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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you believe that other guy only had milk?!

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

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

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

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

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

You just keep telling yourself that, Rabi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome To Hethereau. Very First Impressions Of Neverness To Everness

 

Big day today: Neverness To Everness goes live. 

Went live, actually. At 3am. I took the trouble to look up the exact time, just in case it was late afternoon in the UK or something. Didn't want to be sitting around all day, waiting for the doors to open.

And then, of course, I woke up and forgot about it until after breakfast, by which time it Beryl was ready for her walk. And it's a lovely day, warm and sunny, so we made it a long one, meaning I didn't get to sit down with the game until after eleven. Now that wouldn't have happened a decade ago!

Luckily, I had at least remembered to pre-download the client yesterday. All 50 gigs of it, which isn't really as big as all that by modern standards. The download was very fast, too. Big pipe.

Even so, there was, inevitably, another patch to install before I could log in. And a replacement for the launcher to install before that. And finally the damn shaders had to compile...

Eventually I got in. After which it was all a bit of a whirlwind ...

I like media that don't waste time with introductions. I like books and movies that start in the middle of the story and leave you to figure out the plot. I like world-building where the building has all been done before you get there and all the characters act like you know as much about the world they live in as they do. 

I like to be overwhelmed with new ideas, concepts and jargon and to be left to figure out what it all means from context. If the writing is good, context should be more than enough to go on.

Neverness To Everness opens like that. Just like that. And then it goes on the same way, at least for the first hour, which is about as long as I've played because after that I had to stop for lunch and after lunch I started writing this, which I kind of wish I wasn't... 

I'd say I can't wait to get back to Hethereau but clearly I can because if I couldn't I wouldn't be typing now, would I? But you know what I mean...

Games don't often stick with the "throw them in the deep end" approach for long for the simple reason that you generally need to be told how to play a game in a way you don't have to be told how to read a book or watch a movie. You can only take a player so far with an opening movie and a cut scene. At some point you have to hand over the controls. And then explain what the controls do.

NTE does a pretty fair job of sliding out of that one. For a start, it avoids character creation almost completely. The entire thing consists of one click - do you want to look like a boy or a girl? Doesn't even ask you for a name. That comes later, when you sign what very much looks like your life away. 

No option on that, by the way. I might have opted out if there had been.

Then, for quite a while longer - fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe half an hour - the only instructions you get are to use WASD to move and Space to jump. Even when the fighting starts, you don't get any hints on what to do. The developers trust you to know. You've played games like this before, right? 

Yes, well, as it happens, I have. Even if I am ancient and the game did feel the need to query my age when I set up the account (And I knocked a couple of years off, too, because who gives their real birth date to any of these people?), even then I have played games before where all you really need to do is click LMB for your light attack and RMB for your heavy attack...

...which won't work here because RMB is Dodge. So, fine, I've played those too. Actually I prefer it that way. Much easier than having to hit Ctrl. And as for the Ultimates and Specials, you can see the keys on screen, just like you always can. Seriously, no-one needs to be told this stuff, right?

Yeah, sure. Until the second or third fight, when the game starts to let you into the secret of how complicated combat is going to get. All that stuff about timing dodges to get parry and how to work with the rest of your team for heals and buffs and how to set up Breaks and...

Heh. Important? Sure it is. I know enough to know that none of that is going to matter for a long time, if at all. Not to me. Not the way I play. And if it does, I'll play something else instead.

For now, just button mashing and hitting the specials when they light up looks like it's going to be plenty good enough. It took me through all the fights up to the one where the Boss is Level 9 while you're still Level 1, anyway. See, at this stage, the developers don't want you to lose these fights. Later on, when they're trying to sell you something, then maybe they'll want you to lose but not until they've gotten you good and hooked first.

Meanwhile, as the fights are going on and the game is giving you suggestions on how to win, the story is exploding around you. It's a kinetic introduction to what I'm kind of hoping will be quite a sedentary game, at least the way I plan on playing it. I'm more interested in the getting an apartment, driving a car and running a business side of things than the spinning 360 degrees upside down in mid air to kick some bad guy in the back of the head part.

But it's a good story. Or, rather, it's a good show. Something is happening all the time and most of what's happening is psychedelic or surreal or both at once. It's like a 1990s Grant Morrison comic, come to life. 

After about ten minutes I was pretty clear on what game I was playing. The elevator pitch for this one must have been "What if Once Human and Wuthering Waves had a baby?". 

And you know that's going to work for me. What are my two favorite new games of the last two or three years? Yep, those two. Not that I'm playing either of them anymore but that's on me, not the games. Harder and harder to hold my interest for long, these days. Still, those two together racked up a few hundred hours of my time. If this one can match either it'll be doing just fine for itself, the way I'm keeping score.

That's speculation but one positive thing I will say for NTE up front is that it feels like a very comfortable fit. I barely had to look anything up. All the controls do what I expect them to do. All the key binds are where they should be. I haven't had to change anything yet. Nothing at all. 

There was only one thing I even had to go into settings to check and that was whether there was a screenshot key and, if so, what it was. Alright, two things. Be like that! 

