The Essence Of Nightingale

As you can see, Nightingale has fishing. What self-respecting survival/rpg mash-up doesn't? It's not a very sophisticated implementation of the skill/sport/hobby/pastime but it's fun and useful, either of which trump sophistication in my book, when it comes to pretending to catch imaginary fish in a video game.

I don't exactly remember when, where or how I acquired the recipe to make the fishing rod Flora's holding in the shot above. My best guess is it was one of the basics included with the Simple Workbench but it could just as easily have been a reward from one of the countless Insight, r Agility or Combat challenges. 

Sometimes, when you succeed at one of those, you get a new recipe. I might have gotten my fishing rod that way. I know I had it for a long time before I bothered to make it, which I ony did because there's a quest that requires fish oil you cvan only get from specific type of fish you have to catch for yourself. 

Other than recipes, what you get from doing those challenges are Essences. Essences are the fuel that keeps Nightingale's engine ticking over. I'm not sure it's ever explained what they're the essence of but the human survivors trying to make something of their new lives in the Fae Realms have adopted them as a kind of  universal currency, so you can never really have enough. A small amount of Essence also converts into enough Essence Dust to fund all your repairs for weeks.

OK, I suppose technically you could have enough Essences, eventually. There's a finite number of things to buy with them, for a start and you can certainly have enough of the lower-level ones quite easily as you outgrow the items they can get you. 

Recipe vendors are mostly found in specific Realms. Realms come in tiers and vendors in each tier use the local variety of Essence as coin. Naturally, as you progress through the Realms, becoming ever more powerful as you go, the weaker Essences of the lower tiers and the items they buy lose their significance. Still, I imagine completionists, who must make up a large proportion of players, if not the majority, will want to grab all the sets, no matter how useless they've become.

Essences are also neded to upgrade your gear, a process that, in Nightingale, has a massive effect on your viabilty as an adventurer. I'm used to more incremental progression systems, where it's hard to tell which of two items is better without one of those inbuilt comparison functions to make it clear but there's no need for anything like that in Nightingale, where upgrading an item can almost double its primary stats.

That, of course, means Nightingale is also one of those games where you don't need new gear because you can just keep improving the gear you already have. I don't generally like that approach to progression, mostly because I find it boring. It's extremely practical, sure, but practicality has never been high on my list of criteria for enjoying a video game.

My main objection is to the aesthetics, though, not so much the gameplay. It's not that I want to go back to the turn of the millennium, where getting an upgrade to your leg slot item meant finding out which monster dropped something better for that slot, then finding and killing it, if you even could, so you could steal that monster's pants, strip them from it's cooling corpse and put them on, still warm. Or, more likely, get the alternate drop and have to kill the damn mob several more times before it dropped its pants.

In addition to upgrades, Nightingale does also have a number of different gear sets that represent some kind of progression system in themselves, so you won't be stuck wearing the exact same thing forever. Instead you will be changing your gear approximately once per tier and then upgrading it, multiple times, which is better than nothing but nowhere near as good as a fully-functioning appearance system.

Nightingale doesn't have such a system yet, which is fair enough in Early Access, I guess, although personally, if I were head of a games studio, a fully-functioning appearance system would be a top priority all the way back in alpha. What's worse is that there isn't even a mention of any such system in the recently published Not-a-Roadmap covering the next two stages of development.

The upgrade system, like the Essences it uses, also comes in tiers. So far there are only three and the naming convention used suggests there aren't going to be many, if any, more. There are four qualities: Common, Uncommon, Rare and Epic which come in four corresponding colors: Grey, Green, Blue and Pink. Stop me if you 've hear this one before.

I suppose there's Legendary and maybe Mythical still to come in the standard RPG progression hierarchy, which would allow for enough vertical progression to support at least a couple of expansions. That should see them safely through the next few years.

For now, though, we have those basic four. In theory you could upgrade your Common items to Epic, I think. You can definitely take Common up to Rare. I can't be absolutely sure what happens after that  because I don't yet have the Epic Upgrade Bench or whatever it's called.

