You're No Pal Of Mine!

As the title of yesterday's post made painfully clear, I blew all my saved-up ideas in one unnecessarily lengthy Grab Bag with the predictable consequence that today I have nothing to write about. 

Okay, "nothing" is a strong word. Also not remotely accurate. I have a whole slew of things I could write about but none of them is suitable for the hour or two I have available to put something together. 

So I'm not going to bother. I'm going to say one thing about a gaming event, get AI to make me a header image, stick a song on the tail-end and call it done. Pathetic, isn't it?

Let's start with the gaming thing. One of the games I'm theoretically but not actually still playing is Once Human. I went on and on about how much better it'd be if they'd just give us permanent servers where we could settle down like it was a regular MMORPG and then they did and I pretty much never logged in again.

I still have OH installed and, I think, updated, so I could go back at any moment. I just need a push. And now I have one. Or I will have, in about a month's time.

Once Human is hosting a collaboration with... Palworld. I know! It sounds nuts, doesn't it? Until you think about it.

Apart from one looking like it was designed by a sugared-up eight-year old and the other by a teenage techno-goth, the two games are really quite similar. They're both open world survival games with a large building component and most importantly they both rely very heavily on capturing creatures and putting them to work.

In Palworld it's Pals. In Once Human it's Deviants. Pals roam around your home. Deviants roam around your home. Pals come with you and fight stuff. Deviants come with you and fight stuff. Pals let you do things you couldn't otherwise do. Deviants...

You get the idea. The mechanics are really very similar indeed and so are the results. Luckily for Starry, the studio behind Once Human, they didn't make it so you have you catch Deviants by throwing small spheres at them from a distance. No, you walk up to the Deviant, which is already inside a sphere, and you catch it by holding up your hand, which is entirely different.

I'm not clear on whether the  event is a one-way deal, with Pals appearing in Once Human but not the other way around, or whether Deviants will also be popping up in Palworld. Even if it's the latter, I doubt very much it would be enough to induce me to go back, even for a visit. Palworld is the open world survival game I liked the least of all the ones I've played, although even then I liked it more than that suggests. It was fun. Just not as much fun as all the others. 

I also very much doubt a brief return to check out this event will get me to spend much time in Once Human. I seem to be finding it very hard to stick at any games just now. There does seem to be a lot going on in OH, though, what with this, a new scenario and some more Vision Wheel shenanigans, so who knows? With all of that, something might click.

Another game I'm eyeing up just now is Erenshor, the solo MMORPG. I played the demo and enjoyed it but I never followed it up. It's been in Early Access for a while and there's supposed to be a big patch today that changes a whole lot of systems and mechanics so this might be a good time to start. 

I'm wondering if I might do better with something like this than with an actual MMORPG right now. I'm assuming Erenshor, unlike an actual MMO, allows you to pause or stop at a moment's notice, which is one of the main things that puts me off playing most of the games I usually enjoy. I'm wary of starting anything that can't be easily interrupted these days. 

What I really should be doing, gaming-wise, is getting back to Wuthering Waves, of course. There's yet another content drop coming. I could have embedded that video too and the one before but I haven't watched either of them for fear of spoilers. I took all that trouble to catch up and the moment I got there, I stopped playing and fell behind again. I should probably prioritize that instead of starting anything new.

That's about all I have for today and it's more than I thought I had. 

Let's finish with a song. Not one of mine. Still pondering how best to present those. Ihave more than a hundred now, which is a problem all of its own. 

How about an old favorite I'm not sure we've had on the blog before.

Blurry Moon - Charlotte Gainsbourg

That's Charlotte Gainsbourg's first new song since 2018, which predates the appearance of regular music features on IF, explaining why she's not appeared here before. (Actually, I just checked and she kind of has but only as the featured artist on Jim Jarmusch's band SQÜRL's John Ashberry Takes A Walk, on which she speaks and doesn't sing.)

And also, of course, in that whole post I did about Merci La Vie.

 Pretentious? Moi?

Time to stop before I say something embarassing about post-structuralism.

 

AI used in this post.

Just the header image, which was generated at NightCafe using the very annoyingly-named HiDream |1 Dev. What is it with that vertical downstroke I always have to peer at my keyboard to find? 

The prompt, taken directly from the text, was ""you walk up to the Deviant, which is already inside a larger sphere, and you catch it by holding up your hand", line art, color, retro". Default settings. 

I then trimmed the top and bottom because I forgot to change the format to 4:3. And then I ran it through Dithermark just for the hell of it.

Close observers will have noticed the hand has six fingers. I thought the good image generators were past all that now but obviously not. Then again, it isn't clear the hand is human, so there's a get-out if needed. 

 

On The Changing Of The Seasons In Once Human - or - I Guess I'll Just Sit Here Then...

For once, I seem to be playing some games that are actually quite popular. I know! Weird, isn't it? 

One of them is Wuthering Waves, developments in which I'll get to another time. Today I'm going to ramble incoherently about the other, mostly in the hope that talking about it out loud might help me to work out what the heck is going on with it...

Once Human seems to be doing pretty well for itself. It's on Steam so it's easy to see how just how well. It's still in Steam's top ten by current players but perhaps more importantly, unlike many recent hits, it's also holding an audience. 

The game never reached the kind of seven-digit population highs of the likes of Palworld, peaking at a concurrency just under a quarter of a million. Since total downloads have apparently just hit ten million (!) I'm guessing there must be a lot of players on Epic's Game Store too and presumably other global platforms, too.

Sticking with Steam, six weeks after launch, Once Human is still hitting daily peaks of well over a hundred and fifty thousand players and the graph shows a remarkable consistency throughout the time it's been available.

Palworld, by comparison, hit a peak of more than two million players in its first month but had lost three-quarters of those by month two and ninety per cent by the month after that. It's now bumping along with an average concurrency of between thirty and forty thousand, which I'm sure is a very healthy population for most intents and purposes but which remains, undeniably, a great deal fewer than two million.

Palworld is following the  traditional development pattern, wherin players create characters who inhabit a permanent world to which further content is incrementally added. Once Human... isn't doing that.

I'd love to be able to explain just what Once Human is doing. I've written about the proposed seasonal structure before and speculated about how it might work but as must have been fairly obvious, I didn't really understand it. That's why I was waiting with considerable interest to find out exactly how it worked in practice, when the first, six-week Season came to end.