And there are two keys: F8 and F9. The first is for snapshots, the second for photographs. The only difference I can see is that there are a few more controls in the latter. Not many, though. Not yet. I'd expect that to change later.

What's there already is more than enough for me, in any case. I'd been using Win+PrtScr up to then anyway and that worked fine. I was only looking to see if I could get some shots without the UI. 

Speaking of the UI, it's delightfully minimal and you can make it transparent if you like. Can't get more minimal than invisible.

Enough of the technicalities. I'm sure I'll get into all of that later. This is just an extremely early first impressions piece and my extremely early first impressions are very favorable. The game looks great, it sounds great, the characters are engaging, the voice acting is easy on the ear, the writing is sharp, the translation is fluent...

What's not to like? Well, I'm sure there'll be something but whatever it is, I haven't run into it yet. I probably shouldn't be making any broad statements and assertions at this stage, anyway, good or bad. I've barely been in the game an hour. 

Perhaps the most positive thing I can say about the game so far is that I'm very eager to cut this short and get back to it. That I'd rather be playing NTE than writing about it is about the strongest recommendation I can offer right now.

So if it's all the same to everyone, I'm going to do just that. More commentary and analysis to follow, I'm sure, by which time we can only hope I may even know what I'm talking about. 

First time for everything! 

Pathfinder: Kingmaker - First Impressions

Yesterday, in passing, I mentioned there's a game I'm playing now that seems like it might have some traction, something that's been hard to find in games of late. Since the only thing that successfully sunk its claws in this year was Baldur's Gate 3, I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise that this is something similar.

The game is Pathfinder: Kingmaker, currently on sale for a massive 84% off, which is why I have it. It's an isometric rpg from a Russian studio by the name of Owlcat Games, a pretty good name in my book. It was partly funded through a Kickstarter, one of those really rare ones that not only ended up doing what it said it was going to but in something like the timescale it proposed, the campaign having begun in 2017 and the game coming out just over a year later.

It was originally published by Deep Silver, an Austrian company I've never heard of and a couple of years ago the publishing rights transferred to another unfamiliar name, Knights Peak. That, though, is a subsidiary of someone much better known, at least to me - MY.games, formerly MY.com, publishers of, among other things, Allods Online.

Hey! Look, everybody! I can read Wikipedia!

While I'm cribbing, I suppose I ought to mention how Pathfinder was already a well-established RPG system long before any of this. A decade before, in fact.

Before I started doing this "research", I thought it was a spin-off from the forty-year old classic from Palladium Games, but it turns out to be another Pathfinder altogether. It's from a company called Paizo Publishing and it's based on 3rd Ed. Dungeons and Dragons, which apparently is somehow open source now. How did that happen?

More importantly, why did Owlcat decide to use the same name as another extremely similar system? It's not like we're short of generic fantasy nouns. In this case, confusion doesn't just seem possible, it seems inevitable.

Anyway, that's the provenance. What about the game?

It's weird. I mean, it's not weird as in spooky or strange or outlandish. Just weird in that it looks like other games I've played but doesn't entirely feel like any of them when I'm playing.

It looks like all the Baldur's Gate games or Solasta or Solasta II or Divinity Original Sin 1 or 2 or like any other isometric RPG you might be able to name. They all look the same, don't they? Possibly more so than any other genre I can come up with.

It sort of plays like them, too, but only sometimes. The bits where you click to move your party around an open area or through a dungeon, stopping to engage in turn-based battles that take literally hours to resolve. Or the bits where you find every container in a room and loot it and find you can hardly move. Or when you wander around a safe haven selling all the crap you dragged back to town and making small talk with the locals.

All that stuff is there and about as entertaining as it always is. The beating heart of all these games is always the combat, of course. As long as that's good, the rest is a bonus. 

I had a bit of an issue with the combat in P:K (Unfortunate abbreviation, that...) at first because it defaults to some kind of real-time action combat where your party is controlled by AI and you have to hit the space bar to pause it every time you want to take charge. Once I found out how to toggle that off, though, everything was peachy.

It's D&D so all the spells and abilities are at least vaguely familiar, even though I think this might be the first time I've played anything specifically based on the 3rd edition. It seems ferociously complicated even for D&D, with a ludicrous amount of choice at just about every stage. Leveling up requires a degree in advanced RPG mechanics.

Still, in the end it's just move your little pieces about, set some baddies on fire, hit some other baddies with lumps of metal and remember to save often so you can do it all again when it goes wrong, which it will. It's what they call a gameplay loop, I believe, and a pretty solid one at that. (I had a whole sarcastic aside about Stars Reach here but I took it out. It seemed unnecessarily cruel.)

There's a story, too, naturally. Usually at this point I'd say something abut how it's the same story it always is but actually it's not. It's one of the weird aspects of the whole thing. The set-up is that some noble recruits a bunch of people, of whom you 're one, to go into a contested region between two political powers, remove the faction that's trying to establish themselves in the hinterland and then take over and govern it properly. Or something like that. I wasn't paying as much attention as I could have been.

Even weirder, there are two teams, yours and one led by a sociopathic gnome (As though there's any other kind.) and you have to get the whole thing done in three months or before the gnome's crew, whichever comes first, or you lose. It's very odd and made odder because it's all so perfunctory. 