I have the one that uses T2 Essences to upgrade Uncommon to Rare. The Epic one, it won't surprise anyone to learn, I'm sure, uses T3 Essences, which come, as you'd expect, from T3 Realms.

The catch is that the vendors who sell the recipes for the Epic crafting stations and the items they produce only take T3 Essences, which means you have to do challenges in T3 Realms to get them. And those vendors want huge quantities of Essences for most of the recipes they sell. A few recipes go for the knockdown price of 100 Essences but the going rate for most is 1300 a pop.

That would be extremely awkward if it weren't for the current state of what passes for an endgame in Nightingale, which at present allows for some appropriately epic Essence farming opportunities. 

When you complete the first chapter of the main storyline and gain access to The Watch, you get a short questline to unlock The Vaults, a trio of repeatable dungeons backed by some very iffy lore. When you zone into any one of the three Vault instances (One for each biome.) you find you're no longer playing solo. Suddenly and without any real warning, the game has turned into an MMO.

I have no idea if there's any formal match-making algorithm operating behind the scenes. It certainly didn't feel like it the few times I went in. I just spawned in at the start with a dungeon run already in well progress. I don't even know how many other players were in there with me. More kept spawning and running past me so I fdidn't waste any time trying to figure it out - I just followed them. 

From the Gear Score next to each character name I could see I was teamed with some people much better equipped than me but also others about the same and one or two quite a bit worse. When I say "teamed", I mean it in the loosest possible sense. There's no organised group or party, just a bunch of people soloing together, much like public events in any post-Warhammer MMORPG. 

There's no shared loot system for drops, either, Anyone can hoover up anything that lands on the ground. That sounds problematic but then again, there's no credit system for completion either. As soon as any challenge completes, everyone in the dungeon can open the Essence chest and take a full share. 

There are regular loot chests, too, and I think they all have hypothecated items for everyone that opens them but there it's harder to be sure, especially since no-one ever speaks. My evidence for the supposition is If I was taking anyone else's stuff out of the chests, they never complained about it and there was always something in every chest I opened, even if other players got to it before I did.

In content, the Vaults are like a collection of the usual Realm challenges bundled together with a Boss at the end. There's some half-assed narrative justification for this in that the Fae supposedly used them for some nebulous sort of training and the Boss is actually always the same eternal etentity, inadvertently brought to the Realms by Qatermain himself, who keeps incarnating in varying forms. Killing him repeatedly is the only way to keep him from overrunning the Watch.  

I was not convinced by any of this but then neither are al lthe people who explain it so I think there's meant to be some ambiguity. Most games don't even bother putting any kind of narrative fig-leaf on this sort of thing so credit to Inflexion for at least trying.

The Vaults would be tough to solo, something you can do by crafting your own Vault card for use in a crafted portal. Soloing would be crazy right now, though. In the four or five runs I did I only saw the boss twice. Once he was dead within miliseconds aof my arrival in his arena and the other time I fought him, tanked him briefly, died, ran back and picked up my loot after someone else fiunished the job seconds later.

At the moment, as a critical mass of players reaches the endgame and tries to grind the tens of thousands of essences needed for the upgrade recipes, the public Vaults are constantly busy. You can zone in and find one in progress immediately. Since you get all the rewards just for being there, it makes no difference if you arrive just as everyone else leaves. You get the same rewards as if you'd been there from the start.

Well, so long as you can find all the glowing bubbles you need to click, anyway. A full run nets about 300 Essences but I could never find all of them - the whole damn place is a maze. 

My fastest run netted me a couple of hundred Essences for the time it took me to run through an empty instance from the entrance to the zone-out. My highest total was maybe fifty more for a whole lot of fighting along the way.  If you can face doing back-to-back runs for an hour or two, you could make several thousand Essences but even that would only buy you two or three recipes. You're going to be at it a for a while.

It's not going to be to everyone's taste, not least because it's a major change of direction from what you'll have been doing for the last 30-50 hours. If you don't like the sudden switch from solo or co-op to open grouping, there's always the option to just carry on as you were. As I mentioned, you can set up your own, private Vault but there's a whole set of open-world T3 solo Realms you can craft and farm. All you have to do is make the cards. There's even a quest to get you started.

