Duskwood By Night

 Since I knew I was going to be working on Sunday, on Saturday evening, after I'd come home from work, had tea, played with Beryl and caught up with my bloglog (That's a portmanteau I just now came up with for a backlog of blogs. Think it'll catch on? No, me neither.) I figured I'd better at least make a start on preparing a post for tomorrow. That's today if you're reading this on the day I'll be posting it. I think those are the right tenses. Don't you just love grammar?

I'd already decided on a screenshot post showcasing the new region, Duskmoor, the one got added to Neverness To Everness with the most recent update. I was thinking that, thanks to the miracle of GeForce Now, I could run around Duskmoor in bed on my laptop, a sentence wide open to misinterpretation, I know, but we're all gamers here, aren't we? I'm sure everyone knows what I mean.

  Once I got into the game and opened the map to figure out where to go first, it occurred to me right away that the obvious thing to do would be to visit all the Rero Boxes (Red phone booths.) and open up the teleport system for the new map. There are only three of them so it oughtn't to have taken long. (There go those tenses again...)

Except, as noted, Duskmoor is fricken huge! I started jogging towards the first box from where I left Flora last time, which was  at the entrance to the Fogden instance, then I realized it was a kilometer and a half away.

 I'm in the habit of running everywhere in Hetherau, by which  mean I open the map, locate the teleport location nearest to wherever it is I want to go, port there and jog the rest of the way. You can teleport to all sorts of things in NTE, not just the Rero Boxes, so there's usually something close by.

At least, there is in the city. Duskmoor is very much not in the city. Duskmoor is out of town and it's about 90% forest and lake, as far as I can tell, with a tourist and resort strip along the coast and not a whole hell of a lot of civilization anywhere else. 

But it does have highways. And I do have a car. I don't use it much but I have one. And I can drive it. Not very well, I'll grant you, but well enough to get around.

 I whistled for my trusty steed and along the road it came. With no-one at the wheel. How does that work? An Anomaly, I imagine. If anything odd happens in Hethereau, there's always an Anomaly behind it.

I got in and started to drive and in about ten seconds I realized why it is that Flora goes everywhere on foot. If only that unseen Anomaly could drive the car when she was in it, too. 

But wait! Maybe it can!

There's an auto-drive option. I've tried it before and never got it to work but there's always a first time. 

I hit the key to put the car into auto-drive and for the first time it I didn't get an error message about not having a target. The car set off down the road without Flora's hands on the wheel. It was night and we were careening along at top speed but fortunately traffic was light, although not, as it turned out, nearly light enough.

 I learned a few things on my trip through Duskwood.

1. Autodrive requires you to set a target destination before engaging. That's what I'd been doing wrong all those other times. 
2. Having the car drive itself does not mean you smash into other vehicles. In fact, on this evidence, I'd say it's even more reckless than Flora.
3. If you get out of your car and leave it in the middle of the road, a huge traffic jam will form behind it, even if it would be easy and legal for them all just to pass. Also, NPC drivers get really cross if you do that. 

 Even using auto-drive, which was a lot more efficient than having Flora take the wheel, even allowing for the collisions, it still took quite a while to drive the route that took me past all three Rero Boxes. I wasn't timing it but I'd guess it was something like fifteen or twenty minutes, counting the time Flora spent getting out and going to the boxes, all of which were very close to the road.

There was surprisingly little to see other than some very lovely scenery. Even the spots where the boxes were didn't seem to have a lot going on. It wasn't entirely clear why someone would have taken the trouble to place them there in the first place.

 The oddest thing I found was a ramp, clearly designed for a car to run up at speed so it could launch itself over a cliff. Flora walked up it and peered over the edge and decided it looked like a sure way to kill yourself in  blazing car wreck so she declined to do a solo Thelma and Louise and moved on.

I'm guessing it had something to do with the racing circuit that came with the update. Indeed, the whole of the extensive Duskwood highway system, which appears to be serving no-one and nothing, might be there just for the purpose of giving people somewhere new to race. It certainly seems a more realistic plan than setting up new courses in the city itself.