Nothing in the main storyline seems to be explained in any detail, even though there's a huge amount of explanatory text for everything else. You can click on highlighted words and get gobs of lore about the gods or the cities of the world and every minor NPC with a quest seems to have far too much to say but as for why the player character wants to become a landholding baron/ess or why anyone would let them is a lot harder to parse.

My best guess is that it's like one of those classic fairy tales, where the King offers a third of his kingdom to anyone who can free the land from the threat of the Dragon, except in this case it's just some murdering bastard with horns on his hat who turns out to have had a really bad childhood.

The whole fairy-tale element is compounded by the way many of the non-combat dice rolls are presented as pages of parchment in a storybook. Not only that, it's a storybook that's being written by one of your party, a halfling Bard of relentlessly good cheer, who I'm surprised the always-angry Barbarian hasn't stuffed into a barrel and thrown into a river before the end of the first day.

When you run into one of these skill checks, you get to pick them from a list and the bard re-writes history according to how the dice fall. It's quite enjoyable although I'm not sure it's more enjoyable than just watching the dice was in BG3. Still, points for effort, I guess.

Some of the conversations are voiced and the acting is competent but not so much so as to make me want to listen to it all the way through. I tend to read the text and flip to the next stage long before whoever it is has finished talking. I do like the party, though. They're all quite characterful, even if there is one who sometimes sounds more like a Valley Girl than an adventurer.

The art design is excellent. It's a charming game to look at, especially if you like parchment. There's a lot of parchment. 

One thing that I noticed as I was looking up some stuff online was that Pathfinder:Kingmaker is reckoned to be very difficult at the start. Where most similar games lead you fairly carefully through content appropriate to your level, apparently this one just lets you charge through the main storyline long before you're equipped to deal with the fights. 

I've seen a bit of that but mostly I've been keeping to things I ought to be able to handle and that's been difficult enough. There's been a lot of limping through with everyone more than half dead and a few times where I've had to reload and do something else altogether. 

What makes it feel a lot more difficult - and certainly slower and more tedious - than it probably should is the number of times people miss. Geez! Some of these people couldn't hit a barn with a baseball bat. Not if you gave them three goes.

And it's not only the party, either. It's not at all unusual for an entire round of combat to go by with no-one being able to hit anyone! It may be faithful to the rules but it's very poor entertainment. I'm guessing it's a lot less noticeable if you let the game run in real-time, as the default settings would suggest the devs expected but that takes most of the fun out of the whole concept from my way of thinking. If I wanted to play an action rpg I'd go get my head examined.

Something similar applies to traveling on the abstract overland map and setting camp, both of which are heavily prone to being interrupted by random encounters, some of which are with the aforementioned kinds of completely inappropriate, far too powerful enemies I was trying to avoid. All of that put together made the first few sessions something of a trial and yet I persisted, which must mean I was having some kind fun, even if it was the masochistic kind.

The same Reddit threads I saw that made a lot of the low-level difficulty suggested things started to improve around Level 3. That seems like it would be quick to arrive but it's not, really. I dinged Level 3 just before I started writing this and I had over eight hours played.

I did go out and give it another go to see if it had gotten any better and it did seem as if it might have, so I'm optimistic. I'm slightly less optimistic about the ticking timer. Three months might sound like a lot but I've burned through a month of that already and it feels like I've hardly done anything. 

I guess I'd better get on with it instead of sitting here talking about it. I'd hate to think that pesky gnome was going to beat me to it. Whatever it is. 

Winds Of Valen - First Impressions

I've only recently started paying attention to the recommendations that appear on my Steam home page or whatever the heck we're calling it. Landing page? Login screen? The first thing I see when I open Steam, anyway. You know what I mean.

It used to be filled with games I had absolutely no interest in whatsoever and I trained myself to ignore them but lately I've noticed a lot more turning up there that seem to have some vague relevance to the kind of thing I might usually play. I've gradually slipped into at least glancing at them, taking a closer look at any that stand out. I guess that's how they get you.

Yesterday, a title I hadn't heard of popped up - Winds of Valen. It looked pretty so I passed the mouse pointer across the image to see what sort of game it was. 

It's a F2P MMORPG. That is kind of in my wheelhouse. Not that I have a wheelhouse. Or would know what to do with one if I had. Keep my wheels in it, I suppose...

Here's the store description:

Winds of Valen is a free fantasy sandbox MMORPG. Experience old-school progression where every level, skill, and drop is earned through effort. Train your combat, mining, and smithing skills, and hunt for rare and unique items in a seamless open world filled with danger and discovery.

Well, that sounds alright, doesn't it? I wonder how much of it is true? (Spoiler: most of it, if you squint hard enough and don't set your expectations too high.) The footprint was fairly small, just over a gigabyte (The specs say 2gb required.) so I stuffed it into my Steam Library and left it there for the morning. 

Today I played for half an hour after breakfast and an hour and a half this afternoon. 

And it was fun. For a given value of fun, that is. Whether you think it would be fun too depends on your feelings about The Grind.

