Take Five Girls - or - Will The Real Cat Please Stand Up

The image you see above cost me £6,500. Or about 10 Euros. Or maybe it saved me a fortune. Depends how you want to count it.

Sometime back in the 90s, I was in Antequerra, a very pleasant, not much touristed town in Andalusia. I'd just been made voluntarily redundant after years of trying and I was celebrating my windfall by driving around Spain and Portugal in a hire car for three weeks, on my own.

After two weeks, I'd had enough of moving to a new place every day so I stopped in Antequerra for a while and while I was exploring the back streets I found a shop selling some idiosyncratic and unusual tees. 

I bought several. They were all odd. I never saw any like them again, anywhere. The one I wore the most and for the longest wasn't the one with the five girls. It was this one:

I wore that t-shirt a lot. I'd probably still be wearing it now if Mrs. Bhagpuss hadn't finally told me she couldn't stand it.

I have no idea what Space Motion 570 is supposed to mean, let alone Union Feel The Heat, which is what the very faded yellow-on-white lettering says, in case you can't make it out. I always thought it might have something to do with basketball but chances are it doesn't actually mean anything. (There's a DJ now who goes by Space Motion but I doubt they were even born when I got this shirt.)

Although that was the one I wore the most, it wasn't my favorite. My favorite was the one with the five young women on the front. Unfortunately, that one was just a tad too small for me so I couldn't wear it as much as I'd have liked.

They fascinated me, those women. Who were they? They were obviously all friends. I thought they looked like they were probably about the age to be in college. Maybe they were school-friends who'd left and gone their separate ways and now they were back for the long summer break and catching up. (It's clearly summer where they are, based on how they're dressed.) 

I figured they probably wouldn't all have gone into further education. The one in the beret, though? She definitely had. And the cool one in the middle in the bee-stripe dress and RayBans. Maybe the girl in black and white checks and polka dots was a year or two younger. Just graduated from high school and getting ready to join the others at university. Hearing all the stories about what it was like.

The one in the sensible skirt, carrying the shopping and the one in blue checking out what's in the bag? Maybe they share an apartment. The two that didn't go away to study. Maybe they're working already, doing classes on day release. 

Actually, now I look again, they've all got bags. So maybe they've been on a shopping trip together.

And so on. This is what I found myself doing every time I looked at the shirt. Speculating about who they might be. Making up backstories for them all. Like I'm doing now.

In the end I gave them all names and wrote a short story about the five of them. As I remember, it wasn't a very good story. I don't think I was all that satisfied with it. But I wasn't so down on it I was going to keep it to myself. I published it in the APA.

And then I forgot about it for a quarter of a century until earlier this year, when I dug out all my old fiction and zines and started scanning and digitizing them. It took a lot of digging around in closets and under the bed and up in the loft but eventually I found almost everything I could remember - except that one story. And the T-shirt.

It was frustrating. Not just because there was a piece of my past missing. There are plenty of those. One more isn't going to matter. No, it was frustrating because one of the characters from the story turns up in another sequence of vignettes that I had found. Only now I didn't know who she was.

Late on in my time with the APA I started reviewing a very specific literary sub-genre. No, not a literary genre - a publishers' one. Books that compare themselves to Catcher in the Rye on their covers.

Publishers just love to try to make readers think a book is going to be like something else they've read. They're all scavengers, feeding on the kills of others. If anything ever sells they have no idea why but they're all sure if they copy the cover design they'll be able to sell a bunch more books to readers who clearly can't tell the difference. The same logic prevails with comparisons to other writers and other books.

Since Salinger was at the time my favorite writer and Catcher my favorite novel, two facts that may or may not still be true, I was prone to picking up copies of any books that claimed to be the same or similar. Not because I thought they would be. More to find out the ways in which they weren't.

Some were pretty good all the same and I wanted to share my thoughts on them. But I needed a framework. Because I was even more pretentious then than I am now and I never could just write anything straight.

Which was how I came up with the idea of having Phoebe Caulfield review the books that were supposedly like the one her brother was in, all those years ago. Or Phoebe Maybe, as I've just now realized I should have called her. Who knows if she really was Holden's sister? She never did find out who she was and so far neither have I. Not for sure.

My Phoebe lived in a rambling old house with a walled garden. It was based on the Quaker Meeting House where I used to go on Sundays as a child. It always spooked me out. 

Phoebe lived with ghosts. Her ghosts were other characters I'd written about. Or lived with. I lived with Cathy for years. She was my imaginary friend long after I was too old to have one. My imaginary imaginary friend. I think I was still at University when I last saw her although I wouldn't count on her not coming back some time.

There was Cathy from my past and Rachel and Sally from the proto-novel I was writing at the same time and then there was Cat. Cat was one of the women on the T-shirt. The only one whose name I remember and that only because she lives with Phoebe.

And now I was turning all of this into songs and I needed to know. Who Cat was. Which is how I came to be turning the house upside down, looking for that last, elusive, photocopied zine. And also the damn T-shirt!

So far, I still haven't found the story. I live in hope. It's impossible that I wouldn't have kept it. It's just that the house is full of paper. It could be between anything.

The shirt, though. That I found. Eventually.

