Games For A Wet Weekend

I did a lot more gaming than usual this weekend. For one thing, I wasn't working and for another the sun wasn't out. 

It was raining, in fact, which literally put a dampener on my natural inclination to be outdoors in the summer when the sun is shining. I think it's inbred in English people of a certain age, those of us who were brought up at a time when children old enough tie their own shoelaces were ushered out of the house after breakfast and expected to entertain themselves until at least lunch, if not tea. 

Even now I get that nagging feeling that I ought not to be "wasting the sunshine". Of course, it doesn't help that we see so little of it most of the time. It takes a good few fine days in a row before it starts to feel okay to stay inside. This is what happens when you live in a temperate climate.

The games I chose to play were interesting to me. I've been posting a fair amount about all the choices available and yet when I do find myself with both the time and the inclination to settle in for a few longer sessions, my choices often surprise me.

The steady, reliable pick is almost always EverQuest II, which I have been playing for more than two decades now with barely a break. I did drop the game  between 2012 and 2014, something I can date quite accurately because the two expansions for those years, Chains of Eternity and Tears of Veeshan, are the only ones I didn't buy and play on release. That was because I was full-time in Guild Wars 2 around then.

I came back with 2014's Altar of Malice, after which I played GW2 as my main MMORPG and EQII as my secondary, quite consistently, until I eventually dropped GW2 three years ago, at which point my involvement with EQII largely carried on unchanged. Maybe I play a little more of it these days but it certainly hasn't filled the space left by GW2's departure from the schedule.

At the moment, all I'm doing in EQII is Overseer dailies, which I've now managed to work up to the point where I only need to log in once in the morning to set all ten, then once again in the evening to collect the rewards. 

The recent news that the summer update will come with yet another free set of at-cap gear to encourage lapsed players to jump back into the game has to some extent made my efforts to catch up with Overseer seem unnecessary but that's a trap I don't intend to fall into again. It's how I got into this mess in the first place. I might not need the drops from Overseer but I need to level it up so it's capped when the expansion comes out because there will be things I need from it then and I won't be getting them until they, too, have been superseded if I don't do the hard grind now.

That all only takes a few minutes, though. With plenty of time and enthusiasm to play this weekend, I took the opportunity to return to Once Human, which has just received an absolutely huge update. Starry deem it so significant they've labelled it Once Human 2.0.

And they're not exaggerating. It has genuinely game-changing implications, with the new scenario, Endless Dream, opening up the whole map, North and South, for free play from the start and the update adding a completely new Class System and a whole new feature, almost a game mode, called Dreamland Fantasia. 

 

Up to now the game has been classless, Now, you can still choose to be a "Freelancer", which means you carry on the same as always, but you also have the choice of three Classes - Beastmaster, Chef or Gardener. Because this is Starry, they can't do anything in a normal way, so the Class system is in "public testing", by which they mean they've added it to the live servers as a work-in-progress with the intention of  "refining" it based on player feedback. That always works so well, doesn't it?

My feedback so far is that they ought to move the feeding trough a lot further back towards the start of the crafting tree. I picked Beastmaster (Well, of course I did.) but I have nothing to say about it yet because before you can use your whistle to get your pet to obey you, you have to tame the creature and to tame it you have to feed it and I can't.

It says in the description that you can either put food and water in a feeding trough or throw it on the ground but my wolf ignored anything I dropped next to it. I did a bit of research and it appears that method of feeding had already been proved not to work in animal breeding, a feature of the game I've never bothered with and from which some aspects of Beastmaster play have clearly been derived. 

 

Unfortunately, to make a feeding trough requires steel ingots and steel is several stages into the smelting process, meaning I need not only to have upgraded my smelting to that stage but also my ability to craft pickaxes. Steel is made from iron and you need a bronze pickax for that. 

Progression in Once Human is very fast so I had no issues with gaining the points required to open all the necessary nodes on the crafting tree but even with that done, I still have to go out, find some iron, mine enough of it, bring it back and smelt it (Along with some sintered bricks, also a few stages into the process.)  before I can make a trough to feed and water my wolf. Plus I need some metal parts from scavenging, which means either a lot of exploring or fighting...

Consequently, I am still a Beastmaster in name only, not yet having tamed a beast. It reminds me very much of becoming a Beastlord in EverQuest, when the class was first introduced and you had to slog through the first nine levels on your own before you were deemed fit to partner up with a pet. 

It doesn't help that, when I was playing yesterday, for some reason I still can't explain, I also picked two cooking specializations, which would very clearly have gone much better with the Chef class. It's all a bit of a mess and I'm wondering whether I might have to re-roll and start over. As I said, progress is really quick, so it wouldn't be very hard to catch up and at least I might have a better idea what I was doing this time.

The new scenario looks fun. It involves the dream plane invading reality and comes with a lot of hallucinogenic changes to the landscape, something Starry's artists seem to just love doing. It's one of the biggest attractions of the game for me because it means you barely have to touch the actual content itself to get the full impact of the spectacular visual changes. 

It's a very smart way of re-using the same zones over and over without either replacing them or removing the existing content. You're in the same place each time, with the same NPCs and quests and locations but there's a whole load of weird lighting effects or objects floating in the sky or bizarre weather and it freshens everything up no end.

It has a good deal to do with why I don't seem to mind having to start over all the time but I would still like to get settled on a permanent server so I didn't have to build a new house every time I come back. The 2.0 version of Once Human finally offers the combination I wanted all along - full map access and permanence - so hopefully this might be the endpoint for that journey.

There's an incredibly long and detailed set of patch notes covering the classes, the scenario and more that I won't even begin to try and summarize, let alone go through point by point. Once Human, always confusing structurally, now has so many twists and turns it's very hard to keep any of it straight.

It reminds me in a way of Fortnite, where the original concept was very simple and streamlined and then the developers just kept bolting more and more bits onto it until you couldn't tell what it was any more. I was put in mind of Epic's moneymaker when I clicked on a pop-up in Once Human yesterday, thinking it was going to take me to a dynamic event and it actually took me to the new Dreamland Wonder fairground, a large island instance filled with mini-games.

They're good games, too, some of them. I tried the jumping puzzle, which is visually spectacular and not impossibly difficult. I would have loved to take lots of pictures but I was pretty sure if I stopped to use the camera I'd have fallen off something so I only took a couple. Then I did a race, which was great fun and would have been better still if I'd realized it was a full-contact sport. I got knocked off my motorbike by another player not long after the start, which is my excuse for not finishing the course before the timer ran out.