As many of the Steam reviews (More than six hundred of them, currently aggregating to Mostly Positive.) point out, often as though it's an attraction not a drawback, there's not much to do in the game other than kill mobs, raise skills and pick up loot. Grinding is the gameplay. The developers seem to agree:

"Winds of Valen is built for players who enjoy the open-ended, sandbox design of old-school MMOs." 

Yeah. That's what we called grinding, back in the day.

The other thing many of the reviews agree on is how similar Winds of Valen is to one particular, very specific old-school MMO. It's the one that literally has "old-school" in its name: Old School Runescape. 

I can neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of that impression. I've never played OSRS. I have played Runescape, though, albeit years back and not for long, and it didn't remind me all that much of what little I remember about it, but I think that might have more to do with what WoV looks like than anything. I sure don't remember Runescape looking this charming.

So, where did this thing thing pop up from, anyway? According to the description on Steam, WoV launched in November 2025. According to itch.io, where the game is also available, it came out slightly before that, at the end of October. Itch says the developer is HeadCoach. Steam says it's Fiery Dog Games. 

Not sure it really matters. What does is that, since then, it's been updated regularly. And that tells an interesting story in itself.

If Winds of Valen was a modern, forward-looking, cutting-edge MMORPG it wouldn't have launched at all. It'd have gone into Early Access and stayed there for a year or three. That would have given the devs a pass for any glitches, bugs or shortfalls in content. Or at least they'd have claimed it did.

WoV sure as heck plays like an Early Access game, not least because there's not a whole lot of content there yet, but if you can remember that far back, that's how many MMORPGs used to be at launch. They'd come out half-finished, if that, and then patch patch patch until they had something approximating a full game. Players expected it and if the game was any good they hung around for it.

WoV is like that. The update history on Steam shows a stream of patches, small and large. Eighteen since last November. That's old school, alright. 

As for the payment model, F2P, might not seem to fit the old school bill (Although the free to play model is older than you might imagine.) but if this was a regular 2026 F2P title, it'd have plenty of Supporter Packs you'd be able to buy to "show support". As far as I can see you can't give Fiery Dog or HeadCoach, whichever it is, any money, even if you wanted to. How they're funding this thing beats me because there's no in-game cash shop I could see, either.

So, that's the background. How about the game?

Well, there's not a lot there yet but what there is looks very promising. As you can see from the screenshots, it's very pretty. If anything the visuals are better in game.

Performance-wise, I'd say it was bug-free because I certainly didn't run into any problems when I was playing, except that I hit a pretty big one when I logged out. After each session my PC crashed and had to be hard-rebooted. Makes me a bit nervous to try again, although I might give it a go on the laptop to see if it'll run there.

When you hit Play for the first time, it's straight into Character Creation. There's absolutely no story, no narrative, no introductory movie or cut scene to sit through. There aren't even any passages of sub-Tolkeinian prose to set the scene. There's nothing at all. It's so refreshing!

Character creation itself is fairly basic but the models are cute and I had no problems getting someone I felt comfortable playing. The surprise comes when you have to pick a server. There are half a dozen, each in a different region. How a game like this manages servers in the USA, Europe and Australia beats me. When I was making my choice, there were people on all of them, mostly single figures. The game has a thirty-day average concurrency of just under a hundred with an all-time peak three times that, according to the Steam Charts.

I spawned in on the outskirts of a village with a huge castle behind me, the implication being, I guess, that that's where I'd come from. Nothing in the game said so, of course. Nothing in the game says anything, including the NPCs, mostly because there are none.

There are no questgivers because there are no quests. There are shops but they're automated. No-one's waiting behind the counter to serve you. You have a sword and a pickaxe and that's your lot. It's the sandiest of sandboxes. Who needs NPCs? Just get on with it!

So I did. I went out of the village to see what was there and what was there was goblins. And skeletons. And chickens. And cows. You can kill all of those. I did, except for the cows. I didn't kill any cows. It seemed... unnecessary.

I sliced them all up with my sword. It's not like I had a choice. There's only one weapon type I could find and that was the sword. There's a  whole sword shop. All it sells are swords. There's crafting and the only weapon you can craft is a sword. If you don't like swords you're in the wrong game.

There are shields, too. They have their own shop and crafting recipes. Ditto armor. Ditto potions, theoretically, although I couldn't find the crafting station for those.  There's jewelry, too, and a jewelry store but I didn't see any crafting option for rings or amulets. Probably waiting for a patch.

If you don't want to craft your gear you can rely on the mobs you kill to provide. Everything always drops something, even if its only coin. You can wait for the item you need to drop, which is how I got a shield, a helmet and a ring, or you can save up your coins and buy what you want in town. 

It's surprisingly satisfying. And very old-school, except in the really old days, everything in the shops would have been inferior quality, where here it's pretty good. The motivating factor to get you crafting or looting rather than going to the store is the price. I'd still be saving for a shield if one hadn't dropped.

One distinctly new-school innovation I liked was the information panel that pops up when you target a mob. It doesn't just tell you all the stats, it tells you what the mob drops and the percentage chance of it happening. Until you actually get the drop, there's a question mark to maintain the suspense about what it might be but the likelihood of getting something is clear right from the start.

