much for twenty years, is it?

EverQuest II - 

• If I don't know this one I may as well put myself into sheltered accomodation right now. I've always gathered extensively in EQII and I've been spending quite literally hours every day gathering in Blood of Luclin zones for the last three or four months. 
• Gathering in EQII expanded under Domino's watch to become a full career path. She added multiple questlines, several of which could justifiably be called "Signature" if not "Epic". 
• Gathering has AAs, gear, buffs, you name it. 
• It even has companion NPCs that gather for you, something you rarely find in Western MMORPGs. 
• Any character can gather from any node regardless of class or level. There were both level and skill restrictions for many years but they were all removed, not that long ago. 
• The remaining restriction is that without the right level of skill you can only get commons. Rares still use the old skill floors.
• With sufficient skill (or maybe it's an AA) you get the ability to track nodes.
• Nodes are competitive but they're so prevalent and widespread it's almost never an issue.
• As in WoW, different types follow an approximately logical distribution so you can usually work out where to look for what, even in an unfamiliar zone. 
• What's actually inside a node can sometimes be less than logical, though, particularly in later zones. 
• There are uncommon and rare pulls from most nodes.
•  BoL introduced Shadow Nodes that can only be gathered using a special buff rewarded by the crafting Signature quest. 
• It's entirely possible to spend whole sessions gathering in EQII and I could write several posts on it with ease.

  
Guild Wars 2 - 

• Another game in which I gather every day, if only because there's a daily for it and it's one of the easiest. 
• Yet again, gathering nodes in GW2 follow a fairly logical distribution, although I would say slightly less consistently so than either WoW or EQII. 
• GW2 was possibly the first major MMORPG to introduce non-competitive gathering as the norm.
• Even if it wasn't, you definitely would think it was if you'd heard ArenaNet crowing about it.
• It may have been why the game suffered from an appalling harvest-bot problem in the first few months. 
• Nodes can be seen on the mini-map. No skill required. (That could be GW2's tag line).
• Anyone can gather anything provided they have the right gathering tool. 
• Gathering from nodes requires a range of node-specific consumables (tools) available from NPCs. A wide range of highly advantageous (and highly visually game-disrupting) non-consumable versions of these can be purchased from the Gem store for eye-watering prices.
• You can acquire gathering nodes of all kinds to place in your "Personal Instance" (aka really crappy housing) either through gameplay or via the Gem store. 
• I have never seen the point of this, given the extreme ease and simplicity of open-map gathering, but people seem to like it and often invite others in to gather from their personal node collection.
• GW2 also follows WoW in having cloth drop from mobs. The reasoning behind this (in either case) escapes me. What makes cloth so different?
•  There are other buffs and items available but I can't remember much about any of them. Crafting in GW2 ceased to be of any real interest to me sometime around 2013 and I haven't paid attention to much that's been added in the last six or seven years. 
• In common with probably 90% of players my main interest in gathering is how much money I can sell the mats for on the Trading Post.

Rift -

• Hmm. Does Rift have gathering? 
• It has crafting. When this blog was new I posted about it, saying "I like the crafting in Rift. It's generally simple, straightforward and satisfying." You'd think I'd remember how I got the mats. 
• Well, I don't.
• I do know cloth is dropped by mobs, same as in WoW and GW2. I remember farming undead in Stillmoor for some kind of silk. I have no recollection at all of any kind of gathering or any kind of nodes, though. 
• Nope... without looking this one up I have to admit defeat. Other than the cloth, no memories at all.

Neverwinter -

• Absolutely no clue. 
• Oh, wait, there was that bit where you get some NPCs to set up some kind of sweatshop. That had something to do with crafting. I think I posted about it earlier this year. I vaguely recall having to get some mats or something so the NPCs could craft but if it involved gathering anything I've completely blanked it from my mind.

Lord of the Rings Online - 

• This one I do remember, even though I haven't gathered or crafted there in years. 
• Nodes appear in the landscape in a way almost identical to WoW. 
• You can see them on the mini-map. 
• Probably need a specific level of skill, though. 
• I remember there was more to it than that but that's all I do remember.

