Pocket Apocalypse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fun And Games

There was no post today for two reasons:

1. I couldn't think of anything I particularly wanted to talk about. 

Obviously, I could have come up with something but

2. I spent pretty much the whole day playing Once Human and I did not want to stop.

Probably the most hours I've played one game for months. Many months.

Very pleased with my progress so far.

Absolutely delighted with my new look.

Less happy about where two of the four sceenshots I took for this post have gone. Nowhere I can see.

Normal service may be resumed tomorrow.

Or it may not.

I may play Once Human all day again. 

Five more levels and I can start working on T5 gear.

What Does She Think She Looks Like?

I've said a lot of very positive things about Wuthering Waves since I began posting about the game back at the beginning of June. Sometimes strong first impressions like that fade and falter in the face of a fuller experience but I've had more than enough time now to firm up my thoughts on the game and I'm still very impressed with almost everything I've seen. 

The visuals are gorgeous. It's one of those games that doesn't look as good in screenshots as it does when you're playing so, since the screenshots look great, you can imagine how delightful the world looks when you're running around in it. 

On that theme, the exploration is first-class too. It's one of those games where, if you can see something, you can get to it. There's usually something interesting to investigate when you get there, too.

Getting around is one of the joys of the game. Wuthering Waves has a high-quality instant transport mechanic and it's my favorite kind; the one where there are lots of teleport points but you don't get to use them until you've visited them and opened them up for use via the map. 

Even though it's there and it's good, I don't use the instant transport option as much as I do in other games. People, especially explorer archetypes, often talk about the journey being more important than the destination. That may hold water as a metaphor but it rarely works as a literal description of getting from place to place in a game. In Wuthering Waves, though, traveling really is fun in and of itself.

That's down to movement, which is both highly kinetic and three-dimensional but also extremely comfortable and simple to use, a really satisfying combination. You can run, jump, swim, glide and swing from one high point to another, like Spider-Man, something that's common to many modern games, but what makes it special in this one is that you rarely run out of puff while you're doing it.

There is a stamina gauge but it's extremely generous. I have yet to run out of energy while swimming and in over a month I think I've only fallen off a mountain through lack of stamina a couple of times. And even then I was still able to glide to a soft landing. 

Best of all, you only use stamina when sprinting in a couple of circumstances: if you're in combat or if you're running straight up a vertical surface like The Flash. Running up sheer cliffs is a real rush, too. 

Outside of that, you can dash about as much as you want. You don't even have to hold a key down. Just tap it and it sticks that way until you stop running. 

I'm more than fine with that, although I do wonder why games that allow unlimited sprinting don't simply set sprint as the default, rather than getting you to press a button to make it happen. I played something the other day (I forget what it was.) where you always ran but if you hit Shift you'd slow to a walk, which seemed a far more sensible way of doing things.

I've complained on and off about the quality of the translation but really it's the variability that bugs me. The general quality is plenty good enough - it's the segments that are very good that cast shade on the rest. I should really be praising it for how good it can be rather than picking out the weaker moments.

One thing that really stands out for me is the combat. I generally find fighting the least appealing part of these kind of games, partly because I'm not a huge fan of action combat per se but mostly because they tend to be tuned for a considerably higher skill rating than I can manage. 

So far, Wuthering Waves has managed to balance very neatly on the dividing line between engaging and comfortable. Beating up regular mobs for quests and loot is fun and I have actually enjoyed most of the boss fights and set pieces. I don't know how long it can last but I'm optimistic.

I could go on with the positives but I actually wanted to post something about the one, big negative that slightly mitigates against the fun I know I could be having. I just wanted to take a run through the good stuff before I got to that part so as to make it quite clear how very much I like the game overall.

The thing I don't appreciate about Wuthering Waves applies to most gacha games. It's the extreme lack of character customization available. 

One of the biggest pleasures of most RPGs, whether on or offline, solo, co-op or massively multiple, is the control you have over what your character looks like. We've all heard the jokes and jibes about "playing Barbies" and "fashion wars". Everyone knows the real end-game of many MMORPGs isn't raiding - it's strutting around outside the bank in your finest. Entire games are funded mostly by the cosmetic items for sale in their cash shops. 

Leaving aside what you look like, being able to create a character is a fundemental expectation of the genre. It's so ingrained in the culture that even gacha games don't side-step it entirely. In the ones I've played, you do get a character that's supposedly your own at the start, even if you pretty much get a choice of two pre-mades.

With the exception of one game in the genre, though, that character has never truly been mine. The entire rationale of the gacha business model works against the concept of building a character and sticking with it. The whole purpose of gameplay is to keep acquiring new, better characters and using them to replace your old ones, so why would you want to spend time and money making any of them look good or feel permanent?