Even better, the chance of a special item dropping increases the longer you fail to get one. I was killing skeleton miners to see what the drop was going to be and my chances went from 7% to 12% before I got lucky. 

The rare drop off a Skeleton Miner turned out to be a pair of boots with a bonus to mining. The common drop is either tin or copper ore. Drops are rational and realistic, which I'd have to say is very definitely not in keeping with the old school vibe, but much appreciated by me all the same.It used to bug the heck out of me when a wolf would drop a rusty sword in EverQuest.

The combat itself is about as basic as you could possibly imagine. No player input is required at all beyond targeting the mob and starting the fight. From then on, the two just exchange blows until one of them falls over. If it's the mob, you loot it and move on to the next. If it's you, you respawn in town at full health . There's no death penalty as far as I could tell.

There's not much in the way of healing, either. You can use potions but I didn't bother. It seemed pointless when I was so close to the spawn spot. Mobs either use potions to heal up after a fight or employ some similar mechanism. They heal themselves up in stages, anyway,with a visual effect to show they've done it. If you can run back fast enough, you can catch them still at low health and carry on the fight you just lost, only at an advantage. I did that a few times.

Despite the sparse nature of the gameplay, there are some more sophisticated systems in place already. There's a bank. You can add gems to jewelry to give bonuses. There's fishing. It's not like there's nothing to do.

The main attraction, though, is grinding. Kill mobs to make skills go up. Kill mobs to make your level go up. Kill mobs to get better gear. If that's the kind of simplicity you've been missing you're going to have a fine old time.

I did. I was surprised how much fun I had. That old gameplay loop, with its skinner box structure and all the dopamine hits, it still works. Especially when there's a really satisfying ding every time something significant happens. 

I enjoyed my two hours with Winds of Valen a lot. If I could be sure it wasn't going to break my PC every time I log out, I'd be playing some more right after I post this. That does put me off a bit, though. 

In any case, at the moment, there's not really enough there to hold the attention for more than a few sessions. But all the building blocks are in place. If the developers keep adding systems and content the way they have been up to now, this could turn out to be a very enjoyable MMORPG indeed. 

As first impressions go, I'd have to say Winds of Valen makes a good one. And for free, why wouldn't you give it a go?

Baldur's Gate 3 - It's Just A Game

This is going to be a very brief post for the extremely good reason that I would rather be playing Baldur's Gate 3 than writing about it, which makes it somewhat surprising that I'm not going to be all that complimentary about it. I don't, so far, find it particularly convincing but, like the other Larian games I've played (Which, now I come to think of it, is really only Divinity: Original Sin 2 and some of Divinity: Original Sin.) it certainly is addictive.

BG3 is much more of a Larian game than a Baldur's Gate game. BG1 and 2 seemed, to me, to be about as clearly conceived as a good fantasy novel. BG3 feels a lot more episodic. It doesn't present a cohesive story in anything like the same way its predecessors did but despite the lack of a clear narrative through-line, it has an immediate impact that pulls you in and grabs onto you like it's never going to let go. 

The other Larian games I played did that, too. The trouble with being grabbed and held like that is that it can be an uncomfortably intense experience, not necessarily a pleasant one, especially when it just doesn't stop.

That's one reason I never got to the end of either of their others. I have just over 90 hours played in D:OS2 but I never finished the game. The story wasn't sufficiently compelling that I needed to know how it turned out and I got to a point when it felt like it was never going to stop so I had to stop it myself. Already, I can sense the same forces at play in BG3.

I only started playing on Friday evening but by the end of Saturday I'd logged more than fourteen hours in the game. I pretty much played all day Saturday which, as anyone who's been reading this blog of late would know, is not something I do any more. Except now I do.

You might imagine that after fourteen hours I'd have made some progress. I have not. That's another trademark of a Larian game. I don't believe in the ninety hours I spent with D:OS2 I ever felt like I was getting anywhere. You just keep going, through more scenery and more fights and it's all good fun until it isn't any more and it's time to stop.

The degree to which I'm not getting anywhere with BG3 is exemplified by my quest journal. After fourteen hours, I have twenty-seven quests (Listed under eight separate categories.) of which I have completed three. My gameplay so far has consisted almost entirely of wandering about, talking to people, agreeing to do things and then not doing them.

There's a lot of talking. A lot more, so far, than fighting, although that may be in part because I can't help being nice to everyone, trying to be diplomatic, seeing everyone's side of the story and ducking out if it looks like there's going to be trouble. If my character, a half-elf sorcerer, has a motto it must be "Can't we all just get along?"

Since every last NPC has at least a line of dialog and the world is very fully populated, just getting from one location to another can take a long time. I started off talking to everyone but I've already put a stop to that, just like I'm not opening every box and barrel any more. Many of the people I meet don't have anything much to say that isn't some flavor of flavor and most of the things I pick up I never find a use for, so it seems better to keep myself to myself and travel light.

I don't know if BG3 is technically an "open-world" game but it sure feels like one. I'm not convinced you can get to anywhere you can see but I'm guessing you probably could, if you had the right spells. You can jump over small obstacles so presumably you could leap, fly or clamber over much bigger ones if you had the spell or item that allowed it.