 And that was all I had time for, other than to jog through the woods to take a look at a tall steel pylon, which turned out to be frustratingly just beyond the limits of the explorable area. It immediately made me wonder if further expansion in that direction is planned because if not, why put the damn thing there at all?

All of that took place at night, as you can see from the pictures I took (The new "Hide UI" toggle, now available on F7, makes it so much easier to take quick snapshots.) so it's highly likely I missed something. I could have changed the time to make it daylight but I was so involved in what I was doing (You can call it immersed, if you must.) that I forgot it was an option. 

So far, I can't say I have a very clear idea what Duskwood is for. It's big and it's beautiful but what does it do? Then again, maybe it doesn't need to do anything. Maybe it just needs to be. 

Good advice for us all.  

In The City

This is the second day in a row where I'm only posting because it's Blaugust. Do not expect a quality read! But then, as we were discussing during the opening skirmishes of the Blaugust AI Wars, we don't really have any standards for posting other than that it should be mostly your own work. Neither quality nor word count matters a jot when it comes to putting up something that's going to qualify as "a post" for the purposes of the award tally at the end of the month.

At least say I can say, with a straight face, that this was a post I was always going to write. Screenshot posts have long been a staple of this blog, so I'm not just bunging one in so as not to miss a day. Well, not only that...

I don't always need a reason for a screenshot post, other than that I've taken some and I think they look good, but in this case I do have a minor point to make. As I mentioned in passing, in a recent post about Wuthering Waves, I was taken by surprise on my return to the game by just how exceptionally lovely it is to look at.

I remembered it was good but I'd forgotten how good. I'd gotten used to thinking Neverness To Everness looked gorgeous, which it most certainly does, but WW could give it a good head start and still come in ahead. Given that delightful surprise, of course I took a whole boatload of screenshots on my return, as you would, when you'd seen something worth photographing. 

Even as I was taking those shots, I already had it mind to use a some for a post. This would seem to be the ideal opportunity.

 All of these shots were taken while I was working my way through the twelfth act of the second chapter of the main quest, a section cursed by some ironist at Kuro with the unappealing title Stagnant Dawn on Wastelands. Whatever image that summons up isn't going to bear much resemblance to what you're about to see.

Pretty much the whole act, which took me several hours to finish, takes place inside a Sonoro Sphere in which a city called Honami is trapped, in a kind of Groundhog Day-esque perpetual time loop. The real Honami was destroyed by the Lament decades ago but an image of it remains, complete with all the citizens, known as the Left Behind, going through the motions of their final hours over and over, not knowing anything is wrong and yet somehow knowing something isn't right..

 All of which could be quite depressing if the place wasn't so damn beautiful. It's a stunning creation, all pastel washes and blurred edges, as though seen through wet eyes. To say it was painterly would be underselling it. It has a three-dimensionality paint would struggle to match.

 It also has a surreal element that lifts the whole thing onto another plane. The writers at Kuro seem to be adept at combining elements that shouldn't work together at all, yet somehow making them seem like the most perfect of fits. In Honami, we have a convincingly realistic, albeit mildly futuristic, urban environment, populated by recognizably ordinary people doing and saying recognizably ordinary things, while all  around the surfaces of the city are melting, glowing and sometimes turning into bubbles and blowing away.

 And if that wasn't surreal enough, into this twisted reality intrudes a whole gang of cartoonish capybaras, the highly fanciful incarnations of the Guardian of the city. Previous guardians we've met have been mighty dragons. Honami has a funny animal straight out of a Saturday Morning Cartoon.

It absolutely should not work, particularly given the always bittersweet, occasionally bleak nature of the story, which revolves around loss, sacrifice, bigotry, bullying and despair. But somehow it does.

 In the later cut scenes, after the enemy has been vanquished and the Left Behind released from their eternal wheel, the aesthetic changes to an elegiac, evocative, cinematic style. With plenty of lens flare, which obviously I loved. 

The conversations are heartfelt and emotional and the visuals pick up the tone perfectly. I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming anime. Clearly Kuro has both the writers and the artists to make the transition.