Well, now it has and I'm still none the wiser. I spent a good deal of my limited playing time yesterday and the day before reading all the in-game information that came with the latest update as well as everything in the supporting documentation on the website and in the official statements put out by Starry and/or Netease, along with discussions about it on Steam, Discord and Reddit and if anything, I have less of a clue now than I did before.

Oh, there are plenty of things I do know and understand. All the stuff about what you can keep and what you're going to lose is clear enough. I also know what happens if you do absolutely nothing and just wait, which at the moment looks like what I'm going to be doing.

After spending a while last night, pressing buttons and seeing what happened, I even have a vague idea how the new Seasonal server options work and how to choose between them, although there are some details there I'm still not clear on. 

What I'm not getting is why I'd want to do any of it right now. I read a lot about people wanting to farm Starchrom but I have more of that than I know what to do with already. Also about avoiding dead servers but since I play almost entirely solo, the fewer people there are around the better.

The only reason I can think of to move is to see new content but so far there isn't any that I can't experience just as well where I am. I'd like to take a look at some of the new, non-seasonal content like the revised fishing system and the animal ranching, not to mention the world boss that's a cross between a whale and a plane that you can apparently ride about on but I think I can do all of that on the server I'm already on, which won't close for another four weeks, so I guess I might as well stay put until then. 

Would there be any benefit in moving before the server kicks me out? As far as I can tell, there will be two new Scenarios but they're not coming until September and October. If the server you play on has reached Phase 6 already, though, which mine has, the choices right now are either to carry on just as you are for another month or move to another server running the same scenario on Normal difficulty, which is a step up from Novice, what we've all been on since launch.

There's also Hard difficulty but that's not quite ready yet. It'll be here in a couple of days. It was going
to be longer but enough people complained about the delay for Starry to push the date forward.

I'm quite happy with Novice difficulty but I'm not averse to trying Normal, just to see what the difference is. To that end, I spent about twenty minutes last night on server select, scrolling through all the options and I still couldn't figure out how it worked. 

As I read it, there are currently four types of server: Novice PvE and PvP and Normal PvE and PvP, each of which has a funny name (Manibus for PvE, Evolution's Call for PvP.) That all sounds fine but if you click on any of them it always shows the difficulty as "Novice" on the right panel. Even if you click the "Scenario and Seasonal Details" button it still says the same on all of them: "low difficulty... entry-level scenario."

Then there's the whole thing about "Signing Up" and "Entering" a server, which appear to be entirely different things. You can sign up without entering. If you do, you stay where you are until your server closes and kicks you into Eternaland, which is exactly what happens if you don't sign up at all. It seems signing up reserves you a place but you on't have to take it.

All of which would be fine if I had any clue what "entering" a server meant or how to do it. It would be easy enough if I was making a new character but for the one I'm playing I assume there has to be some kind of transfer process. 

How, when or where you access such a process, I have no idea. Maybe it becomes obvious when you do sign up but since I can't currently see any servers that look any different to the one I'm on I don't want to risk tying myself to an identical server for another six weeks and have the next scenario appear while I'm still on Phase 4 or something.

I am certain I'm missing something but other than playing russian roulette with the one character I have, I'm a bit stuck for a way to find out what it could be. I did consider making a second character on one of the new servers but then I couldn't think what that would tell me about anything so I gave up on the idea. I really son't do alts any more, do I? That's a change I didn't see coming.

Although, the more I think about it, the more it seems the big attraction of the seasonal system is new content, I'm wondering now whether it would actually be an option to keep playing the current content at Novice level by signing up to another Novice level server. It looks like that's possible. Actually, at the moment, it looks like that's all that's possible...

God, I'm confused.

While I dither, I'm spending most of my time in Eternaland which, as the name suggests, won't be going anywhere. I've blueprinted my Season One house and rebuilt it on an offshore island so it doesn't spoil the view. That process had some oddities that could have made a post on their own but I figured it out in the end. Just remember to press "F" not "G" at the crucial moment and you'll be fine.

Of course, while you can replicate an entire home that took you weeks to build in seconds, it won't ever fit exactly on a different piece of land, so I started making some modifications and now my copied house is quite different from the original. So much for the Eternaland Architectural Archive I was planning.

Despite all of this confusion and uncertainty and despite all the prophets of doom claiming the population would drop to near-zero as soon as people found out about the six-weekly "wipes", so far the upheaval doesn't appear to have had any significant impact on numbers at all and the complaints about it I can find on Steam or Discord are minimal. 

My own complaint is mostly that despite any number of attempts, I still can't figure out how the whole thing works! It's hard to say if I like it or not when I can't even understand what it is!

I guess that's what I get for playing a popular game for once. If and when I figure out what's going on, I'll be sure to come back and pass it on. Until then, I think I'm just going to carry on as I am until I get kicked to Eternaland in a month's time and worry about it then.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

Friday grab-bag on Friday! Amazing! It was going to be a music post, mostly because I checked my files and found nearly sixty tunes queued up in there but that's going to take a deal of winnowing and I don't have the time right now. 

Then again, if I leave it, it's only going to get worse...

Never mind. On with the motley.

Nice Hat!

Speaking of motley, I got my jester's hat for completing the new Bristlebane instance three times. That was easy. The hard part is going to be figuring out who's going to wear it. You have to have a certain kind of personality to get away with a look like that and it's not the kind I like to promote in my characters. Still, I imagine there'll be someone.

Sticking with EverQuest II, how about that Producer's Letter, eh? It doesn't add a huge amount of new information to the last one but boy, does it slap some hefty content on the table. 

I've been flipping through some of the threads on the beta forum for the upcoming Game Update 125 aka Darkpaw Rising and the vibe is positive. Someone's done a rough guide to the content, which I won't link to because I think the beta forums are supposed to be Members Only, and it sounds like there's a lot. Apparently there are a couple of dozen quests and they can't all be completed in a single run through the new instance. There are more than thirty named mobs in there with drops, too.

Interestingly, there's also a tradeskill questline and some of the aforementioned named mobs require crafted items just to reach the locations where they hang out. The whole thing is set in the Splitpaw dungeon from the eponymous adventure pack that came out in 2005. That place was always a nightmare to navigate but it was also very popular. It'll be fun to go back and do it all over again but differently.