I don't have any of those yet but a lack of suitable magic isn't stopping me clearing the fog of war from the map, something I keep doing, rather than finishing quests, because it's fun. I always enjoy clearing map fog. Has anyone ever made a game where that's all you do? If not, they should.

The main reason I'm not finishing many quests, however, is because I can't. I can't find the right person or the right place or when I find them I can't get them to do what I want. In one case, I got a stern warning I was getting out of my depth, so I turned back. In another, I found out for myself the hard way so I so retraced my steps back to an easier area and did some leveling-up instead.

Yesterday afternoon, I spent about three hours just trying to find The Pits in the Goblin Camp, so I could get on with the several questlines that demanded it but I couldn't find the damn place even with a walk-through and directions. In fact, the walk-through I followed led me into the Underdark instead, which was very much not where I wanted to be. Or maybe it was, but if the Pits were down there, I couldn't see them.

I did find the Goblin Priestess but I couldn't find any way to conclude my business with her in a non-fatal fashion. Killing her was categorically not my plan. What I wanted to do was make friends with her and the rest of the goblins, who seemed a lot more entertaining company than most of the angsty, po-faced paladins and soldiers who were trying to kill them. Unfortunately, although I had plenty of amusing escapades with my would-be goblin pals, it seemed like everything I did eventually ended with a lot of dead goblins so I'm having to give that plan a rethink..

It is often quite hard to tell what is or isn't meant to be possible. The way Larian structures a dialog tree may be as open-ended and amazing as everyone says but it still has some branches missing as far as my experience goes. Or, if you prefer to think of the narrative as a complex tapestry, even at this relatively early stage I'm finding some loose threads in the weave.

For example, while I was wandering around the Goblin Camp, talking to dozens of goblins, ogres and orcs, along with sundry none-too-fussy hired hands, more than one of them mentioned they were holding a Duke, who they'd captured on a raid on an Inn. Granted, no-one mentioned the Duke's name but when I ended up at the smoking ruins of that same inn a while later I got dragooned into a rescue party, breaking down the door to save "The Duke" who was supposedly roasting inside.

No-one wanted to listen to me trying to tell them they were wasting their time because he wasn't there so,  rather than get myself and my party burned in the futile attempt, I withdrew and left them all to it. Later, when I was back at my camp, a couple of my companions berated me for not doing more to help, which seemed a bit rich, given they were there when the goblins told me they had the Duke under lock and key! 

To top it all off, one of the reserve team, the bunch that hang about the camp, hoping to be picked, revealed himself to be the said Duke's estranged son, something he'd been keeping very quiet about up to then. There was no opportunity for me to tell him about his father's true whereabouts. either. I just had to listen to him beat himself up and all I could do was ask leading questions about their relationship, not tell him where the damn Duke actually was.

It may be that this is my misconception. Perhaps there were two Dukes at the Inn. I'll never find out if I can't get to the blasted Pits. I suspect, though, that it's just one more example of why Baldur's Gate 3 is an extremely entertaining game but a very unconvincing and awkward way to tell a story.

[Edit: As soon as I logged in after writing this I left the camp and found myself back at the Inn, where the fire was nearly out and the rescue efforts had ended. I spoke to a guard, who was looking at the marks showing someone had been dragged away, possibly the Duke, and the option came up for me to tell them I knew the Duke had been kidnapped, although it didn't let me say how I knew or who'd told me. The guard just assumed it was now general knowledge. Whether this NPC was there the first time or whether they only appear when the fire has gone out, I could probably tell if I reloaded an earlier save but honestly I'm not that interested. Either way, I can't give the information I have to either the authorities or the Duke's next of kin so it doesn't much seem to matter.]

Although a lot of the publicity revolved around the intricacies of the story and the way the player could take things in almost any direction, I don't recall as much discussion of the mechanics of adventuring in Baldur's Gate 3. There does seem to have been considerable effort expended on filing the rough edges off the usual RPG experience. 

I started by accepting the offer to have any overly sexualized or violent imagery suppressed and chose the default difficulty option, both of which choices indicate a willingness to tailor the whole experience to the taste of the audience rather than sticking to a strict narrative convention. So much for the broader approach. The small details are equally amenable to customization, albeit less overtly so.

To pick one small example, there's the Send To Camp facility that lets you move items from your backpack to a chest in your camp, remotely. I one hundred per cent appreciate and welcome the ability to clear my bags with a few clicks. It's a massive boon for playing the game enjoyably. It's purely presented as a game mechanic, though, with no attempt to embed it into the lore.

Solasta, a rather similar if less celebrated game, came up with a much more lore-appropriate way of handling the practical problem of how to get your heavy loot back home from the dungeon. In that game, there's a guild of scavengers who follow adventurers around, offering to go in once all the monsters have been safely disposed of and bring any remaining loot back to base - for a percentage of the profit. You just sign up with them and then check in with their representatives in towns you visit and pick up your money or the actual items, should you want any of them.

 

That may be a little far-fetched but it's within the bounds of believability. The BG3 solution is pure gaming convenience, as is the whole camping deal, for that matter. In other games where you need to take a night's sleep to rest your health, you have to go to inns or pitch a camp of your own. In BG3, I can go back to my camp at any time, from anywhere, instantly. 