What with all the scenarios running on separate servers and none of them ever going away and Eternaland and Dreamland and the seaside resort I forget the name of, Once Human is already starting to feel more like a game platform than a single, coherent game but I don't think that's a bad thing at all. 

Even though it sometimes seems it's been in spite of Starry's best efforts, I think Once Human is finally maturing into a very solid, entertaining, enjoyable experience. It has a large, stable population and a Very Positive rating from five thousand recent reviews on Steam, up from Mostly Positive from lifetime reviews. If you've wondered about trying it but have been concerned by the various, well-advertised issues, now might be a good time. 

When I wasn't playing Once Human this weekend, I was playing Crystal of Atlan. Why? Good question...

I suppose the obvious answer is "Because it's fun". And it is. It's cheerful, upbeat, colorful and fairly easy still, although not a complete cake-walk. Whatever the reason, it continues to be the icon my mouse pointer feels magnetically drawn towards every time I think I'd like to play something but don't quite know what.

Progress is trucking along comfortably. I dinged three times yesterday, finishing at Level 47. I now know there are sixty levels in total so a max level character doesn't feel out of the question. 

Not an awful lot happened while I was playing. The big news is I finally managed to get rid of the stupid maid outfit and replace it with something at least slightly less embarrassing. Now I look like I'm on a smoke break from the fortune-telling concession at the Renaissance Fayre but it's definitely an improvement. 

I bought the new outfit with one of the numerous in-game currencies. It was one of the most expensive items but I'd acquired enough coins without even trying so that's a positive for the way the game's been monetized.

Gameplay-wise, I finished Chapter Three of the MSQ and started Chapter Four. The storyline isn't very subtle or complex but it's entertaining enough to keep me engaged. 

I did get some laughs out of Conrad, a senior member of the Church, who I had pegged for a villain almost the moment he opened his mouth. His explanations for his experiments on an innocent bunny rabbit, which he was claiming were intended to heal the injuries said rabbit sustained while helping me in a dungeon (Don't ask...) were so obviously sociopathic I was literally shouting at the screen. I'd say the way no-one else saw through him beats me only it doesn't. I know exactly why that was - everyone is either gullible or innocent to the point of imbecility.

One odd thing that happened was that for some reason I started clicking my mouse pointer on the hotbar icons for my skills instead of using the keyboard as I had been doing. CoA is one of those equal-opportunity games that has action controls and tab-target hotkeys and doesn't care which you use. 

In the old days I'd always have clicked but it's an indication of just how many action games I've played that I didn't even think of playing that way until yesterday. When I got to doing it, clicking felt... I don't know... the same? Maybe better but not really? It wasn't a big difference either way, that's about the only thing I'm sure of.

I did a lot of dungeons and beat all the bosses, except one, without having to use a Revive potion, which is a very good result for me. The game is clearly designed to allow you to brute force your way through dungeons, using a potion to get up every time the boss kills you, putting you back at full health but leaving them still wherever they were. There doesn't seem to be a limit on how many times you can do it in a single fight, although I haven't tested it. Three times is the most I've needed in the game so far. Once has mostly been enough.

If I can beat the boss without a revive, I call it a clean win. All but one of my wins yesterday were clean, even if some were very close calls. My feeling is that I would have died a couple more times if I'd been using the keys instead of clicking because I think I was timing my attacks better with a click and on those close fights even one good combo that might not have landed otherwise could have made the difference. 

Hard to be sure but I think I'll stick with the clicks for a while. It's all still at least 80% button-mashing, however I do it, so let's not get any ideas I know what I'm doing.

How much gaming I'll be doing this week remains to be seen. The weather forecast is very different. Lots of sunshine and getting hotter and hotter. I suspect that will mean less time at the PC although it's possible it might even get too hot to want to be outside for a while so my preferences might all loop round and come back in on themselves. 

Whatever the weather, one game will still get its due time every day. Those Overseer dailies have to be done, rain or shine.

A Question Of Gravity

If there's another developer half as keen as Starry on asking players what they think about the game they're playing, I certainly haven't come across them. The number of surveys Starry puts up for Once Human verges on the absurd. I mean, I'm all for taking a sounding but come on!

Yesterday I noticed, a couple of days late as usual, that there'd been a major update to the game. And when I say "major" I'm not ladling it on for effect the way publishers do with that "Soon to be a major motion picture" line they slap on any book that's even been optioned.

Just take a look at the details on the official website... no, wait, don't do that. You'll go blind!

Have you ever tried to find anything on there? It's like someone hired an advertising agency to produce fifty campaigns at once and then chucked a bomb into the office and filmed the explosion. Try the Steam Community Page instead. That's a lot easier to follow.

Or if you're pushed for time you could watch the trailer. Here it is.

 Wait, though... there's another

And a third!

 This is all for the one update, mind you. There's a lot going on. I could break it down but we'd be here all day. The tl:dr is 

• New PvE Scenario
• New Vision Wheel 
• New PvP Mode

It's like three expansions one on top of another in a way, although the PVP "Raidzone" is being touted as a spin-off game in its own right.  

To get back to those surveys, last night I completed three of them. It's been about two weeks since the last time I played and I did two then. So that's five surveys this month I've filled out. They duplicate heavily but no two are exactly the same. 

For most of the questions that ask for a 1-5 rating, I gave the game five stars. Story, lore, graphics, gameplay, combat, you name it, I'm Very Satisfied with it. Would I recommend it to my friends? Yes, I would. Why? because it's the best game of its kind I've played. I am the model of a satisfied customer.

There is one aspect of Once Human that I'm Very Disatisfied with, though, and I'm happy to take every opportunity to tell the developers about it. That's the ludicrous and wholly unnecessary complexity of the Server/Scenario/Vision Wheel set-up. It's the main thing that puts me off playing more than I do.

Take the last couple of days. I wanted to try the new Vision Wheel event. It sounded like it was going to be a lot of fun. Here's how it works:

"The inverted star will generate gravitational tides from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM (server time) daily, during which players will enter a unique low-gravity state known as Stellar Levity, allowing for higher jumps, extended airtime, immunity to fall damage, and significantly increased Load capacity."

Basically, for half the time you're playing, you'll be able to jump around like a kangaroo on a pogo stick and goof about in the air like one of the Flying Wallendas with a jetpack. Or something.