The Big News, though, has to be the new Time Limited Server coming in May. It looks disconcertingly like EQII's own version of WoW Classic, if you squint. When you look closely, though, you'll notice it isn't taking us right back to the start of the game because, frankly, the game when it began was a mess. I was there and unlike some I do not want to relive that difficult, exhausting, distressing experience.

Luckily for me, the new server is skipping right over all that and settling on the recovery that took place a year or so later, after Scott Hartsman had been parachuted in to save the game. As I remember it, things were still have pretty tough even in 2006 but the most unforgivable of the short-sighted design decisions had been reversed by then, or at least had their vicious spikes blunted and the roughest of the rough edges sanded down, so it was possible to imagine you were engaged in something that was at least intended to be entertaining.

We'll see how it stands up to my memories, although I note that a careful reading of the announcement indicates that "gameplay will be reflective of the 2006 era" (My emphasis.) so anyone expecting a perfect, note for note recreation had better keep working on that time machine.

Either way, it sounds like an opportunity not to be missed. I'll be there for the event if nothing else. I can guarantee it will be packed at launch, both with bitter vets looking to pick holes and with rose-tinted nostalgists seeking to regain their lost youth. How long any of them will stick around is another matter but WoW Classic did alright so it might work...

I Keep On Knocking...

I spent much of this morning first trying to log into and then working through the introduction of the third beta test for Once Human. Although I had no trouble downloading the new client, I had a heck of a job getting the new Netease launcher to play nice. I really dislike these Publisher Portals. They're never any better than a straightforward , dedicated game launcher and all too often worse.

While I was looking up old passwords and trying to work out what email address I used last time, I did at least manage to solve the issue of why no-one had bothered to tell me, a registered player in the last test, when, or even that, another beta was coming. Simple answer? They did send an email but it went into my spam folder. Why that happens to some emails, when other emails from the exact same address, covering almost the exact same topic don't, I have no idea but it's very annoying.

Not as annoying, however, as having to spend the best part of half an hour fiddling with settings and trying everything from Google to Discord to get the launcher to accept my login. In the end I got in via Discord, which probably means I'm now on a new account. 

That wouldn't matter much in a beta except that I believe there are thank-you freebies waiting for anyone who played in the previous test. I might still get those - I do apparently have mail waiting for me in game -  but Once Human takes a very old school stance on in-game mail. You have to go to an actual mail-box to collect it. Since the first one I know of is in a town you don't see until you're about Level 10, it might be a while before I collect whatever's waiting for me.

Wary of the proposed cut-off for making characters (Midnight tonight or after the first 150,000, whichever comes first.) I rushed through character creation as soon as I was able to get in, figuring I could always come back later and make someone I was happier with, if the first didn't work out. OH's character creation is pretty good, though, so I was able to get someone I liked well enough in a matter of minutes. Well, a quarter of an hour, which is lightning-fast for me...

Having logged in, I couldn't stop myself from playing through the excellent introduction, which doesn't seem to have changed much since last time, although I'll have to go back and read my First Impressions pieces so I can compare. I do know I had no trouble at all finding a place to set up home this time, something I remember being a right pain back in December.

After about an hour and a half I had to drag myself away to make lunch. I was very impressed with Once Human last time around and I fully expect to be even more so this time. I think it's likely to be pretty successful come launch, unless they get too fancy and over-complicate things.

Tempting, but...

The two games that occupied most of the first quarter of this year for me, Palworld and Nightingale, both dropped updates this week but I can't see either of them enticing me back, at least for the moment. 

Nightingale's was just a small patch with some bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements but one of those QoLs was pretty huge: 

"Removal of 'Death Chests': dying in 0.1.3 will now only cause loss of durability, food buffs and time. This should make death/respawning less frustrating for Realmwalkers"

Stripped of the jargon, that means no more corpse runs. Latterly, I haven't been dying much - or at all - so it's a moot point for me now but in earlier stages, getting my stuff back was a major pain. Not sure why any dev team ever imagines it's a mechanic players want. I think just about every game I've ever played that had it at the start either took it out pretty quickly or made it optional. They could save themselves a lot of grief by just leaving it out in the first place. And I say that as one of the minority that somewhat enjoys a good CR!

Palworld's update was a lot more substantive. I read the full patch notes yesterday and there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, from numerous bug fixes, graphic and audio improvements to significant  improvements to gameplay. The headline though is the introduction of the game's first Raid Boss.

Unless it was mandatory, non-consensual PvP, I find it hard to think of an addition to the game that would appeal to me less than a Raid Boss. For one thing, when I was playing I was playing solo on a private shard so who would I raid with? For another, I already find the combat the least interesting thing about Palworld. Why would I want more of it but harder?

Luckily, I don't have to log in and try it out for myself to report back on what I don't like about it. I can just link to Tipa instead. As she found out, a "Raid" in Palworld doesn't require any other real players. Just you and a small army of Pals. It sounds about as much fun as those really irritating "base raids" I turned off after the first week, only not that much fun. 

I won't be picking Palworld back up to try it but I am a little more inclined to imagine a return when Pocketpair drops the big one this summer. 

 "We are planning a larger, more content-packed update for summer 2024.
Enjoy never-before-seen scenery and thrilling adventures on a new island, home to many new pals.
In addition, we plan to add a large amount of new content including new buildings, weapons, and tower bosses."

That does sound tempting, providing I can overcome my moral discomfiture with the game in general. I was a little surprised to hear they  were going to leave it that long but I imagine the runaway success of the game took them by surprise and now they're scrambling to come up with a forward plan.

Talking of moral quandaries, that other supposedly cozy, non-combat game, Palia, where I spent most of my time shooting deer, looks like it might be in trouble. The sheer number of cozy/twee/crafting/survival games flooding onto the market right now makes it hard to stand out but Palia did have a lot of positive hype pre-launch so if it's under-performing it's most likely down to the less-than-compulsive gameplay. There's cozy and then there's stultifying.

Well, It's Artificial, I'll Give You That Much

Survival games do look like the exact sort of thing you could train an AI to produce, don't they? Even as made by humans they do all have a very similar look and feel. Before long, I suspect we might look back on this time of glut as a trough not a peak.

