Or You Could Always, Y'know, Write Less?

All year I've been talking about not spending as much time playing video games as I used to but, coming into November, I think I might have hit a twenty-five year low. If I play more than a couple of hours a day now it's a big gaming day for me.

I'm not having one of those burnouts that used to be so common and which I always found so peculiar. I seem to hear a lot less about those lately. I guess most of the folks that were prone to them have flamed and faded now, leaving the rest of us slow-smoldering remnants slowly turning into gaming charcoal, barely glowing, giving off almost no heat at all.

No, I haven't had enough of gaming. Nor have I really chosen to take a break. It's just happening.

It's as if a lot of other things have drifted up and gently nudged me off the gaming highway I was on, leaving me to putter down the slow, meandering back roads of the hobby instead. I'm not even sorry about it, really, although it does feel odd, if I stop and think about it

I've commented before about how strange it is that the more free time I have in theory, the less free all my time feels in practice. I got a lot more gaming in when I was working full-time than I ever have since I reduced my hours and shifted down into semi-retirement, that's for sure. Also I watched a lot more movies then and read more books. 

I strongly recommend anyone who thinks they can safely defer their cultural experiences until they retire to think again. I had so many plans about what I'd use the extra time for when it came. Not a one of them feels realistic now I'm almost there. That whole "Ask a busy person" saw applies to leisure, too.

All of which might sound a little negative, which would be misleading. I'm enjoying my new routines. Well, by and large. For example, following her minor heart-attack in the summer, I have to go visit my 93-year-old mother three times a week now rather than the couple of times a month, which had been my schedule for years. It could have been a problem but it led me to acquire a car of my own for the first time in many years, which feels good and it's a very pleasant drive. I like driving anyway, so it's nice to have a reason to be doing it.

Then there's Beryl. One of the big eaters of time in recent years has been having a dog around. I spend more time almost every day taking her for walks and playing with her at home than I spend on gaming and I can't help thinking that's a good thing. 

I've always loved being outdoors, walking, in both city and country but I'd fallen a little out of the habit, particularly when my gaming time was at it's peak. Even when I made the effort, I wouldn't bother if the weather wasn't great. Now I'm out every day for at least a while, although it should be said that Beryl is not a fan of wet weather. If the rain isn't actually hammering down, though, we can usually find somewhere to go for a half-hour walk. If the weather's even halfway decent that'll often stretch to an hour and a half.

Luckily, she tends to lie fairly dormant during the day, which gives me a chance to do other things, like gaming. Except mostly I'm more likely to be doing this instead; writing a blog post about the gaming I'm not doing. Then, in the evening she wakes up and wants attention, meaning I don't often get to do much else but play with her, feed her and walk her between tea and bedtime.

When Beryl crashes out around eight or nine in the evening, I tend to go to bed, too. It's earlier than I've ever gone to bed since I was a child. I could stay up (I'm a grown-up. I can stay up as late as I want.) but since I got my (Refurbished.) laptop I've found it too tempting to lie down in comfort and use it instead of sitting up at my desk. 

For most of the year that's meant a few hours spent working on AI-assisted songwriting but very recently I've swapped back to watching TV and... playing games. Partly because I had a gap in my schedule with the music-making on hiatus but mostly because I'm still using the stand-in desktop pending Black Friday, it occurred to me it might be worth doing a little experimenting to see just what games would run on the decidedly non-gaming laptop. I tried it back at the start of the year, when I was playing several titles via an external SDD, most notably Cloudpunk, but I'd not done much about it since.

One of the things that nudged me into trying again was the news that Amazon's withdrawal from the gaming sector had led to a rebranding of Prime Gaming. They sent me an "important update" about it. 

Before I read the email, my first thought was that they were going to close the gaming offer down altogether. Then I thought maybe they were just going to stop giving away free games. Eventually, it dawned on me I could stop guessing and just read the email.

It turned out to be good news. Instead of closing the whole thing down, it looks as though Amazon has slightly expanded its Prime offer. There will still be new games to claim every month and access to all previously-claimed games continues (Although the fact they even had to mention it suggests it isn't considered a permanent right, which hadn't really occurred to me.) 

I can see how we might lose access to the games that were playable only on Amazon's own gaming service, should that be terminated at some future date, but I hadn't considered that the titles claimed via GOG or Epic might also disappear. Not, I should make it clear, that there's any suggestion of that happening just now. But the phrasing does make me wonder about the long-term prospects for those libraries.

The bonus for Prime members is that now, instead of having access to a selection of games on Luna, Amazon's remote gaming streaming service, now we have full access to everything on the "Standard" package. Also Prime Gaming has been rebranded as Luna Gaming, effectively if not officially. All claims are now made through the Luna website.

It nudged me into wondering just how many games in my Prime Gaming library would be playable on the laptop. As I've often mentioned, sometimes satirically, there's always been a tendency for Prime to hand out some very old games. My laptop may not be capable of running much that's new but some of these Prime giveaways are virtually pre-historic!

I installed Prime/Luna and also Good Old Games and started trying a few out. I began with Lake, which I'd almost finished on the desktop, but the save files would appear to be held locally. I could transfer them, I'm sure, but it seemed like too much trouble, especially since I'm most likely only a session or two from the end.

I tried The Academy, Dungeon Rushers and Dark Envoy. They all ran perfectly but none of them grabbed me. Next, I looked at the huge quantity of point&click adventures I'd claimed, all of which, I'm sure, the laptop would handle easily, but nothing caught my fancy. I really wanted something combat-oriented and turn-based, like Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. 

Surprisingly, DoN has become my benchmark for turn-based RPGs. Well, I guess that would still be Baldur's Gate but it's a long time since I played any of that series The German spoof is a lot fresher in my mind. And so far I've had very little success finding anything that feels both similar and satisfying.

It was in that frame of mind that I was going through the list of games I'd claimed, well over two hundred of them, when I spotted a familiar title. Familiarish, anyway: Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master. I'd completely forgotten about that one.