I made one last night and had a run around to see how hard it would be. It was perfectably doable with my Rare gear but I'd be lucky to get a tenth as many Essences for ten times the effort. I'd recommend the solo/co-op Realms for exploration and for gathering mats but clearly grinding in the Vaults is the way to go if you want to farm Essences, at least until the current levelling bubble deflates and the torrent of nearly-free Essences dries up.

Other than for the fun of it and to satisfy the inevitable wish to have all the best stuff, there may not be much point in grinding for those recipes anyway. HAvign a full set of Epic gear would certainly make everything a lot easier but the main reason you'd want to be doing that content would be to get the gear in the first place. Once you have it, I'm not exactly sure what the point would be in carrying on.

For that, we'll probably need to wait until some higher-tier content is added to the game. That could take a while. It's not even in the medium-term development plan.

Reaching the Watch does feel like an ending to me. Not the end of the whole story, for sure, but the end of the first chapter, definitely. The driving urge I had to push forwards has all but dissipated now. I feel more inclined to go back to pottering around, exploring the variations on the three biomes, building up my base and generally leaning into the sandboxier elements of the game, which have very much taken a back seat for me until now.

Or maybe I'll just go fishing. 

I wonder if you can upgrade that rod...

Teach Someone To Fish...

I've always wondered why every MMORPG feels it absolutely has to include fishing. Is fishing really that popular in real life, this far into the twenty-first century?

It used to be, or so we all thought, once. Back when I was still in school - and we're talking the 1970s here - I remember hearing people claim repeatedly that fishing was the most popular participation sport in the UK. I was never entirely convinced. I guess it depends whether you're willing to define "Sitting on a fold-up canvas chair drinking warm, flat beer out of a can" as a) sport or b) participation.

In those unenlightened days, I think the general assumption was that most men who went "fishing" (And it was almost always men who I saw doing it.) were really just using rod and line as an excuse to get away from their wives, children and responsibilities as an adult. Sure, there was a competitive sport called "angling" but it was hard to imagine that most of the huddled, humped-over heaps of clothing lining the banks of desolate rivers or deserted urban canals having anything much in mind beyond getting through another Sunday without having to put up a shelf or mow the lawn.

Back then, of course, fishing was also one of those things all boys (Again, just boys. Definitely not girls. It was a very different time.) were supposed to enjoy. It was meant to be every boy's dream to own a fishing rod (And a bike. And a dog. And if you were working class and/or Northern, an air-rifle and like as not a pigeon.). If you couldn't persuade your father or uncle to buy you one, you were expected to make your own out of a stick, a length of string string and a bent pin. 

Seriously, I did that. It doesn't work. Well, it didn't when I tried it. Then again, I was only about eight.

I never owned an actual fishing rod. Not a real one. I think I might have had one that wasn't much more than a toy, for a while. My cousin did, though, and since I grew up almost next door to him, we spent most of our childhood doing stuff together. I tried fishing with his gear and we did occasionally catch something. I think the biggest fish we ever caught might have been six inches long. 

It was also one of the most tedious things we ever tried. I'd had enough of the whole thing after a couple of afternoons. I think he persisted a little longer.

By the time we were ten or so, though, I don't believe either of us would have gone fishing unless you'd paid us. It's very boring until you catch something and then it's gross, disturbing and messy. I can think of a lot of more interesting things to do that meet those criteria now and I could have thought of a few even then...

Fishing in MMORPGs, on the other hand, neatly avoids all the drawbacks of its real life model. You don't get wet. You don't get cold. Your clothes don't get covered in fish guts and have to be boil-washed to get the stink out. 

There are no excruciating moral dilemmas to contend with: does the worm feel pain when you impale it on a hook? Does the fish feel pain when it impales itself on the hook you impaled the worm on? Do you keep the fish or throw it back? If you keep the fish, do you eat it? Do you even like fish? If you throw it back, why the hell did you catch it in the first place?