Final Fantasy XIV - 

• I'm fairly sure FFXIV is on a par with EQII in terms of having turned gathering into a full-blown game mode. 
• I think there's gear and progression and all that sort of thing but I couldn't tell you any specifics. 
• I tried it waaaaaay back in the original release and it was so mindbendingly irritating I never even looked at it when the Realm got Reborn.  
• FFXIV has really good fishing but fishing is not gathering. Fishing is a topic all its own.

Vanguard Emulator - 

• Vanguard had the best gathering of any MMORPG I've played, bar none. It didn't count as a full game mode like Adventuring, Crafting and Diplomacy but it wasn't far behind. 
• There was gear and progression, separate tabs in the UI, all the good stuff. 
• Nodes had skill requirements and were both competitive and co-operative.
• You could gather solo but if you grouped everyone could share and the pulls were bigger and better.
• Grouping also allowed lower-skill characters to gather from nodes above their skill ceiling by sharing the skill level of their groupmates.
• There was a quality system inherant in the nodes themselves, making rare pulls more than just rng-luck or a direct function of improved gear. I only have a vague memory of how that worked, though.
•  Most mats could both be gathered both from nodes and also from the corpses of mobs, allowing you to choose between pure gathering or gathering via adventuring. 
• As an adventurer, you couldn't just kill stuff and loot the mats. You still had to have the gathering gear and skills to gather from the corpse.
• You had to think more about what you were doing while gathering in Vanguard than in any other game I've played.
• That's probably why I liked it so much.
• I hope the Emu manages to implement the full version. I'm sure it will.
  

Riders of Icarus - 

• I have literally no idea. Or memory. Maybe there isn't any. Or maybe there is but I never tried it. Or maybe there is and I did and I just can't remember. Or maybe I don't care.

Secret World Legends -

• I don't think either SWL or The Secret World before it has any kind of gathering. 
• Crafting was that weird shape-making mini-game. I think that used mob drops but I wouldn't describe anything about the process as "gathering".
• If there was more than that I remember nothing whatsoever about it.

And there we go. It must be obvious I can remember far, far more about gathering than I could about the mechanics of casting in the same games even though in most if not all I must have spent more time casting. I'm also perpared to bet that much, if not all, of what I've said is reasonably accurate. And I'm remembering more all the time, as I write.

I guess that's not too surprising. Gathering, while it may be repetitive, is a primary activity for the time you're doing it. Casting and moving are both just background things you do in combat.

There's also the distinct possibility that I like gathering as much as, if not more than fighting. Or crafting, for that matter. I can't deny that in plenty of MMORPGs I gather materials for which I have no immediate use just because I find the act of gathering amusing, entertaining, soothing, relaxing or satisfying. Sometimes all of those at once.

I'd be very interested in playing a fully-fledged triple-A MMORPG in which the core gameplay loop revolved around gathering. One in which the crafting was secondary and the combat mostly an optional extra.

Or is that Animal Crossing?

The Numbers Game

I'll try and keep this short because if blogging about blogging can seem a little self-indulgent then blogging about one's own blogging stats verges on the self-obsessed. In my defense, I can only say that I didn't start it.

There was a bit of a discussion in the Blaugust/Blapril Discord yesterday about viewing figures. SDWeasel followed it up with a list of his top five most-viewed posts. It made me realize I hadn't looked at my own long-term stats in years.

I used to pay very close attention to them. Blogger provided a handy graph on the front page and I would watch the peaks and troughs, enjoying the way the average always trended slowly but steadily upwards as Inventory Full grew and developed what seemed to be a consistent audience.

That lasted for several years. Then everything went haywire. The blog started receiving huge spikes of attention, page hits jumping by an order of magnitude. The line on the graph veered crazily skyward, peaking at many times the previous zenith.

It would have been great if those were genuine readers but of course they weren't. Something had changed. Bots had either found my blog or found a way through Blogger's blocks. I spent a while investigating and I did discover where most of them were coming from but there didn't seem to be much I could do about it.

Old school Blogger. For now you can toggle between this and the new style. Each has its merits. And why do I only have seventeen followers? Up from sixteen, where it stood for many years. Once again, figures elsewhere in Blogger tell me I have a couple of hundred.

The bot invasion had an unexpectedly benign outcome; I stopped paying attention to my stats. They didn't mean much any more so why bother? Instead of caring whether my numbers were trending in the right direction I began to focus on the responses I was getting.