It's a standalone game set in the same dungeon as the original, featuring some of the same characters only instead of being an RPG, it's one of those management sims where you have to set up and maintain the dungeon so that NPCs can come in and do the adventuring. I've never really fancied that end of things, which seems like all the work for none of the glory or indeed the fun but I figured I might as well give it a go.

And it hooked me immediately. I've played every evening for the last few days, at least ninety minutes each time. There's a campaign storyline, which is where I chose to start, but there's also a sandbox version, which I'll very likely try after I lose the campaign.

I'm pretty sure I will lose it because I had no idea what I was doing for quite a while. The first two stories of my tower are a chaotic, muddled mess. The third, to which I've just gained access, is only any better because it's mostly empty still. I'm sure it'll be just as bad soon enough.

That I'm already considering my options for a second run through the campaign, and imagining what I might do in a sandbox setting, says everything that needs to be said about how enjoyable I'm finding the game. I'm not sure what it is about the Naheulbeuk series that works so well for me but clearly it's something.

That constitutes the main thrust of my gaming at the moment. Apart from NDM, the rest of my game-time of late has been limited to Overseer missions in EverQuest II and the occasional, short session in Blue Protocol: Star Resonance. 

I did manage to stay logged into EQII long enough during the Nights of the Dead holiday to collect the new craft books and buy my Necromancer all the petamorph wands she was missing from years past. There were a lot. I also had her buy the new, prestige house, which looks great and will be far more manageable than the vast, sprawling castle she supposedly lives in but which she barely ever visits. Now I just have to find time to move her stuff across and start decorating.

The very interesting-looking new scenario for Once Human has arrived, along with the oddly appropriate crossover event with Palworld. I'm keen to do something about both of those but there are several things stopping me and only one of them is personal inertia.

Even though I thought the stand-in computer wouldn't be able to run a big, flashy, new game like Once Human, I patched it up anyway and logged in to test the theory, which proved to be false. The game runs acceptably on the same graphic settings I've always used and better still if I turn them down just a notch. 

That means I can't use my old PC as an excuse for not playing. Another get-out clause would be that I'm holding back from trying out the new scenario because I'd need to swap characters. The one I'd been playing has finally found herself on a Permanent server and I am not about to move her after the time it's taken to get her onto one. I could either start over from scratch yet again or I guess I could move my original and best-equipped character to a server running the new scenario. Still thinking on it.

The real reason, though, is that I don't think I'll be able to find the time to progress any character very far. At most I might manage a bit of dabbling. That's about all I'm good for at the moment - dabbling.

I noticed Syp saying he was planning on focusing more on CRPGs and less on MMOs in the future. I find I'm no longer able to make that much of a distinction. Unless I stop and think about it, I'm not always even sure to what degree some of the games I'm playing are multiplayer or otherwise. What I do notice now is that the level of regular commitment required to make consistent and meaningful progress in a traditional MMORPG is often beyond me.

Of course, as this blog evidences, I've always been a dabbler and a dilettante by nature when it comes to gaming, be that on or offline, solo or multiplayer. I haven't undergone any kind of sea-change in attitude or approach. It's more that where I used to dabble at gaming for hour after hour, day after day, these days I just dabble at dabbling. 

Not that any of the above is enough to stop me adding yet more games I won't really play to the pile. Today's post was going to be about something else entirely. It was going to be a First Impressions piece about Duet Night Abyss, that not-a-gacha open-world RPG I said I probably wouldn't be playing. Except then I read a piece at MMOBomb where they said the story was quite good. They also made it sound as though there was a lot more to the game than just fighting, which made me think I ought to take a look at it after all.

I remembered DNA was on Steam, which always makes me more likely to give something a try. No wonder almost three-quarters of game developers feel Steam "has a monopoly on the PC games market." Unfortunately, when I went to the game's Store page to download it, I found a note saying "This game is not yet available on Steam". There's no release date, either.

I could download it from the game's own website but who knows if an account there will be transferable later and anyway I really do not want to be filling out another set of details. I'll wait until it comes to Steam, by which time, with a bit of luck, I'll also have a PC capable of playing it properly.

And that, I think, is likely to remain the state of play regarding my gaming for the immediate future. As soon as I do get a new machine, I intend to re-install New World and take a look at the very considerable amount of content I've missed. I'll also be playing the EQII expansion as soon as it arrives, whether or not I have a new machine to play  it on. If necessary, this one should cope well enough.

Whether any of these games, or any more I haven't thought of, will get enough play-time from me to make a lasting impression is another matter entirely. I don't see me freeing up much in the way of gaming-hours unless something quite unexpected happens. 

But then, none of us expected the pandemic, did we? So you never know. 

Carry On Adventuring!

Something weird happened last night. I finished a game and it didn't stop. 

I finally got to the end of Dungeon of Naheulbuek. I fought the final boss, Zangdar, and beat him on the second try, after I looked the fight up on the web and found there was a perfectly legit but totally dubious way to cheese it.

While I was reading up on how to avoid playing the game the way the developers intended, I couldn't help but notice a lot of complaints about the ending. For one thing, some people think the late-game fights are too easy. It's true they aren't as tough as some of the earlier ones, although I wouldn't complain about it. It's not like the game is especially challenging to begin with. Apart from that one super-annoying one I posted about, not that many battles took me more than a couple of tries on the default difficulty.

The real beef, though, was that the game ended far too abruptly. Supposedly it just sort of stopped with no real pay-off for all the hours it took to get there.

I wasn't too bothered although I was quite glad I'd spoiled that part of the surprise by reading about it ahead of time. That's also how I knew there was no loot to be had from the last battle other than a derisory half-dozen healing potions, as if to say "Here, fix yourselves up and bugger off." But I didn't care. I'd had my fun. I've been playing this game most days for months. 