But before I finally remembered where it was (In a small compartment tucked away under the lid of a blanket chest made by my great-grandfather, who I never met.) I went looking for it in the racking under the boiler that supplies the heat for the heating system in this house. Or used to.

It was in a cupboard whose doors probably hadn't been opened since the pandemic. The heating system was in place when we moved into this house and that was the best part of thirty years ago. It's never really been touched in all that time.

When I opened those doors to look for the shirt, what I saw was a disaster about to happen. The boiler was rusting away at the base. Bits of the pipework were starting to sag. When you have a house, there are some problems you can kick down the road to Spring or Next Year and some you have to deal with Now. This was one of those.

So we got it done. We have a brand new heating system. It's great and it's guaranteed for seven years with an annual service contract. We're good on that front for a while. It cost £6,500. 

Six grand, ten Euros or a small fortune. It's a good thing I needed to find that T-Shirt when I did. 

Now if I can just find the damn story. I still need to know just who Cat really is. 

New Lines Now In Stock - No Internet Connection Necessary

Since Inflexion Games (Or "Tencent's Inflexion", as MassivelyOP likes to call them.) chose to make such a priority out of adding an offline mode to Nightingale, I thought the least I could do was try it out, although I can't say it's an update I've been waiting for. 

To be honest, until all the kerfuffle about taking Nightingale offline began, it had never occurred to me that anyone would want to play the game without an internet connection. I never thought it would even be an option. 

Since I started played EverQuest in late 1999, I haven't really made any differentiation between online and offline gaming. If I can't get an internet connection for some reason, I don't play an offline game instead. I do what I can to get back online, and if I find I can't because there's a problem outside of my control, I go and do something that doesn't involve a computer at all, until somebody fixes things.

I'm so used to playing games online, I don't even think about it. Why would I? In the case of Nightingale specifically, in more than a hundred hours of playing I rarely experienced any lag or downtime to speak of. The servers didn't crash, there wasn't much in the way of maintenance and loading times seemed perfectly acceptable. 

Granted, until I got to the central hub near the end of the storyline, I was playing entirely alone, so there wasn't any real need to be connected to the internet but then again I didn't see any reason not to be, either. Once I did get to what passes for an end-game in Nightingale, I was happy to be able to team up with other players so they could carry me through the final instances and fill my coffers with the Essences I needed. If I'd been playing offline I'd have had to do all the hard work myself and where would the fun be in that?

The same patch that brought the Offline changes also added a whole bunch of other stuff, including the game's first holiday-style event and several new NPCs offering quests (Edgar Allen Poe, Joan of Arc and Taliesin the Bard, which tells you about as much as you need to know about what passes for lore in this game.). I'll get to those but it'll have to be online. As of now there's no way to transfer characters between modes and I'm sure as hell not leveling another character up far enough to see the new content.

To play offline you have to roll a fresh character, which is actually quite handy for this post. The update also brought improvements to Character Creation, including new player outfits, body types, and professions. Apparently you can "edit existing character visuals in the character select menu"so maybe I could have checked out the new frocks that way, but I thought I might as well make a new character for offline play and check out the outfits and the mode all at once, even if I had no serious intent to play whatever character I made.

What I might do offline is a bit of building, now and again. It always bugged me a little that you can only have one Abeyance Realm in Nightingale. I wouldn't mind having homes in the Desert and the Swamp as well as the Forest, where I live now. Both of them are a lot more pleasant than they sound. I thought I'd make a character, take a look at the new outfits, then pick an Abeyance Realm that wasn't Forest and see how things went. 

The first thing I realized as I was getting started was that I had no way of knowing which were the new body types, let alone whether they were any better than the old ones. I had no clue which was which. Until today I'd only made one character, back in February, and I can't remember much about it. I did describe some aspects of of the process in a First Impressions post but I didn't list out the full range of possibilities. I can't remember how many there were to begin with, so I certainly can't say how many have been added.

I can say there are a lot now and it does seem to be considerably easier to get a character who doesn't look like Violet Elizabeth Bott chewing a wasp. I didn't bother much with precise adjustments. I said last time that "There were so many possibilities that even thirty minutes spent fiddling with sliders felt like not nearly long enough" and who has the time for that? Mostly I just kept hitting "Random" until I got something I liked.

The addition I was really curious about was the new clothing, anyway. I think there were only three outfits in the original version and I don't recall any of them being all that great. Now there are twice as many, not counting your underwear, which you can still choose to prance around in if you want. And there still aren't any really good choices. Or maybe you disagree. You can see all six in this post and make up your own mind. 

I opted for the military look, one of the new ones and if not the least ridiculous-looking then certainly the most practical. Inflexion claim the new outfits were "very much the fashion at the time", which may be true for whatever alternate dimension the game takes place in but clearly has absolutely no relevance in any timeline known to humanity. I'm pretty sure there were people wearing denim work clothes in the later Victorian era, so why we have to dress up like extras in an end of the pier pantomime beats me, but there you are. That's video games for you.

There are also some new "Loadouts", a fancy name for a very small boost to gear and buffs. I can't imagine having these extremely minor benefits is going to change gameplay in the very early stages to any significant degree and they'll be replaced in a matter of hours, anyway. Still, I suppose every little helps, even if it doesn't help very much.