I find it very frustrating. It takes away all the fun of finding new items and seeing how they look on your character, something that has always been a primary motivator for me, going all the way back to when I commissioned a crafter to make my first set of reinforced leather armor in EverQuest a quarter of a century ago. There's no working on sets or trying to create a signature look. You just have to go with what you're given.

It also means that, when you get a character who's too powerful to turn down, you're stuck looking at whatever outfit someone else thought looked good, even if you think it looks terrible. I'm moderately happy with the pink-party-dress-and-bloomers look someone clearly got their ten year old daughter to design for Encore, the character I'm mostly playing at the moment, but it's not how I'd dress her, given the choice. 

At least it's better than the selection from the Victoria's Secrets nightwear collection I'm stuck with on my actual character. That one is just embarrassing but then Wuthering Waves is one of those games where every playable character and villain looks like they've come straight from a music video or a peep show. 

What really annoys me about it is that, although I've said it's almost a requisite of the gacha mechanics, it actually isn't. I have played a gacha game that both allowed for a great deal of character customization and let you decide how much skin you wanted your characters to show. 

That game was Noah's Heart and the main reason I stayed with it for more than a year was the way it allowed me to work on looks for my characters by acquiring lots of them through the gacha process and then persuading them to give me the patterns for their outfits so I could make them for myself. Better still, the outfits came in a number of pieces so they could be mixed and matched to make different, much more personalised looks.

Unfortunately, I suspect that and similar roleplaying-friendly elements like housing may have been what eventually sunk the game. I get the strong impression that the core audiences for RPGs and gacha games are quite different in their desires and expectations and having pets and homes and funny hats doesn't really excite gacha players the way it does even the most reluctant roleplayers in MMOs. 

My feeling is that, while MMORPG players love to be powerful so they can win big fights with Boss mobs, they also love to work on their characters at inordinate length, just for the sake of it. The twin motivations are beating the game and building the character; the two go hand in hand. 

People frequently want to beat a Boss so they can loot an item it drops, be that a flashy weapon or a shiny helmet or a sparkly mount. That's why we have transmog and appearance systems up the wazoo and people kick up merry hell if they can't go back and solo old raids for cosmetics.

In gacha games, it often seems as though power is an end in itself. Beating bosses doesn't get you stuff you can wear; it gets you materials you can use to upgrade your power. And you want to keep doing it so you r characters can keep getting more powerful until you ditch them for better ones and so the whole thing just keeps rolling.

It's not to say there's no way to change your appearance in a gacha game. It's just no part of the core experience. It's an after-thought, at best.

If you google "can you change the look of characters in Genshin Impact", the huge majority of results will tell you that you can't, which is how I remember things being when I played. It seems that has changed. There are at least outfits in the cash shop and in holiday events, now. Even so, it seems like a drop in the ocean compared to what you'd find in just about any MMORPG.

To anyone who doesn't play games the differences I'm talking about are probably barely discernible. To anyone who's used to the MMO experience, though, while it's a similar gameplay loop, it's really very different indeed. The question is whether it has to be

Noah's Heart definitely tried to hybridize the process and it didn't work, commercially, at all. That doesn't mean someone couldn't do it more successfully.

I hope they do. The open world gameplay of the post-Genshin Impact games would make an ideal base for an MMORPG. But only if you could also play a character you could truly make your own.

A Hunting We Will Go or Be Vewy, Vewy, Quiet - I'm Hunting Pandas!

Somewhat to my surprise, I was at my PC at exactly six o' clock yesterday evening, when the timer ticked down to zero for the start of World of Warcraft's Pandaria Remix event. I logged in, partly expecting a queue of some kind, but there was none. It was straight to character select and the option to make a "Timerunner", which is what Blizzard has chosen to call participants in this glorious experiment.

Skipping ahead a step, the whole affair is typically garlanded with unnecessary trimmings. When I arrived in the world, I found myself immediately engaged in some kind of overly complicated, hard-to-follow narrative, involving dragons and time-portals and the inevitable ill-defined existential threat to natural order.

It would have been quite confusing enough on its own but since I was thrown into the middle of it all with what seemed like hundreds of other players, half of them riding mounts the size of busses (I'm surprised no-one was driving an actual bus...) it was positively over-whelming. 

This not being my first - or probably my fifty-first - server launch, I was able to handle it but I would like to go back and start over when things have quietened down, just to see if any of it actually makes any kind of sense. I tend to doubt it.

Going back to character creation, I'd forgotten just how basic a function it is in WoW. I'm so used to spending half an hour just trying to get my eyebrows right, it came as a bit of a shock to realize there was next to nothing for me to do.

Once you've set the trifecta - race, gender, class - there are just eight appearance settings you need to consider and half of those are colors. Given the paucity of options on offer it seems bizarre that "Eyesight" made the cut. Also, what the hell do they mean by "Eyesight", anyway?