I only recently made a new character but I started her on a Novice server and those don't get Vision Wheels or any new events, so she was out. Luckily, my original character was idling away in Eternaland with nothing better to do so I thought I'd wake her up, pick a server running the new scenario (Endless Dream), which also looks interesting, and that way I could try both the new things at once.

Seems simple enough, doesn't it? Hah! Doesn't work that way as I found out but only after I'd moved her.

Because Starry can never do anything the way anyone else does, the new PvE Scenario, which is technically still in "Early Access", is nevertheless available via exactly the same procedure as any other scenario. You don't have to use Steam's Beta process or sign up for anything. It's just there on the list with all the rest.

What I didn't know then was that EA servers don't get the Vision Wheel. I guess if you're testing you want to stay focused That makes sense. What I also didn't know, at least until this morning, was that lots of servers don't get the Vision Wheel either, not just the EA and Novice ones.

As I now understand, before you to pick a server, you need to check a whole bunch of things: the region, the population, the current scenario stage the server's at, which scenario it's running and whether it has access to the Vision Wheel or not. Probably some other stuff I don't know too, I shouldn't wonder.

Some of this is obvious, some of it isn't. Some of it requires you to click for further information or read a mouse-over. Most of this, last night, I did not do. I just picked a server running Endless Dream and signed my older character up for it. 

And that started very well. The new scenario begins with an excellent intro movie that I watched with enjoyment. Then I glided down, grabbed a spot for my base and jogged over to Meyer's Market to talk to the woman with the old-school TV for a head. She hands out the quests for the new storyline.

So far, so good. Except I really wanted to do the anti-gravity thing and there was no sign of it. So I opened up the map to have a look, which was when I discovered a couple of awkward facts about my new home. 

One was that, as I've already explained, the Starfall Inversion event isn't available at all on Endless Dream servers. The other is that the Endless Dream content itself starts at around Level 18. Or at least it appears that way. I could be wrong. I hope I am.

I'm probably not, though. As far as I can tell, it takes place mostly, maybe entirely, in instances and although there are plenty of them, the lowest Recommended Level for any I could see on the  map was 18. And that was in the starting area so I doubt there are any lower anywhere else. 

I was clearly going to have to buckle down and level up before I could even poke my nose in for a look. Which was annoying because I just leveled one character to 15 a couple of weeks ago. I didn't really want to do it all again quite so soon. And in any case, it was the other new stuff I wanted to see first.

And that's how I came to spend the rest of the session filling out surveys instead of playing. This morning I started over yet again with a third character. I have some Free Move tokens left over, I think, so I could have moved someone to a server running a scenario with the Vision Wheel but I still wanted to see the Endless Dream too so that didn't seem like the best plan. 

Instead, I spent a fair amount of time checking all the servers carefully until I was sure I  knew what content was available on which. When I was positive I had it right, I realized I was going to have to make another new character to get onto the one I wanted, so that's what I did.

And then I had to run that character through the unskippable tutorial. Seriously, why do unskippable tutorials for characters after the first on an account even exist? 

All of that took me an hour or so, plus the inevitable setting up of the base, after which I was finally able to go look for the new up-in-the-air stuff. Only it was four in the morning, game time, and the gravity doesn't switch off until nine. 

Luckily, time passes fairly quickly in game so it didn't feel like too long before I saw the message that things were about to change. And it was worth the wait.

I might - probably will - do a whole post on the Starfall Inversion, when I've been able to give it a couple more sessions, but my initial impressions are very favorable. For a start, it looks great. When the gravity goes, a blue haze appears that makes the whole world look ethereal and somehow cleaner, so that's nice. Then there's the huge sphere hanging in the sky that might remind you of the Death Star or Warworld depending on your personal points of reference. It's hard not to notice things have changed.

I'm guessing that sphere is responsible for the disruption to local physics although it could just be a very large chunk of space detritus. There are certainly plenty of disused satellites and space capsules drifting about, along with all kinds of free-floating junk. Everything from billboards and bits of building to loose rowing boats and cars.

The temptation to try to get up to them is enormous but at the start, even with the hugely increased jump height and no risk of falling damage if you miss, most of them are too high to reach. That can be fixed through the acquisition of a new gear set that, among other things,  gives you the ability to jump even higher. 

I already have the boots. I got them from a Gear Crate guarded by a very impressive new elite mob and his many lackeys and hench-creatures. I spotted him as I was trying to gain enough height to find out what the glowing rings in the sky might be (They increase your gliding speed if you fly through them, just like similar ones in several other games I could name.),

Since I had nothing to lose, playing a brand new character, I thought I'd take him on. It was a chaotic fight, what with the excessive use of the z-axis, and a long one, mostly because although I'd made a pistol, I'd forgotten to equip it, so I had to chop away at the thing's tentacles with a machete. In the end, I came out the winner and those boots, among other goodies, were my reward.

I carried on leaping and gliding until the clock ticked round to 9pm game time and the gravity came back on. That would be a nasty surprise if it happened while you were high in the air. Maybe there should be a klaxon. 

I was on the ground so I was fine but by then I'd been playing for a couple of hours, about my limit for a session these days, so I thought it would be a suitable place to stop. All in all I was very impressed with the new event. If nothing else it's great for goofing about, just like I hoped it would be.

I'm not sure I'll pursue whatever the storyline is with any great diligence but I would like to take advantage of the advertised "Build a Home in the Sky" feature so I will definitely be giving it some more time. As for the Endless Dream, I may have to consider my options again. 

I really don't want to be leveling three characters at once.

Property Liable To Flooding. Danger Of Turtles. Would Suit Adventurer Or Similar.

Yesterday's post started out as a double-feature - games I'm currently playing, co-starring EverQuest II and Once Human - but I ran on at such length about EQII I decided to cut Once Human out of the edit altogether. Just as well, really. I didn't have much to say about it.

I do have some screenshots, though. I take a lot of pictures in OH. It begs for it, what with all the gorgeous scenery and the plethora of odd and interesting details. Also, the in-game camera options are fairly easy to use and give very good results, which encourages scrapbooking if not actual photo-journalism.

The reason I don't have much to say about the game itslef, despite having played it a bunch of times recently, is only partly because I'm going through the same old content I've been through and written about several times already. Mainly it's because I've been spending most of my time building my house.