Other aspects of the character creation process remain as mystifying and bizarre as ever. If there's a reason we need to establish ancestry going back several generations before we can make a character, I'd love to hear what it is. Fortunately, you can randomize that, too.

I tore through the whole thing at a fair old clip, picked Swamp for my Abeyance Realm, took the new Skip Tutorial option and logged in. I got as far as picking a spot for my new home and putting up a cairn to claim it and then I logged out. 

The whole thing took me maybe three-quarters of an hour during which I had no technical problems. Offline, the game played as smoothly as it always has online. It seemed neither faster nor slower, no more responsive and no more sluggish. About the only discernible difference was sound of the fans in my PC whirring away, something I can't recall hearing when Inflexion's servers were doing most of the work. 

It seems unlikely I'll pursue the experiment much further. If I'm going to play Nightingale again I'd rather see what Joan of Arc and Edgar Allen Poe have to say for themselves. Poe is easy to imagine but Joan of Arc is a stretch. 

Maybe when I find out what it is they want I'll come back and report on it. Or maybe not. Perhaps the most instructive part of this whole exercise has been how "done" with Nightingale I feel right now. The curse of Early Access: you get to the end of what there is so far and you feel like it's all there's going to be and maybe all there needs to be. 

Eh. Or maybe I just wasn't in the mood. We'll see.

Feeling Twitchy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I rest my case.

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

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

Kitty's Got Claws!

I fear my time in Noah's Heart may be drawing to a close. You'd think maybe I'd gotten bored with what is, after all, a fairly ropy mobile port that the developer pretty much stopped bothering with after about six months. Or maybe it's just the sudden surge of competition from other, rather better, mobile ports or from dedicated PC games or their expansions. There's a lot going on.

It isn't any of those things. I'm still very happy with Noah's Heart in general. I still have plenty to do there. There's a good deal of the world I haven't explored yet. I haven't even finished the main storyline.

For a couple of months it was enough just to explore the delighful environments, level my character and do my best to follow the confusing plot. Then for a few months more I enjoyed the Seasons, each of which came with a convoluted storyline of its own. 

Eventually, though, the Seasons sputtered to a close. We haven't had a new one for a long time although, since the last two or three were almost impossible to follow, thanks to the truly terrible translations, and obviously padded with pointless boss fights just to make them last longer, I can't say I was sorry to see them go.

About all the game gets now are rotating "events", most of which exist only to drive business in the cash shop. There are still a few, new "holidays", which do have the odd worthwhile reward but a year after launch the game seems to exist in some kind of stasis that looks very much like maintenance mode.

As a player, I don't have an issue with maintenance-mode MMORPGs. If the gameplay is satisfying and the content deep enough, a good MMORPG has almost infinite replayability. It's one reason I've not been keen to see the creeping reliance on linear narratives in the genre - it's probably the least-replayable content of all, while at the same time being possibly the most costly to produce.

Noah's Heart clearly hasn't had either the time or the funding to develop the kind of deep, nested, recursive content that keeps games like EverQuest II or Star Wars: the Old Republic ticking over indefinitely, even through times of content drought. Even so, as I said, I'm still a way from exhausting everything it has to show me.

So why do I suspect I might be moving on sooner rather than later? Because I've run out of clothes I want, that's why! If I do drift away it won't be through any fault of the game. It'll be because I can't find anything new to wear!

As has probably been apparent from the posts I've written about the game this year, my primary motivation for logging in every day has been fashion. I've been grinding away, cooking lunch and dinner for various Phantoms, using home-cooked food made with vegetables I dug out of the ground and meat from animals I slaughtered.  Mostly wolves, weirdly.

It's been a time-consuming but satisfying process and I'd be happy to carry on but I've run out of looks I want to copy. Tonight (Well, tonight as I write this post. Heaven knows how long ago it'll have been by the time this gets published.) I finally made Gretel's outfit, the Heroic Mortality set. 

It was the last one I wanted and even then I only really wanted it for the leather jacket. The piped, zipper-leg jeans aren't bad either but the shoes don't really seem to go with the ensemble at all. I won't be wearing those when I have several pairs of boots that work so much better.

What really surprised me when I tried the jacket on were the claws. There's no indication in the schematic that the outfit comes with white gloves, tipped with long, curving, vicious metal talons. They're clearly visible in the dressing room view so I should have noticed them when I was trying the look out weeks ago but either I'd forgotten or I was concentrating so hard on the overall appearance I failed to register the fine details.

It's a great bonus. I love claws. It's just a shame that the claws from Gretel's top can't be mixed with Sisyphus's tail but as I said, when I wrote about it at the time, the tail is also part of a piece that goes in the same slot.

Last time I was faced with choosing which Phantom to curry favor with next it took me the best part of an hour to make up my mind. I looked at all the possible outfits I could get and tried the various pieces out in all kinds of combinations before committing myself for the long haul I knew it would take.

I really don't think I want to go through that again. I haven't acquired any new Phantoms since then so I'd be looking at the same choices, every one of which I didn't consider worth the effort last time. It's a classic case of diminishing returns.