Wilhelm posted an excellent rant on the current state of AI, which then generated a mighty comment thread full of essays and personal statements. I imagine everyone who comes here has already seen it but if not, you have a treat in store.

I thought I was done writing about AI at least until something new turned up and I was... but now it has so here we go again. I like to finish up these portmanteau posts with a tune. This time I'm going to throw in a couple I wrote myself although I guess "wrote" should be in quotes there.

I've tried a bunch of AI music generators over the last year or so and they've all been disappointing. This one is not. It's called Suno and it's terrifying.

Here's the first song I made with Suno. It's called Lazy Sunday in Seaside Gray, which is a name Suno made up, not me. I typed in "Twee/C86 style song about a slow Sunday at a decaying seaside town" and in about thirty seconds, here's what came out. 

Firstly, I was impressed it even knew what I meant by "Twee/C86". I bet most people reading this blog don't, unless they learned it from reading this blog. If you're not familiar with the genre, it sounds pretty much exactly like that.

Secondly, I was a lot more impressed by how convincing the AI was. I'm pretty sure I could make a quick video for that song from some old camcorder holiday footage, come up with a likely band name (The Wood Anemones, perhaps, or The Closed Wednesdays.) and slip it into one of my music posts and no-one would be any the wiser.

By far the weakest element is the lyrics, although I've seen plenty worse written by supposed human beings. That part gets farmed out to ChatGPT and comes back exactly like you'd expect. I believe if you subscribe, you can upload your own lyrics and just have Suno do the music and the singing, which is a service I might even consider paying for.

I've played around with it a bit since then and the results are disturbingly consistent. I didn't rate the attempt at hyperpop all that highly but the sixties' girl group and seventies' funk numbers sounded unnervingly authentic. 

You get enough free credits to make several songs a day and each prompt returns two options, one of which always seemed obviously better. You also get a nice little AI illustration to use on your imaginary record sleeve. I did try to find out more about how it all works but the makers are keeping unsurprisingly quiet about the precise details.

What's clear is that a process like this could flood the existing streaming platforms with ersatz music of every genre to the point that no-one would ever be able to find anything real again. I imagine there are guards in place to stop that. 

There must be. Right?

Here's another I made earlier and then I'll get out of your hair. 

You Might Think This Is Funny...

As I was saying to my mother on the phone this morning, I loved April Fools Day when I was a child but I'd about had enough of it before I was fourteen. There's not really much of an excuse to carry on the tradition into adulthood unless it's to entertain and amuse your kids (Or grandkids.) by letting them believe they've put one over on you.

That said, whether I appreciate efforts to celebrate the First of April in the games I play depends on how well-integrated the jokes are within the milieu and if I get anything worth having. There have been a few good ones in various games over the years, although time blurs the details. 

I think the killer bunnies in EverQuest might have been an April Fool gag. I still have the bunny hat from that on someone. The most celebrated April 1st in MMORPGs, though, has to be the time Guild Wars 2 gave us Super Adventure Box. I consider that a mixed blessing although it gave me some good viewing figures for the blog back in 2013.

I'm not playing any MMORPGs in a meaningful way right now so I can't say what's being done to mark the day in any of them. I do know EverQuest II always runs Bristlebane Day across the end of March/beginning of April and a quick look at the website tells me this year is no different. Today is the Lord of Misrule's highest holy day so there will be a few one-day-only quests but it looks like the main event is old Bristly's avatar turning up for the ongoing anniversary celebrations.

I really ought to look into doing something for those. The year is slipping away and I've barely participated. I haven't even been collecting my monthly cash-shop giveaway. This month it's yet another baby dragon. I may have as many of those as I need, although this one is cute.

As for all the other MMORPGs on my theoretical playlist, I don't have a clue. Time was when I would have logged in to see what all of them were giving away but I'm not feeling the need to add extra virtual clutter right now. If anything, I could do with getting rid of some.

One game I will not be revisiting just at the moment is Palworld. I dropped it like a hot brick the second Nightingale launched and I haven't missed it for a moment. Back then, I was beginning to have existential doubts about the underpinning philosophy of Pocketpair's Pokemon-inspired survival shooter and passing time hasn't ameloriated my concerns. 

I had some serious questions then about where the game might be going. The video they've come up with as an April Fool certainly isn't offering any easy answers.

In a way, I kind of admire the way that video leans into so many of the things that feel wrong about Palworld. It's hard to deny the consistency of their vision. They've made it quite clear that "darker themes" are part of the Pocketpair brief.

So far that already includes exploitation, slavery, animal cruelty and cannibalistic murder so I guess we ought not to be surprised they're adding questionable sexual politics to the list. The video is borderline acceptable by video game standards but the gloss Pocketpair have given it in the description tips things over the edge. 

As if high school dating sims weren't already difficult territory to navigate, imagine an "adult" version with nudity, where some of the students are human and others are talking animals, and the dating options available include "kill and eat". That's not going to be problematic at all. 

It's also basically Beastars, so there's another of those "Whose idea was this anyway?" debates to be had, too. And yet, who wants to bet against a real game coming out of all this?

NME, where I read the news, also ran a report about an infinitely more wholesome April Fool offered by the makers of Palworld's widely recognized, if officially unacknowledged, inspiration, Pokémon. In a genuinely funny, clever and entertaining four-minute video, complete with all the production values you'd expect of a megacorp, Nintendo give us the ultimate in cozy competition - the Pokémon Sleep World Champions Tournament!

I realize Pokémon isn't exactly free of moral tarpits but I know which of those two videos I feel more comfortable watching. Or indeed comfortable at all.

No doubt there are lots more goofy, guffaw-filled, gimmicky gags going around the gaming landscape today but that's enough for me for one year. More than enough, actually.

Until they make us do it again next time, here's wishing everyone a Happy April Fools. 

(Is that a thing yet? If not, it will be.)

Ignorance. Not Always As Blissful As It's Made Out To Be.

Tipa at Chasing Dings posted a lengthy and detailed review of Palworld yesterday. I'm sure it's both excellent and accurate, only I got about a third of the way through and had to stop because it seemed like I was reading about a completely different game to the one I'm playing. It sounded like a much better one, too.