In WoW's Character Creation, "Eyesight" means whether you you're blind in one eye, both or neither. I am honestly not sure whether this is Blizzard attempting to be culturally sensitive by offering a disability option or the exact opposite.

I'm assuming that blindness in the game is purely cosmetic, which certainly points towards the latter. If giving your character cataracts actually does impact gameplay, then I take my hat off to whoever came up with the idea. It would be quite radical.

I decided not to risk it. I felt I'd already taken enough of a cultural back-step by making my character blonde. 

Once I was in the game, everything proceeded smoothly. Very smoothly for a new server. At least at first. After about half an hour or so the disconnects began and eventually drove me out but until then, everything was fine.

By then I'd spent around an hour in the Remix, some of it on the Timeless Isle, which is where everything begins, the rest in the starting area of the Pandaria expansion, the name of which escapes me, even though I've been there twice this month already.

Last time I was playing a Goblin for the Horde. This time I was playing a Gnome for the Alliance. Both times I was playing a Hunter.

I was thinking about it as I ran around two-shotting mobs with my bow: the WoW Hunter has to be one of my all-time favorite MMORPG classes. I know it has something of a bad reputation but for all the right reasons. 

Hunters are self-sufficient to an infuriating degree. They can manage pretty well on their own in a genre where team-play is often deemed essential. Even more annoyingly, when played well, they can fit into a group with alarming efficiency. Playing a Hunter is often considered EZ-Mode and not without good reason. If what you're looking for out of your gameplay is relaxation and control, you could do a lot worse.

Given that WoW took a huge amount of inspiration from EverQuest and that many of the original design team had played EQ, I can't help feeling one of the reasons the Hunter is so good is that the Ranger in EQ was so bad.  

Rangers in early EverQuest were deeply disappointing, weak in almost all regards. They got beefed up eventually but for years they were, at best, comedy relief. The WoW Hunter looks like someone asked the EQ Ranger Class Lead for a list of improvements that would make the class worth playing and then doubled down on all of them.

I didn't think about it at the time but it was probably quite important that I pick a class and race I'm comfortable with for this experiment. I'm feeling more and more inclined to re-sub for a month or two while the Remix goes on and if I do, it's not impossible this could end up being my highest character. 

It is apparently possible to level all the way to the cap in the event. When it's over, Timerunners will be converted to regular characters on your regular server, or wherever you made them, if you picked somewhere else. My current highest character on Live is 50 so he may well get overtaken if I decide to take this thing even half-seriously.

From what I've seen so far, I just might. Pandaria is a very enjoyable expansion. I've already played through a lot of it and I remember it quite fondly, which is more than I can say of several others. I certainly wouldn't mind pottering through it again, especially on fast-forward.

That said, I didn't find the xp rate that invigorating yesterday. I was expecting something a bit faster. As I said, I did two levels in about an hour, which is probably what I'd have guessed I would have gotten in the regular game at the same point.

Then again, there is all that Level Squish nonsense. I may be thinking of how many levels I used to get in an hour, back when there were twice as many. It's hard to keep track.

Other than the leveling speed, there's also the loot. A big deal has been made of the cosmetics but that doesn't mean much to me. Not because I'm not into playing dolly dress-up with my characters. As multiple posts on this blog can attest, I very much am. No, the problem is that I think most WoW characters look pretty bad, whatever they're wearing.

When I see people proudly sharing screenshots of their best-dressed characters I can rarely see what it is they think they're cerebrating. WoW has a particular aesthetic that definitely works but it does not shine in close-ups. I think my characters in almost any other MMORPG look better than even my better-dressed Azerothians.

I do like the new loot, though. The mobs drop little chests that give Remix-specific loot and it's fun to open them. I also like the gem system, which once again reminds me very specifically of Augments and Adornments in the two EQs. They seem like they'll be fun to play around with, not least because the mechanic for slotting and unslotting them is very straightforward.

I can't say the same about the weirdly overwrought system for scrapping items you don't want and turning them into Bronze, the Remix currency. To do that you have to spawn a portal in the world, then open it and drag and drop your items inside. It's very tactile and fun at first but I'm not sure how entertaining it'll be when you have to do it for the thousandth time.

All in all, though, I thought it was a promising start. I'm quite keen to get back and dig into it a bit more. I would think that by the time I hit Level 20, the kick-out point for freeloaders, I should have a pretty clear idea whether I want to subscribe for a month. 

If not, I can always just make another character and try again. It'll be a Warlock, I expect. If it's not a Hunter, it usually is.

Feeling Twitchy

This is somewhat of a makeshift post. I spent two hours composing a much longer, more detailed one, then I managed to delete it by accident. Unrecoverably. Not for the first time, either, and I don't suppose it will be the last. It's amazing how you can just brush two or three keys at once as you reach across the keyboard and something like that happens. 