 I'm also very much looking forward to reaching the point in the narrative where I can branch off and experience the permanent residue of the Edgerunners collab. Based on what I've just seen in Honami, it's easy to see why that potentially disastrous collision of worlds turned out to be so well received by fans from both sides. These people really know what they're doing.

 My only regret, having finished the Honami storyline, is that I didn't spend more time in the city. True, since it only existed as a backdrop, most of it was blocked off by invisible barriers, but there were plenty of opportunities to explore at least a little off the prescribed path and I failed to take any of them. I was too wrapped up in the story to go wandering off. Now I wish I had.

I don't think the area is there to visit freely outside the story. I may be wrong. I hope I am. 

As far as I can tell, though, most of the wonderfully imaginative, finely detailed places we get to visit as we follow the exciting and complex plot, exist only as long as they're needed. If that's true, it makes the sheer quality that hallmarks each and every one even more astonishing.  I think I'm going to have to give Kuro the nod when we get to Creator Appreciation Week.

Maybe I'll do another screenshot post... 

Idle Thoughts And Meaningless Musings : Neverness To Everness Edition

I spent most of the morning writing a lengthy post about AI and then I read it back and decided it was full of things I'd already said. More than once. There were a few ideas that hadn't been done to death mixed in, here and there, but those probably need a proper post of their own, a post I don't want to write just now, so the whole thing will have to stay in the draft folder for the time being.

I'm technically on holiday anyway (Although when you only work two days a week and you haven't gone anywhere, the expression doesn't really carry the weight.) so there wouldn't normally be a post here today, anyway. Also, it's a Saturday. No-one reads blogs on a Saturday. That's a proven fact. 

Of course, they do read posts that were posted on a Saturday later the following week, when they're at work and bored and the boss is out of the office, so it's not like you can put stuff up on the internet at the weekend and expect no-one's going to see it. More's the pity.

Given all of that, I think I'll just indulge myself with a hotch-potch of screenshots and observations about Neverness To Everness. No theme, no purpose. Take it as it comes.

I just really like those shots of Lacrimosa. She's very photogenic. I ought to remember to get her out when I take screenshots instead of always showing The Appraiser. It's very clear, looking at Lacrimosa, how much more effort went into what she's wearing than the utilitarian outfit Flora's stuck with, at least until she can build a strong enough bond with someone else to steal their look.

Speaking of bonding, Flora still has a house guest. She came home one day to this, which was when it occurred to me there was only one bed.  

I mean, there is a sofa...  I thought Mint must be sleeping on it but apparently not. So I bought another bed. 

Sidebar. Are there any games where characters actually sleep in a bed? As in under the covers? I can't think of any. Everyone always lies on top. At least in NTE they do wear nightclothes to sleep although only by the expedient of walking around the flat like that all the time. Still, better than going to sleep in your clothes. Which, come to think of it, is what Flora does...

There's hardly room on the mezzanine for two beds, though. I could do with moving to a bigger apartment but Flora doesn't seem to have made much progress in that direction. I probably need to look up how it works.

And anyway, now I come to think of it, Lacrimosa might make a better flatmate. At least she'd sleep in her own coffin. 

Flora went to the drive-in with Nanally the other night. We saw Sin City Chronicles because of course we did. I'm not sure Nanally knows there are any other movies. We also didn't take a car, even though Flora has one. For some reason we sat on top of someone else's car and it wasn't even anyone we knew.

There were fireworks at the end and a strange bit of dialog where it was made clear that didn't usually happen but not why it was. I'm not sure if it meant anything. 

I was a bit disappointed the cut scenes don't show any of the actual movie. I could hear some of the soundtrack in the background but that was all. When Flora went to the movies with Mint we got to see a few scenes although it turned out to be the same movie that's the only one that ever shows up on Flora's home wall-screen.  

Kuro's missing a trick here, I think. I bet they could quite easily arrange it so you could stream from your PC onto the screens in the game. I would happily sit in my chair at home, watching Flora and Mint watching actual TV shows or movies in their apartment, instead of watching those same shows on my laptop. I bet a lot of people would.

If you think that's weird, following our successful manga-reading party, Lacrimosa is planning an anime marathon. She wants to hold it at Eidon because she doesn't have a TV and she thinks it would be a great idea to watch anime on Taygedo's head. I don't know if this is a thing that's actually going to happen in the game but I'm praying it is!

