It's Only Rock 'n' Roll - Life In Hethereau

It's been three weeks, give or take, since Neverness To Everness went live and I believe I've played every day. If I was playing the game through Steam, I'd know how many hours I've put in but NTE isn't on Steam so I don't. 

I guess if I was that interested, I could download and install one of those game-time trackers I see people blogging about now and then but I think that really would be taking the whole thing too seriously. I'll just take a guess instead.

Let's see... I doubt I've played any less than an hour most days. Once or twice, like yesterday, I was so busy I really didn't have time to do more than log in, collect my minimum activity rewards and log out again but usually I get involved in something that takes at least a short session to finish and a short session these days would indeed be about an hour.

Often, though, I've played a lot longer than that. This morning, for example, I played for a couple of hours and it's odds-on I'll play for a couple more later today. There have been a few days where I played for three or four hours. Let's say that, over the course of the three weeks the game's been out, I've averaged two hours a day. That seems about right.

So, over forty hours so far. And after all of that, I'm a smidgeon from dinging Hunter Level 24, which is when the next chapter of the main storyline becomes available. I'll get enough xp from tomorrow's basic log-in reward, although I might do something before then that dings me sooner.

As Mailvaltar explained in the comments the other day, Hunter xp is quite specific. You don't get it from everything you do. It mostly comes from log-in dailies and quests. Not all quests, though, and mostly not the ones I've been doing.  

Thinking about it, 24 levels (Almost...) in 21 days in a game where the level cap is 40 (Yes, alright, technically it's 60, but 40 seems to be the de facto practical cap for now.) seems pretty slow by modern standards. And yet it feels anything but. Too fast, if anything, given that I've really made no attempt to chase xp.

If you stand on the fountains, it stops the water spurting up. Ask me how I know...

So what have I been doing? Ah, that's the question, isn't it? I'm not sure I have much of an answer. A bit of this... a bit of that...

Let's take this morning's session, for example. It was probably about average. It should give a fair impression of how most of my sessions turn out.

I logged in with the intention of collecting my basic "Here I am again!" rewards. Other than that, I didn't have much of a plan. I was thinking I might take a look at the clothing options, see if there was anything I could do about getting something different to wear, but that was about as far as I'd taken it.

And I did do some of that, eventually, but not until right at the end, just before I had to stop for lunch. As usual, I ended up spending most of my time trotting around the streets of Hethereau, admiring the view, taking screenshots and getting caught up in the quotidian life of what has to be the best-realized city I've had the pleasure of visiting in any game yet.

I wasn't just roaming around at random, although that is what I find myself doing, often as not. I did have some sort of goal in mind. I was going to stock up on coffee and food supplies to keep my three cafes going.

This is not anything I'd expected to be doing when I imagined playing the surreal, high-paced, action-packed magitech rpg, Neverness To Everness. It's definitely not the game I was expecting. It's a lot better than that.

Come on! It's on Moomin Street! Who'd say no to that?

Still, as a cafe manager, I'd have to admit my involvement so far has been something less than hands-on. Each time I pay the lease on a property and open a new cafe, I somehow manage to convince a couple of my friends into working there for nothing, while I bugger off and leave them to it. About the only active part I play in the running of the business is setting the menu and collecting the money.

I don't do the cooking. I don't think that's even an option. I don't serve customers either, although that definitely is something you can choose to do - if you're clinically insane. And since the first day, I haven't even done my own shopping. 

I do the ordering, That much I can manage. Even then, though, I've been opting to have the supplies delivered. I've been taking the largest available shipment each time, meaning it only takes me a couple of clicks once every three days to keep the place stocked, but I pay through the nose for doing it that way. Delivery charges are obviously part of one of the city's many extortion rackets.

This morning, for no good reason other than miserliness, I decided I'd go pick up my own supplies from the store and save myself some money. How hard could it be? 

As it happens, not very hard at all. NTE has some exemplary systems to support doing your own shopping. You can add everything you need, automatically, to a shopping list that appears on screen and if you click on each item it will tell you which stores, in which parts of town, stock it. It will even open the map for you and show you where to go. And when you get to the store, you can have the shopping list and the store's inventory open at the same time to see each item being checked off as you buy it.

Aand... it took me about an hour to figure all that out. I started off just working purely from memory, as in "Oh, that 24-hour convenience store where I helped the guy with his Fluffy problem probably sells what I need. I vaguely remember how to get there..." Well, he did sell me some milk, when I eventually found him...

Can you believe that other guy only had milk?!

As I was wandering about looking for food stores I just happened to notice a possible new location for my growing coffee shop empire. I'd been ignoring the prompts for ages but I had the cash and I was right there, so...

Now I rent and run four coffee shops. Is that too many? (Probably, yes. By about four, I'd say.) Not sure who's making the coffee and taking the money at the new one because I don't have any more friends left who aren't already working at one of my other sweatshops cafes. I'm probably going to have to split up one of the teams and send someone over to the new place, I guess. #Livinthemanagementlife, amiright?

I had to visit three different stores, one of which was in a part of town I'd never been to before, so that took a while, not least because of all the new photo opportunities. I got it all done, though, and with the money I was saving by not paying sky-high delivery charges, I was able to buy double what I needed of everything. 

It means next time I have to restock, in three days time, I can just do it from inventory. I'm restocking once a week, now, nearly. I imagine once you have the money, you could buy in bulk and barely ever have to shop again. I don't think anything ever expires. There's no item decay in the game.

All of that took me a while but of course I also had to deal with the various protection rackets, muggings and other street crimes that plague the streets of Hethereau, night and day. Not to mention stopping to check what all those crows and seagulls were carrying and to pick up all those lost wallets... 

You just keep telling yourself that, Rabi.

As I was jogging through the big square near Eidon, I saw a girl with a cute-looking Oddity so I stopped to take a photo and ended up agreeing to try a free sample of cake they were handing out, which led me to pick up some kind of quest or other from her father but then before I could do anything about it I'd found this amazing record store up some back alley and agreed with the slacker in charge to go look for an anomaly that had stolen the store's record player...

