Going Gently Into The Good Night

It's Easter weekend. The sun is shining. The trees are coming into leaf. It's the time when everything springs back into life after the long, hard winter.

Or not.

Noah's Heart is set to sunset next month.

On the 29th of April, to be precise. It launched on 28 July 2022 so that's not even two years. I really liked Noah's Heart but honestly I'm surprised it even lasted that long.

As the MassivelyOP report notes, Archosaur, the game's publisher, never really did much - or anything - to promote the title. I can't remember seeing anything about it post-launch. Certainly nothing at all in the last twelve months.

Of course, it's a cross-platform title, playable on Android and iOS as well as PC, so I was never sure whether the complete lack of promotion for the version I was playing also applied to the mobile versions. I've played quite a few such titles and it often seems that it's the mobile players who are keeping the games afloat, with PC players something of an after-thought.

Not so well. The world is ending, in case you hadn't heard.

In this case, though, it does seem to be quite the extreme version of that benign neglect. MOP point out that news of updates has "been kept largely to the client and its existing players" but when I logged in last night to have a look I couldn't see any mention of the closure in the game itself. 

Even the link in the MOP article that goes to the official announcement doesn't take you to the website's front page. It goes to the "News" section, which is only available from a small button in the header. 

As you can see from the screenshot below, taken the day after the closure was announced, the landing page still shows the game as up and running with a massive "Available Now" banner right across the middle. 

And I guess it is. For one more month.

Redbeard asked in the comments to yesterday's post for my thoughts on the closure, given my heavy coverage of the game in the past. There are fifty-nine posts here with the Noah's Heart tag, after all. You might well expect I'd be sad. Or upset. Or pissed.

I'm not any of those things, not really. Mildly disappointed, sure, but not surprised, let alone shocked. As I said, I've been expecting it for a while. And of course, I stopped playing a few months ago. It's not like I'm in the middle of anything

It's an odd thing to say about an MMORPG that lasted less than two years but I think it had a pretty good run. Or maybe I should say I had a pretty good run with Noah's Heart. While my early posts tell some adventure stories, most of the later ones focus on housing and fashion. I played close on every day for more than a year and a lot of that time was spent working on furnishing my house and making my character look good.

I did do other stuff. I liked exploring and the asynchronous PvP was fun. There were some good stories, too, at least for a while. The game does have some kind of through-line narrative. It might even be interesting if you could follow it. It's certainly quirky and amusing in places and even thrilling on occasion. Unfortunately, much of it is so badly translated as to be almost incomprehensible, especially in the later stages.

It may as well be both of us. I mean, what's the point now? It's all over.

I finished all the "Season" stories until they stopped coming but I never finished that main storyline although, even with the problems with translation, it wasn't because I lost interest. It was because it got too hard. 

As with Genshin Impact, I gave up on the main quest because I couldn't win the battles any more. Either I'm not good enough at action-combat or I'm not prepared to pay money to engage with the gacha mechanics to upgrade my characters sufficiently to compete. It's both, actually.

Luckily for me, unlike Genshin Impact, which quickly lost my interest when I couldn't win my fights, I had no trouble finding plenty to do in Noah's Heart without needing to do any combat at all. Mostly I did the extensive selection of dailies and worked on gaining affection with various Phantoms so they'd give me the recipes to craft the nifty-looking clothes they were wearing. 

The main reason I stopped playing towards the back end of last year was that I'd BFF'd all the Phantoms who had anything I wanted. I spent a good while going through all the rest of them in detail and there wasn't a single item of clothing left I could imagine my character wearing so I felt I was done.

Why? It's not like there's anywhere to run.

I could have carried on working on my house but again, I was happy enough with the way I had it set up. It didn't feel like it would be worth the effort required to upgrade it any further so once again, I felt I'd done all I wanted to.

If Archosaur had still been adding content to the game that might all have changed but they weren't. For the first six months there was a torrent of new content, much of it very entertaining. That slowed down to a trickle and eventually stopped altogether. 

Sometimes when that happens, live service games enter a kind of unnanounced maintenance mode and just carry on indefinitely. I could name a good few like that. Sometimes, though, they just close down. 

I used to dread games I played closing down. I even dreaded the end of games I once played but wasn't playing any longer. Now, it doesn't really affect me all that much. If it's a game I'm playing it's a bit annoying. If it's a game I've stopped playing, it's fine.

Everything has its time. For some online games that time seems to be measured in decades. For others it's months. And anyway, as we all are starting to realize, the end doesn't have to mean The End. Games come back, legally or illegally. They're about as hard to kill as super-heroes.

I can see the end approaching.

Noah's Heart won't come back. No-one is going to emulate it. No-one is going to buy it. It's dead, or it will be by the end of April. That's a shame. It was a good game in its way and I'm sure it was someone's favorite and they'll be distraught. Unfortunately, it was never going to be enough players' favorite game. It's a crowded marketplace and there's too much choice.

I've had my Noah's Heart screenshot folder set as my desktop background source for more than a year now. The image changes every ten minutes and there are enough screenshots in there that I don't see the same ones that often. 

Because of that, although I'd stopped playing, I've still been looking at my character every day. But even before the closure news broke, I'd been thinking it was probably about time for a change.

I have my screenshots all backed up. I have the posts I wrote. I can go back and relive the things I did in Noah's Heart any time I want. The best ones, anyway. 

That's what matters. The memories. 

Being able to play the game really isn't all that important. 

Not any more.

Identity Crises

I've gotten into the habit of bookmarking anything I see that might be worth a paragraph or two in a portmanteau post. It's surprisingly organised for me and it might even be useful if I ever remembered to use any of it before it goes horribly out of date. 

In a vague attempt to salvage something before it all goes off and has to be junked unseen, I've slapped together a few thoughts on a couple of MMO-related news items I thought might make a post (Not a whole one, apparently.) plus something about a musical sub-genre that was already over by the time I heard about it. Do I really need to bring out that Ferris Bueller quote again?

I've even somehow managed to find a theme that links them all. Kinda. Close enough, anyway.

Entitled

Trove is a game I've never much liked. I tried it when it was in beta or when it first launched or something like that and never really made much progress or found anything there I'd call fun. It seems strange such an apparently gimmicky, throwaway game should have turned out to have broader appeal and more staying power than any of Trion's more serious MMORPGs.