It's perfectly feasible, too. It's already well-established that Taygedo can show broadcast images on the TV screen he usually uses for his face. The only problem seems to be whether he'd be willing to sit still for long enough, which knowing him seems unlikely. Then again, he's easy to intimidate. Or trick.

Harping on the theme of who are they writing this stuff for, I did another very good, long quest the other day that revolved entirely around helping an architect to come to terms with repressed feelings of grief, loss and guilt over her mother's death, when she was a child. There was some fighting near the end but it was pretty much a short, stand-alone point-and-click adventure. It would fit right in on Itch.io. 

That's a screenshot from the quest, above. It's from the part where Flora had to go into a florists and pick out a suitable flower for the architect to plant in the garden of the house she was having built for herself. Just the kind of thing every adolescent male dreams of doing in a video game, right? I mean, that's why Call of Duty's so successful - all the flower arranging.

Or maybe you'd rather spend an hour running messages between three talking dogs that aren't on speaking terms any more because they're all behaving like seven year-old girls who'have had a falling out over who's best friends with who? I did that one last week. Again, a theme guaranteed to grab the attention of any red-blooded, twenty-something male, I'd say.

It sounds like I'm cherry-picking but the whole game is like this.

Getting back to Lacrimosa for a moment, she's really pathetic. As in she oozes pathos. She's a Sad Goth Girl, which weirdly doesn't seem to be a TV Trope. It should be. 

The scene where you visit her home is quite disturbing. She has hardly anything in there, just some small pieces of furniture and a lot of tomatoes. She rents the place from an old couple, who we don't get to meet, but they seem to be as much her guardians as her landlords.

She didn't find the place herself. Skia, who Lacrimosa refers to as "Doggo" (She gives everyone nicknames, possibly because she can't actually remember their real ones.) found it for her. She certainly would never have managed it on her own. She barely seems capable of looking after herself. 

Lacrimosa may have some mental health issues but exactly what they could be is, as always, unclear. The sheer amount of subtext packed into this vignette is astonishing but I'm finding Neverness To Everness to be all about the subtext. What's often missing is any actual text. 

It's not just written subtext, either. Compare Lacrimosa's barely lived-in room with Nanally's. The effort that's gone into the detail in both. It tells you so much. Nanally evidently has a full and almost certainly happy home-life. The stuffed toys, the Anomaly Guide, the drawing materials, the family pictures on the wall. 

There's a basketball, a soccer ball, the bass guitar Nanally plays now she's in The Whoots!!!! There's the beanbag chair and the potted plant and the bookcase with all the knick-knacks cluttering up the shelves. And look how untidy it all is, while still looking clean and cared-for. That fedora on the rug is a masterful touch.

This is the room of a girl in her early-mid teens, for sure, although to return again to the vexed question of just how old these people are supposed to be, I can't forget something Nanally says in Dreamwalk Corridor, the quest where we learn what little we know about her and where she loses half her mind and half her soul.

She asks the Appraiser "Can I still be the boss of the family if I'm this weird kid, like for ever and ever and ever?" We know Espers frequently experience changes when they come into their powers - physical changes like horns and tails but also temporal ones, like shortened or extended lifespans. I'm wondering just how long Nanally might have been a teenager. The Anomalies began forty years ago. She could be in her fifties but like Peter Pan, she just never grew up.

As for Sakiri, abut whom I know nothing, not having done any character quests with her yet, she looks half Nanally's age but she talks like someone at least in their thirties. In a way it doesn't much matter but in another it's crucial information. It's odd enough sharing an apartment with Mint. I don't want to think about sharing one with Sakiri...

Staring At The Sun

 

Absolutely no time to write a post today or tomorrow but I don't want to go four days in a row with nothing so let's all enjoy enjoy some lens flare!

Look Ma! No feet! It's taken me a while to figure out how to frame the shot to stop that happening. It doesn't help that the in-game camera shows the image without the frame that gets added when you take the shot.