Once Human has excellent housing options although in common with far too many games they don't really begin to show their best side until you've invested a ton of points going down the various branches of the skill tree. That's not what it's called, by the way, but I'm not going to log in just to check the vernacular. We all know how these things work; no-one cares what the labels say.

Because you have to have done a lot of other, unrelated things to earn the points to spend on better materials and architectural features, there's an annoying tendency for all low-level housing to look like prefabricated boxes. I seem to recall this used to be called "ranch-style". That's if people even bother to put a roof on, of course. All too many players just slap down the foundations, place the utilities and leave it at that.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had my house on a small plateau overlooking one of the starter towns, a location that was attractive enough to acquire several message markers from players suggesting it was a great spot to build a starter home. 

Once Human has an odd - I want to say unique because I can't recall seeing it anywhere before - feature, whereby you can craft a glowing spike to stick in the ground just about anywhere. Then you can append a message, saying anything you want. There seem to be very few restrictions on placing these; you can put them on other people's property or in towns, for example. You see them pretty much everywhere although not any longer in the ludicrous profusion of the weeks following launch, I'm pleased to say.

Initially I found them very annoying. They seemed like nothing but visual pollution and if you took the trouble to click on them and read what people had written they usually turned out to be verbal pollution as well. Most of them wouldn't even qualify as tagging. They didn't even have that much style. 

In my initial run, having been infuriated to find someone had placed one of the damn things inside my house, I searched through the settings until I found the option to switch them off completely. After that, for a long time, I never saw them at all and was very glad of it.

Sometime later, though, probably after I re-started in a new Scenario, I began seeing them again and for some reason I didn't immediately switch them off. Instead, I read a few and found that as the game had matured, so had the players. Some of them, anyway. They were leaving very helpful details on things like where to find gear chests or what strategies to use on instance bosses. The messages can include images and hyperlinks so some of them amounted to full strategy guides inside the game. 

Consequently, I didn't switch the feature off again and now I quite enjoy clicking on the little glowing sticks to see what stories they can tell. I was pleased to read all those confirmations of what a good spot I'd picked but puzzled as to why no-one had followed their own advice and built a home there. Didn't take me long to find out.

Although the site is extremely favorably placed for facilities and views, it's also altogether too close to a "stronghold", a term that seems to mean just about any permanent structure currently infested with deviants. There's a small, unnamed camp of them at the far end of the plateau - completely harmless, decent neighbors, keep themselves to themselves, always ready to lend a cup of sugar provided you put a couple of bullets into them before you ask, that sort of thing - but the mere presence of the buildings they occupy hinders development in that direction and completely prevents expansion.

I found that out when I spent the necessary points to expand my territory only to find the machine wouldn't pony up the extra floor space. As it happened, I'd just received the nod to move on to the third town, Meyer's Market, so I figured I might as well move my whole operation down there.

You can just pick up your entire house with all the fittings, pop it in your bags and flip it out again where you want it to be. I thought about doing that but my house, if you could even call it that, was a mess so I thought it might be better if I just started again from scratch. Building in Once Human is both easy and fun so I was looking forward to it.

And it went really well. I found an excellent spot, also recommended by a previous resident, completely flat, on a large sandbank in the river next to the town. I put down my terminal, claimed the jumbo-sized plot.and started building. At the start pretty much all you need is to build is wood and gravel and there was no shortage of nodes for those right outside, so I started mining and chopping until I couldn't carry any more and then I turned to building.

After two or three sessions doing not much else I had the biggest, most sensibly laid-out house I've had in the game to date. It still looks like a box but it's a well-proportioned box with big, open rooms and high ceilings with plenty of light coming in through the numerous windows and skylights. It isn't much to look at from the outside but the interior has huge potential. I'm very happy with how it's going so far.

I'm not so happy with all the snapping turtles that keep wandering in from the river. They're no threat but they're highly aggressive and when one attacks it makes my character jump back about a yard, which in turn sometimes makes me jump, if I'm not expecting it. I may have to build a fence all around the property to keep them out.

I was enjoying building so much, I went out and did a bunch of missions to level up and get more points to spend in the housing tree. I could now build a much more impressive-looking structure in  stone instead of wood but that would mean going to higher-level areas to mine resources and doing more missions to get more points to open up the recipes for more sophisticated equipment...

And that's how they get you. Not that I'm complaining. It's very entertaining. The only shadow of doubt I have about carrying on down this path is whether the Novice server I'm on is eligible for permanent status, when the current scenario ends. I'm not at all sure the starter servers are included in that program.

And anyway, I want to set up my forever home in the game on one of the servers that has the full map open all the time, north and south. That's going to necessitate a move at some point so there's probably not much point my getting too invested in the server I'm on.

That's what I've been up to in Once Human. I said it wasn't anything new. But it's been a lot of fun. Sometimes more of the same is just what I want.

Pocket Apocalypse

Yesterday was a big day for Once Human: the long-promised launch of the mobile client. The highly-anticipated event came with a lot of freebies. I got an email telling me they were giving away more than a thousand cosmetics and there were Twitch drops and multiple in-game giveaways on top of that.

Obviously, I logged in to grab what I could. I thought I hadn't been gone that long and in fact it was only a couple of weeks but that was still long enough for me to get yet more freebies as a returnee. I won't say is possible to have too much free stuff but when it takes the best part of a session just to claim it all and sort through your haul to see what's worth having, things might be getting just a little out of hand.

So, what did I get? Honestly, I wish I could tell you. By the time I'd finished grabbing stuff and going through my inventory to see what was there, I wasn't a hundred per cent sure which pieces were new and which I'd had for a while but hadn't noticed or didn't remember getting.

The "1016 Free Cosmetics" headline offer is a tad misleading in that you don't get them all at once. Probably just as well, although the way storage works in Once Human they wouldn't all go into inventory. Most would appear as options on menus instead.

I'm by no means certain about any of this because there's a ferocious amount of information available in-game, so much that it becomes confusing to try and assimilate it all in one go, but I think the full range of giveaways is spread across a Log-In event that goes on for several months. I'm pretty sure I saw a time-line that had August on it at one point.

Even if that's right, you do get a big drop the first time you log in. It's my impression than most of those are specials or giveaways from previous events or cash-shop promotions, so dedicated players may be disappointed to find they already have a lot of them. I didn't, so I was very happy.