It did, though. It's still here, people still play it and it still gets meaningful updates, which is more than can be said of either Rift or whatever that other Trion game was called. Hang on, I'll google it... Defiance! That was it. I never even got around to playing that one although I always meant to. Too late now. 

Last week, MMO Bomb reported the latest addition to things you can do in Trove. Now you can collect titles, apparently. They were kind of sniffy about it because some of the titles are only for sale in the cash shop and even then you have to buy loot boxes for a chance at getting the one you want. I guess that could be annoying although heaven knows we all ought to be used to it by now.

I was more surprised the game didn't have titles already. What MMORPG doesn't have titles? They've been around just about as long as the genre itself. Trove came out in 2015 ffs!

I used to be pretty sniffy about titles myself. Not because of the delivery method, which was usually some in-game activity. I just thought they were silly. And distracting. Of course, I was a po-faced killjoy back then. I'm waaay more chill now.

And I really like titles. I use them whenever I get the chance, the sillier the better. I got a couple of new ones for Mitsu in EverQuest II last night, while she was digging up graves for the Halloween event.  If you want to talk odd delivery methods, getting a title out of a present with your name on it that you dug out of an occupied grave beats lootboxes all ways up.

My favorite titles, though, are in Noah's Heart. I've been meaning to do a post on them forever. This isn't that post but it is an opportunity for me to show off a few of my favorites.

I particularly like Cute Boy for a female character, although of course you can gender-swap at will in Noah's Heart so maybe that's not its intended purpose. Also, who wouldn't want to run around in an MMORPG with a big sign saying "Residual Aroma" hanging over their head?

That's just a selection from the ones I own, though. Ones I don't yet have but would like include such gems as Aroma Wafting, Academic Rigor, Meticulosity, Brain of God, Not Greedy and Dark Night Crow, not to mention the unbeatable teen trio of Unruly Teenager, Mixed-Up Teenager and Teenage Fighter.

Y'know, I think I may have been paying too much atention to the outfits in this game. I need to be working on my titles. I think I'll start right now!

Jam Today

There's been something of a kerfuffle over the leaked/datamined and now officially confirmed news that Visionary Realms, the developer behind would-be unofficial EverQuest sequel Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, is working on a second game before getting to alpha with the first one. The new title, rather amusingly named 247, is going to be a "survival, arena match-up" or a "marriage between MMO and Extraction", whatever the hell that means.

This comes hard on the heels of a graphical revamp that radically alters the way the game looks, something that had already frightened some of the horses. For what it's worth, I think the new look is a huge improvement but not everyone agrees. More significantly, the combination of these two very significant developments so close together has prompted a lot of speculation that the developers must be running out of money and/or losing faith with Brad McQuaid's original vision™ for the game.

And that's probably not too far off the truth. Pantheon isn't Star Citizen. It can't generate hundreds of millions of dollars by selling virtual mounts. It doesn't even have a persistent, publicly available version that anyone can buy into and play, although supposedly one's not too far off.

As the MassivelyOP article linked above points out, trying to fund an in-development MMORPG by using the same assets to spin up a much less ambitious game in another genre has been tried before and so far it hasn't worked. Experience suggests it's more likely to be a distraction than a lifeline for a struggling studio.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's not going to be of any interest at all. I played Apocalypse, the Battle Royale version of Ashes of Creation, and enjoyed it somewhat. It was quite good fun but far more importantly for me, it offered a very limited peek at the game I'd Kickstarted about a year and a half before. I was mildly to see anything of the game at all.

Of course, what I didn't know at the time (December 2018) was that five years later I'd still be waiting for my first real look at the actual MMORPG. Sure, I get detailed newsletters every month or so, most of which try to sell me something, but what I actually signed up and paid money for was access to the Phase 2 Closed Beta, which was estimated to open in... December 2018. 

Pantheon and AoC are almost exact contemporaries. The posts I was writing about Ashes back in 2017 and 2018 all also mention Pantheon. At the time I was seeing the two as direct competitors for the position of My Next Forever Game. 

Five years later, neither looks remotely close to any kind of openly available build, not even Early Access. I don't honestly care. I'm no longer looking for that next big game. I'm happy to play a bit of this, a bit of that, and not get too heavily involved in any of them. 

The way I see it, I had a punt on a Kickstarter or two and that was quite exciting at the time. I feel I got my money's worth just by being part of something new and zeitgeisty. Making those memories is worth a few dollars. It's just as well I feel that way because all the signs are that crowdfunded MMORPGs either never launch at all or, if they do, they end up looking, feeling and playing almost nothing like their backers imagined they would.

For that reason, I'm kind of pleased to hear about 247, the Pantheon spin-off. I'm not interested in the extraction gameplay but I am interested in a chance to explore the world and goof around there for a while, especially if it doesn't cost me anything. And I strongly suspect it could be the only chance I get. 

I can see why Pantheon loyalists are pissed off right now, though. It's becoming clear the game they signed up for probably died along with its creator.

Shouldn't It Be Janecore? Or Is That The Joke?

Names are important, as any hedgewitch will tell you. If you want my clickthrough you really don't want to be calling your band... well, obviously I can't give an example. If I could, it wouldn't be much of an example, now would it?

An interesting exercise might be to try to quantify just what sort of name does pique my curiosity. Well, it would be interesting to me, anyway. Maybe I'll do something about that sometime but, again, it won't be today.

I just wanted to open this section with a brief note on how I came to be listening to something that already doesn't exist any more, even though by most rational definitions its pretty much brand new. What happened was, I clicked through a link to a song called Census Designated purely on the basis that it was by Jane Remover, which I thought was an intriguing thing to call either a band or a person.

 I guess it could be someone's actual birth name. Not likely, though.

It turned out to be a bit of a fuzzed-up, post-grunge epic. I liked it enough to see what else she'd done. Among many other things it seems she started, then ended, something called Dariacore, now a footnote in hyperpop history. I may have mentioned Dariacore here before. I've certainly heard of it but if I ever knew Jane invented it, that I'd forgotten.

Of course, when she invented Dariacore she was going by the name Leroy, which certainly wouldn't have inspired me to click through. Neither would her other identities, C0ncernn, or dltzk, both of which are admitetedly less inert than plain Leroy but also kind of uninviting. To me, that is. Which is probably as it should be. I'm really not the target audience here.