I haven't kept a track of the hours I've spent on it but the average total playtime is supposed to be between thirty and forty-five hours, depending on whether you stick to the main plot or try to 100% the whole thing. I haven't remotely attempted to complete all the collections or get all the achievements but I'm sure I've played for well over thirty hours. I probably spent a dozen on that bridge fight alone.

However long it was, I definitely feel I got my money's worth. Or I would have, if I'd spent any, which of course I didn't. For all its many, obvious flaws, I'd rate Dungeon of Naheulbeuk as one of the more amusing comedy-adventures I've played - admittedly not a very high bar. It raised the occasional smile and rarely had me wanting to chuck a bread roll at the writers. 

Gameplay is solid. It held my attention throughout. If there was a sequel I'd be happy to play that too, which is just as well because it seems I've already started.

After the battle, when Zangdar had gasped out his inevitable, self-justifying, final words, I was expecting credits to roll. Instead, another wizard from earlier in the game ported in and the game just... carried on. 

First, there was a lot of dialog. I sat back and listened while my party bickered and bargained and went to and fro with various NPCs. It felt like it went on for about ten minutes. Maybe it did.

Eventually, the wizard translocated whole lot of them to an entirely new location, which turned out to be a graveyard at night. That's never a good sign. After warning them not to touch anything, he ran off through a convenient nearby door, leaving the party standing there in the dark, looking even more like they'd been left holding a ticking time-bomb than usual.

At this point I was feeling very confused. I'd timed my evening session in the expectation it would last barely longer than the fight itself and now here we were, apparently carrying on. I thought about going with it to see where things went next but somehow I didn't get the feeling this was a neat little coda the developers had added in response to all that criticism about the ending. It felt a lot more like the start of a brand new adventure.

It was late, so I stopped but as soon as I got back from taking Beryl for a walk this morning I fired the game up and started over from where I'd left off. Naturally, having been told not to touch anything, the first thing the Dwarf did, on noticing some gold pieces just lying around on the floor, was pick them up. And we were off.

An hour or so and several fights later we'd killed a bunch of undead (If you can kill something that's died already. Never been exactly clear how that works.) looted some nice upgrades, something that strongly implies further progression to come and somehow found ourselves in the middle of a feud between Vampires and Necromancers, a feud in which we're expected to take sides. It was one long, run-on action scene that looked like it would never end.

Enough! I saved, logged out and googled the name of the quest I was on, Ruins of Limis. That, it transpires, is also the title of the game's fist DLC. That's what I am now playing. 

No-one asked me if I wanted to. It just happened.

Clearly, the DLC must have been included in the package that Amazon Prime handed out for free last November. Except it wasn't or rather it wasn't mentioned. I didn't say anything about it in my post at the time and neither did any of the news sites that reported on it back then. 

So, maybe the DLC came to Prime later. It's been six months. There's a hand-out every week, pretty much. 

But you don't get those automatically. You have to claim them. And I didn't claim this one. I'd never even heard of it.

I guess I'm not complaining. No, I'm definitely not complaining. I would have liked to be told about it first, but never mind. 

As for the way the new adventure just carries on from the original, it does look as though it's set up to work that way. There's a whole bit explaining why you lose all your gold but keep your gear, for a start. I imagine, when it was first released, players would just have booted up their final auto-save and found themselves carrying on from the end of the final fight. 

In fact, it might even have been designed that way from the get-go. That would certainly explain the non-ending everyone complained about. Also why you might need more health potions even though the game seemed to be over.

It is a bit disconcerting, all the same. I'd been enjoying DoN quite a bit but I have been playing it for what feels like a long time now. I'd been having mixed feelings about it coming to an end. I thought I might miss it and I was wondering what I'd replace it with but I was also quite looking forward to getting stuck into something different for a change.

Now it seems I'm just going to be carrying on as I was. I have mixed feelings about that, too. What's more, there are two more DLCs  and I have no idea if either is also included in the Amazon version. If they are, I could playing this thing all year!

Or I could just stop. It's not an MMORPG. You can save any time you like, come back six months later and nothing will have changed. 

I don't have to go on playing just because I got suckered into it. I'm not some dumb adventurer who can be manipulated into doing something stupid by any smart-talking, hand-waving, beard-faced snake-oil salesman that happens along...

Oh, wait a minute...

Do I Not Like This?

I spend quite a lot of time here banging on about how I mostly look for relaxation from my games. I often say I don't want much in the way of challenge. I try to avoid content that could realistically be called "difficult". If I have to do it so I can get to other content beyond the difficulty gate then I will but I'll do it grudgingly and with bad grace.

One thing I've never been known to do willingly and without complaint is to retry the same fight again and again in the hope of learning the mechanics. Perfecting my technique and making incremental progress until eventually I win. Unfortunately, since around the middle of the twenty-aughts, that kind of content gating has been a constant in MMOPRG design so, much though I might dislike it, I've had to do more of it than any rational, reasonable person would consider sane.

It's very odd, then, that over the past two weeks I've spent something close to fifteen or twenty hours repeating the exact same set-piece battle with every sign of enjoyment. I haven't counted my attempts but I've made at least one try most days for about a fortnight. Some days I've tried twice. I think day I tried three times.

Each fight lasted at least half an hour. One particularly gruesome farrago dragged on for more than ninety minutes. Most times I restarted again from the exact point where I began, without making any changes to my team or my build. Occasionally, I made major revisions to talents or gear. 

Sometimes thing went better. Sometimes they went worse. If I was lucky, I learned something. Mostly I didn't.

I did some googling, looking for advice or suggestions. No-one seemed to be having the same problems as me. No-one really seemed to be having any problems at all. The main suggestions were to do pretty much what I'd done the very first time I tried the fight. I'd thought it seemed like the obvious way to handle it and it seemed I was right.

The gist of the scenario is this: 

• There's a bridge. 
• At one end is your team.
• At the other end is a gate with a lever.
• Between your team and the lever are more than a dozen enemies.
• If you don't close the gate by pulling the lever, after a few rounds more enemies begin to come onto the bridge.
• The additional enemy forces arrive, two at a time, every two or three turns.
• They never stop coming so long as the gate remains open.

