I Want To Ride My Bicycle

 I was in my late teens when I learned to ride a bicycle. I think I only ever owned one, a heavy, green Hercules with white plastic handlebars and a comfy, padded seat. When that fell apart, I never replaced it. I doubt I've been on a bike since the 90s.

They do say you never forget how to ride a bike, though, and that's certainly true for Neverness To Everness. I get myself into all kinds of trouble on the streets of Hethereau in anything on four wheels but motor-scooters and even motorbikes feel like a much safer way to get around.

When I saw that pushbikes were going to be added to the game with the last update, I knew I wanted one. Pedal power. That should suit me fine. Going too fast around corners is my downfall.

Not that I did anything much about it. Not at first, anyway. As soon as the update dropped, I forgot all about the bike in all the excitment. My only excuse is that there's always so much to do I just lose track. When I eventually remembered, I couldn't seem to find any way to get one other than through the Mystery Boxes, the drop rates for which are not great.

Fortunately, Mailvaltar mentioned in the comments yesterday that there's a bike shop somewhere in the north-east of the city where you can buy a bike for the bargain price of 800k Fons. That makes a bicycle eight times the price of the cheapest car! More than three times as expensive as a motorcycle! As Mailvaltar says, that's got to be one hell of a bike.

Even at such an outrageous mark-up, I bought one without a moment's hesitation. I must've really wanted one. 

 

I'd just finished the Breezy Ride event, in which you get to cart ten different characters about the city on the back of your bike. I loved this event. It might be my favorite in the game so far. It has a delicious disregard for logic that's like catnip to me. 

As I said, I didn't buy a bicycle until after I'd finished the whole thing but apparently Flora already had a bike and she's been riding it all around Hethereau without letting me know. 

Every step in the quest chain, if we can call it that, involves the Appraiser just happening to run into one of her friends or acquaintances, standing around on a street corner or siting in a bar somewhere in the city. Conversation ensues, as it would, and inevitably concludes with the Appraiser offering to give whoever it is a ride to wherever they're going. 

On her bike. That I had no idea she had.

What bike, Flora?! When did you get a bike? Why didn't you tell me? I guess there's a lot about our characters we don't know but this really brought home to me how they must all have their own lives, about which we know nothing.. 

Flora even seems to have given her bike a name. It's called Yesteryear. You can see the name next to it when it's parked in the street. 

Wherever, whenever and however she got it, it's hers, not mine. She can summon it when she needs it for a quest but if I want her to ride it to go somewhere I'd like her to go, forget it. For that she needs a different bike altogether. One I'll have to pay for. Albeit with her money. Sometimes I think you need a degree in Metaphysics to play these games.

 

The Breezy Rides themselves are wonderful. I loved all of them. Not just the bike-riding itself, although that was always fun, but the little stories and the conversations along the way. There's always a bit of chat at the start to set things up and then whoever's on the back of the bike carries on talking for the first few minutes before conversation eventually runs down. 

Then, when we get to wherever we're going, there's a little coda at the end of which we both, inevitably, decide we'll do something together again, soon. It's all just so nice. 

I would literally play a whole game based on this concept. Actually, come to think of it, I already have, kind of. It's basically Neo Cab but without the commercial interactions and on two wheels instead of four.

When I say this series of quests is "nice", I maybe ought to caveat that a little. Most of the encounters are really sweet but not exactly all of them. The really charming ones involve the younger characters. Linko and Iroi are positively childlike. Chiz is shy and a little bit lonely; Shinku is funny; Mint and Nanally are confident and effervescent as they always are...

Lacrimosa would probably have been the most bittersweet. She's an enigma. 

I did the quests in the order they came up and she was the last. I was really looking forward to seeing what she had to say but I was interrupted by real life just as she was about to get on the back of the bike and I had to log out briefly. I thought I'd be able to pick up where I left off but when I got back in, Yesteryear and the little vampire were nowhere to be seen. 

Luckily, most quests in NTE that involve travel can be completed just by teleporting to the end-point so I was able to finish it easily enough but I missed out on all of Lacrimosa's on-bike dialog. I just watched it on YouTube and it's possibly the weakest of the lot so I didn't miss much. All the best bits are before and after the actual ride. Her very best line comes just after she gets off, when she says

 

Lacrimosa really is not of this world. 

The other three characters aren't quite as "nice" as the rest, though. Not to say they're unfriendly in any way. It's just that there's something a little darker about all of them.

When the Appraiser meets Hotori she is, as you might expect, drunk. Very drunk. The woman has a problem, there's no hiding it. 

The main reason the Appraiser offers her boss a lift is because she's worried she's too out of it to get home safely on her own. Hotori warns the Appraiser to take it slowly because she wouldn't want to throw up over the bike but when they get back to Eibon she's sobered up enough to tell Flora she needs to be ready for work tomorrow, which even the easy-going Appraiser finds a tad awkward.

Jiuyuan, another business owner with one eye always on the account book,  has an ulterior motive for accepting the offer of a ride to a good place to watch the sun set. She cheerfully tells Flora, when they get there, that her main reason for going was to have another opportunity to make a psychological assessment of her. She's clearly still thinking about what use she can make of the Appraiser in future. Flora isn't entirely happy about that and Jiuyuan's promise never to use the intel she's gathered against her isn't as reassuring as it could be.

Finally, there's Fadia. Fadia is always scary. Flora comes across her drinking alone at a bar. Not, I believe, the first time that's happened. Fadia, as always, is flirtatious and that's being generous. She comes across as a borderline sexual predator sometimes. 

Again, as we've become used to from her, all her talk is drenched with subtext. She purrs about how everything feels so much freer under cover of darkness and suggests the two of them go "do something more fun". As she says, "The city has fallen asleep and no-one will ever know what we did together..."

 

Unsurprisingly, Flora is wary but it turns out Fadia just wants go to the Hethereau Sky Tower. When Flora expresses surprise that it's something so innocent, Fadia makes it very clear it could be something more "dangerous" - if the Appraiser's up for it. 

Which she is not. In the end, nothing untoward happens, despite a bleak aside about mortality from Fadia on the journey. But who knows what goes on ion Fadia's mind? As Flora says right at the end "Fadia, it's hard to get you, sometimes."

As with many of the character quests in NTE, there's a lot going on under the surface but one thing that's hard to miss is all the drinking and sexual tension. I just looked up the game's PEGI rating, which is 12 for "for moderate violence, simulated gambling, in-game purchases involving random items, and online user interaction." and I can't help feeling whoever did the assessment might not have gone deep enough.

It's also very noticeable where the divisions between the characters lie. All the potentially problematic behavior, the drinking, the sexual innuendo, the general louche moral attitudes, comes from the mature female characters. I think that means something but I haven't got a handle yet on what it might be.

It's always been very clear who the grown-ups are in NTE. While there's often some confusion over exactly how old the younger characters might be, it's always been clear which are children, which are young adults and who is fully mature. 

In that regard, there's no questioning the maturity of Hotori, Jiuyuan and Fadia. Allowing for the inevitable perfect skin and lack age lines peculiar to the graphical style, Hotori and Jiuyuan are most likely in their thirties or even forties. Fadia is at least in her late twenties. 