Obviously not before I took a bunch of screenshots. Priorities! I can only think of two games I've played where there's a record store you can go into and look at the album sleeves: this one and The Secret World. The one in TSW has the edge in terms of the music that's playing but this one is bigger and has more to look at, not to mention do there.

It's called Exile on Main Street, which is a great name for a record store. It would be even better if the store was actually on Main Street, of course, but bonus points for ambition, I guess. Also bonus points for the Pink Floyd quote on the wall. 

The line is "We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl" from "Wish You Were Here"

I was pretty curious to see how the musical theme developed, not least since Flora is now the (Very, very bad..) drummer in Haniel's band. That's not some head-cannon thing. It's an actual storyline in the game, one where you go to a dive club with Haniel, meet the woman behind the bar, Akane, who Haniel thinks is her friend but who's really just humoring her, and you both end up jamming on stage after the club closes, meaning Akane can't go home... 

That storyline is ongoing. Flora has jammed with Haniel twice and now Sakiri and Nanally look like they're going to get in on the act so we might have a full band soon. God help us.  

Anyway, I mention it only because, after a trip round half the shops in the area, following the trail of some mysterious, loud "Rock Music", I ended up back at Eidon, where I was fully expecting to find Sakiri and Nunally "rehearsing" in the TV room upstairs. 

I guess it'll be okay to leave her. I put her in the recovery position...

Instead, what I found was Hotori, passed out on the sofa, surrounded by empty wine bottles, drunk as a fucking skunk. This is why I love her! Also, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the quest I was on, which is why I love this game.

When I went over to see if she was OK, a sweet cut-scene triggered in which Flora covered her boss with a blanket and cleared up the mess. That was apparently from another quest I had running but about which I had completely forgotten. 

Once I was sure the boss wasn't going to choke on her own vomit, I went out onto the balcony where I found Sakiri with her Oddity, Kiroumarou, the one that eats everything then sicks it up later.

Naturally it transpired that Kiramourou had eaten the record player and then gone all round town with the music still playing from inside its stomach because that's something that happens. And the record was even still playing when Kiramourou threw it back up! I took the record-player and the record back to the shop and span some sort of tale to Sidd, the dope-head owner, so Sakiri and her pet wouldn't get into trouble.

Geez, Sakiri! Chill, won't you? He's just an oddity!

I just want to say at this point that Sakiri treats Kiramourou abominably. She yells at him, abuses him, threatens him... so far I've never seen her say one single nice thing to or about him. And yet he's always there with her, defending her, helping her, fighting for her. Granted, he's a complete liability, with no self-control whatsoever when it comes to stuffing his face full of anything he can grab hold of, but even so! 

She could be nicer to him. She should be nicer to him! There's no excuse for Oddity abuse and you can put that on a T-shirt.

By the time I'd done all that, I'd been playing for over two hours. I'd also filled out all the dailies without trying so when I claimed the rewards, I got a huge chunk of xp and it all but dinged me. 

When Flora does level up, which will be tomorrow, if it's not later today, I can get her back to the main quest line, at which point I suppose it's not impossible some kind of coherent narrative might start to develop, although I certainly haven't seen any sign of one yet.

Then again, as you can see from the above, I don't really need one. The game's more than entertaining enough as it is.

Thanks, But I Couldn't... Oh, Go On Then...

Want to know what I think of Baldur's Gate 3? I mean, I haven't actually finished it yet but Steam tells me I've played for nearly ninety hours so I guess I'm entitled to an opinion. And I have one.

It's too long!

Geez! Is it ever! I got to the end of Act II yesterday and immediately I was in two minds about whether I wanted to carry on. That's not the reaction a game ought to engender as you arrive at what should be the climax of the central narrative. There should be a thrilling sense of everything coming together at last. All will be revealed. One last, epic battle and roll the credits!

Instead I figured, given that Acts I and II had taken well over eighty hours, unless the whole thing was going to be ridiculously bottom-heavy, I probably had at least another thirty of forty hours of content still to go. Did I want it? Not really.

I took a break and had a bit of a think about it; whether to just quit, at least for now, but in the end curiosity won out. Before I took the road to the city of Baldur's Gate itself, though, and turned my back forever on Act II, I thought I'd go to the store to replace some supplies I needed. 

Except there was no store to go to, not in Act II. Not any that I could think of. All the vendors I'd seen since leaving the Underdark had been killed. Not that I could remember that there'd been more than one or two of them, anyway.

In fact, the last vendors I could remember were back in the mushroom area of the Underdark in Act I, which did seem to have far more vendors than the rest of the game. I considered whether there would be places to shop in Baldur's Gate itself. You'd think so but who knows? Best not take the chance.

Instead, I thought I'd just nip back and hit up the ones I was sure of before moving on. I knew there was no going back to the previous Act as far as questing went but shopping? That'd be okay, surely...

I knew where the elevator was to take me back down but when I got on that irritating "Dream Presence" appeared and started handing out Dire Warnings about what would happen if I broke my promise/shirked my duty.

Obviously, I ignored her. It was easy. Who ever listens to gnomes, anyway?

Back at character creation one of the things you're asked to do is pick an appearance for your "Guardian".  There is absolutely no explanation about who or what this "Guardian" is but I figured it was probably going to be one of those fairies or cartoon animals that flap around and give you unwanted advice in so many games. 

On that basis, I gave it the silliest appearance available and made it a gnome. Unfortunately, the Guardian aka Dream Presence turns out to be an extremely serious character with absolutely no sense of humor at all, just a whole load of portentous and mysterious promises and threats, none of which carry well when being delivered by a three-foot tall gnome in a ball gown.

That's an example of an uninformed choice. BG3 specializes in them. It's almost a feature. 

When I say BG3 is too long, that does depend to an extent on which choices you make. It can be a lot shorter if you decide to do something the developers didn't want you to do. For those they do try to steer you away but infinite saves make it hard to take the warnings seriously. 

My come-uppance just for trying to nip back and buy a few potions before getting on with the job was dramatic. I was immediately discovered by the Big Bad, who took control of my character and unleashed of an apocalyptic swarm of mindflayers the length of the Sword Coast. Up came a big, black "Game Over" screen. It didn't have "Told You So" on it but it might as well have done.