Is that a dog kennel over there? Why, do you know, I think it is! But what kind of a dog would live on a rooftop? Would it be one called Ruddy, I wonder?

 

I think that's more glare than flare but I'll allow it. 

Now that's the real thing!

Pretentious? Moi? Mais certainment non!

And a little palette cleanser there, right at the end. Also, it's really about time I got some new clothes...

It's The End Of New World As We Knew It

I imagine everyone reading this has already heard the news about about New World. If not, brace yourselves.

The final curtain falls on 31 January 2027. At that point the servers will be closed, never to re-open. If you own the game, you're welcome to carry on playing until then. If you never got around to buying it, well you're too late now. It went off sale yesterday.

I'm not going to do an obituary post or any kind of elegy. There's still over twelve months left to go and it's very likely I'll play some more before then. Plenty of time to for a final tour and some screenshots to remember things by.

If you want a full and accurate rundown of how things got to this sorry pass, Wilhelm has an excellent overview. I'm just going to post a few pictures for now.

I'd have liked to post some older shots. Maybe even some of the ones I took in the first closed beta and was never allowed to share. I don't imagine anyone's going to be chasing me down for breaking that NDA now. Unfortunately, everything older than a couple of months is on one of the hard drives in my old computer so that will have to wait. 

For now, here are a few pictures of Aeternum as it is and will be for the rest of this year. And the beginning of the next. And then never again.

It took three of us to kite that giant turkey. I wonder if there will even be three people left by next Thanksgiving? 

One thing I do plan on doing before the final year is out is upgrading from a wolf to a lion. Or is it a tiger? Some kind of cat, anyway...

If there's one thing I won't miss about the game it's probably the clothes. I understand the aesthetic but I never liked it. 

The environments, though, and the countryside: those I will miss.

Of course, there's always the very slim chance Amazon might relent and sell the game to someone else. Unfortunately, they don't need the small change any of the likely buyers would be able to offer. Or, for that matter, the big bucks, were anyone to come with a real proposal. 

I strongly suspect they'd prefer the game to disappear altogether, not hang around like some kind of revenant, calling into question the company's poor decision-making and inability to come up with even a single, successful game.

For the same reason, they might not be quite as amenable to an emulator as many game developers. Still, a year is a long time to leave the game running. Plenty of time for people to data-mine everything necessary to clone it after it's gone.

My guess is that we won't see a working version after the official servers go dark but I'd be very happy to see myself proved wrong. New World was and still is a pretty good MMORPG. It deserved better. 

Oh, I Love What You've Done To The Place!

I don't know if anyone's noticed but there really hasn't been a lot of commentary on Stars Reach since the Kickstarter ended. Not here, not at TAGN, not anywhere that I've seen. A couple of news items at MassivelyOP, the game's unofficial cheerleader and flag-waver, and that's your lot.

I can't recall even seeing anyone whose blog I follow, or who comments here, mentioning whether they'd backed it or not. Maybe someone did say something about that - I seem to have the vaguest recollection - but if so, they've been keeping quiet about it ever since.

After the dust settled, I wasn't quite sure where things had fallen. I won't re-hash the whole annoying story of how many different emails and Steam accounts I ended up using but when I got an email from Playable Worlds, telling me I needed to do something to register my Pledge with the Steam account I wanted to use, I had no idea which it ought to be. 

In the end, I made a guess and now I'm getting press releases from Playable Worlds to one email address, Kickstarter updates to another and alpha invites from FirstLook.gg, the company PW is using to handle the test program, to a third. Looks like I'm covered.

The most important of the three sources is presumably FirstLook. Without their involvement I don't think you can access the tests. Or maybe you can. I mean, I have the client on Steam and it's getting updates, so maybe all that would happen if I didn't get the emails from FirstLook to tell me about the tests would be that I'd have to check one of the other sources to find out when the servers were open. Like Discord, for example, where there's a whole section dedicated to dates and alerts for exactly that purpose.

Honestly, the whole process feels way, way too complicated. I know I've made it harder for myself by using multiple email addresses but even if I had everything on the same one, I'd still be getting emails from three different sources and I'd probably need to check Discord regularly as well. I miss the days when there was just one department at any company making a game that would handle everything in a terst program directly. (Shakes fist at passing cloud...)