Among other things, I got a full set, all pieces, of an outfit called Black Rhinoceros. It's impressive although it's not really the sort of thing I'd wear. Still, nice to have the option. 

More interesting to me were the separates, including several T-shirts, jackets and pants that my character definitely will wear. Shoes, gloves and masks rarely seem to make that much difference to a look, mostly  because they're too small to be seen clearly much of the time, so I wasn't so excited by the new options there. Even so, you can ruin a look with the wrong shoes so more variety is always welcome.

Hats and eyewear, on the other hand, absolutely make a look. I want as many of both as I can get and there were two or three good ones. When I was done claiming and I'd had a chance to go through everything, I was pretty pleased with what I'd got.

I was disappointed not to be able to find the bag charm I thought I'd been given anywhere in my bags or on the appearance tabs. I was sure I'd seen one when I was claiming. I particularly noticed it because don't have a bag charm in Once Human and I would very much like one. Fortunately, one showed up this morning, while I was logged in to take some screenshots. It just popped up in the mail, another pre-registration freebie. What the delay was I have no idea but better late...

Last but most definitely not least, I got a dog. Well, a box of dogs, to be precise. A choice of three - Labrador, Doberman or Blackback. I'm pretty good on dog breeds as a rule but Blackback was a new one on me. The illustration made it look like a German Shepherd, which would have been my preference if true, so I took a risk and picked it.

It is a German Shepherd or as near as makes no difference. It's also a Deviation so I had to make a storage unit for it, then a blue light to hang over the case because that's what the dog likes. Very quickly he was ready and out he popped. He (Or she. Didn't check.) is playful and loyal, as in he follows me everywhere, very closely, which might get annoying. 

He also barks. A lot. Which definitely will. Still, a dog is a dog. 

All in all, I was very satisfied with my haul and there's more to come if I've interpreted the instructions  correctly. My favorite MMORPG for playing dress-up by a wide, wide margin is The Secret World. Or Secret World Legends, I guess, since the revamp didn't change anything about the way appearance works in the game, as far as I can recall but Once Human is first runner-up. Fantasy and Sci-Fi is all very well for story and setting but for playing Barbies, give me something roughly contemporary, every time.

The recent change to the game that made many, probably most, things account rather than character based meant I didn't have to work out who should claim anything. I just grabbed the lot on my new character, in the safe knowledge that any other character I ever play will be able to wear it all too. 

Thanks to that very welcome mechanic, my new character was already kitted out in gear I thought looked spiffy, even though she's only Level 8, but although I was perfectly happy with that look, I couldn't resist giving her a new one. There were several pieces, all predominately pink, that just begged to be put together, so that's what I did. 

Then I spent fifteen minutes posing and taking selfies. It is why we play these games, after all. May as well admit it.

After that, I did a little bit of actual gameplay. Not a lot. First I had some reconstruction to do.

Because I'd not logged in for a while, my house had been packed up and put away but I was still standing on the spot where it had been and despite a whole cluster of messages from other players pointing out what a great spot that was, no-one had built on it, so I put my house back where it had been. It's a flawless, one-click process. Can't fault it.

Then I ran around for a while, shooting and skinning deer, mining copper, chopping down trees and reporting back on various missions I'd finished to Mary and Claire and that suave guy in the suit, the one who likes to sit at wooden tables in the pouring rain as if he's on the terrace of a high-class brasserie. All my old pals, anyway.

I can always tell when an MMORPG has bedded itself down in my umwelt. Going back starts to feel much like when you return to somewhere you used to live or where you studied or had a great holiday. It feels familiar and comfortable and somehow just right.

That doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to play Once Human a lot again. It just means I know I could, if I wanted to. I'm at home there. I might make a list of MMORPGs that fall into that category someday. I bet there are a couple of dozen, at least. 

What I don't imagine I'll be doing much of, though, is playing Once Human on mobile. Still, having taken the freebies, I thought it would be rude not to at least take a look. Plus I was curious to see if it would run on my Samsung Galaxy A16, by no means a gaming phone.

And it does. Quite smoothly, in fact. I received a warning that my device was not supported but I'm pretty sure that if my phone couldn't run the game at all, Google Play would have blocked me from downloading it. I didn't try to do anything taxing - no combat, for example - but moving around and interacting with the world seemed fine and my phone didn't catch fire so I think we're good.

Getting the game installed was very straightforward as was linking it with my Steam account. There's a FAQ on the website about cross-platform play and like most official information about the game, it's more confusing than it should be. Starry really are not good at explaining things in simple terms. They make everything far more complicated than necessary.

The gist is that if you were playing before the Mobile launch, you can link whatever platform you were using to the mobile client and it will work. The game was available on PC via Steam, Epic and Starry's own Loading Bay launcher. If you only began playing with the arrival of the game on Mobile, however, you are obligated to use Loading Bay, whatever device you play on, if you want cross-platform access. Well, I think that's how it works, anyway. Read it for yourself and see what you think.

I got my Steam account linked with no problems. There was a substantial download, well over a gigabyte, which seems a lot for a mobile game, and the usual wait for shaders to compile but then I was able to log my new character in and take her for a stroll down the road. Oddly, she was wearing a different jacket and no pants. 

I took a few screenshots to note the fact but before I logged out she'd magically acquired her full, pink look so I assume there was just some lead-time required to get everything synced. When I checked just now, those screenshots aren't in the Album on PC, either. I think you might need to use the Cloud option for that.

The mobile controls on a phone seem crazy small to me but so does everything on a phone. I could see some advantages to the mobile UI - I'd certainly prefer to have similar on-screen icons to click for dodge and crouch on PC, for example - but in general I'm sure I'd find the whole thing just too fiddly to be enjoyable, especially in any kind of combat situation.

I wouldn't rule out logging in on the phone to do some non-critical housekeeping tasks, though. And it might be interesting to see how the building works. That's the sort of thing that might be fun to do in bed some night, when there's nothing on the streams I feel like watching .

Mostly, though, I' think I'll be sticking to PC for my Once Human fix, assuming I'm playing at all. Which I will be, although I can't say how often. 

It occurs to me, though, that the game I really ought to be playing on Mobile is Wuthering Waves, which will run on my phone. Given most of the gameplay revolves around watching cut-scenes, it ought to be ideal.

Welcome Back. Now Get To Work!