Without the motivating factor of a new look, I'm not sure I'll have the determination to keep logging in every day. I wanted to complete an unbroken year-long run of "playing" every day and I've done that. I've already skipped a couple of days since, so the streak is broken, which is the very best thing that can happen to any streak.

I'm not planning on backing away from the game altogether. For a start, if I miss a whole week I risk getting booted from my guild, which has fairly strict activity requirements. I could ask them to put me on hiatus but since I've barely spoken to any of them it seems a bit cheeky. The guild is still surprisingly active, too. I may not say much but I hear a lot of other people chatting.

I do also have a possible, alternative motivation in housing. I still have a couple of housing levels left before I cap out and I haven't put anything like as much effort in decorating my house as I could have done. I'm a little wary, though, of getting too involved with the housing system in a game that very well might go belly up in a few months. 

We had yet another server merge last week and I find it hard to imagine the developers can be making much money out of the game any more. They most definitely aren't going to keep a server up out of the goodness of their hearts. As I said the other day, it's entirely possible the game will vanish before my interest in playing it does.

For the time being, I'll probably keep logging in and doing my dailies but not every day any more. If it happens that most days becomes sometimes becomes hardly ever then so be it. It's been a good run.

Before I quit, though, I'll definitely spend all the tokens I've saved up for the gacha draw. I have more than seven hundred of them. Who knows? I might pull a new Phantom with a must-have outfit. Then I'll be back to doing my dailies for sure, at least until I've got my new frock.

Or my new leather jacket. Can't have too many leather jackets, after all.

It's Magic!

A couple of apparently unrelated posts I read recently, one by Tipa, the other by Redbeard, along with a flurry of first impressions posts on Palia and Baldur's Gate 3, started me thinking about some of the core concepts of the wider RPG genre. Specifically, I found myself pondering the relative merits of games as opposed to virtual worlds, of settings in which magic is taken for granted and of the often unrealistic expectations of the people who choose to spend their time - and sometimes their lives - there.

Any of these topics could sustain a series of posts but for now I'm just going to fire off a few observations that came to mind as I was reading. If I ever get around to writing about any of this in more depth, at least I'll have some notes I can refer to.

The aspect that interests me the most - and the one I think I've seen given the least attention over the years - is the way almost every RPG, online or off, massively multiple or single player, takes place in a milieu where magic - or science so advanced it may as well be magic - is accepted as the norm. It's so absolutely commonplace in just about every game that we almost never think about the implications.

Redbeard's post makes some astute criticisms of the way NPCs in fantasy games tend to spend all their time gussied up in their Sunday best. I'm not sure it's true to say the farmers are all out there tilling the fields in ball gowns and silk stockings - certainly in some games I've played the farmers are a dowdy lot - but it's definitely the case that around towns and cities you do tend to see an awful lot of very over-dressed citizens supposedly going about their normal, working day.

What his post got me wondering wasn't so much why they'd be doing that as why they wouldn't. These people all live with magic as a part of their daily lives. They may not all be practitioners, although many games are remarkably silent on the degree to which magic is available to the general population, but they certainly see it being practiced in front of them every day.

Most fantasy rpgs include some form of illusion magic, meaning you can't be certain anyone or anything is what it appears to be. Magic-users can transform themselves into just about anything. They can change race, gender, ethnicity, size or species. They can make themselves appear to be inanimate objects or ethereal phenomena. 

You don't always have to be a skilled illusionist to pull off these effects, either. Frequently it's possible to buy potions or magical items that create the illusion on request. Those items are often on open sale in shops in the town squares and side-streets. They're not always even very expensive.

If you posit a society where most people have access to the means of looking just how they fancy, wouldn't most of them choose to look their best? Why would you walk around looking dowdy and down-at-heel, when with a click of the fingers you could look like Lady Gaga on Oscar night?

Even if you choose to believe all those flounces and frills are firmly founded, you know they're still  likely to be something very much other than they appear. Even that much-discussed issue, the disparity between what male and female adventurers wear for protection, recognises a real-world social dilemma, not an in-game credibility gap. 

Don't try and tell me that's not practical adventuring gear!

We all know the armor looks the way it does because the developers expect to market their game to adolescent boys and men with adolescent minds but for the purposes of the world in which the characters operate, the chain-mail bikini makes as much sense as anything. If you can walk the streets with a ten-foot, glowing sword in one hand, leading a saber-tooth tiger on a chain with the other, you can pretty much wear what you damn well please.

All in-game armor provides a level of protection out of all proportion to real-world logic, combined with an equally unrealistic flexibility. Adventurers wear plate armor that somehow fails to drag them to the bottom when they leap into a lake. At most it makes them a little less able to roll and kick like a ninja than their counterparts in leather or cloth - cloth that can turn a blade, if not always as well as steel, then still well enough. 

Every piece of armor is magical. We know that because there are numbers that quantify just how magical it is. Once you give your scrap of cloth a numerical value to indicate how much damage it can take and assign it a slot on a paper-doll representation of the physical form, it's allowed that whatever level of protection it provides applies across the whole of that sector, whether the armor visibly obscures the skin or not. It's magic and there's no arguing with it.

