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...

When The Night Knocks, You'd Better Answer

Readers with long memories may recall I used to play a game called Wuthering Waves. I went on a good deal about how great it was (Which it is.) and how more people ought to try it. (Which they should.) If I was the kind of person who has a Main Game then, for a while this summer, Wuthering Waves would have been it.

It's been more than six weeks since I last mentioned Wuthering Waves. On September 23 I posted almost two thousand highly enthusiastic words about how much I was looking forward to a major content drop called The Black Shores. Since then, nothing. 

As I said in the post, "Wuthering Waves really is good and I ought to play it more consistently than I do." A prophetic observation. Self-knowledge is a wonderful thing.

When The Black Shores update arived, I managed exactly one session before I got distracted by something else. I didn't post anything about it that the time because I hadn't seen any of the new content. As I suspected, much of it, including all the storyline quests, which was what I was most interested in seeing, required a certain amount of progress in the Main Quest. Progress I didn't have.

What I actually did in that one and only session was play through a whole Act of the MQ: Act V - Rewinding Raindrops. It was excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Why I hadn't carried on with the MQ before mystifies me now. I just kind of stopped and carried on playing the game without progressing at all. I guess that's another point in its favor; that it lets you.

I was still way behind. Three full Acts of the original story to go before I got to the new stuff. Even though the chapter I'd just done was so good, I didn't follow on immediately with the next for reasons that had nothing to do with Wuthering Waves itself. I got diverted first by the Nightingale reboot, then by the Way of Winter scenario in Once Human. The two of them together account for something like eighty or ninety hours of my gaming over the last month and a half.

All the while, I've been telling myself I needed to get back to Wuthering Waves, to push on to the Black Shores, without ever doing anything to make it happen. It wasn't until I saw there was a new, major update on the horizon that I finally shook off the compulsion to play Once Human every available hour and logged into Wuthering Waves instead.

This morning, I played through another Act of the MQ, followed by an Interlude. That took me a couple of hours and once again it was top-class entertainment. I've seen Wuthering Waves described as "story-rich" and it is, in more ways than one. There's a lot of story and it's mostly of very high quality.

In fact, as I've said before, the experience can often feel more like watching an interactive anime than playing a video game. There are many very lengthy cut-scenes and the fights are few and far between. 

You do have to be in the mood for that but when I am, I love it. Unlike Final Fantasy XIV, where I just couldn't wait for the ponderous, portentous, pretentious cut scenes to be over, with Wuthering Waves I sit back and just lap them up. The tone is light but exciting, the humor is actually funny and both the character animations and voice acting are emotionally involving. It's quality entertainment all the way.

And the action is great, too. I generally dislike boss fights but WW's variable difficulty options allow for combat that feels urgent and involving without being stressful. The fights are kinetic and explosive and require a little more than just plain button-mashing but not that much more. It's working for me.

There's also lots of interesting and varied non-combat action involving destruction or manipulation of the environment and all in all it's just jolly good fun, something that could well be said of the whole game. It's easy to see why it's been so successful, something confirmed by the trailer for the new update, When The Night Knocks, which has racked up more than a million YouTube views in just five days.

That trailer, like the one for The Black Shores, lists a whole slew of content additions but this time I don't intend to go through them all. Most of them don't really involve me although I'm sure they'll be of huge interest to players who take the core progression and upgrade mechanics a lot more seriously than I do.

What I am interested in is the storyline, which involves a part of the game I have only visited once so far and which I always meant to wrote about but somehow never did. There's a door out in a backwater province somewhere that I happened upon almost by chance. It hangs there, in the middle of an open plain, seemingly leading from nowhere to nowhere, but if you step through it, it takes you to a kind of surreal dreamworld. 

I found it fascinating. I always meant to go back ands see more of it but as usual that never happened, mostly because the door was really far out in the boondocks. 

Well, now we don't have to go there to see the dreamworld. It's coming to us. The name of that place is Somnoire: The Illusive Realm and the opening line of the trailer is "Somnoire breaks into world." I very much want to be there when it happens. 

Once again, though, I suspect I'll have to get caught up first. Then again, maybe not. It's hard to say until the update drops and the terms and conditions become clear. For example, I only realised today that Turquoise Moonglow,  the holiday event I had a great time with, back in the summer, was actually part of continuity, even though it didn't seem like it. 

There were no MQ requirements that I ever saw. I just jumped straight in. I only found out it assumed you'd already finished the storyline today, when I did the aforementioned "Interlude" after the big fight at the end of Act VI: Grand Warstorm. 