Anyway, communications and logistics aside, it does appear I'm still in the testing program, although I suspect it may be as a former, pre-alpha tester rather than as a bona-fide paying customer. I don't appear to have the in-game title "Reacher" that was part of the pledge, anyway. At some point I might have to do something about that but for now I can get in so I'm not bothered.

And I did indeed "get in" last night, for the first time since the Kickstarter funded on Day One a couple of months ago. I didn't log in once during the campaign and I haven't since, either, not until yesterday. The extensive "testing" that happened during the Kickstarter was really just an opportunity for the undecided to get a hands-on with the game before making up their minds whether to pledge. I'd already made up mine so I left them to it.

After the campaign ended, everything went very quiet for a month until, just this week, it all started up again. There was a big update in which a whole load of stuff changed. I'm not going to go through it all. There's too much. If you're interested, all the details are in the very extensive Patch Notes, which seem to be public, as far as I can tell.

The gist of it is that everything is getting much more complicated, slower and more inter-connected. The glory days of pre-alpha, when there wasn't a lot to do and what there was you could do all on your own are long gone. I suspect this is going to end up being one of those games where I keep harping on about how it was "better in beta", except in this case it'll be "I prefered it in pre-alpha".

All this massive upheaval necessitated a full wipe, of course. Playable Worlds apologized for that although now I can't find their apology, which I'm sure I saw somewhere... it was probably on Discord. I can never find anything on Discord. According to the watermarks on the screenshots, we are still in pre-alpha, though. There are going to be plenty more wipes, I'm sure.

I logged in last night mostly on a whim. I wasn't even sure of the test times but I figured they were usually much the same and I was right. I had to make a new character, something that takes all of five seconds because as yet there are no customization options at all beyond picking a race and gender and giving yourself a name. 

Character creation is one thing I wish they would get on and gussy up a bit. I particularly wish they'd lay off the ridiculous gimmick of making your character completely change appearance every time you go through a portal. I don't know if it's a device for testing something or if it's supposed to stop players becoming too attached to their characters, since they're all going to be wiped soon enough anyway, but whatever it is I find it very irritating.

That said, I do like the character design per se. The character models look attractive and approachable, as befits the game's decidedly cosy aesthetic. The whole game radiates cosiness. There are a lot of warm, vibrant colors, soft surfaces and rounded corners. Very few sharp edges. Everything gently glows and feels friendly.

All of which makes it even more annoying that there are still so many highly aggressive mobs all over the place. They may have been toned down to an extent but all too often it still feels like my character is the mob, trapped in some nightmarish MMO the actual mobs are playing. I died twice last night just minding my own business and had to run away several times to avoid dying some more. 

How anyone at Playable Worlds imagines that's fun beats me. I've played a lot of MMORPGs and even back in the glory days of corpse runs and losing levels I never had a quarter as much trouble just staying alive in a starter zone.

I always thought there was a tonal disconnect beetween what the game looks like and how it plays, though, and now it feels as though that divide is increasing all the time, not least because Stars Reach now looks fricken' gorgeous! That was the biggest suprise when I logged in last night. It's always been a nice-enough-looking game but now it's stunning. I don't know exactly what they've done but whatever it was it really levelled the graphics up.

Unsurprisingly, most of what I did once I saw how they'd smartened the old place up was run around taking screenshots. I took more than forty in under an hour and a half. Props to PW for having good screenshot commands this early in development. Some games don't have a dedicated screenshot key and another for removing the UI even by launch. 

Everywhere I turned there was a spectacular view or a striking piece of scenery. I could have taken twice as many photos but I forced myself to stop and find something else to do.

Mostly, what I found was the same as ever: surveying, harvesting, mining... All the old favorites are still there only now the skill-trees have been separated a bit more and the xp is a bit different. Well, supposedly, according to the patch notes. Didn't seem all that different to me in practice but I was only scrubbing along at the bottom. I imagine the differences become clearer as you clamber up the branches of those skill-trees.