It's a testament both to the compulsive pull of survival game mechanics and the specific way they've been implemented in Once Human that, despite having other things I'd rather have been doing, and despite the glorious sunshine streaming through my window, I just spent the last two hours making a new character and playing through the early stages of the game, as far as Deadville. I only meant to log in for maybe ten or fifteen minutes to get some screenshots of the Returning Player rewards for a post but things kind of spiralled, in what I suppose I ought to see as a good way.

It was fun, anyhow. I mean, it wasn't very productive. I could much more usefully have spent the two hours tidying the house or starting to get the garden back in shape or working on another music video or just taking Beryl out for a walk in the sunshine (Although she wouldn't have thanked me for that, having had one walk already and not being the most active of dogs...)

I didn't do any of that, though. Instead I spent the first fifteen minutes finishing making my new character, having already spent half an hour on her last night. I already knew I was in trouble, even then. 

There's a handy Save option for appearance so I didn't have to start over from the beginning. I was trying to get a character that didn't look like my other one, which is why I ended up with someone with blue hair and a big scar. The problem as always is that if I don't feel right about a character from the start I'm very unlikely to keep playing them and the range of looks that make feel comfortable is quite narrow. If i make anyone that doesn't look quite a lot like all the other characters I make in all the other games, chances are I won't stick with them.

That braid is going to have to go. And you need to dye your hair...

I think I did alright with this one. She feels like I know her a little already. I certainly know the opening tutorial by now, having played through it at least half a dozen times. It's very good but it's not short. Even tabbing through all the dialog it took me about twenty minutes to get through.

And that's not the only reason it turns out coming back to Once Human isn't quite as simple as Starry would like to have you believe. This dev team has always had the most back-assward, over-complicated way of doing things and that hasn't changed a jot. I notice the game now has a Mostly Positive rating on Steam, which seems quite appropriate. I'm all but certain if they'd made the choices at the start that they've slowly and grudgingly made over the course of the first year, that rating would be Very Positive instead but they like to do everything the hard way.

All I was trying to do was get the rewards and take some pictures so my first choice was to log in my one existing character and claim them with her. I was also looking forward to moving her to the new scenario that allows access to the full map, the original areas plus those added in the Way of Winter. My further plans would then have been to stay on that server indefinitely, now the option to do so exists.

Except it doesn't. Not yet. Here's a detailed explanation of how it works now and how it's going to work later. Even after a competent journalist has gone through the whole thing and reframed it in clear, concise terms, I still find it confusing. 

Gimme the good stuff!

As far as I can tell, you have to pick a server and play through whatever Scenario it's running up to the end, when you would normally be forced to leave. That usually takes around six weeks or so. When it  happens, you still get kicked to Eternaland as always but, after kicking your heels there for a couple of hours, you can indicate you'd like to go back to where you came from, rather than choosing a new server or Scenario as you always had to before.

Once you're back where you started, you just need to make sure you log in at least once a month to avoid being kicked off the server for good. Later in the year that grace time will be extended to once every six months. 

All well and good but my character didn't have server to go back to. She's been in the limbo of Eternaland since before Christmas, which was when I last logged in. 

No problem. I just needed to pick a new Scenario and go from there. So I looked for the one where the whole map was open and... I couldn't find one. For a very good reason: one doesn't exist... yet. 

The full map will only be available with the "Endless Dream" Scenario, which is due to arrive "this year". It seems I've come back a tad early. Oh, well...

The jacket is some kind of reward too but for what I'm not sure.

Also, I ought to mention that the Endless Dream seems like it might be more of an endless nightmare:

"You might find yourself engulfed in darkness or afflicted with strange vulnerabilities—becoming unusually weak, flammable, or even explosive."

That wasn't quite what I had in mind when I envisaged a permanent server I could call home for the foreseeable future. Even so, if that's what it takes...

For the time being, though, I've gone very much the opposite way in my return to the game: E-Z Mode.

I looked at all the available Scenarios and decide that if I was going to start over, I might as well do it properly. So I re-rolled on a Novice server. 

I hadn't seen much point making new characters before, what with having to start over from scratch every couple of months anyway, but things have changed. Not only can we now have as many as ten characters on a single account (I seem to remember it was just one to begin with and then it was three but don't quote me on that.), they now all share a number of benefits on an Account-held basis, not just currencies but also blueprints, mods, accessories and most importantly - cosmetics.

No more wandering around for days with no pants! No more looking like Jethro from the Beverley Hillbillies in your full Rustic crafted gear! As soon as I got past the introduction and into the game proper I got a series of pop-ups telling me all the shared stuff I was now entitled to use and the first thing I did was give my new character a new look.

Aww! Now we can't see your blue rinse.

And what that made me realize was that I've never put nearly enough effort into finding or buying cosmetics. There didn't seem to be all that much point before; once I get a look I like, I tend to stick with it so there's not a lot of point building up an extensive wardrobe. Now, though, I can have as many as ten looks I like and stick with all of them.

I'm probably not going to go that far but I am re-motivated to go hunting for new things to wear and I'm very happy to know I can do it on my high-level character, where it will be relatively easy, and my low-level characters will reap the benefits. 

There doesn't appear to be any limit to the number of times you can share things or to the number of characters who can use them, either, although presumably once currency is spent by anyone, it's gone. I ought to check if two characters can wear the same hat at the same time, I guess. I'll try and remember to test that next time I log in.

And that will be soon, I imagine, partly because I had a really good time playing again this morning but also because some of those Welcome Back rewards are time-limited until you complete a Reward track to make them permanent.

I have fifteen days to do that. Will I? 

Well, let's just say one of the rewards is that giant cat I used to have, right back at the start. I've always wanted that back.

Sometimes It Pays Not To Play

Since I'm not playing any games right now, about the best I can manage in the way of posts about gaming is either to poke at the news or to talk about the games I would be playing, if I was playing games. I have a couple of ideas for the first but I'm saving those until I have enough for a Grab Bag. Or until I'm desperate for something to write about, which could be very soon, the way things are going.

This morning, though, I'm going with the second option: games I might start playing any day now, if the weather wasn't so damn glorious and I didn't have this unquenchable obsession with creating an imaginary past where I really did something with all those songs I wrote in the 'eighties. 

And the game in the spotlight today is, once again, Once Human.

I got an email from Starry this morning. It was one of those "Come back! We miss you!" ones that all the good PR departments toss out like old toddlers throwing bread to the ducks. Bread, as we all know, is really bad for ducks but most ducks are too dim to know that, so they all pile in and scarf it up anyway. 