The start of Dariacore was in 2021 and the end was the following summer, with the release of Dariacore 3​.​.​. At least I think that’s what it’s called?. Yes, that's the title. All of it. 

I'd go into it in more detail but I can't because I'm old. You need to be either under twenty-five or some kind of internet archeologist to unpick these things, let alone understand the sequencing. 

Fortunately, you can be any age and still enjoy listening to them, which is what I've been doing while I've been writing this. Just as I've arrived, Jane herself has moved on, from both the more sombre, moody digicore of her lauded debut album, Frailty and from the ultra-glitchy Dariacore, which she claims to have invented as something of a lark. She's also retired her several previous names along with their associated internet identities, all of which now go to dead links. 

Her new album, also called Census Designated, is available from Bandcamp , along with a selecttion of her previous work. I suspect we may be hearing more of her but then I suspect that about a lot of people and I'm often wrong.

Breakthrough or not, I kind of hope she sticks with Jane Remover for a while. It's a good name.

Just Browsing

One thing I rarely cover in any real detail when posting about the many Free To Play titles I enjoy is the monetization that keeps them going. Not that they get any money from me. I am the absolute definition of a leech when it comes to these things. 

Developers must hate me. I've enjoyed many hundreds of hours of absolutely free entertainment at their expense. I don't believe I've ever spent a single penny on a fully F2P title. In almost all cases I've never even been tempted. It hardly ever feels like anything I'd want, let alone need, to do.

Very occasionally I toy with the idea of spending a small amount of money - five or ten dollars perhaps - almost as much to show willing as for any practical purpose. In every case, though, the feeling swiftly passes and I keep my credit card in my wallet.

The thing that really surprises me about all these games is that they can make money using these methods at all. It seems to me that F2P titles are, almost by definition, likely to attract people who either don't have the disposable income to buy higher-quality titles or who are, like me, simply too mean to spend money when they don't have to.

I'm aware there are those individuals we sometimes call "whales" who, either because they literally have more money than they know what to do with or because they have psychological issues that mitigate against self-control, are willing to spend extremely large amounts of money to get what they want, even when most of that money, thanks to the various lockbox and gacha mechanics the games employ, goes to waste.

I'm also aware there are people who budget their expenditure in video games in the same way they budget for eating out or going to the movies; people for whom spending ten or twenty dollars a week on a game they enjoy is a rational and reasonable expense. 

All of this I understand intellectually but emotionally it makes no sense to me. My experience of every F2P game I've found worth playing for any significant amount of time has always been that I get more free stuff given me than I'm able to use and that everything I need to fully enjoy my time is available purely by playing the game. 

When I look at the cash shops in most games, F2P or otherwise, I do wonder occasionally what it is that other people are seeing that I'm not. I played Guild Wars 2 for a decade and one of my constant complaints was that there was pretty much nothing in the cash shop I wanted. It's full of ugly outfits I wouldn't wear on a bet and utilities that offer no real convenience. I am very clearly not the target market for whoever designs these things.

Even when the cash shop is pretty good, which is the case with EverQuest II, I still find it hard to spend much money there. Experience tells me that when I do buy things like the Prestige Homes I never use them, so why bother? I'd have to decorate them and then live in them and I already have two huge homes I can barely keep in order, as it is.

A few years ago there seemed to be something of a convention among F2P titles to make at least some of their money by selling not just convenient shortcuts or fancy clothes but the bare necessities required to play the game at all. Allods Online, an excellent game in many ways and one of the early WoW clones deemed most likely to succeed, famously scuppered its considerable chances by employing a punishing death mechanic that required cash shop items to mitigate.

Allods also played the inconvenience card hard with some of the meagrest inventory allocation I've ever seen. Making players get their wallets out to solve the ever-annoying problem of running out of storage space has been a classic money-spinner for a long time and not just in F2P titles either, but it finally seems to be going out of fashion.

It's been a good while since I've found myself struggling to manage my inventory in a F2P game. The last three titles I've spent a lot of time playing - Chimeraland, Noah's Heart and now Dawnlands - all offer far more storage for free than I'm ever likely to use. Neither do any of them restrict instant travel or put up annoying barriers that need real cash payments to remove.

They don't use lockboxes, either. It's a while since I've seen one of those drop in any game I play. They're still very prevalent in older titles but the newer ones don't seem to bother with them at all.  

The current fashion seems to be for Gacha mechanics that are supposedly tied directly to progression. It's a mechanic that most Western players probably knew little about a few years ago but with which, thanks to global success of titles like Genshin Impact, we're all now quite familiar.

When I first encountered the draw mechanic I found it quite exciting, although never so much so that I wanted to pay for the thrill. Still, making my free rolls, watching the explosive animations and finding out what I'd won kept me happily entertained until the novelty wore off. 

The problem with a system that relies on building teams of characters and powering them up, at least from my point of view, is that I hugely prefer to stick with one set of characters that I know. I strongly dislike swapping characters in a team in and out as though they were weapons - I don't even much like swapping actual weapons ffs.

I am very much a set-and-forget player. I like to put in quite a lot of effort to get my character or team just right and then leave them to get on with their job, preferably for the entire time I play the game from then on. If I want to try another character I would much prefer to roll another character and start over. I'm on board with the old adage that you shouldn't change horses in the middle of a stream.

That makes me a particularly bad bet for making money out of when you rely on gacha mechanics, although as I think I've made clear, I'm a pretty bad bet in most other respects as well. If you want my money as a game developer you're most likely going to need to make me pay for content, which these days seems to be the one thing all developers are happiest to hand out for free.

All of this makes it very hard for me to understand when game games like Dawnlands receive such virulent criticism for employing monetization practices derived from the mobile market, where selling overpriced cosmetics, inconvenience and power have long been considered normal. It always seems to me that even if such practices have been imported to the PC versions of the games, PC gamers ought to be able just to ignore them.

It's something I find very easy to do for reasons other than my personal preferences. For the most part, the promotions are sequestered in separate segments of the UI. If you aren't interested then it's quite simple not to click on the icons. It's like walking through a market; you're not obligated to stop and buy something every time a stallholder catches your eye. You can just walk on.

Of course, if you do have the willpower to resist completely, you'll miss out on a bunch of freebies. Most of the many events designed to separate you from your savings come with some kind of sweetener to get your attention. Increasingly, I'm finding that they also offer considerable opportunities to indulge while spending only in-game coin, too.