One very big change I couldn't miss is that crafting has been hived off from everything else. It's now completely siloed, meaning you have to actually craft if you want to be a crafter. No more making single items you need, as you need them. Wave goodbye to self-sufficiency. The idea is that crafters will make stuff and everyone else will buy it from them.

Of course, there's no currency yet so for the time being so trade isn't so much buying and selling as swapping. Player-to-player trade is in but only in the most primitive form imaginable. There's a barter system.

You stand next to someone, open a trade window and pass stuff to each other, just like we used to do back in the 90s. Seriously, I think the last time I played a game where it was done that way must have been EverQuest before the Luclin expansion, which added the Bazaar. It seems incredibly primitive more than twenty years on. Presumably it's just a first step towards a real trading system with vendors or an auction house or something. I mean, this is meant to be set in the future, isn't it? Not before the invention of coinage.

I didn't test the proto-trading experience for myself because a) I didn't have anything to trade and b) I barely saw anyone to trade with. I think I might have seen half a dozen other players in the ninety minutes I was online. One of them was obviously AFK at the spawn-in and the others just ran past me on their way somewhere. I never saw anyone twice.

Suits me. I had a pretty good time just messing about on my own. What with the beautiful scenery and the enjoyable survival-lite gameplay, Stars Reach makes for a good noodling game. 

Digging holes, especially, never gets old. That laser is hella fun to operate. I had a great time putting a big hole in a large chert rock. It took ages because different materials now react differently and hard rock is resistant to lasers but when I was done I felt ridiculously pleased with the result. It was like I'd made an abstract sculpture. Pity someone else can just come along and destroy it.

Destruction is a big thing in the game, of course, and I can't claim I'm immune to the urge to tear eveything down just for the fun of watching it fall. There's been a change that means if you dig caves they might collapse on top of you, so when I fell into a huge underground cavern, the first thing I did was try to cut through some of the pillars of rock that were holding the ceiling up. 

I was ready to die just for the experience but nothing dramatic occured. I managed to sever several pillars alright but they immediately self-healed, which was a disappointment. Health and safety gone mad.

After that, I was just about to go looking for some metals so I could start crafting, when Beryl bounced in and suggested I stop and play with her instead. So I did. That's how most of my pre-alpha sessions have ended. Some things just don't change.

I will go back again soon for another run around, though, at which point I might have something more informative to report, although I doubt it. I don't tend to do much of any significance when I get to play. Mostly I just goof around. At least now I'm a Reacher, not just a Tester, I don't have to feel guilty about it.

Even though I like the game, I still find it hard to imagine ever playing Stars Reach with any serious intent. I can't really see why anyone would want to devote the amount of time to it that it's obviously going to require. But then I could say that about most games these days. Like a lot of people, I think I may finally have outgrown the appeal of games that take up as much time as a full-time job and never come to an end.

Still, it's got a lot of potential as something I might pick up and put down for an hour or two, now and then. Give me a nice, quiet planet with no aggressive wildlife, no more wipes and full character customization and I might really be able to get into it.

Pictures Or It Didn't happen

This is going to be a different post to the one I planned and a much shorter one, too. That's not so much of a problem from my point of view because I have something else I'd rather be doing anyway and the post I was planning was going to require a certain amount of research, by which I mean googling some stuff then cutting and pasting some links and screenshots, which if we're honest pretty much sums up most "research" these days and I'm not just talking about mine...

So, that was a snippy introductory paragraph. Possibly because I'm feeling a bit snippy, thanks to Windows 10 or my PC, one or the other, assuming it wasn't the pair of them, getting together to prank me, which I certainly wouldn't rule out. What happened was that I took a bunch of screenshots of various things I was thinking of writing about, all of which would have made up the infrastructure for two somewhat unrelated posts, one of which I may still get around to one day and the other of which I probably won't.

The first post was going to be a list of all the standalone game launchers I use - Daybreak, Amazon, GOG, Epic, NCSoft, Steam and a bunch of others - comparing them and commenting on which I like, what they do right or wrong and so on. I thought that might be interesting but obviously it would take some effort so I wasn't going to do it today when, as I said, I have other things to be getting on with.