That was my third Game Over event. There was one where I refused to do something the developers clearly wanted me to do and all the True Souls ceramorphed into mindflayers and ate the whole of the Sword Coast or something. I forget the exact details but it wasn't a happy outcome. 

Then there was the time I backed up Gale, when he wanted to blow himself up to kill the Elder Brain. It seemed like a good idea at the time but he was standing right next to the rest of the party so when he exploded the castle fell down and everyone died including us. We did get the Brain though and I don't believe there was a mindlfayer apocalypse that time, so I'd call it a win, albeit a Pyrrhic one..

So I guess you can have a shorter game if you want. Just not a very satisfying one. Assuming you want anything that feels like a "good" ending, you have to keep on slogging through and trying not to piss off the people who made the game, who are all clearly some variant of Lawful Alignment. Chaotic behavior really riles them up.

Here's the thing. BG3 very much wants to have cake, eat cake and keep plenty more cake for later. It wants you to have freedom to choose but to make the choice it intended you to make all along. 

For a game that prides itself on flexibility and verisimilitude, it also does not place a great deal of stock in logic or consistency. There's a good deal of talk about urgency and time running out and once in a while, if you don't get a move on, something will happen without you. Mostly, though, everything waits until you have the time and inclination to deal with it.

Four can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

Some of the more jarringly game-like moments come with the many times NPCs stand around and completely ignore what's happening because they don't have a script to tell them how to react. As I discovered in Act I, if you manage to set something up so as to kill a bunch of baddies without them knowing you've done it, the rest of them just stand around next to the dead bodies as if nothing happened. And they'll keep doing it forever unless you initiate something.

More mildly, lots of dialogs don't really address or recognize events that have happened if they weren't quite what the game expected. Some of this is probably unavoidable but sometimes it just looks lazy. 

After an absolutely titanic battle at the end of Act II, one that would have worked perfectly well as the climax to the whole game in my opinion, my character enjoyed a very lengthy post-battle dialog with someone, while the other three members of her party stood behind her and listened. 

Except two of them had been killed in the fight and were really lying dead at her feet. As soon as the dialog ended I had to figure out how to get back to camp and have Withers resurrect them, at which point they all magically seemed to know what had happened while they were dead. I guess the explanation is in the word "magically" but it's not a good explanation, is it?

There's nothing wrong with any of this per se. Video games aren't perfect reflections of some alternate reality, just clever mock-ups. Larian have likely taken things about as far as the technology allows. The problem is that they've tried to go wide as well. 

The story in BG3 is very much not a linear narrative. There's a through-line, sure, but it has a bewildering number of branches. That would have been more than enough but there are also any number of smaller stories that appear to have no direct significance to the core storyline. Sometimes it turns out they do, after all, but not always.

This makes sense in Act I, where everything is new and unfamiliar and who knows what might turn out to be relevant. It's less convincing in Act II, when the stakes are higher and the urgency more obvious. By the final act, surely, everything should come to a head with no time for seemingly irrelevant distractions.

Hah! Good luck with that!

Once I'd reloaded and pretended I'd never tried to go back into the Underdark after all, and after a somewhat unexpected event in camp that I won't attempt to recount, the party finally arrived in Act III proper only to find themselves in a sprawling suburb, packed with refugees, all yelling about their myriad problems. It was like stepping into a completely different game.  

It's a long walk to the shops...

I looked at the sheer scale of the place, which wasn't even the city itself, just a village outside the walls, and decided I had a whole lot of "content" still ahead of me, even before I got inside. Too much. 

Rather than engage with any of it, I just started wandering around, opening up the map, which inevitably led to meetings with a bunch of people asking me to do things for them or trying to kill me. Before I'd even thought about it, I had a whole new set of quests, some of which looked like they might be related to the main plot and others which seemed like obvious side-stories.

To be fair to the designers, there's almost always an option somewhere in the dialog along the lines of "I'm far too busy saving the world to bother with your trivial little problem" but you'd need to be a sociopath to feel comfortable taking it. It's like the "You can do this if you insist but it means the end of the world if you do" options I was complaining about earlier. They're mostly there to say "well, you had a choice" but it's really no choice at all.

So here I am now in Act III, with the whole of Faerun supposedly teetering on the edge of extinction and only me and my team standing ready to pull it back and what am I doing? Solving the murder of a priest, exposing a blackmail ring and investigating an extremely dubious circus. Oh, and watching an ox turn into an apple. I ought to sell that ox to the circus...

With Act III the whole thing suddenly turns into some kind of point&click adventure game only without the pointing and clicking. It's a very odd pivot. One minute we're in the planes arguing with god-queens, the next we're looking for evidence to present a murder case to the investigating officer (Who just happens to be a flying elephant but we don't talk about that.)

I'm aware that some of this is going to tie in to the main plot. That's already apparent. I'm fairly sure that some of it won't, though, and even if it all did, it'd still be a bizarre way to carry on after what felt like a genuinely climactic ending to Act II. It's as if the whole game is starting over again.

And that's really what I mean about BG3 being too long. They could quite reasonably have released each of the three acts as separate games. There has to be at least fifty hours of solid content in each of them, easily enough for a full-price release, even without the high replayability factor. 

Would I rather have had a trilogy of more compact RPGs? Yes, I think I would. I think that would have left me wanting more, which is supposed to be the entertainer's mantra. Instead I find myself wanting less. 

It would also have meant a new game to look forward to every two or three years rather than a long wait and then a huge splurge. Expectation and excitement would have built to a glorious climax instead of exhaustion setting in well before the end.

I should make it clear, before someone points it out in the comments that, yes, obviously I could just pace myself. I could take a break between acts or more as I go along. I could even play Act I now, Act II next year and Act III the year after that, if I really would have preferred a trilogy.

I could but naturally I won't. Who does that? Like most people, I'll either binge 'til I finish or rage-quit and never go back when it gets to be too much. 

For all the praise the game has received, I'm guessing mine might not be as much of an outlying reaction as all that, either. Looking at the Steam Achievements, of which there's handily one for reaching each Act after the first, I see that only barely over half of all players even make it as far as Act II. 50.7% to be precise. By the time they get to Act III, that falls to a sliver under 40%. 