The post you're not reading right now was about graphical fidelity and appearance gear in Nightingale. Don't get excited. There is no appearance gear in Nightingale. That was one of the points I was making.

Since I'm stuffed if I'm going to re-write the whole thing and since I'm even less inclined to spend another two hours writing another one, we're just going to have to make do with some pictures of the Twitch Drops I got myself by having Gladd's channel tabbed out and muted for six hours today. There's a promotion on.

Acquiring Twitch Drops was a new experience for me but I imagine I'll be doing it again, now I know how easy it is. The hardest part was finding a channel that didn't keep dropping out all the time. I tried three yesterday and they all did it, repeatedly, so it was good to find one today that didn't.

Other than that, it seems like something for nothing. The promotion goes on until the 27th but it only takes eight hours of "viewing" to get everything. You can easily do it in a day.

Here's what's on offer. The outfit splits into five pieces - gloves, shoes, pants, shirt and hat. The dress swaps in for the shirt. Altogether there's something for every clothing slot. You also get the recipes to make them all - so you can replace them if they wear out, I guess.

As well as the clothes, there's an umbrella. Umbrellas are kind of a big deal in Nightingale. Did you know they double as parachutes? Well, they do

You could even use one as a makeshift glider at a push, although they use stamina to float so you wouldn't be gliding far.

The final reward, the one that takes the full eight hours to get, is a dog. A Distinguished Puppy. It's a dachshund wearing a top hat.

I'm not sure how he'll work with Dora, my trusty help-meet. Are there cosmetic pets in the game? Maybe you can have more than one companion out at a time.

I think he's about ready. Hold on... let me just log in and claim him. I'll find out how he works and take a screenshot... 

Ah! I didn't think of that. The Distinguished Puppy is a house item. It took me a while to work it out. Unlike the other rewards, he doesn't just pop up in your pack. You have to craft him from the Building menu. 

More specifically, you craft his bed. It's under the "Rest" sub-category and it's an actual, tiny bed. You can sleep in it yourself if you want, although I can't imagine how that works. 

As soon as you place it, the dog appears nearby. He roams around a little, lies down, sits up... generally acts like a dog.

About the one thing he doesn't do as far as I can see is use his bed. I was expecting him to lie down in it but I don't think he does. 

He's also quite disturbingly realistic. He looks like an actual motion-capture of a genuine dachshund. He's creepy, frankly, especially with that hat.

At least he's purely decorative. The problem I have with the outfit and the umbrella is that it's all proper stat gear and much better than what Flora had. If you can get major upgrades just by not watching someone else live-stream the game, it does kind of blow a hole in the progression mechanics. And since gear upgrades are a huge part of the motivation in this genre, that can't be good.

Then again, it is very early days. Just because the "Simple" clothes Flora's wearing don't match up to these freebies, either visually or statistically, doesn't mean the next crafted set won't make the free stuff  obsolete. Just so long as the developers don't make a habit of giving away the farm, I think we'll be okay.

As for me, it's not the first time I fat-fingered an entire post into oblivion and I don't imagine it'll be the last. I might re-do the post I lost tomorrow or I might just take the hint and move on. It had a few good lines but I don't think we'll be missing all that much.

The main point I was making was that all new games ought to come with two things as standard: a way to take screenshots without the UI and an appearance system for clothing. If the endgame is Fashion Wars or Playing Barbies, which let's be honest, it always is, and if developers want their game to look great in every screenshot, which of course they do, why wait?

I mean, you don't want people to know they're really going to be running around looking like this, do you?

I rest my case.

Well, that turned out to be a better post than the one I lost, I think. Shame to lose that line about the cruel younger son who dresses the housemaid up as a lady for a joke. I was pleased with that one but I'm sure I'll find another chance to shoehorn it in, somewhere.

Oh, I just did, didn't I? Well, there we go!

Any Color You Like, So Long As It's Pink

Since that post, where I talked about deciding to play some EverQuest II,  then spending less than five minutes in the game, I'm happy to say I've now passed several happy hours there, having a very good time indeed. It felt refreshing to go back to a more structured gaming experience after the sandbox free-for-all of Palworld, although the degree to which my play in just about any game could reasonably be described as "structured" is relative, at best.

I did at least manage to complete the next instance in the Ballads of Zimara Signature Questline, along with several side-quests. Experience comes so very much more slowly in BoZ than in recent expansions. I'm still undecided whether I approve of the change or not but I'm fairly sure it will put a stop to any fantasies I had about leveling all my Skyfire characters to the cap before the next expansion.

That said, we are on a two-year cycle for level cap increases. Even with the hyper-accelerated xp we were getting, I don't think I ever capped all my characters until well into the second year. It may still be that I'll catch up in 2025, just in time to slide right back down the hill for the expansion after next, by which time the cap ought to go to 135.