Somehow there's always a camp nearby, even though I never set one up, and I magically appear at it just by clicking a menu option. Then, when I've had a good night's sleep and got all my spells back, I just click another button and I'm back exactly where I was the day before. I'm not for a moment suggesting I don't prefer this to having to walk back to an actual campsite but it very much reminds me every time that I'm playing a game not having an adventure.

What's more, when I meet people along the way who might be useful additions to the party, they always conveniently volunteer to meet me at my camp later, even though I couldn't tell them where it is. And then, even if I never let them join my team, they hang around waiting for their turn and acting as though they're somehow part of the organization. 

Don't these people have lives to get back to? Do they have infinite patience? And why am I the one in charge, anyway? Because I'm The Player and this is A Game, of course. Thee can be no other explanation.

It is possible all of these and many (Many...) other curious or unconvincing foibles will, at length, be explained in lore-appropriate ways. Certainly they could be. Any world that has magic as a part of the natural order is amenable to all kinds of unlikely ways of doing things. I suspect, however, that it won't be the case here. 

I'm not surprised Baldur's Gate 3 is such a popular game. That's because it puts being a game far ahead of anything else. Which is fine. That's why it's so compulsive and appealing to play and also why I'm going to stop writing about it now and go play it instead.

Ashes Of Creation: First Impressions

For once, I'm not going to try anything fancy. No bullet point lists or categories. No framing structure or cutesy faux-RP storytelling. I'm just going to say what I think of the game so far. How about that for an original idea?

First up, it was really easy to link the Intrepid and Steam accounts. Well, it was once I managed to catch the Ashes of Creation website up for five minutes. I had, of course, forgotten whatever password I created for it nearly a decade ago but that was soon remedied and after that it was very plain sailing. 

The client is huge, though. Almost 140GB. Surely that will have to come down if the game ever officially launches. Luckily for me, I have a totally unused 1TB HDD in this new PC. With great timing, we had to go sell the old car this morning, so before we left I set the download running. I came back two hours later to find it had finished downloading and was 99% validated too. Glad I didn't have to sit in and watch those progress bars...

I had lunch and then sat down to play. I wasn't wildly enthusiastic but I was curious to see what eight years wait had brought. 

No introductory movie for a start. Or any kind of introduction at all. Just the usual warning about flashing lights then straight into character creation. 

Well, I say "straight into..."  More like v e r y  s l o w l y into. I have never seen parts of a UI take so long to load. It was so slow I thought they must not have the models available for all the races or the icons for all the skills, presumably because the game is still in Alpha, even though it's also Early Access, somehow. 

But no. Not that.

 As I was already making my choices, sight unseen, icons and images finally started to load. In the end everything was there. Nine races and eight classes, I think, although some of the options are really two variants of  the same race.

I had already picked one (Niküa.) from the description before I found out what I was going to look like.

Moana, basically. Moana, after a giant must have stepped on her.

It wasn't remotely what I was expecting but I was pretty pleased with what I got. As I've said before, it makes a huge difference to me if I feel a connection with my character and this one clicked with me immediately.

There aren't all that many choices to make after you pick Race and Class. Hairstyles and colors, skin tone, height, eyes, nose, mouth... the usual. There's an option to morph your face, so I'm guessing you can make some extreme looks but I didn't bother with any of that. I wanted to get in and have a look around.

The Niküa get a choice of two starting locations, one in the hilly North and one in the flat South but the Northern one comes with a warning that the area isn't done yet so I picked the other. At some point, I forget exactly when, I also had to pick a server from a list of eight or so, either in the EU or East Coast USA. The ping to the East Coast was around 50-60ms, which is fine, so I went for one of those.

And then I was in. And everything was good. Very little lag. Movement felt reasonably smooth. No obvious hiccups or delays. 

The UI felt very intuitive. It would be very familiar and comfortable to anyone who played one of the big, Western theme park MMORPGs in the 2010s or teens. All the controls do what you'd think they'd do. There's a hotbar where you'd expect to find one. All of that.

I did what I always do at this point: opened Settings and turned off as much of the overhead clutter as I could without making the game unplayable. In some games that can be a long job. Not in this one. I had everything set up pretty much as I like it in minutes.

About the only thing I had to google was how to hide the UI for screenshots. It's the Page Down key, an unusual choice but perfectly acceptable, certainly a lot better than the Ctrl-Shift-Something you often get nowadays. Even autorun was on Num Lock and Interact on F, two things I regularly have to change. It was almost as if someone had been playing EverQuest and just copied the keybinds across.

All of that was a pleasant surprise. It put me in a good frame of mind to see what the actual game might be like. And guess what? That was a pleasant surprise, too.

Based on the starting area, if Ashes of Creation had come out when my Kickstarter pledge suggested it was going to, namely sometime in 2017 or 2018, it would have been pretty much what I was hoping for. A tab-target Western fantasy MMORPG with action bars. 

I'd forgotten that one of the primary reasons I was interested in it at the time was that it promised to use the standard (WoW-style.) set-up rather than what were calling "Action" controls back then. At the time I preferred to click icons on hotbars and Mrs Bhagpuss insisted on it. AoC was going to be the next big MMORPG we played together largely because of that. 