The opening paragraphs of Tipa's post deal with the plot, backstory and lore of Palworld. It all sounds fascinating, particularly since I didn't realise Palworld had any. 

I feel kinda bad about fighting them now.

You might think the disparity in our experiences could be explained by the time we've each spent there. Tipa has put over a hundred hours into the game, while I've only racked up about forty. But forty hours is still a lot.

 Or maybe it's our relative levels. She's Level 43, while I'm only Level 26. Again, though, I'm still more than half-way to the fifty-level cap. 

You'd have thought that would be far enough to let me see the shape of the game and start filling out some of the detail. You'd certainly think that by half-way to cap, if there was a plot I'd at least know about it.

Thinking back, I suppose I was briefly aware of something going on in the background. Some kind of nominal narrative structure, at least. There was that tower fight with Zoe and Grizzbolt. At the time it seemed like both the end of a prologue and the beginning of a storyline.

Only it didn't go anywhere. I was Level 10 when I went into that tower and Level 11 when I came out and in the following three weeks and fifteen levels I haven't seen one word of any follow-up. Not a hint. Nothing.

The Tutorial ended and that was that. Since then I've just been exploring, catching Pals, building my bases and levelling. There's been no shortage of character progression but there's been no sign of a narrative of any kind.

Tipa explains there are five tower bosses, representing five human factions on the island. She describes this as being "told environmentally, by glowing slates left in interesting places." I did find a few of those right at the start of the game. They save to a Journal, which helpfully tells you there are thirty-nine altogether. 

I figured.

I was keen to collect them and read them but in my forty hours so far I've found just nine and all of those I found in my first week or so. I haven't seen a single one since. 

What's more, all but one that I have found have been part of the Castaway's Journal series, which only tells you what you, as a player, have probably already figured out, since you too are a castaway.

Even without written evidence, I had figured out there were several rival groups of humans on the island, mainly because I keep running into camps of them and they keep shooting at me. Since none of them ever say anything, though, and since there's never anything in their camps other than a single Pal in a cage, I've taken to thinking of them in much the same light as the generic bandits you find all across the Karanas in EverQuest, there to be killed and looted and not much more. 

Tipa makes their rivalry, based on entirely different and mutually opposed philosophies, sound a good deal more intriguing than that. I'd really like to know a lot more about it. Only the game doesn't seem to want to tell me anything.

I had already been thinking a good deal on the moral implications of playing Palworld, something that was made quite uncomfortable for me by having started playing the game at about the same time I began watching My Daemon. At some point I do want to get into that in a full post because, as Tipa suggests, it opens a whole can of very distateful worms.

This, I did not know.

For now, though, I think I'm going to make looking for those informational plaques more of a priority. Then again, given the amount of time I already spend exploring and the fact that I make a bee-line for anything that glitters, glows or looks remotely unusual, I'm not sure how much more I can do.

I suspect the prime reason I know so little about what's going on in Palworld is my unwillingness to look anything up, read any guides, watch any streams or do anything at all that might in any way give me more information than I stumble upon by chance by playing the game. Because of that sort of behavior, as soon as the Tutorial ended, my every successive discovery was left purely to chance. And that can be a very slow process.

Case in point: in an earlier post, I made a snarky remark in a picture caption about how you can make chairs in the game but you can't sit in them. In fact, as far as I could tell, there were no emotes in the game at all, which I thought was very odd.

What passes for dancing in Palworld, apparently.

And it would be, if it was true. Which it's not. There are emotes. Not a whole lot of them but some. 

What there's not is any obvious indication of how to access them. I stumbled across them about an hour ago, completely by chance. Here's how.

If you stand near enough to one of your Pals a kind of tool-tip appears to tell you can either press "V" to pick them up or "4" to interact with them. Pressing "4" brings up a radial menu of Pal commands. This I knew from pretty much the moment I tamed a Pal and let it loose in my base. 

What I didn't know is that if you press 4 when there's no Pal nearby, a completely different radial menu appears. This one allows you to issue battle commands to your active Pal but it also leads to a third radial menu, this time for Emotes.I only found this out by accidentally pressing 4 when I was too far away from a Pal I was trying to feed.

Once there, you can find not one but two sitting emotes; one for sitting on the ground and another for sitting in chairs. The latter is a bit of a fudge, to be honest. It puts you into a sitting position but unlike other games it doesn't automatically position you on the nearest chair. You need to edge yourself into the right spot first, then sit. Even so, the effect is pretty convincing.

Sittin' by the fire, the radio plays a little classical music...

It's not even as if this information isn't there in the game itself. There's a whole in-game Survival Guide, filled with handy tips for things you need to know. It even has a section called Radial Menu.

The thing is, I've been so strict about avoiding spoilers (Maybe stubborn would be a better word for it.)  I decided on Day One that everything in that Guide counted as a spoiler. Until today I never really looked at it. I'm beginning to think I may have been taking the whole "No Spoilers" thing a touch too seriously.

And it's an apposite time to learn that lesson. At four in the afternoon tomorrow, exactly twenty-four hours from now as I write, Nightingale will enter Early Access. It's another game about which I have made a concerted effort to know as little as possible. I want to be able to go in fresh with as few expectations and assumptions as possible, so my experience will be as organic and unmediated as it can be.

With every new day comes a new opportunity to learn.

Which all sounds very fine but there's discovering things for yourself and then there's not finding out crucial information until it's too late. I'm at the point now, forty hours and a month in, where I'm ready to start doing some research on Palworld, to make sure I'm getting as much out of the game as I can. Only problem is, I'm also probably about to take a break from the game, thanks to Nightingale.

If there's a lesson to be learned, it's probably that I need to be a tad more flexible in future. Be less shy in looking for help, advice and suggestions, when going into a new situation.

I'm not suggesting I'm going to go straight to an online guide to tell me how to play every new game from now on. I'm just saying that if the game actually comes with a guide, I probably ought at least to take a look at it. After all, when games came in boxes I was one of those people who'd read the whole manual, cover to cover, before I even logged in.

I'm not sure I want to go back to that level of nit-picking preparedness but I feel, just maybe, I might have taken winging it as far as it can go. Somewhere between the two extremes would probably be a better place to rest.. 

Now all I have to do is take my own advice. I'll get back to you on how that goes.