I'm stuffed if I'm going to start planning two years ahead, anyway. I barely plan two days ahead, most of the time. If I were more organized, I'd have started in on the Erollisi Day event while there was more than four days left. Of course, that would have required me to have had some sort of plan to do the holiday content at all, which would have been be a plan I did not have at all, not until this morning. 

I logged in to finish off some of the aforementioned side-quests and it wasn't until I'd finished that I suddenly remembered there was a holiday going on in Norrath. I thought I'd read something about there being a new quest. I always try to do those for every holiday. It seems rude not to.

Mostly, these days, what Darkpaw calls holiday "quests" are what I'd call "collections". Which is fine. Collections are great. They're easy, they're fun, they're relaxing; they're ideal holiday content. They aren't bloody quests, though, so it would be nice if whoever writes the copy for the promos would stop calling them that.

I'm long, long past the day when I find it fun to run aimlessly around Freeport, looking for whichever NPC has been given the job of handing out the starter for a new questline. I had a quick look at the official announcement, where I learned the quest was called "Can't Fight This Feeling", then I googled to find out where to go.

Last time I did something like this, I mentioned my concern, when I found out the relevant Holiday page on the EQII wiki hadn't been updated, even though the event had been going on for a while. I am here now to tell you I'm no less worried this time. If anything, more so.

The Erollisi Day page on the wiki hasn't been touched since last year. The "New This Year" section reads

New This Year

The event will officially run from 02/9/2023 at 12:01am PST through 02/22/2023 at 11:59pm PST

That is... not encouraging.

Fortunately, we can always rely on Naimi Denmother for holiday updates. I went to EQ2 Traders
Corner and found everything I needed. The new quest is indeed a collection, of sorts. One of those where you do other quests and kill mobs and among the drops you find something unfamiliar that, when you examine it, offers up a "quest". 

That quest inevitably consists of carrying on doing whatever it was you were doing until a bunch more things drop, each of which updates your "quest" in exactly the way a collection would, except without troubling you to click them to add them to an actual collection. Then, when you have them all, you go talk to someone, who gives you a reward. Just like you'd hand in a completed collection.

You see where I'm going with this. I think the way it qualifies as a "quest" is that the person you give the stuff to has a short conversation with you, whereas the Collector would simply say "That's a decent find. I'll give you something for it" or words to that effect. That and not having to click anything. It's a fine definition, for sure.

According to EQ2 Traders, the quest starter drops either from mobs in The Shard of Love or Nektropos Castle: Love's Errand, a holiday version of the infamous necromancer's lair. I'm often complaining about how poor my memory is but one thing I do seem to be able to remember with worrying clarity is where things are in Norrath. Worrying, that is, because it shows how much of my life I must have spent there.

I seemed to recall the entrance to the Shard of Love being right next to the docks in Everfrost. I also thought I remembered it being a rather easy-to-navigate and generably enjoyable zone, unlike Nektropos Castle, which is a bit of a maze inside, with lots of locked and secret doors and hidden passages, as you'd expect in a dark and foreboding place like that.

To cut short what could easily turn into an unnecessarily long story, I was right in all respects. I found the entrance with no difficulty but then had to go in and come out again because the Shard only scales to 90 and I was on my Berserker, who's coming up to 128. There was an "Agnostic" version of the instance, one that works for any level, but I didn't remember what "Agnostic" meant in EQII until quite a bit later, so I ignored it.

It wouldn't have made much difference to my stated goal of doing the new quest, anyway. The mobs were all grey but they still dropped holiday items. I was going to carry on like that but what happened was, I spawned the first Named mob within a minute of entering the zone and then couldn't bear to think of killing it and not getting whatever it might drop. 

A quick trip back to Freeport to mentor down to 85 soon fixed that and it was just as well I took the trouble because I quickly realized what a really great holiday Erollisi Day is... if you like playing dressing up. Which, obviously, I do.

It's been a long time since I did this particular holiday with anything like serious intent. I'd forgotten it was one Mrs Bhagpuss and I used to farm for appearance gear and house items, back in the day. It was always very good for that and a lot more seems to have been added to the loot tables since then. All good stuff, too.

One thing dropped that I have never seen before and now find myself wondering if it's new this year and if so how many more like it we'll be seeing: a coupon for 20% off all Erollisi Day items in the Cash Shop. At this point I'd love to be able to tell you I was outraged and plan to cancel my subscription in protest but actually I was unreasonably excited. I went straight to the Cash Shop and spent ten enjoyable minutes going through everything in the relevant section, coming away with the gorgeous, pink pegasus you can see me riding in the screenshots.

I was only thinking yesterday, as I collected my monthly 500DBC stipend and saw the total tick past 33,000DBC that I probably ought to think about spending some of it. Now I have and if I get any more of those vouchers I'll almost certainly spend some more. There are some really nice things in there!

