Dress Sense Or Dress Sensibly?

There's not much I don't like about gacha games. I like the way they look, the way they read, the way they sound and the way they play. I would never have expected it but it turns out the genre fits me to a T.

The monetization that gets some people mad doesn't bother me. In fact, since the Free To Play revolution, which suppose must be well over a decade in the past by now, which did, genuinely and literally, make most games completely free as far as I was concerned, about the only kind of monetization that gives me pause is the good old monthly subscription model. 

If EverQuest Legends had launched as Buy To Play, with no sub needed to go on playing after the first month, you'd most likely be reading a post like Tipa's about that game right now (I'd definitely be playing a Kerran.) instead of looking at some screenshots of Flora in her new 1970s-style trouser-suit. That isn't to say I won't buy EQL eventually but it is the reason I haven't bought it yet and it will almost certainly be the reason I don't play it for more than a month.

There is one thing I don't like about Gacha games, though. I've mentioned it before. It's the way my  characters tend to look the same all the time. It varies from gacha game to gacha game but it may not be a coincidence that the ones that put the least friction in the way of changing your apperarance are the ones that fold soonest.

Neverness To Everness is fairly standard in that you can roll for outfits on the gacha board, buy them for in-game currency and win them as rewards for in-game activities but none of those options is both easy and cheap. I've been playing for three months now and only yesterday did I finally get Flora a change of clothes. And even then it was only by way of the alternate NTE universe that is Warrens Continent.

The 999 Nights update that added an entire medieval fantasy ARPG to the magitech modern world was bizarre in all kinds of ways but not least in how it blew a giant, smoking hole in the gacha dress code. In Warrens Continent, characters have a traditional RPG paper doll with gear slots and whatever you put in most of those slots shows up on the character. Mobs drop wearable gear and there are plenty of different looks. 

You can take a pretty good shot at getting your character to look how you want them to... for a while. Then, of course, you have to start paying attention to stats and the whole thing falls apart, just like in a  traditional MMORPG, which is how things like transmog and appearance tabs end up being added to every MMO that lasts more than a few years.

Luckily, whoever designed the gear for Warrens Continent had an infinitely better fashion sense than the average MMO dev, so most of the pieces look pretty good together. And there are sets that have bonuses that make you want to wear all the pieces and naturally sets fit together quite nicely so it all works out.

I very much appreciated all of that, while I was playing Warrens Continent as if it was the main game. I was a bit miffed when I had to upgrade Flora's excellent starting look, probably the most demure and modest outfit in the entire game, to something that looked like it wouldn't be out of place in a Slayyyter video but stats are stats.

The best thing about that original outfit was that you can wear it in Hethereau. I was looking forward to doing just that for a while but then, almost inevitably, I stayed so long in Warrens Continent and changed my gear so many times I forgot all about it. It didn't help that the outfit, appropriately called "Unassuming Warrior", is only available through the "Button Shop" and I had no clue where that was.

I did look for it. My immediate thought was that it would be the Mysterious Fuzzy trader but that was a dead end. I looked at every trader I could find and pored over the map but I couldn't see any sign of a "Button Shop". And then I just sort of forgot about it. Don't ask me why I didn't google it but I didn't.

And then on Wednesday I mentioned the Button Shop in a post and Mailvaltar dropped into the comments to explain where to find it: in the F4 Event Menu.

It is. And I never noticed. I will say in my defense that a) I very rarely look at the Events Menu and b) the Button Shop Button isn't actually part of the menu itself. It's on its own at the bottom of the page. Even so, there's no excuse for missing it.

The upside of having waited so long is that when I finally found the shop I had plenty of Buttons to spend. Over ten thousand, in fact. More than enough to buy me both the outfit and the dyes to change the color. So I bought them all, which may have been a mistake.

Oh, not the outfit itself. The outfit is excellent. Flora's wearing it now and it makes a very nice change from running around in Lycra bicycle shorts under a netball skirt. It's the dyes I'm not so sure about.

They come in a pack of three - red, green and blue. At least I think those are the colors. It's hard to tell. They're very muted, particularly the green. Or maybe I mean unassuming. None of them is bad in any way, it's more that I'm not convinced any of them is an improvement over the basic silver and black look, which has a timeless kind of elegance about it.

Still, it's nice to have some wardrobe choices at last. If only the outfits weren't character-specific. Then all my characters could be unassuming, which would come as a huge shock to several of them, I'm sure. Not to mention they'd all be able to wear the Archmage outfit I won on the gacha board a couple of days back. That won't see use until and unless I win Iroi, too.

All the poses in the post, except the one below, were taken on the roof of Mint's building, which turned out to be the perfect place for a fashion shoot. I was there because visiting the Button Shop reminded me I hadn't finished everything I wanted to do in Warrens Continent yet. 