Comments have always been the most important form of feedback. There's plenty of bot action there, too, but fortunately Blogger's spam filter is very effective so few see daylight. The ones that appear represent genuine readers and that confirms there's someone out there reading this stuff, at least.

I stopped watching the big picture but I still look at my dailies with some interest. I have no way of knowing how many of the page hits are real readers but when I have issues with bot traffic it almost always goes to much older posts, as do automated spam comments. No clue why. You'd have to ask a botmaster.

As with Wilhelm's monthly analysis of SuperData's reports, it's not necessarily the intrinsic accuracy of the data that matters so much as what it shows by comparison. If the data is consistent in its shortcomings it still provides useful information on trends.

After I'd read SDWeasel's post I took a look at the lifetime stats for the blog for the first time in what must be at least three years. At first I thought they were hopelessly borked, as I'd expected they would be. At the very top, with way more views than anything else, were two posts that I couldn't imagine ever having mattered much to anybody.

According to Blogger, my most-viewed post in the entire time I've been at this game is the New Year's Eve post from 2017. A decent comment thread shows it did get some traction and someone even left a comment as late as September 2018 but I very much doubt it was seen by just under thirty thousand real, live human beings. More like three hundred.

Second on the all time list, with a mere seventeen and a half thousand views, is my first-ever post on Project:Gorgon from December 2013. At the time it got a couple of hundred hits, which was very good back then and I've linked to it in many of the posts I've done about the game since, which probably accounts for a few more.

With all of that, I would guess the genuine views for that post over six and a half years might come to five hundred or so. Then, on February 1 2018, more than 17,000 curious P:G fans just happened to drop by to see what I'd thought of the game five years earlier. Yeah, right.

As was mentioned in the Discord discussion yesterday, having a post linked in other media can bring a huge spike in interest. Posting about popular games also helps. I thought at first that might have accounted for the third entry on the all-time list but it's another fake. It may be a post about World of Warcraft but it's just those bots again.There's a huge spike in early 2018, a month which seems to have been a bot hot spot, which accounts for almost the entirety of the five thousand views.

The fourth entry, though, that's different. It's a post I wrote about Black Desert when that game was flavor of the month. I also mentioned the word "boat" in the title. Everyone and their dog was trying to build boats in BDO at the time and I got a lot of traffic just from google searches.

The graph for that one shows what the numbers for a post that purports to be a guide to a common problem in a popular game can look like. You can see how BDO players were still wondering how to build a boat for several years and some of them were misguided enough to come to me for advice.

That post also tells you in a nutshell why my page views are never quite what they could be. That post sounds from the title as though it might have some practical advice (it doesn't) and it mentions the name of the game, too. That's a rare combination. I don't often write guides and even when I do I tend not to let anyone know I've done it.

Following some advice I read when I started blogging, I used always to include the name of the game I was writing about after the title. Now I hardly ever do, partly because I stopped caring about artificially boosting page views a long time ago but mostly because I've come to care more and  more about how the blog looks and adding the name of a game to the title is aesthetically displeasing. These days I pride myself on being as obscure as possible in my titles, which exist primarily to feed my increasingly frequent musical collations rather than to give anyone a clue what the post might be about.

At this point the eagle-eyed will have spotted some very strong evidence as to why Blogger stats are not to be taken literally. In the full list above, the boat post has 4.9k views. In the detailed pull-out it has 7.62k. All of the results vary like that. I don't know why.

As well as the internal Blogger stats not agreeing with themselves I get a monthly report from Google Analytics which doesn't agree with either of them. The GA figures are always much, much lower. Often by a full order of magnitude.

I think the analytics are probably quite representative of what you might call the real audience for the blog. In April, for example, it seems to show a fairly consistent pattern of fifty or sixty unique visitors per day, which sounds realistic. Blogger routinely shows many times that, usually a couple of thousand. I really have no way of knowing which is closer to the truth but sanity leads me towards the lower figure.

The fifth post on the all-time list is also an all-time puzzle. It's my first post about Neverwinter Online, published back when the game was new. As the graph shows it was consistently in demand all through a long period when, as far as I know, blog-botting wasn't an issue here.