That's obviously intended as a lead-in to spending real money but in-game coin is where I stop. I spent much of the last twelve months doing all kinds of events in Noah's Heart, most of which could have led me on to buying premium currency so I could carry on, except of course I didn't. I just stopped when it wasn't free any more. 

It was noticeable that after a few months most of the free events in that game converted to payment-only, a move that merely highlighted what dull events they were and emphasized what a bad idea it would be to spend money on any of them. At the same time, my stash of unused Gacha cards for summoning Phantoms grew and grew. By the time I drifted away from the game I had more than seven hundred unused pulls. 

One thing all the newer games do is tell you the odds. No-one can claim they didn't know their chances of getting the exact thing they wanted were slim. Dawnlands has a very elegant and detailed breakdown of the exact percentages involved. As is common with these systems, it also tells you just how many times you have to fail before the game takes pity on you and throws you a bone.

Where the game differs from most is that the range of highly desirable items on offer is both very limited and worth having, although I realize the latter is a  matter of taste and opinion. This is probably a function of the age of the game. It's very new. Even so, a cash shop with only two outfits seems extremely restrained. 

Yesterday we got a new Event, the third since launch. The first event, which is still running, involves making a video about the game and publishing it on YouTube although, as I found out a couple of days ago, you get fifty Diamonds just for clicking through to the web page that tells you how it works.

The second event, also still running, features a friendly creature called Carromu who, as the event title tells you, is always hungry. Carromu doesn't like to eat Diamonds (Who does?) so he's happy to swap his for all kinds of stuff you probably already have lying about. He just turns up in your camp one day and sits there, waiting for you to feed him. If there's any way for that event to generate income for the developer I can't see what it is. I think it's just a clean, fun event.

The new event is the game's first try at persuading you to part with some cash. It's a Gacha sale. 

As a survival/crafting game with no PvP or PvE ladder competitions, Dawnlands doesn't really have the kind of structure that supports the gacha mechanics I've seen elsewhere. On the basis of the first event, it looks like the solution is to randomize access to the kinds of things that would otherwise be straightforward premium purchases in the cash shop.

It doesn't really feel like a Gacha mechanic so much as a lockbox with out the box. It even has a fricken key as the Gacha item! You can buy the keys with Diamonds, which are an in-game currency, so I bought one to try it out. Having read the odds, I wasn't expecting much and not much is what I got.

Protected by my psychology as already described, I will not be bankrupting myself trying to win any of the admittedly rather spiffy prizes. Not even the really rather fetching bunny costume, complete with carrot holster and carrots. Nor Dodo, the cute-looking, catlike Follower, who is, apparently, "a great helper when exploring unknown lands"

Those two plus a very fancy piece of furniture are the big ticket items, although I'd be pretty pissed off if I made the required 2% roll and got a glorified garden bench. Someone obviously believes home-makers are a major demographic in the game because the second tier (10% chance.) is all furniture too, as is more than half of the bottom tier (88%. Oh, you figured that out already...)

As with everything in Dawnlands, the whole event is beautifully presented. The game has a consistently delightful aesthetic. It makes browsing the menu a pleasure in itself even when you know you're not going to sit down for the meal.

I might indulge in the occasional snack, all the same but it won't be often with keys costing 80 Diamonds a time. That feels quite steep, even with the 10% discount you get on your first ten puchases. As for paying real money, forget it.

As an indication of the way monetization in the game is headed, though, I find it perfectly acceptable. I'm enjoying just looking at the items and admiring the designs and the images. In real life, I can usually get at least as much satisfaction from window shopping as from buying the stuff. In games I'm equally happy just to look.

God, those devs must really hate players like me...

Kitty's Got Claws!

I fear my time in Noah's Heart may be drawing to a close. You'd think maybe I'd gotten bored with what is, after all, a fairly ropy mobile port that the developer pretty much stopped bothering with after about six months. Or maybe it's just the sudden surge of competition from other, rather better, mobile ports or from dedicated PC games or their expansions. There's a lot going on.

It isn't any of those things. I'm still very happy with Noah's Heart in general. I still have plenty to do there. There's a good deal of the world I haven't explored yet. I haven't even finished the main storyline.

For a couple of months it was enough just to explore the delighful environments, level my character and do my best to follow the confusing plot. Then for a few months more I enjoyed the Seasons, each of which came with a convoluted storyline of its own. 

Eventually, though, the Seasons sputtered to a close. We haven't had a new one for a long time although, since the last two or three were almost impossible to follow, thanks to the truly terrible translations, and obviously padded with pointless boss fights just to make them last longer, I can't say I was sorry to see them go.

About all the game gets now are rotating "events", most of which exist only to drive business in the cash shop. There are still a few, new "holidays", which do have the odd worthwhile reward but a year after launch the game seems to exist in some kind of stasis that looks very much like maintenance mode.

As a player, I don't have an issue with maintenance-mode MMORPGs. If the gameplay is satisfying and the content deep enough, a good MMORPG has almost infinite replayability. It's one reason I've not been keen to see the creeping reliance on linear narratives in the genre - it's probably the least-replayable content of all, while at the same time being possibly the most costly to produce.

Noah's Heart clearly hasn't had either the time or the funding to develop the kind of deep, nested, recursive content that keeps games like EverQuest II or Star Wars: the Old Republic ticking over indefinitely, even through times of content drought. Even so, as I said, I'm still a way from exhausting everything it has to show me.

So why do I suspect I might be moving on sooner rather than later? Because I've run out of clothes I want, that's why! If I do drift away it won't be through any fault of the game. It'll be because I can't find anything new to wear!

As has probably been apparent from the posts I've written about the game this year, my primary motivation for logging in every day has been fashion. I've been grinding away, cooking lunch and dinner for various Phantoms, using home-cooked food made with vegetables I dug out of the ground and meat from animals I slaughtered.  Mostly wolves, weirdly.

It's been a time-consuming but satisfying process and I'd be happy to carry on but I've run out of looks I want to copy. Tonight (Well, tonight as I write this post. Heaven knows how long ago it'll have been by the time this gets published.) I finally made Gretel's outfit, the Heroic Mortality set. 

It was the last one I wanted and even then I only really wanted it for the leather jacket. The piped, zipper-leg jeans aren't bad either but the shoes don't really seem to go with the ensemble at all. I won't be wearing those when I have several pairs of boots that work so much better.