Nearly two-thirds of all the people who played the game didn't even stay for the final act. I wonder how many got to the very end? And will I be one of them?

I guess I'll find out soon enough. If you call another forty or fifty hours. soon, that is.

Slackers, Wannabes And Chancers Need Not Apply

Due to circumstances beyond my control (Multiple mildly annoying real life events, mostly of the things breaking down or needing to be replaced variety, having to be dealt with at once.) posts here may be a tad more sporadic than usual for a while, and/or shorter, and/or obviously cobbled together in a few minutes with little or no regard to whether they make sense/are of interest to anyone/appear to be in any way original or worth the virtual paper they're written on. 

Whether anyone would have noticed if I hadn't just pointed it out is another question altogether...

Anyway, in that spirit, here's something I bookmarked to write a thoughtful and considered post about and then did this instead.

Up there at the top, that's the splash for the new EverQuest II Content Creator Program as announced by Senior Community Manager Angeliana on the forums on Friday. What the significance of the image might be I have no idea. It looks like Ice vs Fire but how that has anything to do with creating content beats me. I guess it might be a metaphor but if so I can't imagine how it would be a complimentary one. When fire and ice meet, all you get is a lot of steam.

The forum post itself contains a daunting amount of detail about the new program. A lot of it seemed slightly odd to me and some of it I felt almost verged on the passive-aggressive, as if whoever wrote it was anticipating people trying to blag their way onto the program without having the necessary bona fides. Then again, gamers, so...

The elevator pitch is that the program offers "an official initiative by Daybreak Games to support and empower creators who bring the world of EQII to life." but when you read the whole thing it seems more like an attempt to spin up some social media presence, something the game is currently lacking, by handing out bribes. 

Not a bad idea at all. What surprised me were the requirements for inclusion in the program, which seem very stringent, especially for a twenty year-old MMORPG with a relatively small player-base, and most especially in view of the way that player-base skews towards the upper end of the age scale, at least for online gaming. 

Nevertheless, Angeliana is uncompromising in her determination to professionalize the enterprise. The whole things begins with this statement of intent:

"This is the first official round of the Creator Program. Spots are limited, and while many applicants may meet the base requirements, acceptance is not guaranteed. We’re prioritizing active, engaged creators who align with the goals of the program and can help us shape the future of the EQII community."

My first thought was to wonder if there would be enough interest to fill the available spots at all. The idea that there will be such a rush to join that spots need to be limited seems a little fanciful. How many EQII players even use social media, much less create it, I wonder? Is there really going to be that much competition for places?

Further down the announcement there are some quite specific entry requirements:

"Who can apply?

• Creators aged 18+
• Content makers generating at least 15 pieces of content in the last 90 days across at least three categories (Streaming, Writing, Long-form Video, Short-form Video, Podcasting, Social Reach)
• Must be in good standing in the EverQuest II community"

Over 18s only is standard, of course, and being in "good standing" (I.e. not currently banned or suspended from the game.) makes perfect sense.  I don't have an issue with any of that. 

It's the "15 pieces of content in the last 90 days across at least three categories" part that I find hard to rationalize. I mean, even as an either/or, it seems like a big barrier to entry but both?

And while it's very nice to see blogs included among social media. (It says "writing" in the above quote but elsewhere blogs are specifically mentioned.), who is out there writing blog posts, making videos and podcasting about EQII more than once a week? Anyone? Enough people to make restricted access to a program specifically designed for them necessary?

In case what's expected isn't clear enough from the bullet points, the announcement goes on to delineate the expected participation levels in excruciating detail:

Eligible Content Types (must meet at least 3):

• Streaming:
  • Streamed at least 3 times in the last 90 days
  • VODs must be viewable
  • Must average 10+ concurrent viewers
• Social Short-Form Video Content:
  • Posted at least 3 videos in the last 90 days
  • Platforms include TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc.
• Writing:
  • Written at least 3 articles in the last 90 days
• Long-Form Video Content:
  • Produced at least 3 videos, each 15 minutes or longer, in the last 90 days
• Podcasting:
  • Produced at least 3 podcast episodes in the last 90 days
• Social Media Reach:
  • Have at least 200 combined followers across all platforms
  • Posted at least 9 Social posts in the last 90 days
• X, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Other

So, you need to be active across a number of platforms and operate using a number of media and be consistent about it before you're deemed worthy of consideration for one of the limited places on the program. For which, if accepted, you will be entitled to:

Full access to all adventure packs and expansions through the most recent release

All-access account status

Marketplace cash each month for in-game use

Content Codes to give away to your audience

Access to promo content and preview codes for upcoming expansions

Opportunities to be featured in official EQII social media or articles

Which, actually, isn't bad. You get free expansions beyond the ones that are already free anyway. You get your subscription paid, which is worth a decent chunk of cash. You get some toy money to spend in the game (Although I wonder if that's just the 500DBC you get for being an All Access member anyway?)

You get giveaways for your audience (Twitch Codes and the like, presumably.) You get a first look at the new stuff (Which as far as expansions go, you would generally get for pre-ordering anyway, so once again, probably nothing you couldn't already get as a regular player, just for free.) so you can write/talk/video about it, presumably, unless it's under NDA, of course. And you get to be talked about by people who actually get paid to do what you're doing for free. Big whoop.

Personally, I'd rather pay for my own expansions and All Access membership and get to see everything at the same time as everyone else. I never use the beta access for Game Updates or expansions because it spoils the fun when the real thing arrives and as for getting the expansions and membership for free, I always feel that if someone's giving me stuff like that, even if they make it plain there are no strings, there are ALWAYS strings.

At the very least it makes me feel uncomfortable if I want to say something negative. It's bad-mannered, like accepting an invite to a dinner party, eating the food and then criticizing the host's taste in wallpaper and soft furnishings. I mean, you can, if you want, but everyone's going to think you're a dick, even if they secretly agree with you and so they should.

At this point, if I really wanted to bulk this post out, I'd have no trouble doing it. The announcement goes on and on and on... I could cut and past half a dozen more sections like the above, most of which repeat the previous ones and maybe find something to say about them but that would be as much of an overkill as the thing itself. 