Spoiler incoming, just in case anyone is playing and hasn't got to this next bit yet. 

You should all be playing, by the way. 

Just saying..

So, at the very end of Act VI, at the climax of the Big Boss Fight, little Abby, the supercute creature with the odd-colored eyes and the dangly earrings that somehow lives inside Rover, the player-character, emerges to save the day. That's supposed to be the first time you actually see them. 

Except I'd seen Abby already. The flying cutie features prominently in several scenes in the Turquoise Moonglow. There have already been screenshots featuring them here on the blog. At the time I remember wondering why everyone seemed to know who Abby was, since although I had figured out they must be the mysterious force that had come to Rover's aid once or twice before, I couldn't remember ever having been introduced.

I put that down to my faulty memory but in fact the whole of that holiday event assumes you've already completed the MQ. The Interlude, which immediately follows Act VI, is when you get to meet Abby properly for the first time. 

At that point, the creature doesn't even have a name. Everyone just calls them "the Little One". There's a whole sequence where Chixia comes up with possible names, all of which receive the response "Absolutely NO!", until Rover, as a joke, suggests "Abby", short for that very phrase and the Little One, after some thought, decides to keep it.

End of spoiler. You can come back now.

So, clearly, it's possible that the new update may be both in continuity and not require specific progress in the MQ. It's also equally clear that it would be preferable for narrative reasons to be at the point the game expects you to be. Otherwise some things may just not make as much sense as they should.

As always, there is a hell of a lot going on, gaming-wise just now. It's been quite the year for that. There's still another phase to go in Way of Winter and the EverQuest II expansion, which I've bought and paid for, now has a surprisingly early launch date of November 20.

It's going to be tough to fit it all in but I hereby pledge to myself that I will do my best to get caught up in Wuthering Waves before the new update arrives on November 14. Okay, sure, that's five days from now. I said I'd do my best, not that I'd succeed.

I think I should definitely be able to make it through the original game questline but as for the Black Shore story, it's hard to say. I'm not even sure if there's a deadlne on that. All the special events that came with The Black Shore will go away when the new update lands but I'm hoping the story quests are permanent. Assuming that's so, then there's really no rush.

Still, I don't want to be doing this every time and given the quality of the content I'm being a fool to myself by not prioritising it over other games, many of which are, frankly, nowhere near as entertaining. (Not talking about you , Once Human. You're almost too much fun.)

We'll see. I know my butterfly mind. It only takes a light breeze to blow it off course and then chaos follows. Then again, I quite like a little controlled chaos, once in a while.

Wishes Come True In Wuthering Waves

Last week, Kuro, developers of Wuthering Waves, dropped the game's second major update since launch, taking the game to Version 1.2. It's called In The Turquoise Moonglow and as you'd expect from a gacha game it adds several new collectable characters - Resonators in the jargon. There are also new weapons to roll for and some login rewards you can get without doing anything. Well, you'd have to log in, of course.

That's all par for the course for a game of this kind but this update offers much more.  For a start, it includes what I imagine might become an annual holiday event, the Moon-Chasing Festival, already going down well with players, if Reddit is any guide. 

Then there are two more action-oriented activities, both with really great names: Carnival in Slumberland and Do Echoids Dream Of Electric Sheep? In additon to those, there's a full Companion storyline for one of the new Resonators, the deeply charming Zhezhi, and an "exploration quest" evocatively, if scarily, entitled Vigil of Endless Night.

By any standards, this is a lot of content and to be truthful that's not even all of it. I left out some of the more routine bits. Altogether, there's far more than I've had time even to take a first look at yet. All I've done so far are the first two parts of the four-part festival storyline, which I've found to be both excellent entertainment and surprisingly thought-provoking.

So much so, in fact, that I wanted to post about the new questline immediately after my first session  because I found both the subject matter and the way it had been handled so unexpected. Circumstances intervened, which was probably just as well, since it's never a great idea to rush to print before giving these things time to settle in the mind. Who knows? Maybe the first part of the questline was an exception, unrepresentative of the rest.

I guess it still could be but I've now played through the second section as well and I can at least say the quality absolutely holds up thus far. I'm pretty confident it'll continue that way until the end, at least if it's all been done by the same team, because this is some fine video-game writing. 