I never understood why people were interested in that post. I tried to work it out but I came up blank. Maybe it's nothing to do with the game. The title is vaguely suggestive. Perhaps it's that.

That's my top five. I won't go into the rest of the list in detail but I will say that I can account for the numbers on at least half a dozen of the top twenty by their having been linked on reddit or Massively or the official forums of the game in question. That always brings in the crowds.

Looking at this stuff is endlessly fascinating but it doesn't mean much. Self-evidently the figures are horribly compromised. And it's not as if they're even coming from different sources - all of them come directly from Google!

In the end I work by feel more than these supposed facts. Some posts get traction, some don't. How many comments they get, how many other bloggers mention them or link to them or spin posts off the ideas they contain, that tells me far more about how "successful" posts are than anything Google sends me.

And the truth is, the audience that ultimately matters is myself. Am I pleased with what I've made? Does it give me pleasure when I read it back? Am I satisfied that my time making it has been well spent?

Smug, self-satisfied git that I am, I can almost always answer "yes" to all those questions. Anything more is sugar.

An Opportunity To Go To The Moon (And Other Stories)

A little catch up on a few odds and ends that don't merit full posts of their own. Not that I couldn't spin them up into something longer. I can always do that. I just probably shouldn't.

Divinity: Original Sin

Seemingly determined, as always, to be the last aboard any passing bandwagon, this Friday I bought Divinity: Original Sin. It's been in my short but select Steam wishlist for a while but somehow I have only just now started receiving nudges by email when things go on sale.

I'm not sure why that's happening. I wasn't aware I'd changed any settings. It's quite useful. It also goes some way towards explaining the mystery of how people end up with such massive backlogs. Left to my own devices I'd probably think of checking my wishlist maybe three or four times a year. Except for those times, I wouldn't have a clue if anything had gone on sale.

I still wouldn't have bought D:OS just for that. I don't do everything Steam tells me. Valve is not the boss of me. But I had quite a bit of my IntPiPoMo winings left after buying Californium so I thought I might as well spend it. The game ended up costing me about £8.00 in real money, which seems like a fair price for something I was mildly curious to try.

A squirrel wearing a bone mask and riding an undead... something... started following me and won't go away. Also a cat. The squirrel is by orders of magnitude the most interesting NPC I've met so far and we can't communicate. The cat looks like she has something to tell me too. I've never regretted a choice at character select more.

So far I've played for... hang on, Steam knows exactly how long... oooh! Look at that. Four hours! I would have guesstimated two, two and a half. I must have been enjoying myself more than I thought if time slipped by unnoticed.

As I commented at GamingSF, where Telwyn was talking about the upcoming Baldur's Gate 3, under development by Larian, creators of the Divinity series, "D:OS so far ... seems okay. As usual, I can’t as yet entirely see what all the fuss is about. I read people gushing about RPGs and then when I get to play them I’m underwhelmed – I think it has something to do with ovehyped expectations but a lot more to do with what seems to me to be the overall lower standard of writing and voice acting that’s deemed acceptable in gaming."

That's probably a bit harsh. I'm not even off the starter island yet. And I am enjoying it. It just hasn't really grabbed me yet. Mostly I find myself wishing I'd taken the Pet Pal talent at character creation and wondering whether it's too late to stop and start over. Also the camera controls are some of the worst I've ever battled with, which does absolutely nothing for immersion. And it's a pig of a game to take screenshots.

Other than that, not much to say. I'm a little loathe to write too much about it here because I'm fairly sure everything there is to say about the game has already been said. Still, when has that ever stopped any blogger?

Neverwinter

With Divinity: Original Sin, I just realized I'm now playing two Dungeons and Dragons games concurrently (...or not, as someone points out in the comments, because D:OS is not an official D&D product - it just feels like one to me). That's a bit weird. Of the two I'm enjoying Neverwinter more, which is a surprise even to me.

Something has definitely changed but I can't put my finger on what it might be. As I play, I keep thinking "Is it the game or is it me?". The whole experience feels very different from how i remember it on previous runs.

It feels more like an MMORPG for one thing. There are people everwhere. It's really busy. And not just in the sprawling maze of the hub city (which is, of course, caled Neverwinter, not Everdeep as I said in an earlier post. I knew I'd gotten that wrong and I was waiting for someone to correct me but no-one did so I'm doing it myself).