Why there needs to be such a wealth of detail in the opening announcement beats me. Maybe the legal team wrote it. It certainly reads like it.

Anyway, I won't be applying but I can think of two or three bloggers who'd I'd happily endorse if they were interested. I imagine they'd have more sense than to apply, though.

I'll be interested to see if the whole thing goes anywhere. I suspect it won't but I'll be happy enough if it does. More coverage of EQII out in the world would be nice, especially if I can scrape it for posts of my own!

A Progressive Attitude

I thought I might give a little progress report on where things stand for me in Dawnlands right now. I'm still playing every day, give or take. I first posted about the game on 10 August, when I'd just installed it. Just over five weeks later, Steam tells me I've played for exactly 82 hours, which averages out to a little over two hours a day; pretty close to how I've been playing.

There's no padding in those numbers, either. I've been scrupulous in not leaving the game running when I'm afk and I've hardly even tabbed out to look stuff up while logged in. If it says I was playing, I really was playing.

For all that time and effort, I've haven't even managed to complete 10% of the content. To be precise, my "Proportion Explored" stat currently stands at 8.43%. 

I don't know exactly what's included in that count but I'm guessing 100% would mean at least removing all the "fog of war" from the whole map and exposing all the marked Points of Interest. It could mean much more than that, like maybe unlocking every recipe, completing every achievment or even ticking every box the game would like you to tick. There are many.

Whatever it means, since only six of the proposed ten biomes are currently available and assuming an even distribution (It's not remotely even but let's pretend it is for now.) it's possible I've really only explored 8.43% of 60% of the content, which would be even less in absolute terms - barely over 5% of the whole thing - but more like 14% of what's actually possible at the moment.

Even if I have explored 8.43% of the entire map and/or consumed 8.43% of the total content, it's still not one hell of a lot to show for eighty fricken' hours! It's not even two per cent a week!

Someone might want to check my math there, by the way. I got Bard to do it but I'm not sure it entirely understood what I was asking. I know I didn't...

However much or little I've done, there's clearly a lot more left to go. According to the Sealing Progress charts, I'm almost done with Grasslands (93.5%). Plains (87.1%) and Forest (82.5%) are closing in fast but I've barely scratched the surfaces of Black Forest (15.2%), Swamp (13.4%) or Snow Mountain (3%).

Here, once again, I'm somewhat confused. Swamp and Black Forest are listed as separate biomes but they seem to be intermixed on the map and in the world. They either share the same Boss (Lynd) or one of them doesn't have a boss at all. They do each have their own progress ladder, though, so they definitely count as two, separate biomes.

In terms of the storyline, my next target is indeed Lynd, my first task being to find him (Her, Them, It. I mean, the thing looks like a tapeworm bursting out of an elk - the last thing I need to be thinking about is what pronoun to use. Except that's exactly what I am thinking about...) 

Black Forest by night. More like indigo, I'd say.

It really doesn't help that none of the "official" sources agrees on what to call the biome where Lynd lives. The game calls it Black Forest but the wiki uses both "Dark Forest" and, most confusingly of all, "Black Swamp". As it happens, I know where Lynd is because I stumbled across the Seal while I was looking for iron ore.

I also know what he looks and sounds like because I clicked on the Seal to see what items I'd need to collect to summon him and it turns out you don't need any! He spawned on top of me and started yelling threats so I ran the hell away.

After that little escapade I watched a few videos of supposed quick or safe ways to kill Lynd. None of them look very quick or safe to me so I'm not in any hurry to try. 

It's not like I need to move the needle yet a while, anyway. It's true that much (Although by no means all.) of the crafting in the game is tied to the Sealing process. You do need the new tier of pickaxe that becomes available after the death of each boss to mine the new ore you find in the next biome and you do need that ore to craft the next tier of armor. Despite all that, the game offers considerable flexibility in how you choose to progress.

A lot of recipes are tied not to the death of bosses but to your level. You get a drip-feed of new options as you level up. There is a hard cap on levels tied to each boss but I've never found myself short of things to do even when I hit that cap. In fact, it takes me all my time keeping up with what is available and even then I'm generally falling behind rather than surging ahead.

Swamp by day. Surprisingly pretty, isn't it?

As for handling the general difficulty that comes with a new biome, there's a big overlap that makes it perfectly reasonable to carry on in the armor you already have, provided you also take the trouble to upgrade it as far as it will go. Just this morning I finished my full, upgraded set of Refined Dark Iron Armor (Well, almost. Still need to do a couple more upgrades on the belt.) but I'm not wearing it yet.

The reason for that is item decay, one of the few things about Dawnlands I'm not completely sold on, although I think it's far less of a problem than some of the hysterical rants I've seen would like you to believe. All armor is repairable and although making repairs causes durability to decline, I've never yet had a repairable item reach the point where it couldn't be refurbished and put back into service as good as new before I'd replaced it with something better anyway. 

Nice set bonuses, too.

Repairs are instantaneous and free. You do need a workbench or anvil that's been upgraded to the appropriate level, which means going home to repair, but armor decays quite slowly. Unless you play every hour god sends and never go back to base, if you find your armor falling apart in the field you most likely have only yourself to blame. 

Added to that, the higher the armor tier you access, the further you can upgrade. My new Dark Iron set, can be upgraded from a baseline 250HP to 1000HP. The Bronze I'm wearing starts at 200HP and goes to 800HP (From memory...) At those levels I rarely need to repair at all and it's difficult to imagine that I'll ever need to replace any of the pieces now I've upgraded them. Even so, natural caution makes me reluctant to move on from an existing set before I have to and the Bronze still seems to be doing a good job so why swap?

Tools and weapons are a different matter altogether. Although you can still upgrade them in the same way, they are unrepairable. I've taken to prioritizing weapons and tools as soon as I open each crafting tier before moving on to armor. Fully upgraded, weapons last a good while but picks and axes feel like they wear down more quickly. It's probably identical but of course you do tend to hit ore nodes and trees a lot more times in a session than you hit monsters - or I do, anyway.

Given the rate of decay and the inability to repair, I tend to make spare tools and weapons so I can carry on when they break. I also swap my higher ones out for my lower ones whenever the lower ones are up to the task in hand and I try to avoid using my good axes as a weapons, although it's often just too convenient to resist. I really like axes.