Palworld Progress Report : Thirty-Five Hours And Counting

Wow! It's been a whole two weeks since I last posted about Palworld! Can you believe it? I mean, I've mentioned it plenty of times since then in the context of other games but the last time I posted something specifically about Palworld was the end of last month.

Given a gap like that, you might quite reasonably assume I'd lost interest or maybe even stopped playing altogether. That would be incorrect. 

In the post I just linked I mentioned Steam saying I'd played for sixteen hours. At time of writing, Steam has my time logged as thirty-five hours.

More precisely, it tells me I've put in 18.8 hours in the last two weeks. Since it happens to be the fourteenth today, that's how much I've played this calendar month, giving me an average February playtime for Palworld of just over an hour a day.

(Since we're on the subject of the fourteenth day of February, Happy Valentines to those who celebrate it. I got a great present from Mrs Bhagpuss - a Mikey Fox Fingerling. It's quite rare and hard to get although that may be because hardly anyone wants one. Mine may have been the last ever to be sold. I've renamed him Valentine Fox because Mikey is a really dumb name for a fox. Valentine Fox sounds like a movie star. ) 

Back on topic, yes, I am still playing Palworld. For now. 

If I've been playing, though, the next question has to be what have I been doing?

Levelling

I've been making inroads. I'm Level 25. I want to say halfway to the cap but I'm not exactly sure how many levels there are.

Levelling is an odd duck in Palworld, anyway. I'm playing on a single-player world with a near-standard ruleset. The only changes I've made to the defaults have been to remove the death penalty (So I don't have to go back and get my stuff every time I make a dumb mistake.) and to switch of base raids, (Which I found very annoying.)

I haven't touched anything else but I'm aware that I could make a whole lot of things much easier for myself if I wanted, including increasing the rate at which my character gains experience. You can speed it up by as much as twenty times, which seems a tad excessive. One day I'll make a world with everything tuned to the fastest, easiest possible settings and see just how much fun that is. Or otherwise.

He's gotta be worth at least a thousand xp!

Much though I like an easy life, I've encountered this sort of thing in other games and it can be problematic. While I'm theoretically all in favor of allowing players as much control over the levers of progress as possible, it is still true that even just knowing you could accelerate the speed at which you're levelling can feel uncomfortable, even if you decline to take advantage of the offer.

In other worlds, when you're aware your levelling speed is variable, the process of levelling doesn't seem to have the heft it normally would. At worst, the whole game can turn into a kind of internal battle with yourself over how much willpower you have or how much of your own fun you're willing to gamble. It's occasionally been an issue for me in the past but I'm pleased to say that in the case of Palworld I've mostly been able to forget about the metaphysics and just play as though the version of the game in front of me is the only one available.

Building

There are more progression markers than just levels. One of them is how far you've advanced your base-building skills. I upgraded my first base far enough to earn the right to a second one and the first thing I did was move to another island and make myself a real home. 

Building options in Palworld aren't the best I've seen but they're not at all bad and I was sure I could do a lot better for myself than the log cabin where I'd been living. I'd already opened access to building in stone and I'd considered tearing my first base down and starting over but I knew the option to have multiple bases was coming soon, so I decided to keep the sprawling eyesore, which I'd mostly been using as a combination storage dump, sweatshop and flophouse. 

Since you can teleport almost instantly from one base to another, there's really no reason to have assembly lines and slave pens spoiling the ambience of your seafront mansion. Better to keep all the unsightly practicalities in one place and go live somewhere else entirely.

Nice chair. Now if I could just work out how to sit down...

I picked a beachfront location with a great view, woods on each side and an open field behind. I spent a couple of sessions constructing a three-story mansion with balconies facing the sea, a long verandah facing the meadow and ivy growing up the walls. I put in a neat, tidy working area with the minimal number of essential machines so I make a few basics and do my repairs and left it that.

It took me a ridiculous amount of time to get a proper, pitched roof to fit. I had to watch YouTube videos to figure it out and even they didn't help much. In the end I got everything just about how I wanted it. I'm pleased with the result, even if it is still a little boxy.

I've begun furnishing the place. I have brick fireplaces, which light up a room with a charming orange glow. I have some carpets down and some tables and chairs. There's a lot more I could do but who wants to sit in crafting furniture when they could be out...

Exploring

There's so much to see! Getting a flying mount was a real game-changer, for a couple of reasons. Obviously, there's the access it gives to the many, many towers, buttes, cliffs and other extremely high places. I was expecting that and looking forward to it. Palworld has a great deal of verticality. In theory you could climb to a lot of these spots but in practice you'd run out of stamina and fall to your death long before you got to the top of most of them. I know. I tried.

What I didn't realise was that in acquiring a flying mount I'd also effectively get a boat along with it. Not an actual boat. That really would be weir and anyway I'm not sure if boats are in the game or not. Let me explain.

Flying mounts use stamina when they're aloft but not when they're "on the ground".  At ground level,  although they still look like they're flying as they cruise along just a few feet in the air, they operate just like a ground mount, using no stamina at all. 

That doesn't look natural...

So far, so ho hum. Not having to change from a ground mount to a flying mount is a nice perk in itself but no big deal. What is a Very Big Deal Indeed is the way flying mounts treat water exactly as if it were solid ground. 

Where as a player character or a ground mount will enter water, be it sea, river or lake, and begin to swim, something which uses stamina and can result in drowning, a flying mount just carries on cruising six feet above the surface, just as if it was still on land. It doesn't look like a boat but it sure behaves like one.

The combination of flying and "sailing" means there's nowhere I can't go, so of course I've been going everywhere. For an explorer archetype, it's been a joy but also very time-consuming. My Nitewing is great but you couldn't call him a fast flier. When I tried to see what was out in the deep ocean to the south-east (Spoiler - nothing.) it took me nearly half an hour to get to the edge of the map and back.

Mostly, though, it's been a never-ending series of short trips to interesting places. I've seen deserted cities, active volcanos, hidden refuges and mysterious statues. I found the perfect spot for my third base, when I get the go-ahead to build one. I've opened up a lot of the map but there's plenty left and I mean to see it all.

Hunting

While I've been out exploring, I have naturally run into many news species of Pal. Whenever I spot one I haven't collected, always assuming it's in my level-range, I stop to try and catch a representative sample for my Paldeck. 