What really surprised me when I tried the jacket on were the claws. There's no indication in the schematic that the outfit comes with white gloves, tipped with long, curving, vicious metal talons. They're clearly visible in the dressing room view so I should have noticed them when I was trying the look out weeks ago but either I'd forgotten or I was concentrating so hard on the overall appearance I failed to register the fine details.

It's a great bonus. I love claws. It's just a shame that the claws from Gretel's top can't be mixed with Sisyphus's tail but as I said, when I wrote about it at the time, the tail is also part of a piece that goes in the same slot.

Last time I was faced with choosing which Phantom to curry favor with next it took me the best part of an hour to make up my mind. I looked at all the possible outfits I could get and tried the various pieces out in all kinds of combinations before committing myself for the long haul I knew it would take.

I really don't think I want to go through that again. I haven't acquired any new Phantoms since then so I'd be looking at the same choices, every one of which I didn't consider worth the effort last time. It's a classic case of diminishing returns.

Without the motivating factor of a new look, I'm not sure I'll have the determination to keep logging in every day. I wanted to complete an unbroken year-long run of "playing" every day and I've done that. I've already skipped a couple of days since, so the streak is broken, which is the very best thing that can happen to any streak.

I'm not planning on backing away from the game altogether. For a start, if I miss a whole week I risk getting booted from my guild, which has fairly strict activity requirements. I could ask them to put me on hiatus but since I've barely spoken to any of them it seems a bit cheeky. The guild is still surprisingly active, too. I may not say much but I hear a lot of other people chatting.

I do also have a possible, alternative motivation in housing. I still have a couple of housing levels left before I cap out and I haven't put anything like as much effort in decorating my house as I could have done. I'm a little wary, though, of getting too involved with the housing system in a game that very well might go belly up in a few months. 

We had yet another server merge last week and I find it hard to imagine the developers can be making much money out of the game any more. They most definitely aren't going to keep a server up out of the goodness of their hearts. As I said the other day, it's entirely possible the game will vanish before my interest in playing it does.

For the time being, I'll probably keep logging in and doing my dailies but not every day any more. If it happens that most days becomes sometimes becomes hardly ever then so be it. It's been a good run.

Before I quit, though, I'll definitely spend all the tokens I've saved up for the gacha draw. I have more than seven hundred of them. Who knows? I might pull a new Phantom with a must-have outfit. Then I'll be back to doing my dailies for sure, at least until I've got my new frock.

Or my new leather jacket. Can't have too many leather jackets, after all.

Holding Pattern

One of the reasons I posted about three potential new games yesterday is that I feel like I'm in a bit of a holding pattern right now, when it comes to gaming. It's nothing new or unusual. I think most of us go through it at one time or another.

Krikket was talking about not being able to settle down to playing any particular game for more than a few minutes before losing interest and wandering off to something else. Syp, as usual, has been looking ahead, preferring the as-yet unspoiled excitement of gaming tomorrow to the frayed and worn familiarity of gaming today.

I'm feeling a little of both. Occasionally I wonder whether it's gaming that's losing its hold on me, not the individual games. It wouldn't be the first of my deep and abiding interests to fall away to nothing but bittersweet memories. 

There are a few such lost obsessions in my life. I can name them all because for a time I felt they defined me. I won't, though. Not right now. I'll save that for Blaugust. It'll fit nicely into Introducing Yourself week. I have a couple of ideas for that to avoid repeating myself from previous years.

Sticking to the point, for once, I feel that rather than losing interest in playing games per se, I'm a little disconnected from the process. Time was, the inside of a game seemed bigger than the outside. It's been a while since it felt that way. 

Although, actually, not that long, I guess, when I really think about it. Valheim wrapped me up for a while. I got drawn into Chimeraland's craziness for a couple of months. It can still happen.

It doesn't last, though. Not for long. It's weeks not months, months not years. Is it just a function of having done this for so very long, now? Is it an inevitable wearing-down of the receptors? Does the dopamine just not hit the way it did? 

Or is it the games? Does the way they're made-to-fit today leave too little room for wonder? When no-one knew what to do, did they do it better? Now there's a map do we miss getting lost?

All of that and more. And less. Sometimes a slow patch is just a slow patch. Shouldn't read too much into it.

Then there's anticipation. That's a double-edged claymore, isn't it? The future smells so sweet it makes the present taste bland, sometimes.

Take Palia. I didn't even want to play the game. I'd read a little about it and it sounded... okay. Not that interesting. I certainly wasn't hanging around waiting for it. Now I am, apparently. And Tarisland. It was just a curiosity until I got a taste and then they took it way and now I want it back.

I'm even quite... excited isn't exactly the word but it's headed in that direction... to get the Hildir's Request patch for Valheim. That's the one with the difficulty sliders. It's been on the Public Test Server for a month now. It must be due to go live soon.

I'm not sure if you'll be able to apply those sliders to an existing world. If you can, I'll finally be able to get my corpse. If not, though, I'm quite keen to start over with the world set to something much closer to a sandbox, so I can just concentrate on building and forget about surviving.

Immenence has its own issues. If something's way off down the line it's easy to put it aside for now. Shunt it into a siding of your one-track mind and let it idle there. When it's barelling down the rails right at you, getting bigger every day, it's harder to ignore.

Except when it's really super-easy. It was only when I read that post of Syp's I remembered there's an "expansion" coming soonish for Guild Wars 2. And I even wrote about the damn thing not much more than a couple of weeks ago.

I can't ever have been less interested in an upcoming expansion for a game I supposedly play, surely? And I do still play GW2, right? I mean, if not, why did I bother to claim that code for free dyes from Amazon Prime yesterday?

Rhetorical questions. There is no "play". There is only playing and I'm not playing GW2. I expect I will again, one day, but if I don't it won't matter. Everything has its season.

It isn't only games, either. Blaugust is sucking all the air out of the blogging room right now. I keep thinking of ideas and putting them aside for August. I did it just now. You saw me.

The upshot is, I have plenty to blog about but not much to post. Which is why you get to read this instead of something more interesting and why I'm going to stop here. Also, it's summer and it's finally stopped raining and Beryl just woke up so I think I'm going to take her for a walk.

I'm working tomorrow so I won't be back until Thursday. Let's hope I have something to post about by then or things could get ugly.