The forecast said snow...

 All in all, I don't find the system too onerous. I wouldn't even remove item decay, given the choice; I'd just make tools and weapons repairable in the same way armor is. I do think that having decay and repair nudges lazier players like me into making the effort to go all the way down the upgrade path rather than, as I'm pretty sure I would otherwise, stopping at the minimum viable option.

In gameplay terms, it means I spend a lot more time planning and thinking ahead instead of just rushing off into the wilderness unprepared. It also means that much of my gameplay consists of looking for nodes or other sources of materials, collecting them, bringing them back to base, refining them and finally using them to craft and upgrade my gear.

It's time-consuming but absorbing. I spent two full sessions last week, scouring the entirety of the Grasslands and a good portion of the Forest for Phantom Crystals, a resource that seems plentiful in the early days but which rapidly becomes scarce. They're needed for part of the upgrade process for higher tier armor and weapons as well as for the starting gear so they remain in demand but because most resource nodes in Dawnlands don't regenerate, what started out as a trivial activity eventually becomes somewhat challenging.

Leaving aside the opaque Exploration percentages, what I do know is that I have two bosses left to kill and at least two more armor sets to make. There's a cold weather set that I've already started on but which I think will require items from Lynd to upgrade in full and a Mithril set that certainly will. The same applies to the mithril tools and weapons. There's also one locked and as yet unknown crafting station that probably won't reveal itself until I seal Lynd away either.

Based on my current rate of progress, I'd guess that could take as much as another forty or fifty hours, always assuming I could even manage to beat Lynd at  all, let alone seal the fifth and currently final boss, Niedner. He looks very tough and without him, there's no Mithril armor.

Something for every occasion.

I'm in no hurry. I have a lot of work still to do to get my complete set of upgraded cold weather armor and I haven't even started building a castle. That's not any part of progression but since there are a whole set of recipes for castle-building, it would seem crazy not to build one. 

There are also recipes for building a mining railway complete with working mine-carts. I'm not entirely sure if there's any practical benefit to doing it but once again, if it's there...

To re-iterate something I've said before, I've read quite a few critical reviews that talk about Dawnlands as some kind of predatory gacha game. While it does now have some gacha mechanics for cosmetics, it didn't at the time these comments were made. People see want they want to see. 

The non-respawning of nodes and the need for pages to unlock crafting recipes have also been cited as evidence of unreasonable monetization. After more than eighty hours, I have seen absolutely no sign of any of that.

With the sole exception of Phantom Crystals, which as far as I can tell you can't buy for real money anyway, every other resource remains far more plentiful than I can imagine needing. There are nodes everywhere in the areas I've explored and there are vast tracts of land I haven't even visited yet.

As for recipes, I've been able to buy everything I wanted immediately and I still have more than a hundred pages saved. Unless you want to buy every recipe as soon as it appears, just for the sake of owning it, I can't see what the problem is.

Well, yes, I think I can. It's a lack of patience. I guess if you have to have everything right away you might find Dawnlands a little frustrating. Maybe then you would try to buy your way out of the problem although I'm not at all sure you'd be able to; most of the basics aren't really for sale in large quantities and even the small amounts available only change hands for in-game currency.

It seems to me that the only real requirement for steady progress is to play the game, which suits me fine. I'm doing that already and very happy to do it I am, too.

The Main Idea

A few seemingly random ideas, floating around the blogosphere of late, coalesced into a mini-epiphany for me this morning: How We Play Now. Or how I play now, anyway. 

First there was MassivelyOP, asking how good a fit alts are for the genre these days. Then there was Shintar, talking about the appeal, or lack therof in Star Wars: the Old Republic's new combat styles. Redbeard was musing at length about the joys of old-school class quests in World of Warcraft and Yeebo was enjoying the parts of EverQuest II that time seems barely to have touched.

Meanwhile, I was sailing happily through Guild Wars 2's latest expansion, End of Dragons, following the story and ticking off boxes. Story's a big thing in mmorpgs nowadays. Given Final Fantasy XIV's surge it could well become bigger still. Kaylriene's surely not the only one wondering if narrative spines with the heft of movies are where the future lies. Maybe BioWare were right all along.

I did take a brief sidetrip to Norrath to check out EQII's latest dungeon but other than that all the mmorpgs I'd happily been playing this year are back on the virtual shelf. By now my house in Chimeraland must be thick with moss and I can't even remember what I was doing in Lost Ark. I know I was well past the flooded dungeon Wilhelm enjoyed so much but there's still a fair old way to go before I can join in the latest bizarre event, for which you need to be a minimum of Level 50.

Cast adrift behind me as I navigate these choppy seas are the abandoned hulls of countless mmorpgs, some of them rotting hulks, barely breaking the waterline as they sink into oblivion, others calmly adrift, so many Marie Celestes, just waiting for the crew to return. It's a very different picture from the way things looked a decade ago, let alone back at the beginning, when the century was just about to turn.

The Friendly Necromancer, aka Stingite, has just started playing New World. He's not bothered that he's arriving in Aeternum just as everyone has left. Nor should he be. It's a great game for at least fifty levels. After that... well, I wouldn't know. 

As I said in a comment on his post "I got well over a couple of hundred hours out of it before I drifted away. If that was a single-player title I think we'd all agree it was value for money. Why mmorpgs are supposed to provide endless entertainment for the same box price is unclear."

It's a question that was a lot easier to answer back when nearly all mmorpgs came with a monthly subscription. They were supposed to provide endless entertainment because we were endlessly paying for them. Now they're mostly either free or the same single purchase cost as any other video game, that doesn't really wash.

Even if we were content to take our forty or sixty or a hundred hours of value and move on, mmorpg developers can't afford to let us leave satisfied. They need to keep us around so we'll spend money in the cash shop or pay the premium that stands in for an optional sub. Preferably both.

A chunk of cash from the box sale is a nice bonus but as many developers have found to their cost, even a one-off charge can dampen interest to the point where it's deemed to have damaged the game's long-term prospects. If you have to give the game away free, focus moves to keeping players logging in long enough to spend money, which is why we end up with both huge swathes of Free Stuff! just for turning up and insanely long, drawn-out or difficult grinds to get anything worth having.