Appropriately dressed for a memorial service?

If that's true for adventurers then why would it not be true for nobles or citizens too? Clothing may not be armor but it provides protection from the elements and from everyday incident. Imagine if nothing you wore ever got torn or soiled and even if it did, that somewhere in every town you'd count on finding a smith of some kind who could magically restore every single item of clothing on your body and in your backpack back to new, for only a few coins. If you knew you could have all damage repaired in a moment for the price of a pub lunch, would you worry about the wear and tear to your best clothes when you went to work or would you strut around like Beau Brummel on a bank holiday while you counted out the carrots?

And since I mentioned backpacks, let me address Tipa's points about "how to get those 200-300 pounds of meat and fur back to your home" after you kill a deer or "why would anyone think they’d be able to single handedly clear out a dungeon full of treasure?" The answer's the same in both cases of course: it all goes in your backpack, along with your horse and quite possibly a couple of goblins and a pagoda or two. 

It's magic. Don't question it. You can't. You don't know how it works. No-one does. Least of all the developers.

Palia fashions are... strange.
Although not as strange as
what's happened to her feet...

Now, Tipa is saying things might be more interesting if the games used real-world physics and that may well be so. Games that make that choice do exist. If you take that route, though, you can't also have almost any of the magic that makes the rest of the game what it is. 

It's not just that once you open the door to things like instant travel, no encumbrance or flying mounts, you're into a brave new world of logistics. It's also that you can't easily separate out the magic you want from the magic you don't without creating just as many cultural infelicities as if you'd left it alone. 

Look at a real-world example: AI. Now the large language models are loose it's proving extremely difficult to contain them. Once a principle is demonstrated, applications follow. The culture is already changing as a result and if draconian restrictions aren't applied and enforced, something which will require a cultural change all of its own, then many things will become possible which used to not to be.

A world in which magic is demonstrably real will necessarily have radically different cultural mores and practices from one where it's not. If we're going to start questioning the internal logic of these societies, we should probably be asking why they look so similar to cultures with which we're familiar, not why they don't look similar enough.

This leads directly in to the more pressing question of whether the games are as entertaining as they could be, although even to get there we first have to get past the hurdle of whether they're meant to be just games or something more. The argument over whether the goal is to create the most enjoyable games or the most convincing virtual worlds has been raging since even before I started playing MMORPGs and that was almost a quarter of a century ago. I certainly don't propose to try and resolve it here.

What I am going to suggest is that the two concepts are considerably less compatible than many people have been trying to suggest for decades now. There's a solid, commercial reason why MMORPGs (And, perhaps to a lesser extent, RPGs.) have become more and more gamelike over the years; it's because that's what players are most likely to accept, to enjoy and pay for.

There absolutely is a market for games where, as Tipa describes, you need a wagon to get the carcass of the creature you've killed back home so you can butcher it. ArcheAge come to mind as a game I've played that incorporates such features. But even in those games, such activities tend to be optional. 

It's also not as easy as all that to set up such systems to be consistent with real-world values, even if you wanted to do it. Star Citizen is perhaps the "shining" example here. In attempting to create a gamespace in which everything really does behave in a way logically consistent with real-world physics, Cloud Imperium Games have... not made a game at all.

We all look completely fine.

If and when they do make a game that conforms to that blueprint, it's odds on that most of the game-playing world, having given it a go, will decide they already have one life to live and can't fit the requirements of another, just as nitpickingly tedious and demanding, inside of it. Every action in a game must be easier, faster and more fun than the real-world activity it mimics. Otherwise, why not just go do the real thing instead?

All of which brings me to unrealistic expectations. These days games are expected to be both rigorously realistic and absolutely convenient. If it takes a long time to get things done it's a grind and if it doesn't there's not enough content. If travel is instant it's an insult but if it's not it's a time-sink. If death means nothing but a brief interruption to gameplay it's trivializing the risk but if there's a corpse to be recovered it's an archaic throwback to the bad old days.

There's so much choice these days, no-one has time to put up with anything that's not perfect. But nothing's ever perfect. Or will be.

Least of all this post, which as I said is just a few jottings on some things that occurred to me while I was reading stuff other people wrote. One day someone might knit all this together and come up with the ideal game but it won't be in my lifetime and probably not in the lifetime of anyone reading this, either.

We're all just going to have to get used to some things in our games not being exactly how we'd like them to be, I guess. Which is probably the closest to reality the games are ever going to come.

Thereby Hangs A Tail

Time for another fashion report. My latest acquisition is the Black Mountain Set, as worn by Sophos Sisyphus, sometimes known as Sophia.

Sisyphus has a very unusual backstory as you can see from the panel,on the left.

If you can pick your way through the translation, the gist is that she's forever rolling the stone of her age up the hill of years from eight to twelve, whereupon it slips and rolls back down and she has to start all over again. She's knows she's doing it but she doesn't know why. She wants to stop  but she doesn't know how. It's heartbreaking.

That's not why I picked her, though. I picked her because she has a tail.

It's not a real tail. She's a human girl not some kind of animal that walks and talks like one. (If only...) The tail's a part of her costume. I thought it was attached to the legs but it turns out it's sewed into the top.