When I'm out and about adventuring I can barely get to the questgivers for adventurers on unlikely mounts. Not quite as unlikely as the ones in Azeroth, Norrath or Tyria but still quite outlandish enough to let me know I'm playing a bona fide multiplayer fantasy rpg with a cash shop.

I'd somehow always thought of Neverwinter as closer to the original Guild Wars - a central hub with instanced adventure areas - than a traditional quasi-open world MMORPG but many of the zones I've been adventuring in are open to all and the gate system for travel is no more artificial than EverQuest II's world bells.

The open air zones are attractive if a little hazy. So far I've been too focused on following the sparkly trail to the next quest marker to explore but at least they look like places you might want to explore if you found yourself with time on your hands.

The biggest change from previous runs is definitely the gameplay. The whole thing feels more streamlined, cleaner, smarter. I can see there's a lot of work waiting to be done in gearing up for anyone who takes the whole thing seriously and that's quite re-assuring to know. For now, though, everything seems to trot along quite nicely without much behind-the-scenes preparation from me and I'd like to keep it that way as long as possible.

I did the introduction to crafting. It made me think of Black Desert, which in turn made me think I wanted to stay as far away from it as possible. Not because either of them are bad systems - just that they involve a level of micro-management I don't find particularly entertaining. I'd rather gather my own mats and craft my own stuff, if I'm brutally honest. I don't much relish roleplaying the branch manager of a regional garden center franchise, which is what these things sometimes feel like.

I think that so long as I stay well clear of the workshop I should be fine. My Warlock dinged twenty-three last night doing some proto-espionage work for The Harpers. It felt a lot more like the kind of thing I've been looking for. I look forward to quite a few more leveling sessions having jolly, swashbuckling  adventures, at least until my Warlock's  black crows all come home to roost. When you look at her backstory, it's no surprise the Moral Majority used to call D&D out as a gateway drug to Satanism.

EverQuest II

Yesterday I finally got around to finishing the Signature adventure questline from Blood of Luclin on my Berserker. It sounds late, given the expansion launched well before Christmas, but it's actually quite speedy for me. It took me more like six months to get to the same point in 2018's Chaos Descending.

The main reason it took as long as it did was that I was anticipating the final instance being hard work. When I finished the penultimate stage I made the mistake of going to the Wiki and reading the walkthrough for what came next.

There's a perennial problem with walkthroughs on the excellent EQII wiki: they almost always make things sound more complicated and fiddly than they really are. It's hard to avoid. Try writing a detailed, step-by-step guide to a series of scripted encounters without leaving anything out or being vague.

I've tried it and it's difficult to be concise, clear and comprehensive. In an effort to cover everything it's almost impossible not to make things sound more obtuse and convoluted than they are in practice. The EQII wiki does a brilliant job but the sheer level of detail can feel intimidating. That's why I used to love Borgio's video walkthroughs - he made everything seem really easy. Unfortunately he had a falling out with the game a couple of years back and that was the end of that.

The other reason I hadn't finished up the questline was that the same walkthrough showed me the rewards and they weren't anything I wanted. My Berserker could already fly in BoL zones thanks to having done the crafting Signature line and the weapon is a choice of one-handers, whereas he's used a two-hander almost exclusively for years.

Even so, it needed to be done sometime and I had the afternoon free so I set to it. And guess what? It was easy. The instance took around an hour. All the bits that looked annoying in the walkthrough were a lot more simple in person.

There were a couple of mana drains but I managed them effectively with the help of some of the Clarity potions I got from Overseer missions. My almost maxed-out Inquisitor mercenary did a great job curing detrimentals. My DPS was plenty good enough. The trash fights took seconds, the boss fights two or three minutes. None of those attritional fifteen minute slugfests from a couple of years back.

After an hour it was off to see The Duality for a debriefing session that made it very obvious our visit to the moon is going to be a two-parter. We haven't heard a peep out of Darkpaw about this year's expansion, except a very vague nod towards there being one, but I'd lay heavy odds on a trip to the dark side of the moon.