It was so good, I took forty screenshots across the two sessions, all of them of dialog. I was thinking of using them for the post I wanted to write and honestly even at forty shots, that was me trying to restrain myself and not just clip everything. The dialog is that strong, from start to finish, any of it would have done to make the point.

Since it's apparent this thing will get away from me if I don't impose some structure on it, I'm not going to touch the whole Moon-Chasing Festival mini-game, other than to say it's hella fun and extremely well-done. I might get to it in a separate post sometime. Ditto all those other quests and activities I mentioned up above, none of which I have even got to yet, so why speculate? Their time will come.

Here, I'm just going to stick to the main questline. There will be spoilers so you've been warned. Not, I imagine, that anyone reading this is currently playing the game. But just in case...

Okay, here's a synopsis of the plot so far, all from memory. Apologies if anything's not quite perfect. My memory certainly isn't. Plus there's going to be commentary as we go because I just can't help myself.

The player character, Rover or whatever you've called them (Let's not get into all that again...) gets talked into going to the Moon-Chasing Festival by her girlie chums. Boy, these girls can talk!

Once they get there, Rover runs into a strange little robot called Patty that seems to be having some technical difficulties and ends up chatting to a hot-looking guy (That's my take - there's nothing about it in the dialog!) who turns out not just to be in charge of the bot but who also built it and another one like it.

The bot-builder, Xiangli Yao, moonlights (Heh!) as the secret hero who makes everyone's wishes at the fair come true. How he does this is unclear but we are in a magitech setting so it seems fair. Plus most people seem to be wishing for nice things like having fun at the fair not for a million dollars or eternal life so mostly he probably has to just stand back and let it all happen. 

The second little robot, cutely named XiangLEE after its creator for cute reasons of cuteness,  has the job of collecting and collating wishes for the Fair but is having a melt-down because something in the wishes has glitched its programming. And we're going to fix all that, right? Because that's what we do.

So far, so RPG. The twist is in what, very specifically, the problem turns out to be. 

And now, having issued a spoiler warning, it falls to me to add a trigger warning as well. The problem that's freaking the little bot out, it transpires, revolves around wishes that touch on depression, grief, guilt and similar difficult mental states and the anonymous individuals making the wishes more than hint at suicide being their wished-for solution. 

For Patty, it's a classic Does Not Compute situation.To grant such a wish would breach the robot's Asimovian programming, hence its confusion.

I know! Cheery, fun little mobile game, right? 

Yeah, not this one, or not so much, at least, when you aren't getting kittens out of trees. Multiple previous questlines I remember revolved around similar subjects like dementia and racial prejudice but this new set strikes me as even more challenging, thematically. 

To a considerable degree that's because the translation and voice acting is so good. In the game in general, translation can be variable - some of it is excellent but, for example, the long quest involving an old man and his failing memory was nowhere near as emotionally affecting as it could have been because the dialog didn't read at all naturally. Also, from memory, I don't believe that one was voiced at all. Good voice acting really does add a lot.

It definitely does here. The whole thing is fully-voiced and the readings are both accurate to the text and carried off to perfection with a good deal of understatement and gravitas, a take which really suits the subject matter. 

One thing that is weird about it is the way Rover sometimes speaks and sometimes doesn't but that's almost becoming a trope of the game. I'm used to it now. When she does speak, though, the actor who voices her is really convincing. Normally I prefer my characters to be silent but I'll happily make an exception for line readings like these.

Back to the plot. Xiangli manages to isolate the problem to four specific wishes. After a good deal of discussion and some detective work, which mostly consists of analyzing the prose style of the wishes then sidling up behind people and eavesdropping on them, we pare the possibilities down to the shy, nervous artist Zhezhi or a young scientist by the name of Shifan. 

I'll give you a clue: it's not Zhezhi.

Shifan does his best to disguise his suicidal tendencies but fails to throw us off the scent. By way of some highly dubious rifling through the record of his online activity (To which he objects and we just ignore him, because that's what heroes do.) we soon establish that he has a history of posting his negative thoughts on the forums of the institution where he works. It seems he may be suffering from something that's becoming an endemic problem in the city, a maliase commonly referred to as Nighttime Blues Syndrome.

Much more investigative work follows. We discover Shifan was the instigator and leader of a project that resulted in the injury of his colleague and best friend, Jiuli. The project was shut down but Shihan still blames himself and has slumped into a suicidal depression as a result.