As you can see, there's really no way to tell where it's attached from the pattern. The tail doesn't appear in any of the pictures. Well, it wouldn't be attached to the shoes, I guess, although with magic in the world you can never be sure.

Before I decided which pattern to unlock, I spent a good, long time looking at all the available options in the Fashion preview window. I was a little gunshy after unlocking the last one and finding it didn't look exactly as I'd imagined.

I couldn't find any more full sets I thought I'd want to wear just as they come. There are several I really liked the look of when I saw them on the big, splashy, full-screen picture that flashes up when you first acquire a new Phantom and some still look good on the Line-Up page but when I got to see the as-worn version in the preview window, most didn't look quite so appealing.

Consequently, instead of full outfits, my main focus has moved to separates and there you have to be very careful. Some patterns give you Top, Bottom and Shoes but quite often, especially with any of the gowns or dresses, the Top and Bottom (And sometimes even the Bottom and the Shoes.) are all one piece.

Separates combine pretty well in Noah's Heart. They fit together very smoothly. There are plenty of pieces that share an aesthetic and go together convincingly. I'm acquiring a lot of leather jackets and leggings and things with straps and buckles. A tail, though, that's something special.

Sisyphus' Top and Bottom both go with several things I already have but if I want to wear the tail, I have no choice but to wear the top too. Luckily it goes really well with several options in my wardrobe.

As you can see, my choices do tend towards the gothic, although that's mostly a by-product of the original designs. I'd prefer at least a splash of color but for that I'd need some dye. The good news is I have finally figured out how the dye system works. The bad news is that, as you'd expect, dyes are mostly sold in the cash shop. 

There are some that come from "Events". I have received a few of those but at the time I didn't really understand how to they worked and I used them up trying to figure it out. The other good news is that the're not very expensive. I could unlock a dozen colors for five dollars and a dozen is about twice as many as I'm ever going to need.

That brings me to a very significant moment of truth. Do I actually spend some money on this game? Given I've been playing it for nearly a year and it's cost me nothing, it seems reasonable to pony up a fiver. I'd spend twice that on an indie game on Steam that might only give me four or five hours of playtime and I must have had hundreds of hours of entertainment from Noah's Heart by now.

Without being entirely paranoid, I'd be wary of giving my credit card details to whoever's behind this thing but I just checked and you can pay by PayPal, which is the exact reason I made a PayPal account all those many years ago. 

Looking past that decision, I'm really not sure what Phantom to butter up next. There aren't many obvious choices left for seperates and none of the full Outfits feel like anything I'd wear in preference to those I have already. 

I might even have to start thinking about which Phantoms would be most helpful in combat rather than focusing on whose clothes would suit me best. There are practical reasons as well as cosmetic ones for bribing a Phantom into liking you, after all. 

For the time being, though, I might just make some pies and stockpile them. They don't go off so there's no need to rush.

Tarisland First Impressions: The Market or Why A Duck?

I was working all weekend so I didn't get much chance to log into the Tarisland beta. Those Noah's Heart dailies don't do themselves, you know. I mean, they almost do but you still have to be there...

I wanted to play, though, and I did manage to get a few minutes, here and there. On Saturday evening  I was fiddling about with the UI because I didn't have enough time to go adventuring, when I happened across something you'd think might have come up in the tutorial but, as far as I can remember, wasn't even mentioned - the Market.

By "Market" I don't exactly mean the cash shop. I think it probably will be the cash shop, when the game goes live, but there is no cash shop in this beta. 

I suppose it's an assumption to say the game will have a cash shop when it goes live but it seems a pretty safe one. It would be a weird free-to-play title if it didn't. Then again, now I come to think of it, I haven't actually seen any mention of the payment model. 

Hang on - I'll check... 

 

Hmm. It's surprisngly unclear. I can't see anything specific on the official website other than the much-touted "Say No to Pay to Win!" policy. A general search of the web finds most sites describing it as "A Free to Play Cross-Platform MMORPG" so I guess that's what it is. I imagine the payment model is something so obvious to the Chinese developers they don't even feel the need to mention it. Are there any MMORPGs in their home market that require a subscription?

Anyway, getting back to the point, I hadn't noticed until a couple of days ago that there even was a marketplace. I think it might get a mention at some point during the extended tutorial but I don't recall anything specifically directing me to open a window or buy anything, as happens in most games that rely on people spending money in the company store. I had to find the Market for myself.

What I found when I did surprised me a little. I knew the game had various factions with which you could raise your Reputation and that by doing so you could purchase crafting patterns and other useful items. I also knew there were tokens to collect for doing different activities such as running dungeons and other instances and that you could spend those tokens on gear upgrades. What I hadn't appreciated was just how intensive and wide-reaching those systems were.

The Market window has three tabs: Appearance, Market and Trade Assoc. 

There's next to nothing in the Market tab, just some health and mana potions, a four-slot backpack expander a name-change token, all of which you can buy for a small amount of silver, the most common in-game currency. I'm guessing (A lot of that going on here.) that this is the tab where most of the non-cosmetic Cash Shop items are going to appear, when the time comes.