Thereby Hangs A Tail

Time for another fashion report. My latest acquisition is the Black Mountain Set, as worn by Sophos Sisyphus, sometimes known as Sophia.

Sisyphus has a very unusual backstory as you can see from the panel,on the left.

If you can pick your way through the translation, the gist is that she's forever rolling the stone of her age up the hill of years from eight to twelve, whereupon it slips and rolls back down and she has to start all over again. She's knows she's doing it but she doesn't know why. She wants to stop  but she doesn't know how. It's heartbreaking.

That's not why I picked her, though. I picked her because she has a tail.

It's not a real tail. She's a human girl not some kind of animal that walks and talks like one. (If only...) The tail's a part of her costume. I thought it was attached to the legs but it turns out it's sewed into the top.

As you can see, there's really no way to tell where it's attached from the pattern. The tail doesn't appear in any of the pictures. Well, it wouldn't be attached to the shoes, I guess, although with magic in the world you can never be sure.

Before I decided which pattern to unlock, I spent a good, long time looking at all the available options in the Fashion preview window. I was a little gunshy after unlocking the last one and finding it didn't look exactly as I'd imagined.

I couldn't find any more full sets I thought I'd want to wear just as they come. There are several I really liked the look of when I saw them on the big, splashy, full-screen picture that flashes up when you first acquire a new Phantom and some still look good on the Line-Up page but when I got to see the as-worn version in the preview window, most didn't look quite so appealing.

Consequently, instead of full outfits, my main focus has moved to separates and there you have to be very careful. Some patterns give you Top, Bottom and Shoes but quite often, especially with any of the gowns or dresses, the Top and Bottom (And sometimes even the Bottom and the Shoes.) are all one piece.

Separates combine pretty well in Noah's Heart. They fit together very smoothly. There are plenty of pieces that share an aesthetic and go together convincingly. I'm acquiring a lot of leather jackets and leggings and things with straps and buckles. A tail, though, that's something special.

Sisyphus' Top and Bottom both go with several things I already have but if I want to wear the tail, I have no choice but to wear the top too. Luckily it goes really well with several options in my wardrobe.

As you can see, my choices do tend towards the gothic, although that's mostly a by-product of the original designs. I'd prefer at least a splash of color but for that I'd need some dye. The good news is I have finally figured out how the dye system works. The bad news is that, as you'd expect, dyes are mostly sold in the cash shop. 

There are some that come from "Events". I have received a few of those but at the time I didn't really understand how to they worked and I used them up trying to figure it out. The other good news is that the're not very expensive. I could unlock a dozen colors for five dollars and a dozen is about twice as many as I'm ever going to need.

That brings me to a very significant moment of truth. Do I actually spend some money on this game? Given I've been playing it for nearly a year and it's cost me nothing, it seems reasonable to pony up a fiver. I'd spend twice that on an indie game on Steam that might only give me four or five hours of playtime and I must have had hundreds of hours of entertainment from Noah's Heart by now.

Without being entirely paranoid, I'd be wary of giving my credit card details to whoever's behind this thing but I just checked and you can pay by PayPal, which is the exact reason I made a PayPal account all those many years ago. 

Looking past that decision, I'm really not sure what Phantom to butter up next. There aren't many obvious choices left for seperates and none of the full Outfits feel like anything I'd wear in preference to those I have already. 

I might even have to start thinking about which Phantoms would be most helpful in combat rather than focusing on whose clothes would suit me best. There are practical reasons as well as cosmetic ones for bribing a Phantom into liking you, after all. 

For the time being, though, I might just make some pies and stockpile them. They don't go off so there's no need to rush.

This Summer's Fashions Arrive Early

If it seems much too soon for another post on my latest outfit in Noah's Heart that's because it is. It's been barely two weeks since I last wrote about adding another outfit to my collection and all along I've been saying the fastest I could manage it was around once a month. So what happened?

Well, I didn't make any extra effort, that's for sure. I didn't grind or quest or play the game more than usual or any of those things. I also didn't get my credit card out and spend any real money. 

In-game money, though? Ah, now we're talking!

Like most modern mmorpgs, Noah's Heart has far more currencies than anyone can begin to care about, or should. Most of them I ignore although, as I've mentioned before, Noah's Heart has possibly the best-documented UI of any game I've ever played, so I can't pretend I couldn't immediately find out what every currency was for and where to get it and spend it if I wanted to.

Even if I don't go looking for them, there are certain currencies I can't seem to help piling up. One of those is the imaginatively named "Home Coin" which, among other things, autogenerates from owning and upgrading a house. You can spend it in the Home Store and at the merchants who regularly appear in various rooms around your demesne without invitation, just like they do in Chimeraland, although at least in Noah's Heart they stand demurely in a corner and don't sit preening themselves at your dressing-table or crash out on your bed.

Because I'm naturally frugal by inclination, I've never really bought all that much from these stores, preferring to hoard my imaginary coins while picturing myself rolling around in them like Scrooge McDuck. A week or so back, though, for no particular reason, I found myself in a spending mood, so I bought every recipe the store had to offer.

One reason I'd never bothered before was that I didn't really know any use for food other than to give it to my Phantoms to try and make them like me better. Once I had several recipes to make the highest Affection food, worth three hundred points, there didn't seem much point having any more.

Shows what I know! When I looked at the foods I could now make with the recipes I'd bought, I discovered I already had huge stockpiles of the ingredients. They needed things I'd previously had little use for but also they used a wider range of mats for each dish but fewer of each individual item, meaning what I already had in stock suddenly went much farther.

Freed from any need to go foraging or slaughtering for a while, I took to using all my available energy every day to make the new dishes I then force-fed them to my chosen Phantom, Sanada. Fortunately, battle-hardened tribal warrior that she is, she has the digestive tract of a goat, so she loved it. And, increasingly, me as well.

That on its own still wouldn't have been enough to have me writing this post today. I'd fixed the hitch in the pipeline caused by running out of mats but I still had to deal with the bottleneck of my daily Energy allowance.

Until last night, when I happened to be browsing the game's many, many stores, I came across a fix for that. 

There are more than thirty storefronts accessible through the UI alone, not counting who knows how many attached to NPCs. The one I was looking at was called The Mall.

It's  one of the cash shops where you can spend both Ori-Crystals, the currency you buy with real money, but also several in-game currencies like Diamonds, Gold and Shells. I'd scanned the items on offer there, cursorily, a few times before but never with much attention. 