I mean, it's not hard to figure out, is it? Get the bloody gate shut ASAP. The plan is simple enough. it's the execution that's the problem.

That's how I spent most of my game time these last couple of weeks. Trying to cross that bridge and close that gate. 

At first I couldn't even get to the damn lever without everyone dying. After a while I could get someone there but they'd die before they could pull it. If I managed to get the gate shut it was never before I already had more enemies on the bridge than I could handle. 

Concentrating on getting one person all the way across the bridge with enough health left to pull the lever frequently left most of the rest of the team dead or close to it. Trying to get several people across so as to have redundancy on the pull attempt went even worse. 

After too many failed runs using the obvious tactic I flipped the plan and tried moving forward as a team, clearing the bridge of enemies as we went. That didn't work either.

Although I always felt my errors were the main reason I was failing, a part of the problem was out of my control. Combat in the game involves a significant amount of dice-rolling so luck is always a factor. It also employs a system of Critical Hits and Failures, meaning a particularly bad roll can be catastrophic.

There were things I could do to mitigate some of the impact of a bad set of rolls. There are talents that prevent crits, for a start, and others that negate specific types of damage. All the usual push and pull of RPGs down the years. 

But the thing about random factors is they're random. It's all very well giving one character immunity from critical hits but who's to say they'll be the one to get the bad roll? And you can't make everyone crit-proof. Or fire-proof. Or poison-proof... 

Then there are the really super-annoying design decisions you would never have made in a million years. For example, if you have a Thief, who can go into stealth so no-one can see him, why would you have him come out of stealth automatically, just to take advantage of an Attack of Opportunity? Wouldn't you code it so he stays in stealth unless he's either spotted or chooses to attack?

That one dumb mechanic screwed me over on several runs to the point that I had to stop using the Thief as my sneaker altogether. I had the Elf do it instead. She was lighter on her toes, anyway. 

I also had the Barbarian do his flying leap to get past people. I even had the Ogre throw the Dwarf halfway across the bridge. It's a party trick they do. None of it really worked.

But I kept trying. I didn't even get mad when I failed, again and again. Ok, I didn't get mad much. 

Mostly what I got was interested. It didn't feel so much like I was being forced to repeat the same annoying, over-tuned fight again and again. It felt more like I was putting together a puzzle. Maybe if I put this piece here... or move that one there...

It probably goes without saying at this point that the game I was playing was not an MMORPG. Fights of this kind in MMORPGs are rarely - if ever - fun. Also, most MMORPGs I've played haven't been turn-based, although of course there are a few.

The game in question was one I've mentioned before: The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. I'm only playing it because it came free with Amazon Prime Gaming. There is absolutely no chance I'd have paid money for it.

And it's not even that great an example of its kind. I'd say it's pretty good but it sure as heck isn't Baldur's Gate or even Divinity: Original Sin. It doesn't have that much of a plot and the dialog is cheesy. The whole game doesn't amount to a lot more than a string of set-piece fights strung together with a bunch of lame jokes. 

What all this tells me is that I'm not very good at knowing what I like. Although, I already knew that. I didn't need to have it pointed out to me. Again.

I have a tendency to believe I actually like things when in fact they're just things I think I ought to like. Conversely, I imagine I don't like things when all the evidence suggests I do. It doesn't happen all the time - just often enough that it catches me out, once in a while.

I think it might happen more with games than anything else, too. I expect it's because I know less about games than most other things I like. Or don't like. Whichever.

Now that I've noticed, I'm hoping maybe this time I'll learn something from the experience. That's why I've written it down. In the hope that might make it stick.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and find out what comes after the bridge. I think I've earned it.

Jumpstyle Is Not A Crime

Since I ran up against the buffers in Nightingale I've been game-hopping like crazy. Typically, when I was spending all my time in one game, I complained about feeling trapped. Now I'm back to jumping between half a dozen games it's giving me the jitters. There's no pleasing some people.

The games I'm "playing" just now (Although that's a very fancy word for what I'm actually doing when I log into some of them.) are:

• New World
• AdventureQuest 3D
• Once Human Closed Beta 3
• EverQuest II
• Nightingale
• The Dungeon of Nahalbeuk: Amulet of Chaos

I don't have one of those fancy apps that tallies exactly how much time I spend in each of them but I can say with a fair degree of confidence that it isn't a lot. I doubt it's more than a couple of hours altogether most days.

As well as those six, I have a mental list of about twice as many games I feel I ought to be playing - or could be playing - or was in the middle of playing before I stopped for no good reason. Those include:

• Valheim
• Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit
• Tales Noir Preludes
• Imposter Factory
• Lake
• My Time At Sandrock

There are more - potentially a lot more - but that's a round dozen so I'll call it there, just so I have time to give a little gloss on each of them, starting with the ones I'm at least managing to log into once in a while:

New World - I came back for the Spring event and kind of hung around. I've been logging in most days to do the rounds of the settlements and festival camps so I can pick up my freebies, especially the tokens. I've bought some of the furniture I wanted and I have a couple more days to get the rest. I need to remember to spend everything I've earned because the event currency vanishes along with the event itself a tthe end of April.

Other than that, I've done a few quests and I feel like I might carry on and do a few more, just for the fun of it. Questing in New World is generally entertaining and I see new quest markers everywhere I go. Unfortunately, I'd need to buy the expansion to level any further and I think it's a bit steep at £25.  I'm somewhat discouraged to do too much questing while the xp goes nowhere so I'll probably shelve this one soon in anticipation of whatever the Big Announcement in June might be. Maybe that will make it feel like it's worth buying the DLC.

AdventureQuest 3D - I log in every day just to collect my three daily chests. There are two reasons I keep doing it: 1) The first chest always gives some cash shop currency and I want some for housing items and 2) AQ3D has by far the fastest login process I've ever seen. 