In-game goals that take forever or have you doing the same thing over and over again are, of course, intrinsic to the genre anyway. Free to Play didn't invent this stuff. Remember one of EverQuest's many snide nicknames - Evercamp? 

The whole genre has always revolved around extremely time-consuming content, frequently highly repetitive, often not all that entertaining, if looked at objectively. Over time those unappealing yet compulsive concepts have been refined and concentrated until they're about as potent as they can be. They've also largely been shifted away from the begining of the games so as not to frighten away nervous customers.

There's always been a high reported rate of attrition in the early stages of all games but at least, when you were making people pay an up-front fee, there was a fighting chance sunk cost woud keep them around, at least for the time they'd paid for. Investment in a free to play mmorpg is more fragile; no more than the few minutes it took to download.

That's why all F2P mmorpgs start off easy, something that's pretty much the diametric opposite of the introduction subscription games used to offer. If your first experience of a new free mmorpg consisted of falling off the starting platform and not being able to find the way back up, forcing you to re-roll, or having the first questgiver you spoke to punch you to death, chances are you'd uninstall.

It's also why story feels so important now. Levelling doesn't matter any more and no-one really cares about gear or skills until the cap. There has to be something to attach yourself to, something to keep you playing until you get to the endgame. Why not "What happens next?"

There's not much that's inherently bad about any of this. It's not like the old ways of playing were flawless fun. What's ironic is the way some of the changes seem to work in direct opposition to the supposed goals.

Let's go back to that question about alts and whether playing multiple characters in the same game works any more. Why did people do it in the first place? I can't speak for players in general but I know why I did: to have new experiences.

In the older mmorpgs, starting a new character usually meant playing through new content. Most games had multiple starting areas, usually based around race. Dwarves generally did not live with Elves nor Orcs with Humans. There would be a new town to visit and a different newbie zone or two at the very least. Sometimes the hunting zones wouldn't converge until you'd been playing a character for days or even weeks.

In those days, classes often tended to be race-locked, too. There's a controversy today concerning gender-locking that derives from a desire to see real-world identity accurately represented in the gameworld but locking race to class is purely a gameplay issue. If you start from the premise, as most high fantasy games do, that in-game races have hardcoded belief systems, meaning you have to roll an evil race to play a Shadowknight but a good race to play a Paladin, any player who wants to find out which class suits them better is going to have to make at least one alt.

Many of us ended up making alt after alt not because we wanted to play those characters at endgame but because we wanted to see the places where they lived and try out the classes they could become. There aren't many old school mmorpgs I've ever played where I haven't left half a dozen characters behind. In some it's double figures and in one or two it's more than a score.

As I played those characters, some of them grew on me while others didn't. I never knew which would click until I tried so I kept trying. There are mmorpgs I ended up playing for twice as long as I expected because an alt caught my attention and carried on well past the point where I was back playing the same game I'd already played as someone else.

Having new things to see, fresh creatures to kill and different stories to follow extended the life of the games and kept me logging in. I was never a player who aimed for the endgame. If I got there at all I usually saw it as the perfect opportunity to roll another character and go back to the beginning - a new start.

All of that would seem on the surface to be an ideal fit with the supposed desires of free to play developers; keep the punters playing and maybe we can sell them stuff. Of course, it's not quite that simple.

One of the more expensive aspects of running a live service mmorpg has to be content creation. Five genuinely different races with five genuinely different starting areas is five times the work for artists, animators and writers. Okay, maybe not five times; there are probably some synergies. It's more work, though, for sure, and work costs money.

As well as the cost of creating all that extra content there's the non-trivial risk of splitting the playerbase. Free to play games rely on looking Busy! and Popular! to new players. When you make your first character and log in to a new mmorpg, you want to be sure you're making the right choice. There are so many to choose from nowadays. You wouldn't want to pick one no-one else plays.

If you have five starting areas, even if they're all equally popular, which they won't be, each of them is going to be eighty per cent emptier than if you funnelled everyone into the same one. Apart from the first few days or, if your game is exceptionally successful, weeks, pretty much anywhere outside The Bubble is going to feel empty enough, without having people starting on different continents.

Once you've made everyone start in the same place, you might as well make them all look the same, too. It certainly saves on animators and it's well-known that most players want to play pretty people who look like idealised versions of themselves. The whole Dungeons and Dragons derived notion of racial advantages and disadvantages got thrown under a bus years ago so racial choices are purely cosmetic. They have to be or they get metagamed and no-one rolls the bad ones.

There's a trend at work here, even if it didn't start with F2P and it's far from universal or consistent. Every developer has some idiosyncratic ideas that don't fit the mold, whether it's Chimeraland with its dozens of wildly varying racial appearances, all entirely irrelvant to gameplay, or New World with its multiple starting areas, where every new player arrives with the identical back story.

The trend is convergence. Whatever variety the games once had it's less now. Sometimes that's managed with the player's convenience in mind, others very much the reverse.

Shintar's post, linked above, discusses the recent change to SW:tOR that allows players to try out different combat styles without having to re-roll as the classes to which they have hitherto been locked. As Shintar acknowledges there are pros and cons, but from an outsider's perspective it does at least look like a well-intentioned addition to the game.

The revelation that ArenaNet have chosen to lock every new End of Dragons Elite Specialization behind story completion looks, by contrast, very much like a cynical attempt to compel players to spend a lot longer replaying the same content than they might otherwise have done. As Eliot at MOP archly observes, it does make you wonder whether some of these people even play their own game.

It's not hard to see where this is all going. FFXIV, arguably the current market leader in the West, is pretty much there already. With every class and job being available to a single character and every racial appearance just a glamor away, there was never much incentive to roll alts there. Some people, inevitably, did it anyway. but as the Main Story Quest grows to the length of several movie box sets, the number of players who are likely to try seems vanishingly small. 

Which brings me back to where I started, namely my own mini-epiphany. I used to have a clear view of my identity as an mmorpg player; when it came to alts, I wasn't just an altaholic, I was a player who simply did not have either "alts" or "mains". I just had characters, some of which I played more than others.