 

The mature male characters - Baicang, Chaos, Adler and Skia - are distinctly less prone to drinking and flirting than their female counterparts. In fact, they're mostly so stiff as to be made out of cardboard. Only Baicang really steps outside of his professional persona in any of storylines I've seen and he's a lot milder in his rebellion than any of the three women I just mentioned.

All of which seems like a long way to go on a bike ride. It's another reason why I like this game so much. There's a depth to the triviality that makes an impact. And there's so much subtext, all the time.

A couple more examples before I go. Things that speak to the complexity of the world-building here. 

I'd forgotten all about Shinku, the "dragon" who we met in the fantasy land of 999 Nights. When Flora met her outside Little Sparrow, the maid cafe, I had to stop a moment to think who she was.

 There's a whole bit where the Appraiser teases Shinku for her interest in whatever the heck happens in Little Sparrow, an interest Shinku most unconvincingly denies, but more interestingly perhaps, as Flora gives Shinku a ride back to her home in the suburbs, Shinku talks about how her house isn't really all that messy and how she knows where everything in her collections is. It's a beautifully natural, organic conversation and it told me a lot I didn't know about the character.

After Shinku got off the bike and disappeared inside and Flora was standing outside the house, I noticed the door was open. I was curious to see if I could look at Shinku's place so I took Flora inside. It turns out you can go into her apartment and look around. It feels a tad transgressive because Shinku isn't there but it's highly revealing. The whole place is exactly as I imagined it from the conversation. 

 

It's quite untidy, with all kinds of things lying about all over the place, but it's clean and feels pleasantly lived-in. And there are a lot of collectibles. Shinku has display cabinets filled with figures and dioramas and there's a whole wall of board games stacked semi-neatly on shelves al the way to the ceiling. I didn't spend a long time there but the detail is impeccable. Someone's clearly taken a lot of trouble mirroring  Shinku's personality as it's written. I don't know if there's a storyline that supports that level of effort or if it's just someone having fun but either way it's powerfully immersive.

And finally, there's Linko and her Tamachi obsession. When you meet her, she's near the coast, talking to herself. It transpires she has a day off and she's going to spend it looking for rare water Tamachis.

I had never heard of Tamachis [Edit: I must have because apparently both Linko and Mint talk about them a lot but it obviously didn't stick in my mind.] but it quickly became clear from context that they're Hethereau's equivalent of Pokemon and Linko was playing the local equivalent of Pokemon Go. Flora gave Linko a ride around the bay and Linko caught several Tamachi. 

It was an entertaining insight into the hidden life of the characters who live in this world we, as players,only get to visit. In fact, the entire Breezy Ride event was like that. I'm very happy I spotted it be.

Now Flora has her bike and she can invite any of those ten characters to ride on the back of it, whenever she likes. As soon as I bought it, I had her ride around Hethereau for half an hour with the UI off. It's the most fun I've had just riding around in a game since I stopped playing Once Human. Next time I might ask Chiz to come with her. Or Linko. Or Mint. Just not Hotori or Jiuyuan. 

And definitely not Fadia...

800k well-spent, I'd say. 

 

Notes On AI Used In This Post

None. But I did look a few things up on Google and Gemini always gets its two cents in first, which almost caused an upset. I was googling to see if Tamachi is an actual game of some kind and it was pretty clear it wasn't but just to be absolutely sure I googled "tamachi neverness" and this is what Gemini told me:

In the supernatural urban open-world RPG Neverness to Everness (NTE), Tamachis are collectible virtual pets or digital creatures that players can hunt, collect, and raise throughout the city of Hethereau. Heavily inspired by real-world Tamagotchis, they function as a core slice-of-life minigame and collection system.

 The AI then went on to give me bullet points on how to play Tamachi in NTE.:

Key Features of Tamachis in NTE

The Tamachi Index: Players track their findings in an in-game Index. Finding every standard version and unlocking the elusive secret variants is required to fully complete it. 
Tamachi Hunting: These digital creatures emit signals across Hethereau. Players must explore the map—often climbing skyscrapers or navigating hidden urban spots—to track down rare variants.  
Linko's Specialization: The playable S-class character Linko is deeply connected to this mechanic. Known as one of the top "Tamachi pros" in Hethereau, he features unique outfits and abilities that make tracking and picking up rare Tamachi signals much easier.

Let me make it clear right away, almost none of this is true. 

Oh, it's true that Linko plays Tamachi. So does Mint. But I can't and neither can you. There is no "in-game index" where players track their findings. Players do not "explore the map—often climbing skyscrapers or navigating hidden urban spots—to track down rare variants" because there's no Tamachi game a player can play. I wish there was. Gemini makes it sound like it would be a lot of fun.

The sources that Gemini quotes to back up these claims are from in-character posts by Linko on Instagram, a beta video on YouTube and a reddit thread where a bunch of people talk about how cool it would be if the Tamachi game ever became playable. Which it would. So get on that, Hotta!

Honestly, it's a textbook example of why you should never trust an AI summary without carefully checking the sources it cites. I actually had half a paragraph written about how I must somehow have missed it when they added creature collecting to NTE, when I thought "hold on a minute..." 

I do find it very amusing that an AI, which is effectively a fictional entity, finds it difficult to tell the difference between the social media posts of real people and those of other fictional entities. I know it's fashionable to hate this sort of thing but it's getting to feel like the future I imagined living in, back when I was younger, and it's not that far from being the reality that's existed in my head all my life. 

Who can say what's really real, after all? 

Read All About It! Cat Scratch Fever Hits Hethereau!

Any fear I may have had that Warren Continent would prove so compelling, I'd forget all about Hethereau itself, has proved unfounded, albeit not through any conscious choice of mine. I was just starting to work my way through the second difficulty level, Challenge, when I was interrupted by external factors (Social visits, work...) and next thing I knew I was back doing the regular dailies. City life just seemed quietly to reassert itself.

In fact, I found myself playing for an hour or so today before I remembered the 999 Nights content was still there. Oh, how soon we forget! I will get back to it soon. I need to kill the Molten Dragon one more time and do a couple of other things to fill my dance card for the update, if nothing else.

Mostly, though, I want to go back just for the fun of it. My general suspicion of repeated content of that sort has been pushed aside thanks to the excellent entertainment on offer in this particular case. And anyway, I'd hardly have a moral leg to stand on, looking down at repeated content, considering what I've been doing instead. Something that makes re-running dungeons look positively benign. 

That's not addicted behavior at all, is it? Not compared to frenziedly buying and scrubbing away at scratch cards, anyway. Which is what I was doing this morning. Not, thankfully, outside the newsagent around the corner from my house, if only for the extremely good reason there is no newsagent around the corner any more and hasn't been for a couple of decades. 

No, I was scratching away, standing on the sidewalk outside a Midnight Catzebo In Hethereau. I can't remember which one it was. There are a bunch of them now. They're new. And they're run by cats. Very big cats.

Maybe I should explain what they are. I'm not sure the name really gives it away. "Midnight Catzebo" is a chain of newsstands dotted around the city of Hethereau. Allegedly you can buy papers and magazines there but I can't say I saw them sell any. 

What they do sell are scratch cards. They have five kinds at prices ranging from 10k to 50k. Specifically, there's a 10k card, a 20k card and three 50k cards. The prizes range from 10k to 2.5m, with the higher-price cards offering the biggest wins.  