The Trade Assoc. tab breaks down into half a dozen sub-tabs, each featuring a named Association. Some of those in turn open out into more tabs, around a dozen in all. That's almost certainly just the beginning of what you'll see when the game leaves beta. 

The Associations are:

• Adventurers
• Honorary
• Universal Hall
• Reputation
• Lifestyle
• Friendship.

Each of them uses a different type of token from a different type of gameplay. The Adventurers Association rewards stat gear for the tokens you get from running dungeons, whereas the Honorary Association takes tokens from PvP. Sound familiar at all?

The Universal Hall is a kind of ascending solo instance as seen in games such as Final Fantasy XIV and takes tokens earned from doing that content. Reputation is self-explanatory. So far there are only three Reps, one for each of the zones available in beta, but presumably eventually there'll be one for every zone in the game. (And again, I'm making an assumption, this time that Tarisland will launch with more than three zones...)

Lifestyle Association is for crafters. This turns out to be where you buy the kind of mats that are often vendor-sold in MMORPGs, as well as the crafting tools themselves. If that was explained in the extremely brief crafting tutorial, I must have missed it. Everything in there costs nothing but silver and in amounts that seem very reasonable, although since I have yet to do any crafting, don't take my word for it.

For the Friendship Association it looks like Tarisland has borrowed an idea from FFXIV generally reckoned to have been a good one and then expanded on it. The currency you spend in this tab is the Friendship Badge, which you earn in three ways: by doing dungeons with players who have never done them before, by completing - or in some cases just attempting - the higher difficulty Elite and Arcane instances, and by taking on the Healer or Tank role in Raids. Be a good egg and karma will reward you, in other words.

It's a wide-ranging and potentially very solid scaffold on which to build a range of platforms for character-progression. It certainly seems to back up the No Pay-to-Win claim which, of course, invites the question so what are you going to make all your money on, then?

I'm guessing that's where the third tab, Appearance, comes in.

In Appearance you can buy Mounts (Ground and Flying), Costumes, Weapon Skins and what the game calls Pendants. We'll get to Pendants later.

All of the mounts (There are only four available in the beta) have special abilities in addition to their obvious mobilities. There's a mech suit that allows you to craft a portable Warehouse, giving remote access to the storage vault to you and your "nearby allies". There's also an elegant, icy elk-like creature called a Polar Bluehorn that allows you to gather crafting materials without having to dismount. I wanted that.

I'd seen people riding the Bluehorn and wondered what you had to do to get one. You get a free mount from a quest fairly early on but it's a clunking great rhino that I found aesthetically unpleasing, not least because someone on the art team made the dubious decision to have female characters ride the thing side-saddle. 

Or maybe everyone has to. It's about as wide as a VW Microbus. You'd need some thighs to straddle one of those, gender notwithstanding.

It hadn't really occurred to me I might just be able to buy a better mount and even if the possibility had crossed my mind, I certainly hadn't entertained the idea that I might be able to afford it. When I found the mounts in the Market, it came as a very pleasant surprise to discover I could do both.

In beta, that is. I'm pretty sure it'll be different in the Live game.

It's not explained anywhere I could find it but I'm guessing everything in the Appearance tab will eventually be available only for a curency purchased with real money. Oh, I'm sure there will also be a way to earn a pittance of the same currency in-game. There always is. The main route to looking good, though, is going to be through your wallet.

For the beta, however, it seems we've all been given a stipend of three thousand... I'm going to call them Gems, because that's what they look like. Mousing over the icon for once produces nothing. 

I spent a good, long while examining all the ways I could spend my free money. I really wanted the Dauntless Explorer costume, a kind of catwalk version of something Indiana Jones' cooler, younger sister might wear. (That's younger when the first movie came out, obviously, not younger than Indie is now, when his hypothetical lil' sis would probably be even older than I am...)

Unfortunately, I couldn't run to both that and the Polar Bluehorn and the sheer utility of not having to get on and off my mount to gather from nodes won out. That still left me with a chunk of change to spend so I spent some of it on...

Well, I kind of blew the reveal with the picture at the top of the post. Yes, I bought a duck. 

And not just any duck, either. I spent 180 Gems on a bright yellow duckling that tosses a purple ball into the air then catches it, occasionally turning somersaults, all while sitting on a fluffy white cloud that floats over my character's head. The in game logic and lore-appropriate explanation for this is anyone's guess.

Weird objects that float above the player-character's head are called Pendants in the terminology of Tarisland. It's a category that also includes back items and halo-like particle effects, a couple of which I may well also spend my remainingGems on before the beta comes to an end. I am absolutely the target market for this kind of thing, always providing it's not going to cost me anything. Well, anything other than my self-respect, but that's a ship that sailed long ago.

All things considered, the mechanics underpinning this aspect of the in-game economy seem solid enough. I personally prefer the more traditional approach to gearing up that comes from beating up monsters and taking their stuff but token systems have been with us almost as long and many people seem to prefer their predictability. 

According to the website, Tarisland is also supposed to have a "Free Trading System ... committed to restoring the freedom of trade in the endgame and creating an economic system that closely resembles a real market." If that's in the beta, I haven't found any sign of it yet, but then it took me twenty levels to find the bank, so once again, don't rely on anything I tell you.