I'd like to think of myself as smarter than the average duck and even if I wasn't I'd hope at least to have better self-control and more discernment. In order to maintain that delusion, I try not to hurl myself at every inducement to return to games I stopped playing for what were probably very good reasons, if only I could remember what they were. 

The litter of past posts here, chortling over freebies I've claimed for games I went on never to play again, or at best that I played only for a desultory number of sessions after I filled my imaginary pockets, is all the evidence anyone could need to convict me of self-deception and maybe even hypocrisy. I say one thing and do another all the time although not, I hope, when it involves anything that actually matters.

It's true, then, that I'm a sucker for a freebie but it's also true that there are plenty of offers I can easily resist. And most of the "Please come back" offers plop squarely into that pot. Blizzard send me begging letters pretty much every week and so do ArenaNet but I haven't touched World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2 for years now. 

Of course, that might be because their offers aren't all that. Certainly ANet's aren't. The best they ever seem to be able to come up with is long notes about what I'm missing and promises to sell me stuff for a bit less than they usually ask. Blizzard occasionally tempt me with some kind of "Play for a while for Free" but they largely scuppered their own ship there, when they came up with the endless free trial.

I try to avoid regionalist generalizations on the lines of "Asian games be like this but Western games be like that" but there are times when it's hard. Cultures do differ and its daft to pretend they don't. 

And one way the Eastern and Western gaming cultures definitely differ is that the Eastern ones give better freebies. They hand out more stuff, more often and it's better stuff. I've been taking their largess happily for years and it still puzzles me why they're so generous. It makes it completely unnecessary to give any of them any money at all. 

Cultural differences aside, as has been pointed out by angry players on both sides of the continental divide many times, developers are prone to giving you more stuff if you don't play their games than if you do. I receive a continual stream of inducements to return to games I haven't played in years but do I get any "Thank You for being a Loyal Customer" emails from the games I'm actively playing?

No, I do not. I get emails telling me what's new and suggesting I log in and enjoy it but they rarely, indeed almost never, come with rewards attached. The theory seems to be that if you play the game already, you can damn well log in and play it if you want stuff.  

It's no surprise. It's the way the world works now. Apparently I'm an idiot for not changing my utility suppliers at least every six months and I should be swapping my savings from bank to bank every time the interest rates change.

Well, screw that. There was a time - and I'm old enough to remember it - when the norm was to find something you were happy with and stick with it and that suits my personality a lot better than all this chopping and changing. I'm fundamentally lazy and I don't mind paying a small surcharge just to be left alone.

Unless, of course, all it involves is my pressing a few buttons. If it's that simple, why not? 

I pressed a few this morning and now Once Human is downloading to my external SSD. Again. Let's hope it's easier to keep updated this time.

To be fair to myself, it wasn't just the "10+ cosmetics" that hooked me back in. Or the 40k Starchrom currency. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Starry have finally seen sense and opted for permanent servers. They've also added a Scenario in which the whole of the map is available. Those two moves directly address and to some extent resolve my two biggest problems with the game: impermanence and artificial boundaries.

So, I was going to come back at some point. What the latest offer did was bring that point forward to "Now". Whether I'll do any more, once the game has finally downloaded and installed itself, than log in to claim my loot, I can't predict. I suspect not but at least the client will be back on my hard drive and the possibility will be there again.

Since I was thinking about the game and since it was right there in the email, I also took a moment to pre-register for the upcoming Mobile version. I thought I'd done it already but it seems not. More than thirty million people have, though. Once Human is a popular and successful game.

There are freebies for pre-registering, naturally, along with a draw for real-world prizes ranging from in-game goods to computer peripherals and money. Top prize is an iPhone 16 Pro Max. 

You get draws for various "tasks" - registering your interest, providing an email or a phone number, following the game on social media and so on. I got two draws for registering with an email address and I won... a thank-you. That's an actual prize. I got thanked twice.

I imagine most people get a thank-you, unlike the Lone Ranger, who famously never did. I would hope quite a few people also get the "In-Game Bundle", whatever's in that. As for the rest, well they have been kind enough to reveal the probabilities. Not that I can make much sense of them. I'm not sure how there can be a 60% chance of a "Redeem Code" if there are only 30,000 of them and more than thirty million people have pre-registered...

For once, though, I'm not in it for the freebies. I want to see if the game will run on my phone. I don't imagine it will but it will be an interesting experiment, provided it doesn't catch fire trying. 

Steam is still working on getting the PC version up and running as I type and the mobile game doesn't go live until 23 April so for now it's back to what I really want to do - enjoy the spring sunshine and start work on another music video for my new YouTube channel. 

Once Human can wait. It's not going anywhere and anyway, if I leave it long enough, they'll almost certainly give me more stuff. 

New Toys Vs Old Games

There almost wasn't a post today because I've got a new toy and I can't stop playing with it. Two new toys, really. One's real, one's artificial, but they fit together perfectly. Finally, a use for AI that's both practical and satisfying. More of that another day, though. 

Meanwhile, here are some scraps. 

EverQuest II

My Necromancer made it to Level 130 in Tailoring a couple of days ago. It may only have been five levels above the boost but it still took a while. I had several expansions to level in and all of them offered those delicious, huge gobs of xp for every Signature quest but I'd forgotten just how long and fiddly some of those quests are and how much slower it all goes when you can't fly everywhere.

It didn't help that in some of the expansions I'd already started the Adventure questlines on my Necro. In a couple she'd finished them altogether and in one or two she'd made it some of the way and then stopped, but in the others she hadn't even started. Sometimes she could fly, sometimes she couldn't and sometimes she could fly for a bit and then had to walk. 

All the skills, none of the recipes.

It was all more than a tad confusing but I muddled through. I had to change expansions one time, when the questline required her to harvest a rare and she was about 500 skill points short. I changed a couple more times when quests seemed to be going on forever with no sign of any xp or because they wanted her to travel all over the place ans she didn't have the right to fly. 

After a while, she ran out of Tradeskill Vitality and went to refill it with the Veteran Hammer, only to find that, not having been a crafter before, she'd never even claimed it. (She has now, obviously.) When she ran out of rested xp a second time, I took a break for a few days, then came back and finished it off. The whole thing took either a week and a half or three or four hours, depending how you want to count it.