There's a limited number of cards of each type available at each stand. I'm not sure what the limit is but I bought one stand out of 10k and 20k cards and it felt like I bought maybe twenty of each? Bit of a blur, if I'm honest.

I'm also not sure if each stand is independent of the others, with its own stock, or whether draining one dry drains them all. I couldn't easily tell by googling it and I'm sure as hell not going to go round spending my own money to test it.

They refill overnight, meaning you can theoretically buy all the cards once a day, every day, for as long as the event lasts. Oh, yes. It's an event. I didn't realize that at first. It was added with the 999 Nights update but I totally missed it because I totally missed everything about the update, except for Warren Continents, which absorbed 100% of my attention for a week or so. 

The name of the event is Mews Flash, which makes me wonder whether someone came up with the pun first and then decided to make the stallholders cats or if it was the other way around. There's a backstory of sorts, although it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Allegedly, the Midnight Catzebos were set up by Grandpa Miles as a way to fund his Midnight Newsstand, possibly the last functioning newsstand in the city. Social media and smartphones have basically done for newspapers in Hethereau. 

As Catvioli explained to Flora this morning,  Grandpa Miles sank all his savings into the project. Where the cats come in is anyone's guess. I met two of them They both had "cat" names, Catvioli and Cat Cake. I feel like I need to visit every stand in the city now, just to find out what the rest are called. 

When I saw Grandpa Miles' name, it reminded me I was halfway through a quest involving him. Before the game went all medieval on us, Flora was trying to find out why he was suffering attacks of delirium. Was he showing the early effects of dementia or was there an anomaly at the root his confusion?

Flora met Grandpa Miles when she happened to be passing his newsstand and noticed a blue exclamation point hanging over his head. That being the universal symbol for "Talk to me and you may learn something to your advantage"  in every game since 2004, she jogged over and introduced herself. 

Thus began a very long, well-written, emotionally satisfying quest concerning an old man, his childhood friend, her grand-daughter and the old man's busy but concerned son. The narrative touched on the changes technology brings, the impermanence of memory and how the past needs to be preserved if it's not to be lost. 

Everyone involved showed exemplary levels of responsibility, self-sacrifice, compromise, and empathy, including the JTF officials, who turned up towards the end, looking suspiciously like Men In Black, as they always do. The whole storyline felt rich in compassion and adult in theme, making it yet another fine example of why I find this and similar games an awful lot more satisfying to play than more traditional fantasy titles these days. (Ironic, considering the Warren Continent digression, I know...)

Having been reminded of its existence by a cat in a suit, I went back and finished the whole thing before I bought any more scratch cards. (At that point I'd only bought a couple, just to try them out.) The quest, which goes by the name of either“Gift for the Little Book Lover” or "Books Are Like Old Friends", depending on whether you've accepted it yet or not, is a lengthy one but it would be one whole hell of a lot longer if you waited for each of the many two-day delays to pass in game-time.

This is a mechanic I just do not get at all. I understand how developers might want to time-gate progress for any number of reasons but why would anyone build a whole bunch of delays into a quest like that and then allow all of them to be freely bypassed by moving the clock forward? 

Even that might make sense if events in the game-world took place according to a fixed calendar, as they do in the "My Time At..." series or any number of Stardew Valley type games. Then there'd at least be some notional cost to skipping a few days. Missing a festival or an event, perhaps.

As far as I can tell, though, there's no such mechanic in Neverness To Everness. Turning the hand forwards on the clock makes the sun go down and the moon come up and that's about it. The only discernable effect I could see when I did it was a change in the light and the removal of the restriction preventing me from carrying on with the quest. 

Oh, and the rain. It was gloriously sunny on the day I set the clock spinning for the final time but when the hands stopped moving we were in the middle of a thunderstorm. It was raining as hard as I've seen it in Hethereau. The streets were awash. There was forked lightning flickering across the sky. Everyone either had their umbrellas up or they were holding books or magazines over their heads and running for cover.

NTE has some of the best weather effects I've seen in a game. Everything changes when it rains, from the quality of the light to the reflections in the wet surfaces to the behavior of the people all around. Except, of course, for all those poor NPCs who have to talk to the player. They just stand there, getting drenched. As did Flora.

We got it all sorted in the end, despite the rain. Between us, we managed to bring Grandpa Miles back to himself without destroying Aria's grandmother's precious diary or nullifying the Old Diary anomaly, which turned out to be entirely benign. It was the Good Ending, for sure. Not that there was any alternative.

All of which didn't entirely jibe with the giant cat's assertion that Grandpa Miles, having brought his past and present into alignment, had then rushed out to invest his life savings in what can at best be described as a venture of dubious morality or, probably more accurately, a flat-out scam.

Although that, I imagine, will depend on how you feel about gambling. I'm neutral about it, myself, but as several reddit threads confirm, some people are less sanguine to see it added to the game. (Again, ironic, considering it's a gacha game...) Then again, I imagine you  might have some doubts about the event if you'd just lost two or three million Fons on it. 

I did not lose that much. In fact, after what felt like about half an hour of non-stop scratching (Could have been more, could have been less. I didn't time it.) I think I was pretty much back where I started (Didn't keep an exact tally of my wins and losses, either, but the numbers look much as I remember them.)  I do know I'd had fun, though. And I got a whole load of gifts to hand out to all the characters I'm trying to ingratiate myself with because you get one of those every time, win or lose.

I really enjoyed the tactility of the whole thing. You get a different scratchcard on screen for each of the five types you can buy and you can scratch off each image with the mouse, It's an extremely convincing replication of the physical version, or what I remember of it, not having scratched an actual card in a decade or two. 

There is a button to remove all the coatings instantly if you don't, as I do, find doing it yourself with the mouse hugely satisfying. That seems daft to me. Why simulate a scratchcard and then invite people not to scratch it? Why would you be in such a rush you'd skip the whole thing? Presumably because you only bought it to win the money. In which case more fool you! Of course, you aren't going to win the money!

The most I won was 160k on a card that had five small wins. About 80% of the cards had a single win that gave the exact amount the card cost. A few had nothing and a few had slightly more or less than the cost of the card. 

That meant it felt pretty safe to keep buying the 10k and 20k cards, which I did until they ran out. They mostly paid for themselves. As soon as I got to the 50k cards, though, it was clear two or three bad cards in a row would put me further behind than I'd be likely to make up, so I stopped.

I found the whole thing an entertaining diversion. I'll probably do it a few more times before the event ends but I certainly won't be trying to grab every card, every day, the way some people supposedly have been doing. 

There's a conspiracy theory on reddit suggesting Hotta have added the event purely to bankrupt people so they'll have to buy more Fons with real money. Seems a bit far-fetched to me but then I would say that, wouldn't I? I've never had a real problem stopping before I lose only very slightly more than I'm happy to lose. 

And it's not as though you get nothing for your money. I have a whole load of gifts to give away. 

Now, who am I going to give them to? 

We Need To Talk About Taygedo

Nimgimli and I have been having a conversation in the comment threads of our respective blogs about the merits or otherwise of a series of quests in Neverness To Everness involving a character called Taygedo. I covered a little of this in yesterday's post but to recap, Taygedo is a work colleague of the PC, he features heavily in the early game and a lot of players find him really annoying.