Seriously, it's like lightning. I wish every MMORPG was even half as fast. I just timed it and it took 28 seconds from Pressing "Play" in Steam to looking at my character in game. I can log in, get my chests and be back in Steam in under a minute although I don't usually go quite that fast. Of course, I'm not actually playing the game but there's certainly nothing being put in my way if I wanted to, which is more than I can say about a lot of games - *cough* Lord of the Rings *cough*

Once Human CB3 - I logged into this one for the first time in a couple of weeks last night and my house was gone! That was a shock. It turned out to be more of a feature than a glitch, though. It seems that if you don't log in for a while (I don't know what the time-limit is.) your house automatically gets copied and stored using the system designed for moving home. 

All you have to do to restore it is find a new spot and put down the blueprint and it magically reappears, just as it was, with all the furniture in the right place. It seems like a very ingenious solution to the endless problem all games with open-world housing have, namely absentee homeowners. This way, no-one has to look at hundreds of abandoned homes and all the best building spots can be taken by people who are going to use them.

Once Human has a lot of clever design features like that. Yesterday I ran across the game's ingenious solution to that other annoying trope of so many F2P MMORPGs, player-owned strip malls. You must have seen them; dozens, scores, hundreds of stalls put up by players to sell their goods, all crammed together in a particularly ugly form of urban blight.

In OH, players sell from pick-up trucks on which they place vending machines. These fit so well into the post-apocalyptic environment, already littered as it is with broken-down vehicles and machinery, it took me a good while to realize what they were. They also have the benefit of all being different. I haven't found out how you get one yet but it looks as though once you have one, you can furnish and decorate it like a room in your house. I wonder if you can also drive about in it? There are vehicles in the game, so I don't see why not.

I want to do at least one more full post about Once Human soonish, so I'll leave it at that for now. I don't plan on playing much more of CB3 but that's only because I want to save my enthusiasm for when the game goes live. I did do some exploring yesterday, though, which is where all the pictures in this post came from. It's fun just driving around on my motorcycle, looking at the scenery. I might do some more of that before the beta ends.

EverQuest II - I'm in and out of this one as usual. This morning I finished the Signature Questline from the current expansion, Ballads of Zimarra, which would normally be a big moment. Instead it turned out to be something of an anti-climax. 

For one thing, it's the first expansion for a long time where finishing the Sig hasn't also put me at the level cap. My Berserker is still only half way through Level 128. For another, there isn't a big, explosive ending to the storyline - just a regular fight with a named mob I wouldn't even call a Boss, followed by a hand-in, at which point you get a pop-up telling you the Sig line is finished.

It transpires there's a reason for that. The Signature Quest might have stopped but the quest faucet is still jammed full on. Other NPCs nearby immediately sprout feathers over their heads and everything carries on as before. I looked ahead on the wiki and there are tons more quests of all sorts in the expansion, many in direct line of sequence from the Sig. 

I'm not sure why they've done it this way although no doubt there are reasons. It's fine with me, anyway. Now I can just carry on chipping away until I eventually hit 130. I'd like to get it done before the Anashti Sul server arrives in June. That shouldn't be too hard...

Nightingale - As I said the other day, the changes they've made aren't significant enough to get me back playing regularly again. I would like to re-visit all the vendors so I can buy stuff directly from the UI in future, though. That would be a project in itself.

The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: Amulet of Chaos - The wild card on this list, being both the only game that's both solo and offline. It's also the one I've been playing the most. I've had a session most evenings, usually lasting a couple of hours, which is sometimes as long as it takes to finish a single battle.

I really like the gameplay. It's one of those XCom-style, turn-based, tactical group combat games, only with a high-fantasy skin. Lots of setting people on fire, knocking them down and hiding behind things until someone blows them up. All of that.

It's also - loosely - a parody and I was wary of what that might mean in the way of "humor" but it's largely okay. The voice acting is just the right side of amateurish and the jokes rise just above embarrassingly cliched. I wouldn't call it witty or original but it raises the odd smile and the characters... have character.

The game also seems to go on forever. I feel like I've been playing it for months. I know I'm doing all the side quests but I feel if I wasn't my party wouldn't be tough enough to handle the main quest so it doesn't feel like that's much of an option. Anyway, I'm enjoying it and I hope one day I might even finish it.

And now the ones I'm thinking - but not doing much - about...

Valheim  - Wilhelm writing about this one again reminds  me I ought to go back and at least take a look at the Mistlands. I had a terrible start with that biome, although from what Wilhelm says that was likely the developers' intention. 

I'm not even going to bother trying to play the game properly any more but luckily I don't need to because I've switched all the mobs to Passive, meaning I can go explore without fear of being jumpd on by a spider the size of an elephant, moving as fast as a cheetah. I mean, does that sound like fun to anyone?

I was tempted to go back and have a wander around yesterday but then I thought about the final biome, Ashlands, which is in testing now and should be going live in a matter of weeks. It probably makes more sense to wait for that and then explore both biomes together. If I do, I won't be switching mob aggro on for that either, I'll tell you that for nothing!

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit - I bought this in January. Haven't even logged in yet. Every time I see it in my Steam Library I feel uncomfortable. Maybe I'll start on it as soon as I finish Naheulbeuk.

Tales Noir Preludes  - I bought this around the same time and played it right away. I was really enjoying it but then I stopped, for no reason I can recall. I keep meaning to carry on from where I left off but somehow I never do. Must try harder.

Imposter Factory - Much the same story for this one, although I got further before I stopped.

Lake - And this one! I have no idea why this keeps happening. I have a post in mind to write about Lake, too. Something very odd happens in it. Twice, in fact. 

I thought I might already have posted about that but search suggests I haven't. I guess I could tell you what the Odd Thing is now but there's still the outside possibility it might happen more than twice, so I really ought to finish the game first, just in case.

My Time At Sandrock - Will I ever play this damn game? I very much doubt it. 