There are also some really nice things for sale on the Erollisi Day vendor and even more going free in the chests dropped by all the Named mobs in the Shard of Love. It didn't take me long to decide a pink mount  deserves a pink rider. I bought my Berserker a pink outfit and a pink hat. 

I also bought him a pink cloak and then another cloak, even flashier, albeit not so pink, dropped off one of the Nameds, but he isn't wearing either of them. That's because he was lucky enough to get the Valorous Wings as a drop in Mithaniel Marr's Lovely Treasure Trove chest on the first kill. Some people report having to wait a while for those. Like forty kills. Or more.

The reward for the new quest is also a back item - the Huntress' Mounted Quiver - so I'm spoiled for choice. Yet again, I'm reminded how incredibly generous EQII is with appearance gear and house items. 

I mean, yes, there's great-looking stuff in the Cash Shop, but the reason I have so much DBC saved up is that there's always such a fire-hose of really nice drops and rewards in the game itself, I hardly ever even think of spending my funny money. Coming from a decade of Guild Wars 2, one of the stingiest games for appearance and cosmetic gear I've ever played, it's hard to overstate just how refreshing it is to be able to log in knowing I have a great chance of getting something worth having every single session.

I'm working tomorrow and Nightingale arrives on Tuesday, the same day the Erollisi event ends, so I barely have any time to farm for more stuff. If I can fit in a session or two, I'd like to get some goodies for a few of my other characters, especially a couple on other servers, who won't have the benefit of the duplicate Heirlooms I've been getting as I farm.

It'll make a nice change from all that surviving - for a day or so. Then it's back to punching trees, I guess. At least until the next Norrathian holiday rolls around.

You're Not Going Out Dressed Like That! (Once Human Edition)

There's much to say about what I've been doing in Once Human since last time I wrote about the game but before I get to any of that, I thought I'd better re-assure those who may, quite reasonably, have felt  concerned about the way my character's been dressed in every screenshot so far. The outfit she's been wearing has seemed weirdly out of keeping with the gritty, post-disaster backdrop, even though there is a logical reason for her seemingly insouciant state of déshabillé.

It all refers back to the very start of the game. The story begins with a cut-scene of an unidentified technician completing some kind of procedure on a human figure in a pod. The facilty where this is happening undergoes an attack, bringing the procedure to a premature end and spewing the contents of the pod into the lab; the contents of the pod being, of course, the player character.

So far, so lore-appropriate. What happens next, though, is arguably less convincing. I suspect that most people, awakening to find themselves wearing not much more than a one-piece bathing costume with a lot of plastic tubing sticking out, then being set loose in open countryside with no more protection than the little they're hardly wearing, would make getting some clothes an early priority. It seems not.

The situation doesn't go completely ignored. V, the bird-shaped avatar personifying the brain-scan of your former Mayfly colleague stored in your backpack (Don't ask..) does make a comment fairly early on, suggesting you might think about getting some clothes. It would be perfectly possible, not to say sensible, to take him up on that suggestion right away, but you'd have to be paying attention to notice. It's mentioned just that once and never again.

BEFORE

As I think I said in a previous post, the game itself provides you with a framework of sorts. It's called The Journey and it's very easy to find yourself thinking of it as a linear set of objectives, to be completed in the order they come up on the tracker in the top, left corner of the screen. If you do that, as I did, you'll find yourself running around in your swimsuit for several game sessions, feeling slightly self-conscious and wondering when the prompt to do something about is going to appear.

The approximate answer to that, in my case at least, was around six hours in, when my character had just dinged Level 7. I'd been waiting with increasing impatience for the Journey to tell me it was time to make the Armor Workbench. 

By then I'd already been told to make the Primary Supplies Workbench, the Synthesis Workbench, the Weapons Workbench, the Disassembler, the Forge and almost certainly something else I've forgotten. I'd been told to make a base to put them all in and even a bed to sleep in but until then the idea of making myself something to wear just hadn't come up.

This makes it sound as though the developers must have had some rather strange ideas about acceptable daywear, let alone what the average, modern, post-apocalyptic survivor is wearing these days to go scavenging for scrap in a zombie-infested trailer park, but in fact the problem lay mostly with my own expectations as they've been formed by other games.

AFTER

The Journey, as I gradually came to understand, isn't a linear, quest-like sequence of stages to be ticked off one after another. It's a menu of possible activities to be undertaken in whatever order you choose. That really should have become apparent to me when I first received retroactive credit for doing something that turned out to have an entry in the Journey I hadn't gotten to yet.

Unfortunately for my credentials as a free-thinking individual, even once I knew I could take the stages out of order, I still found myself almost slavishly following each completed segment with whatever on-screen prompt popped up next. In my defence, I would point out that the crafting process does somewhat rely on making the basic stations in roughly the order they come up but, even so, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from choosing to make yourself something more suitable to wear before you get stuck into the enticing prospect of guns, drugs and explosives.