For a long time that was objectively true. I had lower level characters in some games with more played hours than higher ones. I logged in characters according to mood and whim every bit as much as what I was meant to be working on right then. I would play healers or tanks or crowd control or dps to fit in with other people or just because that's what I wanted to play, forget about whether it fitted anyone else's agenda at all.

It's been a while since almost any of that was true. I just hadn't noticed until now. About the last new mmorpg I played where I followed that pattern has to be Guild Wars 2 and that's a decade old this summer. 

I certainly followed my pattern there at first, buying three accounts and making more than twenty characters. It's been a long time, though, since I can truly say I play more than a handful of them and I can't deny any longer that I clearly have a Main, my original Asura Elementalist. 

Until End of Dragons I had a "Story Main", too; my Asura Druid, who I'd played through both previous expansion storylines and every Living Story episode as well. This time around he stayed on the bench as I took my Ele through the story instead. It seems I really am down to just the one Main.

If I look at all the recent mmorpgs I've played and written about here recently - Lost Ark, Chimeraland, New World, Bless Unleashed - or the mmo-adjacent Valheim and Genshin Impact - I have just one character in all of them. 

Going back a little, I only made single characters in Blade and Soul, Riders of Icarus, SW:tOR, Elder Scrolls Online, Secret World Legends, ArcheAge... Even in mmorpgs where I did roll more than one character, Black Desert for example, it was only because I came back and started over from scratch.

Some of it - a lot of it - comes down to the kinds of content compaction I've been describing but I think I also need to accept that, after more than twenty years of doing this, the allure of starting over in the same game doesn't have the magnetic pull it once did. Time was, I just couldn't stop myself. Now I find it all too easy to say no.

Once again, I'm not sure it's a bad thing. I'm going to have to think about it. It may be that, now I've drawn my own attention to what's been happening, I'll begin behaving differently. Sometimes all it takes is an awareness for perceptions to shift. 

Or maybe I'll just settle into it, get comfortable, learn to enjoy playing the way other people have always played. After all, it looks as though I've been playing that way for a while without even realising. Maybe I like it better and just don't know, yet.

However it pans out, one thing I can say for certain sure is that I will not be playing through the entirety of the End of Dragons story nine more times. Not even if it's the last expansion GW2 ever gets. 

It was good but it wasn't that good. ANet need to get over themselves.

I've Got A Lot Of Catching Up To Do

 

In a desperate attempt to prove there are other games available besides Valheim (which I just this morning gifted to Mrs. Bhagpuss after she expressed repeated interest in trying it, so we'll see where that goes...), this morning I finally got around to doing something I'd been meaning to do all week, namely log in to EverQuest II.  

I'd been meaning to drop by to celebrate Erollisi Day. It isn't my favorite Norrathian holiday but it's in the top five. (I totally should do a Top Five. A Top Ten even.) It's been running for a while now. I knew there was some fresh content in the form of a new quest and some crafting recipes, plus new rewards for some of the older activities, including that excellent Public Quest I always enjoy doing.

Luckily there are still a few days left. Time to check out the new quest, grab the recipe books and maybe do an old favorite or two. It ends on the twenty-fourth, after which there's a brief respite until Brewday arrives on the fifth of March. Brewday definitely would not make my Top Five. (Damn! I really have to do that...).

It's been a while since I logged in, which is not something I was expecting to be writing about EQII at this point of the expansion cycle. I was thinking I'd still be taking characters through the Reign of Shadows storyline by now and working on all the detailed upgrading and filling out of various slots and abilities that come with vertical progression.

That's not what's been happening but it's very much not the fault either of EQII or the expansion, which I thought was first rate. It's just that I seem to have entered an enthusiasm phase for gaming in general, one where everywhere I look I see things I want to play. Ironic, isn't it, after I was mithering about not really feeling it just a month or so back ? 

It looks as if EQII will very much be back on the schedule soon, though. When I opened the launcher the first thing I noticed was a link to a new episode of the dev podcast, Kander's Candor. It's Season Two : Episode One and it's available through all the usual channels. I like to listen to it on Anchor, which is incredibly simple and unfussy to use.

I had it on in the background as I played through Heartbreaker, the new Errolisi Day quest. It's a classic holiday story of cursed flowers, disruptive demigods and vendors who just want to make a buck. If you're an EQII player and you like the kind of quests you're familiar with from playing EQII then you'll like this one because it's just like all the others. I loved it.

Since I knew exactly how it would go and I was following the walkthrough on the wiki, I had plenty of mental capacity to spare not only to listen to the podcast but even to make notes. I could woerk them up into something more elaborate but I think the notes make pretty solid bullet points just as I wrote them down.

• Lofty plans for the year
• Company "absolutely re-investing in EQII" (and EQ)
• New nodes to reduce lag
• PQs had been off development because they addded to lag
• "Feel like we're in good and safe hands" with new owners
• Blood of Luclin "a rough year"
• RoS "much better"
• Some stuff about raids.
• "Large GU" in March (probably).
  
• Solo, Heroic and a lot of Raid content.
• New Overseer Season
• "Cool stuff" Kander can't talk about
• New RoS Guide quest (lots of status)
• Some guides have been around since the beginning of EverQuest
• Whole bunch of new rewards etc. for Guides
• Something PvP related being worked on for "sooner rather than later"
• Specifics on PvP in next Kander's Candor podcast

That's the bones of it. If you want details, listen to the podcast, but really there's not a lot more detail than I've given. There's a lot of flavor and nuance, though. As always, plenty's said in the things that aren't being said and if you missed that, well Dreamweaver and Kander keep pointing it out.

I think when the new lot (I've already forgotten their unmemorable name) bought out the old lot (who had more names than I care to recall) most players probably felt more relief than concern. It's good to hear that sentiment covertly echoed from the other side of the fence.

It's also good to hear for sure that Overseer isn't being dumped in the pile of forgotten things that seemed like a good idea at the time. Because Overseer was a good idea. One of the best they've had for a while. Very much looking forward to a new season. I hope EverQuest is getting one, too.

With so much going on all over right now, it's a little hard to say how I'll fit EQII in but I'll manage somehow. Now I'm off to grab those recipe books while I still can.