I almost wish I hadn't bought it, now. I feel like its whole schtick has been done by so many other games, I can't really see the point. Then again, the My Time At... games probably do it better than most of them, so why play any of those, when I already have this one installed? 

And there we have it. Not so much a post, more of a to-do list. Maybe putting it all down on paper will even inspire me to get some of it done.

I kinda doubt it but you have to try something, don't you?

Is That Supposed To Be Funny? First Impressions of The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk.

The latest EverQuest II expansion, Ballads of Zimara, arrives today but chances are, I won't get to see much of it until tomorrow. The doors aren't due to open until eight in the evening, my time, always assuming there's no additional downtime.

Even if I do manage to get in early enough to have a quick look around and take some screenshots, not something I'd count on, based on long experience with previous expansion launches, I certainly won't have time to post about it so instead I thought I might write something about the game I'm currently playing to pass the time until BoZ launches, namely The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: Amulet of Chaos.

As just about every review begins, the name is a pain to type so I'll shorten it to DoN from the start. That's the thing about funny names; they're funny once. If at all. After that they're just a nuisance.

Except, is that really true of this one? Is that name even supposed to be funny? It's hard to tell. 

I'm assuming it is because the whole game is a parody but unless I'm missing the pun, Naheulbeuk is just a bit awkward to pronounce. If there's anything intrinsically comical about it, I don't see it. As for the rest, it's just bog-standard fantasy-speak, isn't it?

In a way that sums the game up. It's only nominally parodic. It constantly does that thing of having the characters talk archly and self-referentially about the tropes of the genre but any satirical effect is undermined as they do it while they're following a completely unreconstructed genre narrative that both characters and writers appear to take entirely seriously. 

 I'm in Chapter 3 now and the plot so far is basically this: 

A party of adventurers, who apparently either met in a Tavern or through some kind of noticeboard (I confess I wasn't paying attention at the start.) were hired by someone powerful (Again, not paying as much attention as I could have been.) to go look for a statuette. 

The statuette is supposedly in a dungeon (You can guess which one.) but when they get there, things don't go exactly as planned. The party, who bicker and kvetch constantly, make their way deeper into the dungeon, all the while riffing on their roles and racial stereotypes, something which you might think was satire but could just as easily be standard genre fantasy writing. 

They somehow find themselves stuck with a cursed artefact they can't get rid of, which shifts the narrative from a bunch of mercenary adventurers in search of loot and glory to a more serious tussle with the forces of evil. Along the way they run into all kinds of mysterious and unusual individuals. Some, they fight, others join the party, often with agendas of their own. 

Is any of this starting to sound familiar?

And there's the generic problem with parodies and satires of fantasy RPGs (And novels, and movies...). They pretty much all end up being actual fantasy RPGs (And novels and movies...) only with a lot of metafictional jokes that frequently don't land. I'm always very wary of these things. More often than not they end up just offering weak versions of the exact same things they purport to deconstruct.

DoN is better than that by a fair margin. The jokes are generally well-worn but by that means they've lost a lot of their abrasiveness by dint of familiarity, making the whole thing feel quite cosy and comforting. A good deal of the banter between the characters seems not unlike the sort of well-worn routines you might expect to hear between players of an established table-top campaign.

There's certainly nothing original or surprsing about any of it. The Elf and the Dwarf despise each other and take every opportunity to tell everyone about it. The Ranger and the Bard both behave foppishly, but the Bard has an effeminate air, while every time the Ranger sees a buxom wench he can't resist making the kind of remarks that would have him waiting outside the door of the HR Department in any business where I've ever worked.

The Barbarian has clearly been recruited straight from central casting, where the clerk didn't flick any further through the files than C for "Conan", while the Ogre (Yes, it's a class as well as a race now, apparently.) seems to have wandered in from a kids show. On the other hand, the Wizardess, who both gains and loses points for having a feminised job title, is so bland it actually seems like someone might be making some kind of point, while the Thief manages to be both typically arrogant and yet oddly insecure. 

It won't surprise anyone to learn the Dwarf speaks with a Scots accent. All dwarves are Scottish as everyone knows. It's not the worst Scots accent I've ever heard in one of these games although that's a very low bar. The Dwarf is obsessed with gold, once again as everyone knows. He's quite keen on ale, too. Bet you didn't see that coming.

He does vary very slightly from the absolute stereotype by also being a kleptomaniac and a borderline socipath but that's well within the acceptable paramaters for Dwarves.

The Elf, by contrast, bears literally no resemblance whatsoever to anything ever written by Tolkein. She seems to have a good deal of Fairy blood, probably by way of a Daisy Meadows novel, although it's entirely possible she's on sabbatical from her day job at Santa's Workshop. 

Her objection to the Dwarf seems more of an aesthetic choice than any socio-political schism. To be fair, he is pretty gross.

I should probably make it clear at this point that I haven't forgotten the names of the characters. They don't have names. NPCs get names but playable characters just get job descriptions. That probably says something about the intentions of the writers although I don't think I could tell you what.

Humorous games of this nature rely on the writing for effect but also on the acting when, as in this case, they're fully voiced. The actors do a decent enough job all round although no-one particularly stands out. The Wizardess is played by Felicia Day but so far she hasn't had all that much to work with. 

It's mostly been the Elf, the Dwarf and the Ranger. There's an option to mute both the Elf and the Dwarf, which may be a meta joke in itself or may reflect a genuine concern by the developers that players might just quit if they have to go on listening to the two bicker for the entire game. Personally, I'd mute the Ranger.

DoN opens with no fewer than five Logo screens identifying the various organizations involved in developing and publishing the game. The game development itself was done by French developer Artefacts Studio but everything from the characters to the storyline to the setting and style comes from a very popular French language audio series created by someone with the very unFrench name of John Lang, who even more confusingly operates under the English pseudonym Pen of Chaos.