Collecting is the driver but just catching Pals is fun. Throwing the sphere is quite a skill and so is softening up the target. There are lots of ways to do it. The sneakiest is to wait until they're asleep then creep up behind them and club them with a baseball bat. I've caught quite a few that way.

Catching tougher Pals requires a lot of softening up and/or better quality Pal Spheres. There's some thoughtful and challenging gameplay involved in whittling them down to a vulnerable state without either killing them or letting them kill you and it gets a lot more challenging when your own Pal is trying to "help". 

Screw sportsmanship! Just get him before he wakes up!

One thing all the Pals on my Go Team seem to have in common is that they don't know their own strength. Against Pals their own level or a little above they often seem overpowered; against most things lower than them they're just murder on paws. I've lost so many potential targets to an over-zealous assist from my Nitewing or Tombat and even my humble Cativa seems incapable of keeping her claws sheathed.

I could probably benefit for a more thoughtful choice of companions but I'm both lazy and loyal (A terrible combination for most video games, I've found.) so my line-up doesn't change much. I've had the aforementioned three and Foxsparks with me for a long time now. The only recent change came when I captured a Dumud, a kind of land-shark. The animations were so goofy I couldn't resist taking one along for comedy value. Of course, he is a shark, so he's just as deadly as the others, for all that he looks like a parade balloon come loose.

Teamwork

I feel at this point I should point out I actually treat all my Pals very well. The game, which has numerous moral failings deserving of a long, critical essay I may even one day get around to writing, allows for some really quite disturbing mistreatment of the hapless creatures you capture. I'm fairly sure that to get the most out of your Pals in terms of productivity and efficiency, you have to behave like a cross between Bernard Matthews and Patrick Bateman. That's not really me.

Other than capturing them in the first place, I leave the Pals who live at my base pretty much alone to get on with their lives. I feed them well, I make sure they all have somewhere to sleep and I tend to them if they get sick or injure themselves.

Now imagine him bouncing along like a spacehopper.

Other than that, I let them wander about, doing what they want, which mostly seems to be hanging around the food bins 24/7. If I really want something done urgently I might pick one of them up and show them the relevant crafting station but I rarely want anything done in a hurry so that doesn't happen often.

I definitely think of them more as pets than workers. Quite annoying pets. Who keep getting in the way. Which is why, for much of the last couple of weeks, especially since I built my big, stone house, as much as possible I've been playing...

Palworld Without Pals

Okay, not completely. I have my five, special Pal friends with me at all times. What I don't have are any Pals at all living at my new house. 

I thought about it. Obviously it would make a lot of things easier. The whole idea is that Pals operate machinery or perform tasks using their various, specialist skills and that more pals or higher-level pals make everything happen faster. 

It's true and the necessary corollary is that, without Pals, everything takes longer. Sometimes a lot longer. It takes an astonishingly long time to make some of the more complex or complicated items without the help of a Pal or two or at least it seems like an astonishingly long time if you're the one doing it. 

Thanks for the help, Sparky! Take as many red berries as you want.

If you want to go it alone, you can't just walk away and leave the timer to tick down, either. You have to sit there, holding down "F", for as long as it takes. For minutes at a time. A few minutes doesn't sound like that long? Try holding down one key for five minutes straight. See how you like it!

And that's what I've been doing. It's fine. As I said before, I'm rarely in a hurry. I sit and watch the little circle slowly edge round. I look out to sea. I enjoy the view. 

There are some things you simply can't do without the help of a Pal, of course. Anything that requires kindling, for example, like the Forge. You need a fiery Pal to breathe into it or it just won't work. For those, I just summon one of the five Pals on my travelling team and have them do it. Then, when they're done, I recall them and I'm all alone again.

Future Plans

At level 25, it's become very clear to me that Palworld is a true sandbox. I'd been so wrapped up in my own little projects it took me a while to realise just how long it had been since I last received any kind of hint or suggestion on what to do next. Nothing's even sent me to another tower to fight another boss. 

There's no shortage of progression but none of it feels directive. Most of it barely even feels obligatory.

Heat Resistant Metal Armor modeled by Flora

Motivation and direction evolve much more organically than by following a narrative or even working your way up a ladder or down a path. One time, I went exploring and I found a ruined city. I wanted to explore it but when I got there it was too hot to stay long. As soon as I levelled up far enough to be able to make some armor better able to resist the heat, I went hunting for the materials to make a set. Once I had it, I went back and explored the city and after that, a volcano. 

From the volcano I saw a tower to so I flew up to it and from the tower I saw an island and glided down. The island turned out to be a sanctuary with rare Pals but they were too high to capture so I marked my map for later and carried on.

Everything seems to happen that way. I go exploring, find something interesting, realise I need some new gear or item or levels to get any further with it and that gives me another goal. There are no tasks or missions or quests but it never feels like there's no structure let alone nothing to do. 

And After That?

How long all this can go on is less than certain. The world is curated not procedurally generated. Given time, I'll have cleared all the fog from the map, captured all the Pals, learned all the recipes... or I will if I stick around long enough. That's unlikely. I'll be surprised if Nightingale doesn't nudge Palworld into the background and after Nightingale there's going to be another game and another...

I read an interesting opinion piece at Gamesindustry.biz, making the case for the "Live Service" model being all but played-out. It appeared, presumably not at all co-incidentally, just after a news report on the same website revealing that 95% of games studios are currently said to be working on a Live Service game. 

It almost seems a shame to build here. Almost.

Palworld, Nightingale or Valheim may not be Live Service games in the sense of having "seasons" or "battle passes" but I feel much the same law of diminishing returns applies to open-ended, exploration-driven survival sandboxes. They're fantastic for a time - and it can be quite a long time - but after a while there's a definite feeling of being done with them. Not forever but at least for a while and once you move on, will you return? And if you do, for how long?

My future plans for Palworld and all games like it are much the same: play them while they're fun but if something more interesting comes along, play that instead. Interest and involvement can run extremely high for a while; comittment, not so much.

I've been used to MMORPGs, which tend to set their hooks much deeper. My time with a favorite MMORPG is often measured in years. Even a dalliance can claim months of my life. Survival games, in comparison, might only expect to hold my favor for a few weeks. 