It's not just a matter of seemliness and decorum, either. There's a reason it's called the Armor Workbench not the Wardrobe or the Changing Room. The first sets of clothing may look like workwear with a few modifications but they come with a range of stat boosts that significantly enhance your ability to survive in the wilderness - and to take more hits from those pesky snipers and flying montrosities.

The first thing I did after I made myself a full set of clothes was to go to the Stronghold just up the hill from my base to see how much tougher I felt. OK, no it wasn't. Obviously the first thing I did was take a bunch of screenshots of myself. But the first thing after that...

I'd been doing fine scavenging in my skivvies but there had been more than a few times where I'd had to duck into cover to avoid sniper fire and blasts of indeterminate energy from hovering nightmares. Even when I had some bullets for my pistols, I had to be careful not to stand around for too long as I tried to bring the damn floaters down. 

With some heavy denims and a flak jacket, everything was a lot easier. And remember I said it was already easier than I felt I had any right to expect. Then again, by this time the mobs were three or four levels lower than me. I could really have done with getting dressed sensibly before I outlevelled the content. If only I had some iniative of my own...

Crafting in Once Human is fun, I think. I'm not a hardcore crafter by any definition; I'd classify myself as an enthusiastic bodger. I like making my own stuff but I don't relish the fine detail. Consequently, I'm not crazy about quasi-realistic crafting systems that have you refining all your own ores and then making all the component parts individually before combining them into whatever it was you actually wanted at the start.

On the other hand, the ultra-simplistic systems that give you a recipe for a particle accelerator and tell you to put two copper bars and a jug of water into a synthesizer and press the big red button don't really do it for me either. Once Human straddles the two extremes quite satisfactorily. 

You do have to gather and make your own mats from ore, wood, stone and various scrap parts but so far it's not only quick but also easy to do. Trees and boulders are everywhere, as you'd expect, but so are copper nodes. They all give large yields with even the most basic tools and you can chop wood and mine ore with the same pickaxe, something I have to say makes a lot of sense - I mean, it's even called a pick-axe, right?

Recipes ask for a lot of seemingly complicated, not to say fiddly, components, some of which you do have to make yourself as sub-combines. Most, however, can be acquired by simply throwing everything you loot from buildings and mobs into the Disassembler, which instantly breaks everything down into useable mats and sorts it all neatly into your bags. 

Even better, when it comes to subcombines, the grunt work is all done for you. Taking my new pants as an example, there are three subcombines right there on the main recipe screen. If you click each of them it tells you what mats you need and if you have them it populates the fields. All you do is click once and that subcombine happens instantaneously.

As soon as you have all three done the "Insufficent Materials" notice turns into a Combine button. Press that and your pants are ready in a matter of seconds. That's another nice thing about crafting in OH; combines don't take long. It's a matter of seconds not minutes or, god forbid, hours (Hi, Fallen Earth! How's it going over there these days?)

That said, I am extremely low level still. There is a Crafting Queue, which does suggest that at some point you're going to want to cue combines up and go of to do something else until they're finished. Looking down the crafting trees, the whole thing looks pretty deep and complex so maybe it does get a lot slower, later.

For now, though, it's fast enough not to be frustrating while also interesting enough to be fun. It's a combination I find almost dangerously addictive. If combat and exploration in the game weren't easily as satisfying and exciting, I might never leave my base. 

Well, except to go up the hill behind my house to the local Stronghold  for supplies, of course. I think of it as the corner store...

You're Not Making It Easy To Come Back, Blade & Soul.

It took the best part of two days but I did finally get Blade & Soul to run. I don't know what NCSoft did to make the new launcher so pernickety but I'd have to say I preferred the old one. It just worked. 

Anyway, after downloading something like 250GB of data to get a final install of 66GB I was eventually able to press play and actually have the game start but even then the wait wasn't over. Logging in seemed to take forever. It was probably only about five minutes but in the context of getting into an online game that is forever. 

Do you know how many things I can think of in five minutes that I need to do more than I need to play an old video game , NCSoft? You really don't want to give me that much time to reconsider my choices.

I stuck it out. I mean, I'd given the thing hours already. What's another five minutes? 

When I got in I did not find myself where I expected I'd be. Usually, when I log out of an MMORPG - or an RPG for that matter -  I try to leave the character I was playing in a comfortable spot. If they have a home, my first choice is to take them there. Otherwise I like to leave them in a town or city where they can carry on with normal life.

No room to claim this one.

If I have to leave them wherever they were adventuring, either because it would be too much trouble to get them back there next time or because I had to log out suddenly and unexpectedly, I at least try to leave them in a safe place that looks reasonably sheltered from inclement weather. It seems like the least I could do.