He is French all the same, born in Paris and raised in Brittany, as his biography explains. The audio series and the game were both originally written and voiced in French, which explains the occasional infelicity in the written text. On the whole, though, the translation is excellent.

Combat is standard XCom apparently. I have to say I realised that pretty much immediately even though I've never played any of the XCom games. I've read a lot of blog posts about them and this felt like that, only with pictures.

There are four difficulty settings. I'm playing on the default, Tavern Song. There's an easier one called Gripping Tale for people who don't care about the fights and just want to enjoy the story and two harder ones for masochists. 

I'm finding the default difficulty about right so far. Most of the fights are close. I've only lost once but I won easily on the second attempt. The main drawback is healing, which is fiddly enough that I tend to try to wing it without healing everyone up between fights. That's fine if the next stage turns out to be travel and talk but not so good if I get jumped by a gang of undead on the way back to the Tavern to rest up.

All things considfered I'm having a good deal of fun. The story may be generic but it rolls along nicely enough. The graphics are excellent so there's always something pretty to look at and the fights are tactical enough to be interesting without being so complicated as to annoy me. There is a lot of RPG management but some of it can be automated and there's a respec item you can buy as often as you want if you need do-overs (Provided you can get the gold, of course.) so making choices isn't stressful.

DoN is nicely amenable to playing in shortish sessions and being turned-based means I can stop at a moment's notice. The game also has a pause function in combat if needed. It's there or thereabouts the game I was hoping for, especially since I'm finding the humor mildly amusing rather than, as I feared, embarrasing or excruciating.

As far as free games from Amazon Prime go, I'd have to say this has been one of my better experiences, thus far at least. The arrival of Ballads of Zimara might put a crimp in my progress through the Dungeon of Naheulbeuk for a while but I'm confident I'll get to the end of it eventually.

Also, now I really want to listen to the audio series. I wonder if there's an English version?

Friday, Saturday, Who Knows Any More?

When I started writing this, it was going to be one of those Friday Grab-Bags again. And on an actual Friday, too! Then stuff happened and now it's Saturday. Not interesting stuff, either. Just downloads and dogs, which could be the name of the least interesting tabletop role-playing game ever...

The Dungeon of What, Now?

I wasn't planning on a portmanteau post anyway. I had it in mind to write something about the new-to-me game I just got free from Amazon Prime Gaming. It's called The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos, gawd help it, although since it's a parody, I imagine the name is supposed to be faintly ridiculous. It's a "tactical RPG", which seems to mean some kind of ultra slowed-down version of an actual RPG like Baldur's Gate. 

Of course, I'd rather be playing Baldur's Gate - specifically Baldur's Gate 3 - but even though my PC now passes the Can I Play It? test, after I bought my spiffy new graphics card a couple of months back, even Black Friday hasn't tempted Larian to drop the price and I'm not paying fifty quid for it so here we are.

Unfortunately, when I came to write the post I'd planned, I just couldn't find a way in. I'd played the game for close on two hours by then and when I stopped for lunch I was still in the Tutorial. About all I can say about it so far is it looks pretty, the humor isn't as irritating I as I expected and there's a heck of a lot to learn. 

There's so much micro-management. So many things to check. You don't just move, you have to choose an orientation or you'll end up facing away from the orc you want to clout. Mobs aren't just melees or ranged or healers or magic-users - they have strengths and weaknesses and conditions you need to study on mousover. There's cover and partial cover and friendly fire and who knows what else to consider even before you begin.

When the fight ends there are levels and talent trees and gear to deal with and there's a storyline and a narrator and all the members of your party talk and bicker all the time and everything just takes forever. The reason I had to abandon the post I started about the game was that I found myself extemporizing on the existential crisis of spending literally the length of a movie just getting through the Tutorial - and not even finishing that - when I can't seem to find the time to watch any actual movies. 

I mean, what does that say about my choices? What am I doing with my time? Or my life?

I was making myself depressed, just writing the damn thing. I couldn't expect anyone to read it. So I junked the whole thing and...

It's Still Patching... No, Seriously, It Really Is...

... decided to download Blade & Soul instead. Because displacement activity rocks!

It wasn't entirely random. I've been meaning to get back to B&S for a long time but I also had this crazy idea I could get a very quick post out of some screenshots of the free stuff I've claimed there from Prime. I think it might be quite a lot of stuff. I seem to remember claiming something most months and I haven't logged in for at least a year.

I thought I remembered having uninstalled B&S a while back, when I was rationalizing my hard drive space. I couldn't see the icon on my desktop so I went straight to the NCSoft website and downloaded the patcher. 

That was easy enough. I still had my login details. I signed in and got started on the 57GB download.

It stuck at about 25% with a message about some file it couldn't download that had an name so long I couldn't remember it. I couldn't copy it from the pop-up window either. I googled but no-one else seemed to be having a problem with the patcher. I spent a good while messing around, restarting the download, running the File Check from the launcher and getting nowhere until eventually I found some useful advice on reddit that had me digging through the partial installation, deleting files. 

I say "useful" but it still didn't solve my problem so I decided to uninstall and start again, which was when I discovered I did actually still have the game installed after all. It was just on another drive. In fact, I still had the old version too, the one from back before the game was ported to Unreal4.

I cleared all the deadwood out and tried to save myself some time by patching up the installed game only to have the launcher tell me I didn't have it, even though I could see the files right there in front of me. It started downloading the entire thing into the same directory alongside the 56GB of files already there. I tried to fool it by moving the new install into the folder of the old one, a trick which always used to work for EverQuest, but times have moved on. 

This went on for some time. The corrupted file issue didn't recur but instead every time the download and installation ended, as soon as I tried to launch the actual game the whole process started over. By ten in the evening I had three full versions of Blade & Soul and not one of them worked so I deleted the lot and went to bed. 

That's why I'm posting this on Saturday even though it's a Friday Grab-Bag. Also because inbetween all of that I had to play with Beryl for an hour, take her out, feed her, then play with her again. She tends to sleep all day and get manic when the sun goes down. Or when the moon comes up. She's probably a weredog.