I think I'm going to need to break that down a little. Bear with me if you don't play NTE and maybe even if you do because I'm about to give some background detail to elements of the game I don't entirely understand yet. 

The set-up for the game is that there was some kind of global supernatural or paranormal incident a while back, which continues in the form of rolling reality breaches of varying significance and seriousness. The cause may be explained and I just didn't take it in or it may be unknown. Either way, I have no clear understanding of how it happened, how long ago or what the wider implications might be.

What I do know is that these incursions show no signs of stopping and regular, human society has had to learn to live with them. It's clearly been happening long enough that most people have adapted to accept and incorporate the new status quo. 

There are government departments and private organizations ready and willing to deal with any new incursion or threat. Responses vary from banishment to containment but there are also opportunities to be had so there's no real sense of imminent apocalypse, which makes a nice change.

There are rules and systems in place to allow and even encourage the integration of any useful artifacts or materials that enter the world via an Anomaly, which is only to be expected. More importantly, there are strict rules for handling the entities that arrive through anomalies (And, I think, for those that were already here, if they become in some way changed by them.)

Sentient creatures that meet certain criteria, mostly not being dangerous, are known as Oddities and these Oddities can be sponsored either by individuals or organizations. A sponsored Oddity has to be kept under close watch at all times by its Guarantor, making them roughly equivalent to a pet dog. They're not allowed to roam freely and their Guarantor is responsible for any accidents or mischief they may cause.

Particularly well-adapted Oddities, however, can apply for Citizenship. If granted, this gives them an official ID Card and the right to move around the city freely, without oversight by their Guarantor. They can also have paid jobs, own property and do many, if not all, of the things a human citizen can. The ID needs to be renewed annually. Renewal is not automatic, requiring a visit to the BAC offices and a repeat of the same tests that granted citizenship in the first place. Providing nothing has changed, though, renewal is pretty much a formality.

That, at least, is how I understand it, having finished several of Taygedo's quests, in which much is explained. A lot of what I just wrote might be wrong though because while there's an extraordinary amount of detail on the bureaucracy of the process there's little in the way of historical context. 

And my character knows very little more about it all than I do. The player-character is a newcomer to the city and with memory loss on top (So what's new?). It's confusing for her and me but for the NPCs we meet, it's all just everyday life. This is a society that's both familiar and comfortable with its situation. Crisis? What crisis?

Taygedo is a Citizen. Like most Oddities he has an ability (Superpower might be a reasonable analogy.) which in his case is some sort of affinity with and ability to affect mechanical devices. I'm still hazy on the details but it allows him to work as a mechanic at Eibon Antiques, under whose corporate Guarantorship he remains, even as a citizen. 

In appearance he's a short, plump, anthropomorphic otter wearing clothes, except for his head, which is an old-fashioned cathode ray television set displaying the cartoon face of an otter. He speaks in an incomprehensible dialect consisting largely of variations on his own name and he has the squeaky cartoon voice you'd expect a comedy cartoon otter to have.

By most reports, people either love him or loathe him. I like him, personally. Nimgimli is firmly in the other camp. What I think we both agree on, in common with many others on both sides of the argument, is that Taygedo and his storyline have no place in the opening chapters of the main quest.

There's a great summation of the problem in the opening post of this Reddit thread.  As the OP explains, the quest, which is called "Love That Begins With Lies", may work for players who "like Slice of Life anime" but "If you don't like those types of story, you will HATE it."

What's arguably worse than merely alienating what's probably the majority of your players with a poor aesthetic choice is misleading them about the nature of the game itself. As the OP (MutedCountry3708) points out, those players "may WRONGFULLY think that this is how the rest of MSQ is going to be: which is NOT the case". 

I'm going to have to take their word on that because I haven't seen any more of the MSQ yet. You need to get to Hunter Level 14 to open the next chapter, which is also a problem because what does the game suggest you do while you're waiting?

A whole bunch more of Taygedo's quests, that's what. The follow-on is seamless. I received a very urgent message from Taygedo almost immediately after the MSQ section ended, although I ought to clarify that all messages from Taygedo are "Very Urgent" because he's a hyper-excitable drama queen. I didn't realize until much later that it wasn't just a continuation of the same quest.

I'm going to give my considered opinion here that Taygedo's quests are actually pretty good. The MSQ one is arguably the weakest and certainly the silliest but it's not bad. The others I found very engaging, particularly the one where I had to accompany him to get his ID. 

All these quests supply a lot of interesting and helpful backstory without making it feel like you're getting infodumped. If you're interested in backstory and world-building, you'll likely get something out of them.

If you're not, though, and for many people I suspect even if you are, you're in for a long and tedious plod through a really extraordinary amount of surprisingly realistic legalese and bureaucratic red tape. There is a fair bit more to do than just click through dialog but effectively these are the short story equivalent of visual novels.

And here's the real problem, I think. Although I knew going in that Neverness To Everness was to some extent a life sim as well as an adventure game and an RPG, I wasn't really imagining this level of engagement with the minutiae of life in Hethereau. Taygedo's citizenship is just one example among many of the way the game is willing to let you experience the world at the same pace as its citizens, regardless of whether that makes it entertaining.

Here's another example, taken from my session this morning. To leave my fifth floor apartment I have to open the door into the hallway, walk along the hall to the elevator, call the lift with the button on the wall, wait for it to arrive, walk (The game enforces walking at this point.) into it, wait for the door to close, select the floor I want, press the button, wait for the elevator to descend, then finally walk out into the lobby. 

Every part of that operation takes roughly as long as it would if I was doing it in real life. The only other game I remember being that literal about things is Star Citizen. 

I also rode the bus again today, to see where it went and how long it would take. The simulation was disturbingly realistic or perhaps i should say authentic. The bus moved at the speed of a city bus, obeyed every traffic regulation, gave all the right maneuvering signals and stopped at every stop, where it waited for NPCs to get on and off. Outside, all the other vehicles moved just as real vehicles would, always assuming they were being driven by people who obeyed the rules of the road. Pedestrians used the crossings, waited for the lights to change, broke into a jog if they were still on the crossing when the traffic began to move...

I'm having a great time in NTE precisely because it's the most convincing iteration of a fully-functioning city I've ever seen in a game-world. I thought the cities in Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves were impressive but this is better than either. Which is amazing, if what you're looking for is a life sim but not so much if you thought you were getting slam-bang supernatural action.

The promotional videos certainly did give the impression of a far more action-oriented experience and from what I can tell that experience is certainly in the game, somewhere. It's just not in the opening chapters of the MSQ. There's some of it in the Prolog but that doesn't last long. Taygedo's MSQ quest, even without all the subsidiaries, goes on for much longer. Or maybe it just feels like it.

The early stages of the MSQ feel a bit out of kilter even allowing for Taygedo and his love-life butting in and taking over. Even though I've been enjoying myself, I still have relatively little idea what my character is supposed to be doing. She seems to have been inducted into a quasi-military police force at one moment and then handed on to a bunch of eccentrics running a dubious back street junk shop the next. 

The BAC, which inducted her, is full of hyper-efficient workaholics operating from state of the art offices bursting with hi-tech equipment, whereas Eidon Antiques is a ramshackle operation in a back alley in the bad part of town, run by an alcoholic good-time girl, an otter and a bunch of bickering children. How these pieces fit together beats me.