Mostly I go there to buy Seasoning, a cooking material I get through in prodigious quantities. It's almost the only thing I ever buy with my Diamonds but this time, as I was scrolling through the available stock, I noticed there were Ornate Gift Boxes on sale for 1000 Diamonds apiece. 

Ornate Gift Boxes are something I get very occasionally from a Home Merchant's lucky bag and once a week or so from the Planet Traveler mini-game. Inside the box there's an item worth a thousand Affection, the most you can get in one hit, so far as I'm aware.

As with most things in Noah's Heart, the Ornate Gift Boxes in The Mall come with a purchase limit but it's a very generous fifty a week. I only needed another thirty-nine thousand points of Affection to persuade Sanada to hand over her recipe. I checked my Diamonds. I had a hundred and ten thousand. So I bought forty Ornate Gift Boxes.

In the time it took me to open them and hand them over I had my new recipe. All I had to do was make it. I had all the mats but I was a little down on Energy. Fortunately, The Mall also sells Energy recovery in units of five-hundred at even weight for Diamonds. Another thousand Diamonds and I was ready to sew.

I wouldn't say this is a game-changer for me. It so happened I had a large stash of unspent Diamonds to hand but I have half that many now and they don't rain down like Gold (Of which I have in excess of eighty million coins and no clue what to do with them.) I'd have to make quite an effort to earn enough Diamonds to claim my permitted fifty Ornate Gift Boxes every week.

It does add another option to gameplay, though. With the new recipes and the ability to buy at least a few thousand more points of affection every week, I ought to be able to count on a new outfit every two to three weeks instead of every four or five.

Now I just need to work out whose affections to bribe my way into next. It's no longer the full signature appearance of a given Phantom I'm after, more the individual pieces I can put together to make some looks of my own. Not all Phantom outfits can be used as separates and those that can sometimes have other restrictions. Working out what will go with what takes research but it's fun to do.

In fact, it's arguably the most fun you can have in Noah's Heart. Certainly the most fun I'm having, anyway.

It's All You, You, You, Isn't It?

Straight-up Friday Grab Bag. No Messin'.

Okay, let's open the bag and and grab something. What've we got?

You Call That An Offer?

Prime free games for the month, here we go... Remember when this used to be a post of its own? Ah, the heady days of May '23. Now it's relegated to and in other news.... 

There was even a moment, about a week ago, when it looked as though Prime Gaming would get a second post all to itself for May. I got an alert telling me "Prime Gaming Adds Eight Games, Bringing May Line-Up Total to 23 Free Titles" but when I read it, the extra games turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of stuff they'd brought back from previous offers, so that was the end of that.

This month brings a baker's unlucky dozen of thirteen. The pick, from my perspective, would be Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition and SteamWorld Dig 2 but even those aren't the draw you might think they'd be. 

I already have two versions of Neverwinter Nights - the original box and the "Diamond" edition on Good Old Games. Granted, it would be a lot more convenient for me to play NWN as an Amazon app but the chances of me playing it at all are vanishingly slim. As for Steamworld Dig 2... I have  Steamworld Dig on Steam and I haven't played that yet so do I really need the sequel?

Of the other eleven games, the only one that looks remotely interesting is Once Upon A Jester. I'll claim that one but the rest I wouldn't waste hard drive space on. If you want to check them out for yourself, here they are.

I hate to have to align myself with the cavilling crowd but it is getting harder and harder to pretend that anyone who matters at Amazon gives a damn about the Prime Gaming App any more. I get the strong feeling that whatever plan they had for the platform they inherited from Twitch has either failed outright or already fulfilled its purpose and been shunted into the promotional equivalent of maintenance mode. Oh well. It was good while it lasted.

You Do Know They Can't Hear You?

A couple of people asked questions or raised points in the comments that I either answered there or said I'd post about. Since I doubt many people go back and read the comments to posts they've already seen, comment threads are a particularly poor place to make pertinent points so maybe I thought maybe I should highlight them here.

Angry Onions left a comment on the "Covered in Confusion" post to the effect that AIs "don't know and can't think", which is demonstrably and absolutely true. You wouldn't think it was even in dispute if it wasn't for the claims that keep being made about them, although not on this blog, I hope. Everyone does realize I'm treating them like toys, right?

I really ought to do a proper post, laying out my motivations and interests and explaining why I feel the need or desire to keep posting about the AI trend. I'm mulling one over. Maybe I'll even write it myself. Until then, the tl;dr version is that I grew up reading Philip K Dick and I've been waiting all my life for this, so I'm quite excited and when I get excited about something I want to share, whether anyone wants to hear about it or not.

I do realize that we won't get to the autonomous, cranky, personable AIs of science fiction in my lifetime or possibly ever, but for a long, long while it seemed like no-one was even trying. At least now they are and I'm very happy about that. Yes, it could all go horribly wrong but then doesn't everything? Is that a reason not to try?

On a a much less emotional, more practical level, I'm experimenting with and posting about the current generation of AI apps because I can see a lot of potential uses for them that would either solve problems I have or make my life easier. 

One thing I'd really like is an automated research assistant, something I could set parameters for and send out to find, collate and precis information that I could use in posts I'm writing without having to start from scratch. I've been trying to find out if Bard or ChatGPT could fill that role and so far it's clear they can't, mostly because of that endearing but infuriating tendency they have to make things up if they can't find the answer.

I'm sure plenty of older readers (Heh! That's all of you, isn't it?) will remember Ask Jeeves, the search engine that you could talk to in full sentences. It wasn't very good, was it? I learned something from it all the same and that was to treat all search engines as if they could understand normal English. I generally don't just type keywords into Google; I ask it questions. I also cut and paste whole sentences into the search bar and let Google sort out what I want to know. It works very well.

It seems to me that it wouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine a version of regular Google Search that can parse sentences and paragraphs and return results that have been sorted and summarised in good English, rather than just pulling up a page of links you have to go read for yourself. That's what I've been hoping the AIs would be able to do. That they can't is frustrating but their failures are hilarious. 

That's basically what I'm up to with these posts, just in case it hasn't been obvious - pushing the AIs to do what I want and then laughing at them when they can't. Probably going to come back and bite me in the ass when AIs get full autonomy and non-human rights but I reckon I'll be long gone by then. 