Once I was done with all that, I moved straight on to Qho's super-annoying gathering quests. It was made very plain to me as I was trying to level Tailoring that not being maxed in Gathering is no longer an option for a crafter. 

Qho's notorious demands have not gotten any less irritating over time, let me re-assure you of that. Especially the Nektulos Forest stage, always the most hated of all. I ended up buying a bunch of Gnomish Divining Rods off the broker for that one, which just about saved my sanity.

I'm up to the Feerrott/Rivervale stage now. If I remember correctly I think there's only one more double-dip after that - Lavastorm and Everfrost. From then on I think it's just the one zone each time. I bloody well hope so!

Once I get this lot done, it's on to the other gathering quests, the ones Raffik gives. Those are a lot more fun and Raffik is way less annoying. After that, I need to get my Sage out to make the Necro a whole load of Expert spells. 

And that's still not everything, not even close. There's still a hell of a lot to do just to get her up to speed on the basics and even then she'll still be heavily disadvantaged compared to the Berserker. It's no wonder I always end up going back to him every time expansion season comes around- it's pure inertia. 

This time, though.. This time I will succeed! I swear it!

Wuthering Waves

Team photo!

I finished the Riniscitta storyline a week ago. The story was really good and better yet, the fights were especially well-judged. I didn't even have to do the really big one at the end at all. I just got to watch my character do it without any help from me. If only all big storylines ended that way!

Since then, I don't think I've even logged in once. The moment I finished the Riniscitta questline, the game immediately started me on the one from the current update and I wasn't ready for it so I stopped. Then I had a load of work days and then Next Fest arrived and somehow I haven't gotten around to going back to Wuthering Waves just yet. 

I'd better do something about it or I'll be an update behind again... 

Maybe tomorrow, as the song goes.

Blade & Soul NEO

I logged in on the day it launched, which was sometime last week. I played through the now-optional introduction and tutorial. It was all exactly as I remembered and yet somehow much more disturbing. It didn't appear to have been changed in any way by the NEO update, not even visually, but I'd forgotten just how brutal that beginning is.

I kinda wish I'd chosen this option now...

Seriously, even among the many openings to RPGs, where you get to watch everyone your character knows and cares about get slaughtered before your - and their - very eyes, Blade & Soul stands out as particularly cruel and callous. They make a point of giving you just enough time with everyone so you see them as individuals with personalities, not just as faceless NPCs, then they pick them off one by one in front of you, right after your character has just had a really nice moment and everything feels great.

And if that isn't disturbing enough, they even make sure you get to see all the dogs and cats killed too. The camera actually lingers on the bodies of the pets for a second or two, just to make sure you don't miss anything. I did remember it was a bit of a traumatic opening but not just how disturbing it was. It's right up there with The Searing in Guild Wars 2 for shock value.

And then, of course, you wake up and instantly you're off doing quests for people you've never met, almost like nothing ever happened. There's clearly no such thing as PTSD in MMOland. 

To be fair, when you wake up there is a war going on, but still...

As for the NEO part, so far I can't say I've noticed anything different at all. Then again, I haven't logged in again since, for much the same reasons as I already mentioned. Maybe next week, as the song doesn't carry on.

Once Human

I haven't played this one for a while but there's a good chance I could start again soon, although I'll have to re-install it first. The reason I'm thinking of going back is yesterday's announcement that there are going to be "permanent servers" due to "consistently received" feedback saying that's what players want. Well, Duh!

Seriously, what is it with Starry? They developed a really excellent MMOFPS/RPG and then made every conceivable effort to make it as awkward and complicated to play it as they possibly could. 

Insert witty comment re
Starry keeping everyone hanging...

Although the Scenario system has always had its supporters and really isn't all that different from traditional Seasons in other MMOS, the impermanence dictated by the complete lack of any persistence in the world itself has always rubbed many players up the wrong way. Eternaland is all very well as a kind of sandbox mode but it was never going to replace having an actual, persistent world in which progress mattered and in which the excellent housing tools could be put to good use building actual homes.

Of course, this being Starry, they can't simply add some permanent servers and leave it at that. If they did, someone might be able to work out what they were doing..

As always, the update notes are ferociously long and complex. They've chosen to call the new servers "Non-Shutdown Servers" which really trips off the tongue. They aren't truly permanent in the sense we know and expect from most MMORPGs, either. They're governed by a whole load of rules and regulations, which I won't attempt to summarise here, but the important caveat is that although Scenario servers will now carry on after the Scenario ends, they will only remain active as long as enough people keep logging in to them to make them worth Starry's while.

After that, it's anyone's guess. I've read and re-read the rules and I still don't understand them. Try this:

"ii. Each server will be merged into a single World on the permanent server. After the merge, you can switch between Worlds to interact with players from other servers. Subsequently, Worlds with relatively low activity levels may be merged to ensure a good experience."

Insert witty comment#2

The server goes into the world goes into the server but there are multiple worlds and servers. I'm not sure if it's a translation issue or just jargon that's been in use internally for so long no-one realizes how confusing it must be for outsiders. I think it means that although the nomenclature will change, you'll be able to keep logging in to the same scenario indefinitely but I can't say I'm even sure about that.

Whatever the technicalities,it does seem as though, when the update arrives, you'll be able to settle down somewhere and just keep playing if that's what you want. No more having to start over every few weeks. If only someone had thought of that a year ago, eh?

There are a whole lot more positive developments in the upcoming update, too. One new scenario will have all the available landmass available at the same time, another thing players started asking for as soon as the Northern region was added. The downside there is that it's only happening in a scenario with a very off-putting rulset but chances are I'll move there when it happens anyway.  

Or I could re-roll there instead because yet another thing that players have long been asking for is coming - Account-based ownership of assets. Starry have moved from not wanting anyone to have more than one character through grudgingly allowing it to now actively encouraging it. Previously I couldn't see much point in making another character but suddenly it's beginning to look like quite a good option.

All of that and more puts Once Human firmly back on my list of possible games for the Spring and Summer. 

Of course, first I have to get my current obsession out of my system. Since I got my new toy I haven't really wanted to play any games at all. That will pass soon enough, though. Novelty never lasts long. When it wears off, anything with value sticks around but has to take its turn.

And with that, I'm going back to play with my toy some more. Maybe I'll have something to share in that regard later. Or maybe I'll just keep it to myself. Decisions will have to be made. Anything to do with AI always causes such a fuss and I'm not sure whether I'm up for any more of that...