The thing is, I like the shabby, fractious crew at Eidon whereas the slick, smart, secret-agent/super-hero gang that picked me up in the Prolog and passed me along to Eidon when they'd done with me made my teeth itch. I'd far rather hang out with otters and tweens pretending to be in the cosa nostra than a bunch of runway models cosplaying James Bond.

But that's just me. I'm the part of the audience this stuff is working for, although I'm one hundred per cent sure I don't fit the demographic description. I'd be more than happy to carry on with Taygedo's storyline and not get back to the serious stuff ever. 

Unfortunately, there has to be a real chance that a sizeable portion of the audience, the part that doesn't feel the same way, will already have voted with their uninstall buttons. Taygedo's trivial troubles might make a great series of side-quests but even I can see there's no place for them in the main storyline.

Except... there is this one thing...

Remember what that quest is called? "Love That Begins With Lies". That obviously means the lies Taygedo tells his love-interest, Tako, as he tries to impress her, right? 

Well, yes, but what if also meant the lies she's telling him?

I have no evidence for this, other than a nebulouis sense that there's something ironic about her dialog, but I just don't trust her. So much so that, at one point in the storyline, I literally told Taygedo  out loud, "I wouldn't trust her as far as I could kick her!"

Granted, it might have been in part because Taku reminds me of Sweet Sue from the Sooty Show, a character I've always found intensely irritating. Or it might have just been that Taku is BLOODY ANNOYING! Even so, I'm pretty sure she's up to something.

If she is and if it turns out to have some major storyline implications further down the line, it still won't justify the placement of the quest where it is. It's just "in the WRONG PLACE, at the WRONG TIME"
as MutedCountry3708 so aptly puts it.

I only hope it hasn't done too much damage to the game's prospects overall. I imagine most players will grit their teeth and get past it. I hope so, anyway. 

Me, though? I'm looking forward to more of Taygedo's antics. Who doesn't love a comedy otter?

Progress Notes: New World

Busy time... Christmas...Work... Obligations... blah blah blah...

All I've got is an update on how things are going in New World. 

Good. 

Yeah, really good.

Playing every day. Only an hour or two. Trying to level, mostly. Just short of 64 now. Well, maybe halfway through 63.

Moved up to at-level content yesterday after several sessions back-capping old quests and doing faction missions thirty or twenty levels below. 

Already finished MSQ from launch. Well, might have. Not actually sure. Seem to remember getting stuck on some dungeon stage but no sign of it in the Journal. Maybe the revamp fixed it. One of the revamps.

Latest MSQ flags as Brimstone Sands. Good with me. Story never made sense anyway.

Cleared a bunch of side quests. Took some more. Not great. XP poor. Stories not very interesting. 

Saw some advice to skip side quests. Seems solid. 

Pity. Usually enjoy them in MMOs. Not so much here.

On the subject, writing in New World always seems stiff. Nothing really wrong with it but it seldom comes alive. Reminds me of ESO. Too... I dunno... worthy? 

Might have to give it a good think. Writing in anime/imported games so much more relatable, satisfying, just more interesting. Even with the bad translations, sometimes. Why is that?

Faction missions much better. No plodding plots, just go kill this, loot that. Collect big XP. Double, treble story quests, at least. And takes half as long. Which would you do?

Also, fun when you get sent to kill named mobs. Lots of loot then. No idea what to do with it. All just stashed. Huge storage space and all in one place now. Just shove it all in a chest under the stairs in the Mourningdale house.

Oh, speaking of...  

There's me, stuck under the stairs to my house. Logged out lying in bed. Well, on bed. Logged in next day, rent due. Kicked me out. Got stuck under stairs. Trapped!. 

Even after I paid the rent. Couldn't even Return Home. Already there, I guess!

Had to Fast Travel to some shrine. Thought it wasn't going to work. No room to crouch. Animation didn't play. Did, though. Work, I mean. Then had to Fast Travel back to get into my own house. Rude!

New World always had a rep for bugs. First I've seen since I got back but game is laggy as hell, first thing. Log in, always have to wait two, three minutes for scenery to load. Stand there, dropping through the floor, rubber-banding back, over and over. 

Given up trying to move until it settles. Nothing to do about it. Tab out and web browse while I wait. 

After that, usually pretty good. Occasional lag spikes. Mostly smooth enough. Don't remember it being like this before and I was always on East Coast servers. Looked at switching. No dice. You can move server but not region so stuck with it.

Killed the big turkey. Not done it before. Three of us. Took twenty minutes. Fuckton of hit points. Easy otherwise although someone got killed. Rezzed him. Good I remembered how!

Turkey died. Didn't get anything much.

Got a good gathering thing off a little turkey, though. Random drop. And plenty of coin off some others. Kinda wish I'd gotten onto event before it was almost over. Not exactly hard to make money here, though.

Starting to think I should get back to crafting. Did a lot of it before. Haven't touched it this time. Everything gives XP in this game, doesn't it? Maybe craft a level for a change. Sure got the mats for it.

Dinged 63 last night and thought it was probably time to get back to the desert. Had a couple of quests to finish. Did those. Mobs a lot tougher. Fights a lot harder. Obviously. Hella fun, all the same. Always liked the fighting in this game. More than I can say for some.

After that, saw I had an MSQ close by. Started on it and got a lot further than I expected. Went into this huge pyramid. Killed a big beetle. Looted a load of chests. Took so long doing that, beetle respawned. Attacked me so I had to kill him again. Fun times!

Climbed a bunch of stairs to top of the pyramid. Killed some guards. Went through a door. Expecting a big fight with a boss. There was one but all she did was monologue for like five minutes then leave. Turned some glyph on and that was it: MSQ stage done.

Ported back, handed it in, on to the next. If only they were all like that, eh?

Guess I'll carry on this way to 65. Shouldn't take too long. Then on to Nighthaven. Really want to check that place out. Sounds cool but no point going if everything's too tough. 

Or is there? Guess I could just go explore. Open up the travel points. Fill out the map. Take some pictures.

Why not?

That's a plan, then.

Of I go. Maybe a proper post about it tomorrow. 

Or about something, anyway. 

Don't count on it... 

Have You Done That Little Job I Gave You Yet?

A couple of days ago, I mentioned in passing that Panda Panda Panda was back. The event, which used to be known as Days of Summer, when it started a litle earlier in the year, is a series of weekly quests in EverQuest II that, at least on the face of it, offers a huge boost in power for casual players at the cost of very little effort indeed.

At least, that's how it appears until you take a closer look at the way it works. I had the opportunity to do just that yesterday, when I went to pick up the first of this year's quests and found I hadn't finished last year's yet. Or started them, either.

Technically, I had started the 2024 set of nine quests, but only in that I'd visited Bao Bao, the current Panda-in-Residence, and taken the first one. It was in my Journal but I hadn't actually done anything about it in twelve months. Bao Bao was not interested in giving me this year's quests until I finished the job I was already on.

I had thought you could skip the ones you hadn't done. You'd probably want to if you were a new or returning player because the event has been running since 2017, meaning there are now seventy-two quests in the full sequence, not counting the new ones this year. There are a lot of rewards from previous years that still have some currency, not least the huge number of house items, but the main thrust of the event has always been to gear up and who wants a load of outdated armor with inferior stats?