Up to this point, getting to which has taken the best part of an hour, there has been no combat at all but the abandoned project, which represented Shifan and Jiuli's life's work, more a calling than a job, involved working with the "Echoes" Tacit Discords sometimes leave behind when destroyed. Naturally, Rover offers to gather a few to get Shifan back on track. That's going to mean a battle, surely?

It does. Kind of. The fight takes about a minute and that's all the fighting you get. Other than that, the entire quest is conversation, interspersed with a few changes of location. 

I found it compelling from beginning to end. I never knew exactly what was going to happen next. The part where Jiuli shows some tough love for his friend by punching him in the face came as a particular surprise!

In the end it all comes right. We don't grant Shifan's wish for self-oblivion but we do deal with the underlying cry for help and everything ends with the project back on track and the two friends re-united. Plus Patty is working properly again, meaning we can crack on with the next glitchy wish.

I completed the second part today and it was possibly even better-written and voiced than the first, although I didn't find it quite so surprising. I won't subject anyone to another fifteen-paragraph summary but I will say the narrative revolves, once again, around an elderly person and their sense of isolation and powerlessness following a personal loss. 

There was also a sub-plot with another, young, character that revolved around more issues relating to overwork and not being able to achieve a good work-life balance. The themes in this game are consistently adult even when the presentation comes from the perspective of youth.

I didn't have a timer on the first part but I know it took a good while longer than the second, which I clocked at almost exactly an hour. That hour did include some business with the new mini-game, progress in which is required to move the main quest along, plus a few minutes when I got distracted by other things that were happening in the game around me. Wuthering Waves reminds of Guild Wars 2 in that it's very easy to find yourself caught up in events when you're out and about in the world.

I think I'm half-way through the quest now. I've done two of the four wishes, anyway. Assuming they're of roughly equivalent length, this one quest could take me three or four hours. Having mentioned GW2, I can't help comparing this update with the old Living Story chapters, most of which infamously had storylines which, minus the intentional padding of pointless and drawn-out fights, generally lasted no longer than a couple of hours, tops.

This story I'm enjoying so much here is just a smallish part of the full update. It's also considerably more solid and satisfying as a story than those old Living Story segments, with a lot less cruft and considerably tighter focus. I'm used to my fantasy MMORPGs slipping some heavier themes in through the back door - the Living Story certainly covered plenty of emotional ground - but not to having those themes placed so squarely front and center with no crunchy action-adventure coating.

And then there's the specific nature of those themes, surprisingly common throughout the game so far. There seems to be a highly unusual concern among the writers for the mental health and well-being of the characters, something I can't help but feel has to be drawn from personal experience.

Every new character introduced in this update that I've encountered so far expresses concerns about work-life balance. Over-working, not making time to relax and recharge your energies, not trying to do everything yourself, listening to other opinions and recognizing your own limitations - these themes come up again and again, as do understanding your duty and carrying it out in difficult circumstances. 

These are the kinds of things that make me feel this is the most "Chinese" game I've played. The cultural expectations to which these storylines refer and from which they arise feel noticeably different from what I'd expect in an American or European title. There's less of an automatic assumption that individuality is the apogee of human behavior, more of an expectation that players will react with emotional familiarity to scenarios involving parental pressure and social obligation - and not react with outright rebellion, either. 

All of that makes the repeated attention paid to maintaining good mental health by way of self-care all the more impressive. The tone manages to be supportive rather than directive and the feeling I'm left with after completing quests in Wuthering Waves is frequently one of warm satisfaction. It's a very positive game without being in the least bit "cosy" in the current, often uncomfortably twee, gaming sense of the word.

In terms of game mechanics, the second part of the quest has no more combat than the first. Possibly less. So far, it's been something like three hours of gameplay with maybe five minutes action, if that. And yet I've found it riveting. 

I think it helps a great deal that the long dialog sequences are handled not in cut scenes per se but in something of the style of an interactive novel. Having to press "F" frequently to choose between two dialog options works well to maintain a sense of involvement, even if there doesn't appear to be any material difference in which of the two you choose. The simple fact of being able adopt a variety of tones to move the story along does manage, somehow, to feel like agency.

The nature of both the gameplay and the subjects under discussion means I don't much feel like burning through the whole thing in a single sitting. I was happy to take a break of a day or two after the first part and I'm not planning on moving on the next until tomorrow or the day after. There's no hurry. The event runs almost to the end of September. 

With luck I'll have finished everything I want to do in it by then. With the game being as successful as it is, I'm sure there'll be more to come. If subsequent updates are anything like as good as this one, we're in for a treat.