As I write this, the game is downloading for the fourth or fifth time. I forget how many it's been. If it doesn't work this time, I'm done with it. If it does, expect a post about how great I look in my new clothes sometime soon. Assuming it was clothes I got. I have no idea what it was.

247 - All Switch And No Bait

Since this seems to be mostly a grab-bag of gripes, let me throw in another entitled complaint, this time about Pantheon. Remember the kerfuffle when Visionary Games announced out of the blue they were putting development on hold to work on a survival extraction spin-off called 247? Well, that's not happening any more.

Predictably, the players being extremely invested in the game they thought VG was making (Some of them to the tune of $1000, which is what it costs to get a pre-alpha spot in Pantheon.) not in some fly-by-night, seat-of-the-pants knock-off moneygrab (As they would see it.) raised a ruckus, at which point the developers faced the exact same fork in the road as every other in-development game that's tried this malarkey, namely carry on down the new road, leaving most of the people paying the bills waving their pitchforks in the dust behind them or pull a screeching, bootlegger turn back to the non-existent safety of a game they already know is making them bankrupt, all the while wringing their hands and begging for forgiveness. 

(That's all one sentence, you know. Good luck picking your way through the clauses.) 

 

It's a no-win scenario. I'm sure VG wouldn't have opted to make a second game before they'd finished the first if they hadn't been desperate. I mean, I guess they could just have been bored with dusty old Pantheon and thought it'd be fun to work on something cooler but I doubt it. 

Whatever the secret reasons behind the decision, they lost their nerve and 247 is now 007. Er, no, not that. I mean it's dead. Which is kind of a shame. I was looking forward to seeing it. 

I'm not as disappointed as I might have been because although for a while I was looking forward to playing it, I soon found out it was going to be nearly as expensive to opt into 247 as it is to Pantheon, which to my way of thinking kind of undermines the entire point of doing the thing at all. 

Did they really think the same people were all going to stump up a few hundred dollars more just to play a sawn-off version of the game they really wanted? That's delusional. If they weren't going for a much wider audience, why even bother?

Where that leaves Pantheon and Visionary Realms now, I guess we'll have to wait and see. Then again, "wait and see" is all we've ever had from Pantheon so I guess nothing much has changed.

I Think We Used To Play This At School

The Pantheon/247 affair made me realize I have no clear idea what a "survival extraction" game is. I keep seeing the term, or variations that theme, most often in the guise of the "extraction shooter". It seems to have replaced "Battle Royale" as the pot of gold concept for game developers, just like Battle Royale replaced MOBA and MOBA replaced MMO.

I had a vague idea what's involved - running away, mostly, in the hope of getting to a safe zone with whatever you've managed to loot off the corpses of your victims - but how that would dovetail with a retro-revivalist, old school, DikuMUD mmorpg like Pantheon beats me. They seem to be almost antithetical.

I was hoping for a nice Wikipedia article to explain the whole subgenre but there isn't one. It's buried somewhere in the massive "Shooter Game" entry but I wasn't about to plow my way through all of that. The best explanation I found, when I googled "survival extraction game" was, as it so often is, in a reddit thread, this one handily titled "What is an Extraction Shooter?" 

 

The thread is full of people giving their personal interpretations and naturally they all assume the game will be "a shooter", something Pantheon categorically is not. PvP also seems to be a key element, something I don't think is high on Pantheon's feature list, although most of the explanations refer to a PvPvE environment, which can be more of an MMORPG thing.

Group play appears to be strongly encouraged and there's a surprising amount of reference to persistent worlds and even story, too, so I guess it's not such a big leap from Pantheon's underlying principles as I thought.  I came away with a much better idea of what might have been expected, had the game ever manifested itself. 

Even so, it still seems like a very different kind of game. One of the best summations I read was this:

"Simply put, an extraction shooter has a unique gameplay loop, when you die you lose all of your gear and have to perform a "Regain Run" often referred to as a "Zero to Hero Run". This creates Gear Fear and a desire to stay alive for as many runs as possible before your inevitable death. Extraction shooters are unique with exhilarating highs and devastating lows. They're not Battle Royals or looter shooters but the baby they would make."

I was surprised to see one commenter suggest the genre has been around for almost a decade. I can't remember hearing about it until the last year or two but then I don't pay any attention to what's going on in the shooter world. I only really picked up on the term "looter-shooter" a couple of years back.

Anyway, I don't imagine I'm going to playing a lot of extraction games, shooters or otherwise, but it's always good to know what people are talking about when they propose hacking up a game you're interested in and turning it into something else. There's always the chance they might make something you'd like even more so it's never a good idea to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.

Always End With A Song

It's a tradition. Although I used to hate it when comedians used to do it in the 1970s. Then again, that was mostly because the songs were terrible. And comedians can't sing.

Well, there are exceptions...

Yes, Syp got there first. Thanks Syp! 

That's Elise Ecklund. Mostly she does short, humorous, satirical or parodical pieces to camera about music and pop culture. Like this:

I love her flat, lack-of-affect delivery. That's what really sells it. She doesn't do a lot of full songs but when she does, they're really good. And not necessarily funny. Like this one.

So I guess some comedians can sing after all. 

And with that, we're done.

Notes on the AI used in this post.

For all of these I just pulled phrases out of the text and added a visual style. All of them were created at NightCafe, using the free model DreamShaper v8, which seems to give results at least as good as the Dreamshaper models that cost credits. The second and third image use the default 50% prompt weight but the first gave me a building on that setting so I upped it to 80% to get the image I used.

The prompts were:

Image #1 : "This download is going on forever. retrofuturism"

Image #2 : "some fly-by-night-and-seat-of-pants knock-off moneygrab . High fantasy." You'll note I changed that phrase in the final edit of the post but that's how it was in the draft.

Image #3 : "What is an Extraction Shooter? hypermodernism"