The wiki is somewhat confusing on whether you can skip the years you don't want to do: "Each of the quests must be completed in the order they were released, starting with the quests from 2017. You cannot skip ahead to later points in the quest series. *2023 can be completed without previous progress in this questline." (Emphasis theirs.) Why 2023 is different from the rest I couldn't tell you but it doesn't seem to have been the start of a new, more relaxed ruleset because this year's starter quest looked to be firmly gated behind completion of last year's.

I imagine the reason I thought you could skip was because in 2023 you really could. Maybe I did. I haven't checked. I vaguely remember deciding last year that, since I wasn't going to use any of the gear, I wouldn't bother doing the quests. Or maybe that's post hoc rationalization. It's entirely possible I just forgot.

There were nine quests in the 2024 set. There are nine every year. It takes us through the autumn to the arrival of the annual expansion, one quest dropping every week after the regular update, usually, on a Tuesday. It's a pleasant weekly ritual to get the new one, fly around for a few minutes ticking the necessary boxes, then come back to see what new stuff you can grab off the store-panda.

If you let yourself fall behind, however, it all feels a bit less amusing. Last night and this morning I did all nine quests. I did it the fastest way possible, using my All Access Membership for instant travel to and from the various zones, moving between the various locations within those zones on my very fast, max-level flying mount and using the detailed walkthrough, complete with copy-and-paste waypoints, from the Wiki.

Since I was on my Level 130 Berserker, all mobs in every required zone were grey to me and non-aggressive. All I had to do was port, fly, gather and return. It still took me two hours to finish all nine quests.

The quests themselves were exactly as they always are: gather some samples from various parts of Norrath so some lazy/greedy/cowardly panda can satisfy their curiosity/stuff themselves stupid. Bao Bao is quite an endearing panda as these things go and the quest dialog was amusing enough but the most interesting part to me is how long the dev team can keep the whole thing going. 

There's a whole gang of pandas standing around in Sundered Frontier now. I think there are three questgivers and two vendors at least. When the thing started in 2017 there was only Yun Zi handing out the quests and he did his own storekeeping.

Thanks to the wiki, I had very little trouble finding everything. Almost all of the items were there in profusion. Most of them sparkled and some were oversized. A couple were none of those things but the wiki warned me about that and told me where to look, with accompanying screenshots. 

The only part that gave me any real trouble was the quest that asked for some foliage from Lesser Feydark. Lesser Fey is and always has been a total pain to navigate. It has no portals at all accessible via map travel. The best you can do is map to either Butcherblock and take a griffin from the cliffs above the dock or port to Greater Feydark or Steamfont and fly to the zone-in.

I went via Butcherblock first, only to find that the BB entrance brings you in on the opposite side of the map to where you want to go. I figured it would be faster to map-travel to GFey and come back in from that side than to fly across the whole of LFey so I did that and it wasn't. 

I'd forgotten that you land in Kelethin and Kelethin has its own map and I got myself lost coming out of the dumb elf tree city and ended up wandering about for ages before I finally worked out where I was supposed to be going. 

Once in LFey it wasn't much better because the whole place is constructed from a bunch of separate valleys with invisible walls preventing you from flying between them. You have to follow rivers and go through tunnels and you can't fly through most of the connections so you have to go on foot. The whole place is a confusing, annoying mess and flying really doesn't make it any easier.

So that was fun. I got it done eventually, anyway.

With all of that out of the way, I was finally able to get the first of this year's quests, for which we will be collecting rocks, just for a change. It turns out Bao Bao, who demonstrated his lack of self-control when it comes to stuffing things in his mouth all through the 2024 questline, ate his way through his grandmother's entire vegetable garden and now he needs to give her some pretty rocks for her collection to get back on her good side.

Guess who'll be doing the hard work lugging those rocks about. Muggins, that's who.

And that brings me to the question, once again, of whether it will be worth it. I looked at the first set of rewards, which include a bunch of purple Augments, some weapons and the inevitable bags of decorating items and... that's it. 

Usually there are full sets of armor for all weights and dozens of Augments, along with a few other odds and ends, utilities and so on. I'm not sure if that means none of those things are going to be on the vendor this time or whether they'll only appear week-by-week. And if they aren't going to be there, does that mean there's going to be a substantial change to the way gear works in the new expansion?

Or does it just mean someone has finally admitted that handing out three full sets of gear in three months, each of which upgrades the one before, is taking generosity beyond the bounds of reason? If so, you can bet there will be howls of complaint.

Not that the dagger I took does upgrade the best one already available to me, anyway. I took it because it's an upgrade for the weapon I was using but I wasn't using the best weapon I own. I haven't claimed the weapon from the Anniversary crate yet. The panda dagger won't upgrade that and if there is panda armor this year and it has the same Resolve as the weapons, that won't upgrade the anniversary gear, either.

In fact, it will be much worse. The Anniversary stuff is 525 Resolve. The new panda weapons are 505. 

Even if we discount the Anniversary gear, which you only get for one character on the account, Resolve 505 isn't going to cut it for long. As a casual soloist I already have lots of 495 pieces so it's a minimal upgrade and it will be instantly rendered redundant the day the expansion arrives. I don't know what the Tishan's gear will come in at but you can bet it will be at minimum 505 and come with Augments that work in the new zones, which none of the old ones will.

Some of that is speculation. This is, or should be, a level cap increase year. Those are usually when things change the most so anything could happen when the expansion arrives. As must be plain from everything I ever write about EQII, the game is ferociously over-complicated, especially when it comes to gear and stats. The team have been trying to strip away some of the accrued cruft for a while now but every time they remove anything there's an outcry, not least from the crew that claims to play EQII specifically because it's complicated and difficult to understand.

I'll be doing the panda quests anyway. They're a fun little diversion and don't take too long (Lesser Feydark always excepted.) and they unlock the vendors for the whole account so it's a useful option for some of my sub-max-level characters. Most of all, though, I don't want to fall behind again. 

Who knows, next year the pandas might come up with something different. If they do, it'd be nice to be able to grab it right away instead of playing catch-up first.

It's All In The Preparation

There are often rumblings in this part of the blogosphere about how tough it can be, going back to an MMORPG you haven't played in a year or so. It's true, too. And I'm here to tell you, it's not a lot better going back to one you were playing as recently as a couple of months back.

Scars of Destruction launched for EverQuest II just over a week ago and I've played quite a few sessions since then but it wasn't until a couple of hours ago I finally got as far as starting the first quest in the Adventurer Signature Timeline. Even though I had a character just a level and a half below the access requirement when I logged in eight days ago, it's taken me this long to get to the point where I could finally start in on the new content.

As I've posted already, a lot of that time was taken up figuring out how to get that last level and a half but even when I got to Level 130, I still had quite a bit of prep to do. 

The first and most important thing was to clear some bag space. I do realise this isn't entirely something the developers can do much about, what with it having more to do with my personality, psychology and playstyle than any particular flaw in game design. The name of this blog is a bit of a giveaway there. Still, I've read enough other bloggers complaining about the problem of coming back to a game only to find all their bags full of stuff they don't know whether to keep, sell or junk to know it's not just me.