It's funny how a couple of weeks ago we (That's just me, Nimgimli and Mailvaltar really, I guess.) were complaining, or at least observing, that it looked as though we'd be doing nothing but the 999 Nights content for weeks and now here I am, having almost forgotten it was there, back running around Hethereau every day as if the update had never happened.

But it did and I'm back with it now. Not only do I want to finish the event itself but now I've seen inside the Button Shop there are a few more things I want to buy there. Not least the money.

Yes, you can buy money with buttons. Fons, specifically. If I can get enough buttons I might even be able to buy enough Fons to cover my losses at the Catzebo. They are substantial.

Also, I just realized this minute, as I typed the word "Catzebo" for the umpteenth time, that it has to be a pun on "Casino"; not, as I've been thinking until now, on "Gazebo". I really did think it was a joke about the cats all standing around in little, wooden huts...

And with that, I think I'd better make my exit. Fast. 

A Few Improvements Necessary - Things I'd Like To See In NTE

Something the developers - or maybe it's the publishers - of most of the open world gacha games I've played like to do is poll the players. Not the core fanbase, the people who follow the game on social media and chatter about it on Reddit and Discord, but all the people, the silent millions who actually play the games. Neverness To Everness has barely been out for a week and I've already completed two enormous in-game polls asking me how I feel about it.

The polls are multiple choice but they also have plenty of space to give your opinions and suggestions. The one I filled in yesterday ended, as they often do, by asking what I thought Hotta could do to make the game better. Given I'd picked "Very Satisfied" for almost every answer up to then, you might have thought I'd struggle to come up with anything but I didn't have any problem at all.

What the game is missing most, in my opinion, is personalization, something that applies to just about every game of its kind. When you have a business model that revolves around constantly encouraging players to add new characters to a team and then to swap from one character to another during gameplay, the underlying design mitigates against any form of personal identity for or identification with whatever character you're playing.

It doesn't much help that you can dress them up, either, especially when the only way you can acquire new clothes is through the cash shop. I'm not sure if that's the only way to do it in NTE because, as I told them in the poll, I haven't even looked at the cash shop offers yet, but if there's another method I haven't happened across it. 

I haven't taken a look at the cash shop yet because I'm a terrible, terrible customer as far as any game developer is concerned but especially for anyone operating any kind of Free To Play game. F2P to me really does mean free. I struggle to think of a single, wholly F2P game, where I've ever spent any money at all.

There are several reasons, the first and foremost of which is that I'm a mean-spirited old skinflint I barely have any desire to spend money on anything, period. I'm not much of a shopper, in or out of games. My default, baseline emotional reaction to just about anything I see up for sale is "Well, I'm sure I can manage perfectly well without that!" 

In games, I frequently don't bother to spend even the in-game currency other than on essentials. I just let it pile up until I need it for something practical. Money doesn't burn holes in my pockets, real or imaginary. 

Still, there are occasions when I might make an exception. I do like playing dress-up...

In fantasy games, I generally don't much care what my characters look like. Or, rather, I do but the games rarely want to facilitate my low-rent fashion aspirations. I'd quite like my characters to look like regular people but apparently that's not what I'm supposed to want.

Redbeard was saying something the other day about how hard it is to get a character in a fantasy MMORPG to look like an ordinary person rather than an extremely rich one but really that's the best scenario. Most player-characters in fantasy games look more like a ten year-old's idea of a super-hero than any member of the aristocracy. 

If you want to look like an average member of society, you'd often be best off sticking with whatever starting clothes the game gave you. You remember? The dull set that was clearly intended to make you as keen as possible to level up just so you could get out of them and into something better. 

In games with a contemporary setting or a near-future approximation thereof, the chances of putting together something that both feels natural and looks stylish tend to be a lot better. In the really good games you might even manage to dress your character in clothes that would look cool even to someone who doesn't play video games. I know! It's the dream, right?

My gold standard for dressing well in video games is still The Secret World. No other game I've played has ever done a better job of letting me create a character that looks like I wish I looked like in real life. Or indeed, who's dressed in clothes I'd be prepared to leave the house wearing. (It also lets you look like a crazy person who thinks it ought to be Halloween every day of the year, so there's something for everyone!)

One of the many things that's pulled me out of fantasy MMORPGs and into open world gacha titles over the last few years is the clothes. Everything just looks so much better. The design sensibilities and attention to detail are orders of magnitude beyond anything I'd been used to seeing in the games I'd been playing before (TSW always exempted.). The streets are full of NPCs who look like they actually thought about what to wear when they got up and obviously all the characters the company is hoping you'll pay money for are catwalk-ready.