When I logged in Meldra Mye, my main character in Blade & Soul, she woke up in a bush. I couldn't even see her for leaves. I must have been in a real hurry when I logged out, however long ago that was.

I say "Main". I could almost say "only". I do have one other character but I only made her to try out a max-level buff I got for free. As you might expect, getting a max level character that way does not also instantly grant you the ability or knowledge to play one, something I remember people complaining about in EverQuest as far back as the turn of the millennium, when one of the worst insults you could hurl at someone was to accuse them of having bought their character on EBay.

Of course, after more than a year away, I have no idea how to play my regular character either, which was why, the moment I got into the game, I was pleased - and impressed -  to see a link to a New and Returning Player Guide.  Unfortunately, I was a lot less impressed after I'd finished reading it.

As a guide, I'd have to say it's both barebones and overly specific. It tells you a lot of things that are extremely obvious just by looking at your character, such as what "type" your equipment is. A "weapon" is a "weapon", you may be surprised to learn, while a ring or a necklace is an "accessory". 

I could probably have figured that out for myself, along with what kind of stats each slot supports, just by mousing over them and reading the tool-tips. Conversely, telling me a type of item "enhances the ability of certain skills" doesn't really tell me anything at all.

At the other extreme, the guide seems determined to portray the entire game as a series of instanced dungeons and raids, all of which it lists by name and required group size, along with a detailed account of what loot you can get there. I'm not saying that's not meaningful information but it's extremely reductive. Of all the time I've played Blade & Soul I doubt more than ten percent has been spent in dungeons. There's a huge, fascinating open world to explore. Why would I want to go inside?

There's a hugely more comprehensive and wide-ranging guide on the forums, written by a player called HungiBungi. It's fairly up-to-date, having been written at the end of last year, and yet the OP still needed to post a second guide six months later because there'd been a substantive change to the gear upgrade path. Such is the way of online games but at least the currency of the updates and commentary on them suggests a game that's still in active development, with an equally active playerbase.

In the moderately unlikley event I end up playing Blade & Soul "seriously" again (I use the word almost ironically - I have never played B&S in a way anyone in their right mind would call "serious". What I mean, I guess, is "regularly", although even that would be pushing it...) then I'll defnitely be referring to Hungi's guide. 

It's much more likely that I'll just log in a few times, claim all the stuff that's waiting for me (It's a lot!), try on any new clothes, summon any new pets, take some screenshots and call it a day for another few months. That tends to be the way it goes in just about every MMORPG I used to play, don't play any more but still haven't quite given up on.

In the case of Blade & Soul, though, there is a slightly enhanced possibility of my doing a little more than the bare minimum. The world, as I said earlier, is vast and quite beautiful. My character is full of personality and charm. There's a plot that I was quite enjoying back when I could remember what it was and the combat isn't bad for an action MMO. 

All of that works in the game's favor. What works against it is the precipitous re-learning curve common to almost all MMORPGs but also the aforementioned lengthy log-in time, which does put me off firing the game up unless I'm also willing to put in a good session to make the effort worthwhile. 

And then there's the almost Norrathian time it takes to get from one place to another.

Blade & Soul does have some kind of instant travel, at least I seem to remember something to do with map-clicking, but how it works is something I need to re-learn. This time, when I found I didn't have enough bag space to claim most of the stuff that was waiting for me, I could neither remember where the nearest bank was not how to get there if I did.

No room for this pet, either.

If there's anything that acts as a bigger drag anchor on enthusiasm for returning to a former MMORPG than full bags you have no idea how to empty, I don't know what it is. Icons you no longer know the meaning of and combat skills you no longer remember how to use are bad, sure, but if I can't get my bags sorted I'm probably never going to get far enough to need to know how to hit anything anyway.

In this case, I'd only really come back to try on my new gear and take some pictures and I haven't even been able to do that yet. I managed to put on one new outfit, the one at the head of the post, but the rest I could only look at in the dressing-room.

I didn't help myself. I somehow managed to claim one complete outfit twice on the same character despite a clear warning about it requiring some currency I didn't recognize to transfer to other characters on the account. That was how I filled up most of my minimal free inventory slots. It's also why I wanted to find the bank so urgently.

When I work out where the bank is and how to get there (Always assuming Blade & Soul is a game that has a vault system. They don't all, you know.) and I've had time and opportunity to get myself sorted, perhaps I'll be in a position to post a proper fashion show. Until then, this is going to have to do.

Also maybe I'll finally write something about the actual game. I maintain Blade & Soul is a lot better than it ever seems to get credit for being and would almost certainly be more to the taste of many Western MMO gamers than the average import, if only anyone noticed it existed.

Then again, maybe it's just that I like having a giant cartoon cat that follows me about. I mean, it's living the dream, isn't it?