The temptation is always to clear just enough space to get by and pretend the rest isn't there. I tried that. It didn't work. And even doing that little housekeeping took me an hour or more.

It left me with half a bag empty, out of six in total. Not much but I figured it might be enough to take all the free gear I knew was going to have to deal with the moment I arrived in the new lands.

It wasn't enough. Not even close.

Free stuff. It always brings the crowds.

The upside is that Darkpaw have largely perfected the onboarding process for new and returning players, at least to the extent it's possible to speed the lengthy process to a satisfactory conclusion.

Once upon a time  you were left entirely on your own when a new expansion arrived to invalidate every piece of equipment you owned. Then they moved to leaving hand-outs lying around in boxes without telling anyone where they were or what was in them, expecting players to figure it out for themselves.

Now, you get a an actual quest as soon as you become eligible for an upgrade and there's a quest-giver waiting right next to the box to talk you  through the entire process. This year, you barely even need to look in the box! The guy gives you a crate that unpacks straight into your inventory, giving you a full set of armor for your class and every piece has the correct Adornments already installed!

I optimistically opened that crate hoping for the best and it filled every available slot in my half-a-bag and carried on into Overflow. When I put the armor on, all my old gear popped off, right into the vacant bag slots, leaving me back where I'd started. So much for trying to do it the lazy way.

I gave up any idea of adventuring and ported back to Freeport, where I spent the whole of  yesterday evening working on a proper clean-out. I went to two of my mansions to place every house item I could find, put a bunch of stuff up for sale on the broker, emptied all my mats, collection items and Lore and Legend parts into the hoppers outside my crafting hall and did a few other things as well.

All of that got me one empty bag. I could have worked with it - it was sixty-six slots - but I knew I could do better so this morning, when I came back from walking the dog, I settled down for a proper clearance session. I went through five of my six bags - several hundred items - sorting everything into three piles - Keep, Sell, Trash. Then I sub-sorted the Keep pile into Bank Vault, Shared Bank, Guild Bank and so on. I have a lot of storage options.

I hung those lights, you know. The round ones. Not the lanterns.

That told me what to do with it all but before I could make any actual room I had to go check all the places I was planning to put things to make sure there was room. Of course there wasn't. So I had to sort those as well.

All that took a few hours and even when it was done I still only had two empty bags plus a few slots in the third. Everything that's left is either something I want to keep close at hand or a quest item of some kind.

Quest items are the real problem. My Berserker has a lot of them in his bags - likely more than a hundred - and hardly any of them mean anything to me. Or, presumably, to him. His Quest Journal is all but full and that's after I purged it of all repeatables and anything I hadn't actually started. I'm always very loathe to delete a quest where I've already made some progress, just in case it turns out to be needed for something later on.

It'd be easy to wipe the lot and start fresh but only this week I wrote a whole post about how useful it turned out to be to have a bunch of quests in my book from four expansions ago, so I don't see scorched earth as the best policy here. Experience tells me I tend to regret getting rid of stuff a lot more than I ever regret keeping it. That's a general principle of life, not only gaming.

Still, I know I ought to go through all those quest items, one by one, to find out what they're all for and whether I really need them. Developers in too many games I've played have not always been as diligent as they could have been about making quest items auto-delete themselves when they're no longer needed. That has gotten better but some of these go back many years, to when practice was often lax in that regard.

It wouldn't be difficult to check. The huge majority of quest items say exactly what quest they're whern you mouseover them. All I'd have to do would be cross-reference the information on the item with the quests in my Journal and the steps on the Wiki... Does that sound like a good time to anyone? 

I don't know. Maybe? I'd have to be in the mood...

Do you know who I am?

I'm not doing it now, anyway. I may only have a third of my Berserker's potential onboard storage capacity available but those are two big bags. Over a hundred and fifty slots ought to be enough, provided I clear as I go from now on.

Having leveled up and cleaned up I was finally ready to start adventuring after lunch. Well, after I sorted my new Mercenary out, that is. That's part of the process that could still do with some work. 

It's great that you get a new Merc as part of the Welcome to The Expansion quest (Not the actual quest name.) It's even better that he comes fully leveled up. It's weird you still have to dress him yourself, out of the box on the floor. How primitive!

Plus there's no specific Mercenary gear in there other than a whole bunch of Accolades. For the armor slots, Mercs can wear the same, free gear as player characters, only no-one tells you that. I nearly didn't think of it and I've done it a few times, now.

All of that and a few other things took me until mid-afternoon, at which point I was finally - finally! - ready to do some actual questing. And what did the devs have me doing, now I was all kitted out in my spiffy new gear with a new mount, merc and familiar and a bunch of special buffs? Swimming around the bay, grabbing leftover fishing floats, that's what. I could have done that in my skivvies!

There was some fighting, to be strictly fair to whoever came up with the quest. I fought some fish. Quite small fish. But feisty!

My characters routinely hob-nob with demi-gods and get called in as special consultants by the likes of Firiona Vie and the Duality but here I am, treading water, stabbing pike with a dagger so I can string up some fairy lights in the hope of getting a bunch of downtrodden orc vassals  to give me the time of day. (That's vassals of orcs, by the way, not vassals who happen to be of orcish descent.) I guess it's a living.

Anyway, I'm up and running at last. We'll see where it takes me.

Going Further Back To Go Forwards Faster

I would have posted yesterday but I was too busy playing. I even had something mapped out in my mind, but I didn't want to stop to write it up.

I suppose that's a good thing. It suggests I was enjoying what I was doing enough to want to carry on, rather than just doing it long enough to gather enough material for a blog post, something I freely admit is often the case when I play games these days.

At this point it's tempting to go into a peroration about blogging and gaming and synergies and which drives what, but blogging about blogging, while very enjoyable for the blogger, can sometimes remind me uncomfortably of all those novels about being a novelist or, worse, those depressingly popular books about someone who reads books. 

Instead, how about I just get on with it and talk about what I was doing? There's an idea.

So, there I was, trying to get my Berserker in EverQuest II to Level 130 so I could start on the new expansion. I already explained the problem and outlined my plan to deal with it and how long I thought that might take. Then, when I was playing on Sunday evening, I had a bit of luck.

I logged in expecting to pick up where I left off, cleaning up all the non-story quests from the previous expansion, Ballads of Zimara, most of which come from starter items that drop off mobs. I opened my quest journal to see exactly where I was up to and because I was in Freeport at the time, instead of sorting it by the zone I was in, as I usually do, I sorted it by Quest Level instead.

That brought up far more yellow quests than I was expecting, yellow meaning just comfortably above the character's level, usually the sweet spot for the best xp. That made me curious so I took a closer look. I found something surprising.

Many of the yellow quests weren't from the last expansion ore ven the one before that. They were from Visions of Vetrovia, which came out in 2021. The level cap back then had been 125 so it seemed strange that the quests were flagged Level 130. But they were.

Since the quests in BoZ were already very easy it seemed logical the ones from the expansion before that would be easier still. Whether they'd be faster wasn't so certain. In my experience with most MMORPGs there are three things that take time when you quest:

1. Killing mobs.
2. Traveling to and/or finding the place you have to go to to kill the mobs.
3. Listening to NPCs telling you why you should go kill the mobs in the first place.