 Now, of course, I've played so many action-rpgs with so many control systems I barely even notice which it is any more. And Mrs. Bhagpuss has given up on MMORPGs altogether. 

This is a First Impressions piece, not any kind of review or analysis, but I will say that it very much looks as if AoC might be the right game for the wrong time. It's not 2018 any more. The pandemic changed a lot of things and I'm realizing now that one of the things it changed for me was my connection with MMORPGs. Or, more specifically, Valheim did. There's a post to be written about that but this isn't it. 

Anyway, I suspect the mainstream ship for games like this has long since sailed. A solid niche success though? That's still very much a port worth steering for.

Getting back to the First Impressions, they continued to be very favorable right until I had to log out to go and have tea. By then I'd been playing for almost three hours, which is a really long session by my current standards. I would happily have gone on for quite a while longer, too.

Visually, or graphically if you prefer, the game looks very attractive, as I think the screenshots show. I let the game audit my PC and set the optimum settings accordingly, which turned out to be "Medium" all the way. I'm very happy with that, given I deliberately chose a low-end system. If it looks this good and plays this smoothly on my machine, I imagine it must look and play much better on a proper gaming rig. Although in my experience that doesn't always necessarily follow...

By the time I logged out, I was Level 4. I'd done a lot of quests, all of them absolutely classic mainstream theme-park MMO fare. I started off killing goblins, then got sent from one outpost to another to introduce myself, before I was given a whole bunch of jobs for which I was barely qualified, everything from interrogating prisoners to breaking up a suspected demonic ritual. 

Eventually I graduated to raiding bandit camps for evidence of some kind of conspiracy. Every quest was verbose to a degree unusual even for the genre, which has always been very heavy on the word count. It was all quite well-written, in the typical RPG style. 

Each hand-in came with a fulsome recap of exactly what I'd just done, frequently with lots of extraneous, scene-setting detail that I would have better appreciated if it had come at the time I was actually doing whatever it was I was now being told I'd done. A lot of it came as news to me. 

Thinking about it makes me want to write a whole essay on MMORPG quest writing but I'll save that for another time. What I will say is that I'm not sure I have the patience for this sort of thing any more. It's a lot of reading. Some of it was quite enjoyable but it takes so long. Is this really the level of detail most players want for every little side-quest? It smacks of someone having had far too much time on their hands and not much to do with it, these last eight years.

Still, I did read most of it. And it was mostly quite engaging. So I'm not complaining as such. I'm just acutely aware that if I'd skipped all the jabber, like probably 90% of players would, I'd probably have been two levels higher when I logged out. It really did take that long.

One thing I liked much more than having to plow though all that verbiage was being given a horse almost at the start. I always think it's a good sign if the developers allow you to mount up from the beginning of the game rather than holding it back as some sort of reward you have to earn. 

In fact, most of the choices I was aware of the developers having made seemed very encouraging. I did get the feeling they wanted me to enjoy myself, which you'd think would be a given in a video game but I imagine we all know is very much not.

Take PvP, for example. I've read an awful lot of scare stories about non-consensual PvP and ganking in Ashes of Creation, which certainly does advertise itself as a PvP title, so I was both surprised and pleased to find that, at least in the starting areas, PvP is off by default. You have to switch it on if you want it. 

Or you can just attack someone, I think. That'll set you up for a good kicking, if not by the other player then by the guards. If someone attacks you and you decline to respond, the only flag that gets set is on the attacker. You can just stroll away and let the authorities deal with it.

At least, I think that's how it works. I didn't see a single example of anyone fighting anyone else in the few hours I was there. I imagine there's plenty of that later but if anyone's worried about getting repeatedly ganked at spawn before they even load into the game, I can re-assure you it's not going to happen. 

What you are going to see, almost as unwelcome as a gank squad barrelling towards you, is endless gold spam in General Chat. I haven't seen this much for years. In one way, it's the sign of success. No-one wastes time trying to sell gold in a game that no-one plays.

You'd think no-one would bother in game that's still in Alpha, either, but that just tells you these labels mean nothing any more. Intrepid can call this "Alpha" and "Early Access" all they want but when the doors are open to all, they're taking money and there are tens of thousands of people playing, we all know that means Ashes of Creation has launched. It may not be anywhere even close to being done but so what? It's an MMORPG. A finished game has never been a requirement.

Am I bothered? Surprisingly not. To my considerable surprise, it looks as though the game I signed up for might be the game I got. I mean, I'd rather have had it six or seven years ago, when they told me I would and when I'd really have appreciated it, but I wasn't expecting it to be this close to what I imagined it would be, all those years ago. Now I've seen it, I'm a lot happier with what's there than I thought I would be.

How long that will last is another question. I'm only Level 4. A lot of games are fun in the early levels. For a First Impression, though, I'd have to say this has been pretty solid. I'm keen to wrap this up and get back for some more. After that, maybe I'll be back with some rather more critical comments.

Or maybe I'll still be having an unexpectedly good time. I do hope so. We could all do with a decent, new traditional MMORPG.