The problem is, they never really change. All the characters have a signature look and they stick with it. There are cash shop options to change things up with appearance gear and sometimes it comes free with special events or holidays but if you don't want to spend money or wait for the rare opportunity, you're mostly going to have to keep on wearing the same old duds.

Where MMORPGs have the advantage is that they expect the player to have just a few characters, who they'll stick with for a long time, not constantly be acquiring new ones. To keep people playing they have to provide lots of chances to change things up for those characters, keep them fresh. New possibilities come at you from all directions: drops, quests, holidays, events, crafting, cash shops. There are so many ways in an MMORPG to keep your character looking... well, if not good then at least different. 

And players lap it up. Some even have fashion as a kind of end-game goal. It wasn't always that way. There was a time when you just wore what had the best stats and complained about how awful you looked but those days are long, long gone. Now every Western MMO has some form of transmog or appearance tab so you can wear your best fighting gear while looking like you're dressed for the Met Gala.

In most of the gacha games I've played there is no gear as such. I don't believe the characters even had a paper doll with gear slots in the traditional manner. Maybe a weapon slot if you're lucky. Or a hat. 

The notable exception, in my experience, was Noah's Heart although that was kind of a gacha/MMORPG hybrid. Noah's Heart did have a few gear slots but what it did that worked so well for me was allow me to fill them by mixing and matching items from each of my playable characters to build a look of my own. 

It managed that through a clever mix of an Affection system and crafting that made the process feel more organic. I played Noah's Heart for over a year, longer than I've played any pure gacha title so far, and although the general quality of the game and its story were both well below the standard of the market leaders, the main reason I stayed so long was that I was working on looks for my character. 

Not that it did the game much good. Noah's Heart, of course, is no longer with us. I think it's the only gacha game I've played that's not. It was the lack of polish that finished the game off but I don't imagine the way it let you dress your character up without spending any money did it any favors. I'm not really surprised other gacha games don't allow it.

I had all of this in the back of my mind when I filled out the poll and gave Hotta my considered opinion on what might make their already excellent game even better. I didn't have a lot of hope they'd be willing to add costumes and appearance gear as quest rewards or implement crafting so you could make your own clothes. 

Of course, I still asked. I mean, if you don't ask... 

What I thought might be a bit more realistic would be pets. Pets are great for making your character feel like an individual. And most games have them so they can't be that hard to add. I also think pets are something that could happily co-exist in a gacha game as both cash-shop items and in-game purchases or rewards.

I'm pretty sure I'm pushing on an open door here. Hethereau already has pet shops and it already has pettable dogs and cats, although you have to do a quest (That I've started but haven't finished.) before you can actually pet them. There's apparently even a hint or two in some conversation or other that a pet system might be coming, or so I've heard.

That was one thing I suggested in the poll. I wasn't the only one. 

I also suggested they should  add some form of crafting and gathering. It's hard to believe they don't have gathering already. Every game has gathering. And since they have housing, furniture and house items would be the obvious output. Can't say I have a lot of hope for that one either, since they already have a well-established in-game means of obtaining housing items via furniture shops but it's a possibility. 

The final suggestion I made, one that I'm sure must have been echoed by thousands of respondents, was for emotes to be added to the open world. There's already a very limited selection, maybe half a dozen of the most basic gestures, in the game already but they're accessible only when using the camera. Even then it's via a somewhat obscure menu option and they don't persist long enough for you to take a picture unless you're in snapshot mode. 

Well, they didn't for me, although I might have been doing something wrong. I was only testing it, anyway. I don't use emotes much, so their omission doesn't impact me significantly, but even I was surprised they weren't in the game from the start. What sort of anime game launches without a full suite of emotes? 

Not to mention dances. I haven't seen any of those, either. Damn! Should have thought of dances... And boats! I forgot boats...

Those were my suggestions to improve the game: better appearance options, crafting, gathering, a pet system and emotes. I'd bet we'll get a couple of those very soon indeed and a few of them sometime closer to never. 

Oh, and the other suggestion I made was that they add a PayPal option to the cash shop. That's the other main reason I never buy anything F2P games. They always want direct payments and I'm not happy about giving new companies I don't know much about my financial details. 

It's irrational in a way. I'll quite happily pay a subscription by credit card. Not sure what the difference is. Maybe I should have a rethink. I would actually spend a little money in some games, sometimes, if it wasn't for that.

Hey, who knows? Maybe NTE will be so successful they'll start selling currency cards in stores. Then I could ask for some for my birthday and Christmas. I should have suggested that, too. 

I'll mention it in the next poll. There's bound to be another in a week or two. 

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!