There are other factors, especially in those games where the devs seem to be involved in some kind of in-house competition to find the most obscure, awkward or annoying ways to increment a quest counter. I long ago lost track of the number of ways it's possible to interact with an object in EQII but I can tell you it's too many.

Mostly, though, it's a combination of TTK, TTT and TTR. Time to Kill, Time to Travel and Time to Read. Dropping back three expansions was always going to help with TTK. Having flying enabled in all zones, instant map travel as an All Access member and the exact locations of every update step in the Wiki was going to cut down hugely on TTT. Two out of three. Not bad. 

I wasn't sure there was much I could do about the last one, though. Many players, possibly most of them, shave a good deal off the running time of every quest by skipping the quest text but I always (Well, almost always...) read every word. I could have made an exception for the sake of expediency but it would go against the grain so I knew I would probably skim-read everything, at least.

The big question was would the xp from two expansions ago be worth bothering with? The way Darkpaw has futzed around with xp and leveling over the past few years makes it hard to be sure until you try. Since I had the quests my book already, I thought it was worth a look. 

I was hoping these older quests would move the dial enough to justify the effort because, although I
could see a path to Level 130 by way of the BoZ scraps I had left, nothing was giving me much more than 2% of the level and I still had about 60% to go. I didn't much fancy having to find all the dropped quests and then finish up on the dregs of the few repeatables. If I could find some narrative quests, at least the time might pass faster and the whole thing wouldn't feel quite so formulaic.

Naturally, I started with the quests in my journal for Forlorn Gist, the highest-level zone in VoV, on the assumption those ought to give the best xp. There's no way to travel there directly (Oh yes there is but I'd forgotten!) so I had go the long way, map-hopping to the starting zone, flying to the griffin station, riding public transport to the next zone, Karuupa Jungle, flying across that to the next station and finally arriving in Mahngavi Wastes, from where you can walk to Forlorn Gist. So much for saving on travel time.

I was about to head to the zone line when I happened to notice I also had some quests in the Wastes and what's more two of them were complete and ready to hand in. That seemed like a gimme so I took it. I flew to the questgivers, a couple of centaurs hanging around next to a graveyard, big, red books over their heads to tell me they'd been waiting three years for me to show up. I spoke to the pair of them, accepted their thanks and collected the reward.

Those quests gave easily as much xp as I'd been getting from the ones in BoZ. Maybe a little more. Great! Op success! And both centaurs had more work for me so rather than head off to Forlorn Gist I thought I might as well carry on where I was.

I worked through the two related quest sequences, all of which were either Kill or Fetch quests or a combination of the two. The mobs and objects were all in the same zone. Everything was an insta-kill. Travel distances were short. I barely even needed to refer to the wiki because I had EQMaps up with all the POIs highlighted. It was glorious!

Once again, I'm going to make the point that I prefer questing when there is absolutely no challenge to it. I love one-shotting all the mobs - better yet if I can round up a bunch and one-shot the lot with an AE - and best of all if it's all those inevitable, irelevant, infuriating adds that insist on piling on. 

I can't see how having to spend five to ten seconds killing each mob that gets in your way as you roam around looking for the ones you actually need for the quest adds to the entertainment value in any way whatsoever. If you have to interact with them at all, surely it has to be more fun fun to mow them all down like so many stalks of wheat.

It's more fun for me, anyway. I can one-shot for a long time before I get bored. I'm not sure I've ever gotten bored doing it, in fact. Usually I stop for other reasons long before the warm feeling it gives me begins to cool. Conversely, I get very tired of hacking through hordes mobs that take time and effort to kill. Even thinking about can sometimes be enough to make give up and go play something else instead. Something easier. And more fun.

All of which meant that I was having a high old time, picking up quests and knocking them out as fast as I could. After a while, though, the quests ran out so I had to stop and think again. And I found myself puzzled.

Although all these quests were new to my Berserker, they were far from new to me. I remembered all of them. It took me a while to work out why but the answer, when I found it, was simple: I'd done them on a different character. 

For Visions of Vetrovia three years ago, I ran an experiment. I swapped my regular questing character, the Berserker, for my Bruiser, who I'd heard through some research I'd done should have a better TTK. Also, Bruisers can feign death, which is always handy.

The experiment was inconclusive. I couldn't tell much difference between the two of them. They're both melee classes. They both use a lot of AEs. Plate is thicker than leather but avoidance makes up for it. Feigning death gets you out of a lot of things but so does having three death saves. Solo there doesn't seem to be a lot to choose between them. 

I went back to the Berserker for Ballads of Zimara and I'd forgotten he'd ever skipped an expansion. Thinking about it, I recalled how he'd done the crafting questline and while traveling arond the VoV zones for that, had picked up just enough loose adventure quests as and when he came across them to get his five levels, from 120 to 125. As I discovered yesterday, though, he'd never even started the Adventure Signature questline.

That turned out to be a godsend. I dropped the idea of going to Forlorn Gist and instead I went right back to the start to begin working my way through the MQ. 

Visions of Vetrovia, four expansions ago now, is part of the era when every stage of the main quest rewarded massive chunks of xp, often enough to move the bar half a level or more. Even at 129, with the required xp per level measured in the trillions, allowing for full vitality, I found almost every step of the Signature line was giving around 5% of the level.

That's more than double what I was getting for the BoZ pick-ups and repeatables and I was also getting a lot more than double the entertainment value into the bargain. I was enjoying myself so much that when I dinged 130 yesterday evening I was almost sorry there weren't any more levels left to get.

Event then, the whole process still wasn't exactly what you'd call fast. I didn't time it but I think it probably took me around four hours to do the final two-thirds of Level 129. The important thing was that it didn't feel like a grind or a chore. It felt like having fun.

There were several things that did make it all go by a bit faster. As soon as I realised I'd done the entire storyline before, I felt under no obligation to read any of the dialog. It was quite liberating to click through it all as fast it appeared. 

I also gave up looting most of the mobs after a while, after I thought about the value of what they were dropping. EQII suffers from hyper-inflation, meaning nothing any mob drops is of any value unless you can either use it yourself or sell it to another player. Cash drops that sell to vendors might as well be pocket lint.

Lastly, I was helped considerably in my progress through the MQ by the fortuitous circumstances of my Berserker's happy-go-lucky approach to questing four years ago. The quests he'd been able to get while not following the main storyline mostly turned out to be the same ones you have to do for various NPCs before they'll give you their MQ quests. Every time he got to a point where the wiki said he'd need to go do all of someone's quests to get the next MQ stage, he found he'd already done them and the NPC was happy to speak to him right away.

All things considered, it was both a very enjoyable way to get that last level and a very useful learning experience. I see now that there's a good reason to hold back on doing current content on some characters. 

While it was super-easy to level, I got into the habit of taking half a dozen of my crew to the cap every time it went up. Now it's likely to be more better - or at least a lot less trouble - to let them leap-frog each other a year or two apart and let time and power creep turn what might have been a painful slog into an enjoyable romp.

That, though, is for the future. As soon as the Berserker dinged 130 he got a letter inviting him to come to the new zones to help with the latest crisis, whatever that might be. It means going back to taking things seriously, playing properly, reading all the quest text and doing things the way they're supposed to be done. 

I can't say I'm thrilled but I suppose I'll have to. I mean, that is why I was leveling him in the first place...