Over the coming months I imagine I'll slowly finish the Adventure sig line on the other five max levels and the tradeskill line on the three that craft. Plus I want a Provisioner, so there's that to do as well. Should keep me logging in for most of the year, on and off.

Funny Ha Ha

The third topic I had in mind to post about today involves something that started in Neverwinter last night. I'd been trundling along quite contentedly, playing for an hour or two, taking whatever quests popped up and generally acclimatizing. I wasn't expecting anything out of the ordinary.

At Level 17 my Warlock was still in an extended tutorial. It's rather well handled. She was out doing the usual, killing orcs and wererats, retrieving stolen jewellery and foiling nefarious plots as one does, yet all the time little taking sidetrips to learn about Enchanting or the how to use the cash shop. You know, the important stuff.

Yesterday evening she found herself involved somehow with an organization called Acquisitions Incorporated. She'd picked up a flyer to a recruitment fair and ended up setting some stuff on fire and killing some people. It all seemed to just happen, somehow.

From there things escalated alarmingly. Next thing I she knew she was interviewing for an intern position. The people running the company seemed odd to say the least, particularly the self-descriptively named Jim Darkmagic.

There was a ride on something that looked like a carnival float, a lot of fighting, many dead interns and a great deal of sarcasm and snark, a surprising amount of which was actually funny. The whole thing was voiced, as most things in Neverwinter seem to be, and the voice acting wasn't terrible.

I'm not convinced it was good enough for the main characters to get a cut scene introduction complete with the names of the voice actors, something I have never before seen in any game, ever, not even when the voice actors were a lot more famous than any of these people, but it wasn't terrible. Bits of it were quite good, even.

Some of the visual gags were pretty funny, too. Unfortunately, since I hadn't been expecting anything special, I hadn't fired up FRAPS before I started and Neverwinter's own screenshot function is abominable so I didn't get any pictures.

I ended up back in the AI offices  where my Warlock settled down on a nice sofa next to a roaring fire and logged out. I was under the impression I'd finished but when I logged in again this evening I noticed the quest was still in my Journal and the sparkly trail led back downstairs to the same portal.

It turned out I must have somehow jumped the rails about halfway down the tracks. Metaphorically, I mean, although there literally are rails runing through the instance. When my Warlock got back to where she thought it had all ended, Jim Darkmagic was still standing there, waiting to get on with the next part.

I had FRAPS running this time but photo opportunities failed to arise due to the second part of the adventure mostly involving being attacked by wererats, goblins, kobolds, fire elementals, fire scorpions and overconfident villains keen to monologue their evil plans.

I died once and nearly died several times. My Companion, who I've figured out how to summon, had to go and train twice, which was in fact why I died. Turns out he must have been healing after all.

Eventually I made it to the end, recovered Jim's giant statue, ported topside and camped out on the sofa once again. It was all very enjoyable. I did a bit of googling before starting this post and I'm quite disappointed to learn that the Acquisitions Incorporated Campaign is "the first and only campaign to involve a lot of humor".

Shame. It's quite rare for me to find humor in MMORPGs that I find even slightly funny. Usually it falls flat and at worst it's positively toe-curling. The best I usually hope for is some pleasant whimsy of the kind EverQuest II does very well. This actually made me laugh a couple of times.

On investigation, the reason for that is quite simple. It was written by people who do comedy for a living, namely Penny Arcade. I don't know all that much about Penny Arcade. I don't follow the strip and what I've seen of it hasn't always struck me as particularly amusing. Even so, the step up in comic skill was apparent.

The writing in Neverwinter is generally above par from what I've seen. I'm puzzled as to why I was so down on it when I played around launch. I can't imagine much of the low level text has been re-written. It's a pity there's not more funny stuff if this is the standard we could expect but it's probably just as well the in-house writers didn't go on to try and emulate Penny Arcade. That might have been awkward.

According to the wiki there's a new Acquisitions Incorporated questline every ten levels or so until Level 70. I can't imagine I'll get far enough to see many of them but who knows? I'm having a good time so far - a lot better than any of my previous runs, that's for sure.

Maybe the prospect of a good laugh every few levels will keep me plugging away. I've seen a lot worse incentives offered. I just hope the rest of the instalments are up to the standard set by the introduction. Not that it's a very high bar but still it'd be nice if they didn't trip over it.