At the end of my session this morning, most of which was spent researching this post, I was asked to complete another, entirely different, lengthy survey on how I was finding things. They didn't ask me to score the Market but if they had I'd have given it an 8 out of 10, which is what I've given most aspects of the game I've been asked about so far. 

I am a very generous grader, though. Always have been.

This Summer's Fashions Arrive Early

If it seems much too soon for another post on my latest outfit in Noah's Heart that's because it is. It's been barely two weeks since I last wrote about adding another outfit to my collection and all along I've been saying the fastest I could manage it was around once a month. So what happened?

Well, I didn't make any extra effort, that's for sure. I didn't grind or quest or play the game more than usual or any of those things. I also didn't get my credit card out and spend any real money. 

In-game money, though? Ah, now we're talking!

Like most modern mmorpgs, Noah's Heart has far more currencies than anyone can begin to care about, or should. Most of them I ignore although, as I've mentioned before, Noah's Heart has possibly the best-documented UI of any game I've ever played, so I can't pretend I couldn't immediately find out what every currency was for and where to get it and spend it if I wanted to.

Even if I don't go looking for them, there are certain currencies I can't seem to help piling up. One of those is the imaginatively named "Home Coin" which, among other things, autogenerates from owning and upgrading a house. You can spend it in the Home Store and at the merchants who regularly appear in various rooms around your demesne without invitation, just like they do in Chimeraland, although at least in Noah's Heart they stand demurely in a corner and don't sit preening themselves at your dressing-table or crash out on your bed.

Because I'm naturally frugal by inclination, I've never really bought all that much from these stores, preferring to hoard my imaginary coins while picturing myself rolling around in them like Scrooge McDuck. A week or so back, though, for no particular reason, I found myself in a spending mood, so I bought every recipe the store had to offer.

One reason I'd never bothered before was that I didn't really know any use for food other than to give it to my Phantoms to try and make them like me better. Once I had several recipes to make the highest Affection food, worth three hundred points, there didn't seem much point having any more.

Shows what I know! When I looked at the foods I could now make with the recipes I'd bought, I discovered I already had huge stockpiles of the ingredients. They needed things I'd previously had little use for but also they used a wider range of mats for each dish but fewer of each individual item, meaning what I already had in stock suddenly went much farther.

Freed from any need to go foraging or slaughtering for a while, I took to using all my available energy every day to make the new dishes I then force-fed them to my chosen Phantom, Sanada. Fortunately, battle-hardened tribal warrior that she is, she has the digestive tract of a goat, so she loved it. And, increasingly, me as well.

That on its own still wouldn't have been enough to have me writing this post today. I'd fixed the hitch in the pipeline caused by running out of mats but I still had to deal with the bottleneck of my daily Energy allowance.

Until last night, when I happened to be browsing the game's many, many stores, I came across a fix for that. 

There are more than thirty storefronts accessible through the UI alone, not counting who knows how many attached to NPCs. The one I was looking at was called The Mall.

It's  one of the cash shops where you can spend both Ori-Crystals, the currency you buy with real money, but also several in-game currencies like Diamonds, Gold and Shells. I'd scanned the items on offer there, cursorily, a few times before but never with much attention. 

Mostly I go there to buy Seasoning, a cooking material I get through in prodigious quantities. It's almost the only thing I ever buy with my Diamonds but this time, as I was scrolling through the available stock, I noticed there were Ornate Gift Boxes on sale for 1000 Diamonds apiece. 

Ornate Gift Boxes are something I get very occasionally from a Home Merchant's lucky bag and once a week or so from the Planet Traveler mini-game. Inside the box there's an item worth a thousand Affection, the most you can get in one hit, so far as I'm aware.

As with most things in Noah's Heart, the Ornate Gift Boxes in The Mall come with a purchase limit but it's a very generous fifty a week. I only needed another thirty-nine thousand points of Affection to persuade Sanada to hand over her recipe. I checked my Diamonds. I had a hundred and ten thousand. So I bought forty Ornate Gift Boxes.

In the time it took me to open them and hand them over I had my new recipe. All I had to do was make it. I had all the mats but I was a little down on Energy. Fortunately, The Mall also sells Energy recovery in units of five-hundred at even weight for Diamonds. Another thousand Diamonds and I was ready to sew.

I wouldn't say this is a game-changer for me. It so happened I had a large stash of unspent Diamonds to hand but I have half that many now and they don't rain down like Gold (Of which I have in excess of eighty million coins and no clue what to do with them.) I'd have to make quite an effort to earn enough Diamonds to claim my permitted fifty Ornate Gift Boxes every week.

It does add another option to gameplay, though. With the new recipes and the ability to buy at least a few thousand more points of affection every week, I ought to be able to count on a new outfit every two to three weeks instead of every four or five.

Now I just need to work out whose affections to bribe my way into next. It's no longer the full signature appearance of a given Phantom I'm after, more the individual pieces I can put together to make some looks of my own. Not all Phantom outfits can be used as separates and those that can sometimes have other restrictions. Working out what will go with what takes research but it's fun to do.

In fact, it's arguably the most fun you can have in Noah's Heart. Certainly the most fun I'm having, anyway.