You'd Look Pretty In That Dress

On yesterday's post, Redbeard asked if I'd say fashion was one of the primary parts of Noah's Heart. I gave him some sort of reply in the thread but it's not such an easy question to answer because, if I'm honest, I have no clue what the point of the game is or even what it's supposed to be. One thing I can say with some confidence is that I'm sure you're not meant to play it the way I do.

When I began playing Noah's Heart I treated it like any other mmorpg. I explored the world, levelled my character and followed the storyline, all of which were fun things to do. After a few months I found myself doing very little in the open world, beautiful though it is, because I'd opened all the teleport locations and kind of felt that was enough.

From then on I concentrated mainly on the monthly story Seasons, which were complete in themselves and had somewhat intriguing plotlines, if you could pick them out from the execrable translation. Those have a time-gating mechanic based on tokens you get from doing dailies so I got into the habit of making sure I hit my daily max of two hundred points.

As the months went on and the game lost players, as evidenced by the multiple server merges, the new content drops dried up, to be replaced with not much more than a rotating sequence of quasi-holiday events and cash-shop driven minigames. No more story seasons have arrived since the one I'm supposedly doing, which is handy in a way because I got fed up with that one half way through, when it became obvious it was padded out with stupid boss fights, and stopped. 

Despite no longer needing tokens for the season unlocks, I've carried on doing dailies because I actually like doing dailies now. Guild Wars 2 gave me Daily Stockholm Syndrome and I've never recovered. 

Apart from enjoying them, the two practical reasons I do dailies are a) to fulfill my Guild responsibilities and b) to get mats and sundries to progress my Phantoms. My guild is a lot quieter than it used to be but I still like being in it and I don't want to get kicked out for not meeting the minimum activity requirements. 

As for my Phantoms, while I don't do much fighting these days, I do still like to see how far I can get in the Fantasy Arena, where Phantoms are pitted against one another in a form of quasi-PvP. If I'm ever going to get past Diamond 3 I need my team to get stronger, so that's a motivator.

Dailies in Noah's Heart are also very quick and easy now. I won't bore everyone with the mechanics of how it works but suffice to say that a while back the devs added some automation to the daily mechanics that allows me to get things done in a matter of seconds that used to take me half an hour or more. I've also built my home up to the point where it provides me with a hefty supply of crafting materials every day just for the few seconds it takes me to set some switches.

That's meant I have a large supply of materials for crafting gifts to give my Phantoms so they'll like me more, which is how I persuade them to give me the patterns I need to copy their clothes. I also get a fair amount of a number of currencies I can spend on items needed for both upgrades and crafting. If I had to go out and harvest or fight for those myself, the way I used to, I don't think I'd have become as invested in getting the different appearances as I have done. I'd probably have given up quite a while back.

Since my playstyle is so truncated and limited, I find it impossible to say whether fashion is intended to be one of the endgames but I'd have to say it is for me, not least because I have no clear idea what the alternatives even are. There are several ladders for PvP and PvE that I guess competitive people work to rise to the top of and there are a few of those endless progression dungeon things that seem to have become mystifyingly popular in a number of games of late but other than that, your guess is as good as mine as to how people spend their time in Noah's Heart.

A lot of people do wander around all dressed up, though, so it looks like I'm not the only one working on their wardrobe. For a game with a lot of looks to collect and a payment model that relies on cash shop sales, I'd have to say there don't seem to bthat many clothes or accessories you can flat-out buy for real money. Most things seem to come either from the kind of in-game activity I've been doing or from unspecified "Events" that I never seem to be able to find.

It's a strange game in so many ways. I like it a lot but I can't see it lasting much longer.

You Can Be My Daddy

I love the way Lana del Rey's father, Rob Grant, is playing with the odious concept of "Nepo Babies". That's the concept 'm calling odious, by the way, not the babies. 

Seriously, at what point of human history has it ever been about what you know rather than who you know? And what are children supposed to do? Actively reject the experience and advice of their parents? 

Are we going to accuse someone of nepotism because they've decided to train as a doctor or a teacher, following in the footsteps of a parent or grandparent? Are we going to ban offspring from carrying on the family business? If not, why should it be different just because the family business involves singing or playing the guitar?

It's even more stupid considering the result is right there in front of us to make up our own minds about. Aren't we capable of judging value by the quality of the work any more? Is it all about the connections, now?

Pah! And pfooey! Anyway, having the dad ride in on the coat-tails of the daughter is hilarious, especially when you consider the lyrics of any number of Lana's early recordings - and when it comes out sounding like this, it's glorious too. I'm gonna buy the album, which I certainly wouldn't if Lana wasn't on it. Nepotism works! 

You've Got To Laugh

If you remember the post I wrote about whether cover versions can be considered free of the stain of their corrupt originals, you might also remember me mentioning a book called Monsters by Claire Dederer. At the time I hadn't read it. Now I'm about half-way through.

As I said then, the copy I have is an uncorrected proof so I can't quote from it. It says so, right there on the cover: "Sceptre uncorrected proof. Not for resale or quotation". I'd post a picture of the cover to show you but I imagine that's not allowed, either.

It's a shame, because there are plenty of lines I'd like to share, not so much for the political or critical or socio-politico-critical points they make but because they're damn funny. If there was one thing I wasn't expecting from a semi-academic treatise on the moral conundrum of what to do about art we admire when it's also created by men we revile, it's that it would have me laughing out loud. 

But it has and it does. I've laughed a bunch of times now and inwardly chuckled a whole lot more. A hundred pages in I'm not at all sure what case is being made or whether I agree with it but I'm certain I want to read more by this author.

At one point she describes herself, somewhat uncomfortably, as a memoirist, something that would be hard to deny, given she's published two memoirs, one with the highly unappealing title "Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses", which apparently has a recommendation by Elizabeth Gilbert on the cover, enough to warn anyone off, I'd have thought. The other's called "Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning", which isn't a whole lot more enticing.

I read some of the Amazon reviews and wishlisted both books. I mean, who wouldn't, when people are saying such amazing things about them, like "The book had quite a few stains on the front which I wasn't expecting" and "It is mildly interesting, but to my mind the contents would've been best left in the author's diary". I mean, it's better than a nod from the author of Eat, Pray, Love, that's for sure.

And that, I think, is just about enough. Working the weekend so that's all until Monday.