For now, though, I'm playing Palworld and liking it a lot. This won't be my last post on the game, I'm sure of it. I barely got through half the topics I wanted to cover today and even then the post ran long.

Then again, I could say that about pretty much every post here...

How Much Is Enough?

I was very amused to hear Tobold complaining that after playing Palworld for fifty hours he'd run out of interesting things to do. I almost wish I had his problem. It continues to be a busy time around Chez Bhagpuss and finding the time both to play the game and compose thoughtful, detailed posts about it is proving difficult. 

Steam now tells me I've played for just over sixteen hours, which I can assure you is as much as I've been able to fit in since I bought the game a week ago. If I could have played for fifty hours I certainly would.

Tobold is right to make it clear that "The lack of content problem is a subjective one." I suspect it isn't even so much a mater of interpretation as one of taste, playstyle and personality. I also don't believe the issues he highlights are specific, let alone unique to Palworld. They seem to me to be more like generic, intrinsic problems - or perhaps we should say features - of the Survival genre itself.

When he says "...the higher level content often doesn't introduce something new... less novelty, more grind at higher levels... the rewards I get for exploration and leveling are mostly just stronger versions of stuff I already have..." he seems to me to describing all Survival games. Indeed, he could just as well be describing most MMORPGS and a very large proportion of all video games, so I'm not sure that, as a complaint, it boils down to much more than "video games tend to be very repetitive."

In fact, the more I think about it, the more concerned I am that Tobold has teased out a thread we probably ought to be very wary about tugging on any harder. It raises some very pointed and potentially uncomfortable questions about productive use of time and the value and purpose of the kinds of video games a lot of us choose to play.

For at least a decade and a half, I played MMORPGs almost exclusively. The mere fact of their endlessness, that it was literally impossible to finish them, seemed to me to be a recommendation and a justification all of its own. In more recent times, however, I've branched out somewhat. I've played a lot more narrative-focused games with novelistic or film-like storylines; three act structures; a beginning a middle and an end.

That is a very different experience. Self-evidently, it's much closer to more traditional forms of entertainment or even to literature and art. There's a much clearer purpose to the activity. It's not simply a means of passing time. 

Pastimes, entertainments and games have similarities but they are not the same. For years, I railed against the use of the word "Game" in the acronym MMORPG. It feels like an archaic argument now. Modern MMORPGs are far more game than anything else, with much clearer "win" conditions than anything seen in Ultima Online, EverQuest or Asheron's Call at the turn of the millennium.

Back then, I often chose to think of the kind of virtual world exploration I engaged in as more of a hobby than a game. I sometimes referred to it as "virtual tourism" but my go-to analogy was "virtual whittling".  I used to imagine myself whittling away at my characters, starting with a block of plain, undiferentiated wood, slowly teasing out a recogniseable shape and form, often over hundreds or even thousands of hours. 

There was no purpose to it other than the pleasant sensation of doing it and the steady satisfacion of watching the figure come into focus under the endless strokes of my keyboard and mouse. I had scores of characters in multiple games and at that time I could name and describe most of them. Even now, I remember quite a few.

I don't regret any of the very many hours I spent doing that. It was the right thing for the right time. I certainly took a lot longer than Tobold's fifty hours to tire of it. More than a decade, for sure. Maybe two decades.

After a quarter of a century, though, I do feel as though I may be largely over it. I still love to develop the characters I play but I no longer feel the same desire to play dozens of them and keep them all happy. I used to complain quite bitterly about MMORPGs that made it plain they preferred you to play just one character but now I rarely make more than one character in any new game and if I do make more, I still only play one.

Of course, one of the big reasons MMORPGs were so successful, for a time, was the infamous application of the Skinner Box of tricks. Playing virtual Barbies, now frequently seen, unironically, as the genre's endgame, has always been a big part of the attraction but the deep clawhold of addictive behavior comes from something much less fanciful - those dopamine hits supplied by a relentless drip-feed of incremental rewards.

Survival games, I find, take much of what was addictive about those practices and reduce it down to a much simpler, more elegant gameplay loop. You begin with nothing, you get something, it makes you able to get more, you get more and it never stops. That's basically all it is.

As a reductive analysis, it doesn't only apply to pure Survival games, either. It works just as well for so-called "Cosy" games like poor old Palia (Anyone remember Palia? Anyone still play Palia?). I haven't played Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing but from all the accounts I've read by people who have, I imagine it applies there, too.

All of these games - and by now there are plenty of them - arguably, more than anyone could realistically want, let alone need, to play - differ mostly in the context of their aesthetics and their narratives. The ones with more story-driven content feel more purposeful, although the quality of the stories may not stand up to gentle, let alone rigorous examination. The ones with more creative options feel more toy-like, more playful, perhaps even more artistically satisfying.

No matter the trappings, though, underneath the paint there's always that same engine, the one Tobold singles out for gentle criticism in Palworld. If he's correct in observing "One of the attractions of any game with any sort of resources is to find out how the economy of the game works, and then to optimize it ", then he's predicting the exact problem I've read so many bloggers complain about: the better you get at playing these kinds of games, the less fun they are.

What Tobold describes there isn't a game at all. Neither is it a story. It's a puzzle. Here are some pieces. Figure out how to put them together so they make a machine that works in the most efficient way possible. When it's done, it's done. Congratulations You solved the puzzle. Now start another.

Is that a sustainable model for a Live Service game? No, it's not, but I think that may be where perception and expectation run up against intention. Are Survival games even meant to be ongoing, open-ended endeavors like MMORPGs? Does anyone expect Valheim or ARK to last twenty years, continually adding new biomes, new ores, new monsters? Is that anything anyone really wants?

Wilhelm, after a lengthy search for a new game like Valheim to play, decided to return to Valheim, astutely observing that Iron Gate have a set number of biomes in mind for the game and that, when the final one is added, that will "... complete the set to appease Odin, prove our worth, and win the game." In other words, Valheim is designed to reach a complete, finishable state and then stop.

This is perhaps why it's okay for survival games to do no more than offer better versions of the things you already have as a reward for playing. Eventually you will have all the things, the game will be complete and you can stop. 

That's an offer no MMORPG can ever dare to make. Once, I would have taken it as a threat. Now it feels more like a promise.