I was nudged towards the idea by two things: firstly, the ongoing awfulness of Standing Stone's Lord of the Rings Online launcher, which is so bad I can't even bring myself to stick with it long enough to get into the game to see if I can move my characters over to the new 64-bit servers. There was that moment when it looked as if the "One Launcher" might fix things, until that turned out to be just as bad if not worse. Did that ever improve? I gave up on it almost immediately so I have no idea.

Secondly, there was Kuro's launcher for Wuthering Waves, which I discovered, when I went to log in this morning, has just been upgraded or updated or replaced or something. I could be be a bit more specific if I had those screenshots because a couple of them were of the announcements explaining it. Unfortunately, wherever they went, if they went anywhere at all, I can't find them. They should always go in the default Windows Picture folder but not today they didn't, none of them. I took about a dozen. 

After I found they weren't there, I took a few more to test what might have happened. For some reason, although a screenshot of the desktop still saves as normal, a shot of the desktop with the Wuthering Waves launcher open doesn't. It does go into the clipboard but it just sits there and then gets overwritten by the next one.

At this point you may be thinking "But Bhagpuss, the Windows clipboard saves the last twenty-five entries. If you only took a dozen shots, why can't you get them all from the history?" and that would be a perfectly good question, to which my answer would be "Because I had the history turned off, that's why!" 

I have it turned on now but horses and stable doors and all that. In my defense, I had no idea there even was such a thing as a clipboard history until today but ignorance is no defense, as any competent brief will tell you.

So, that was one post I could have written today but now I'm not going to, although if I'm going to be realistic, I probably wouldn't have anyway. Too much work. I'll add it to that ideas folder I haven't got. Maybe I should start one.

The post I really quite likely would have written today because I was quite interested, not to say excited about it, arose from an in-game survey I took almost as soon as I logged into Wuthering Waves. Kuro are always doing player surveys, asking how us how we like certain aspects of the game and what other things we'd like to see added or changed and so on. They hand out in-game currency and other rewards for filling them in although I would happily complete them for free because I like filling out questionnaires and always have done.

This one was interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it specifically asked if we'd like housing. 

I always put "Add housing" in the "Any other feedback" section so I was very happy to see an actual line item about it. Whether it'll happen is another matter but at least they're thinking about it. (This time I put "Add non-combat pets" in the suggestions box, in case anyone was wondering.)

That wasn't the thing I was going to post about, although believe me I could make a whole post about one line in a survey if I wanted to. There was something in the survey a lot more suited to a full post: a list of upcoming games Kuro wanted to know if we were looking forward to.

I thought that was taking quite a risk. They often ask which current games we're playing, usually accompanied by a list of a whole bunch of titles I have never played, considered playing or even heard of, but there's an existential difference between naming the games that might have been your competition in the past and putting the names of games that might be your competition in the future into the heads of your customers. Brave move.

Anyway, there were maybe a dozen names on the list, only one of which I'd heard of, that being Neverness To Everness. As it happens, that is a game I'm very much looking forward to, so I ticked that box, but I also immediately wondered: if that one was on the list, might I not also be interested in some  of the others? Told you it was a risky move.

So I took a screenshot, intending to go look them all up after I finished playing to see what they were like and if any of them looked any good. I wanted to do that partly for my own satisfaction but also because it sounded like a great idea for a blog post. Lists and previews are both kinda my thing.

Except of course, when I went to look at that screenshot, it was nowhere to be found. And obviously I can't remember the names of any of the games. Not one. I mean, if I'd known the screenshot wasn't going to save I'd have written them down...

Also the survey isn't anywhere online that I can find. I already tried that.

It is possible, although not very likely, I might be able to get to the survey again from within the game itself. I don't think you can go back to old surveys but I'll have a look next time I'm playing, just in case. I'm not going to do it now, though. I just played through the whole of Act 1 of the Averado Vault storyline and that took me two hours. I'm Wuthering Waved out for the rest of the day.

And that's why there's no interesting post here today, just this. Sorry. 

I did take several screenshots while I was playing, using the in-game camera, though. And those all saved properly, so at least there are some pictures to brighten things up. So there's that.

Be grateful for small mercies, eh?