Best of all, in an MMORPG you never have to wait more than a couple of minutes at most before you catch something, as opposed to several hours in real life. . Often in a game it only takes a couple of seconds. Okay, rather more often than seems statistically likely, it might be an old boot or a piece of wood that you catch, not a fish at all, but then again it might be a treasure chest or a diamond necklace, which seems even less probable - and yet somehow it keeps on happening.

The depth and quality of the experience varies widely. In some games it's perfunctory. In others it's practically a complete game all its own. I prefer something towards the simpler end of the curve.

My first introduction to fishing in MMORPGs came with EverQuest, where it was a skill that increased with use, as all skills did in the original game. You did have to own an actual rod and equip it in your main hand, something that caused much amusement when a gnoll or a wolf snuck up behind and attacked you as you were standing on the river-bank and you tried to fight back, forgetting all you were wielding was a long stick with some string hanging off the end, but other than that all you had to do was click and wait. 

As often happens in online games, after a while things got added until a few years later there were all kinds of baits and lures and tackle boxes to keep them in but as far as I know, even now, all you have to do in EQ is click once and wait to see what you've caught. Such skill as there is lies in your character and their gear, not in anything you, the player, might do.

Rather than leave things to the character in that old-fashioned way, most MMORPG developers prefer to create a mini-game for the player instead. Complexity varies from a couple of simple clicks to the equivalent of a boss fight but you always have to do something active to land your fish. 

I confess I quite enjoy it. I use the word "confess" advisedly because, as must be clear from the introduction, I'm no fan of fishing per se. I do, however, rather approve of mini-games in MMORPGs, a point of view, I know, not shared by everyone.

It's not to say I don't see the merits of a good old "one click and it's done" mechanic and I definitely do not endorse the addition of gamelike elements to basic gathering functions, of which fishing is arguably one. When it comes to mining or logging I draw my line at a few animations but for some reason I'm fine with fishing being a lot more hands-on.    `

At this point I would start to describe just how fishing works in Once Human, only I really haven't done enough of it to say. So far I can confirm you need a rod, which you have to make for yourself and bait, which you also craft. It's possible you can buy either or both from vendors because the game has NPCs who sell you stuff but if so, I haven't run across the right vendor yet.

I can also say that you need to find a particular body of water but not a specific marked spot. I tried fishing in the sea with no effect before I noticed the tool-tip mentioned rivers. When I moved to one of the many inland waterways leading to the coast, I was able to find fish right away.

The mechanics for casting and reeling in are not the most intuitive I've ever used and they're not explained as clearly as they could be either. Even so, it only took me a few experimental casts and some trial and error to figure it out. I managed to land the second fish I hooked.

I'd love to able to tell you I cooked that fish and it kept me fed for a day. I did hear someone in General Chat claiming fishing was one of the best sources of food in the game and I was keen to try it for myself. Unfortunately, I got involved in something else (Killing and looting, most likely.) and by the time I remembered I had a fish in my bag, it had gone off.

With my time in the game now severely curtailed and the beta slowly meandering towards a close, I don'tknow if I'm going to find the time for another fishing trip but at least I have the basics down. 

Then again, I do have a few balls of dough left for bait.

Pity to waste them.

Hey, Ray! Won't You Please Stay?

Just as I didn't plan on doing two consecutive music posts last week, I wasn't intending to post twice in a row about new content in EverQuest II but that was before I checked my email right after publishing yesterday's post on the Myth and Monoliths update and found I'd been invited to this year's Oceansfull Festival. 

It started yesterday and runs for another couple of weeks, finishing on August 24, 2022 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. As I type this my Bruiser is sitting on the edge of one of the platforms in the new dungeon, recovering from having been killed by the second boss. 

Yes, the second. He has indeed managed to kill the first, which puts him well ahead of his dismal performance in Fabled Kurns. It took him a long time, although nothing like as long as it took him to spawn and find the second boss, something that requires an insane amount of swimming up and down pipes, lighting braziers and using waterspouts and whirlpools to teleport around the zone.

 

There's a ferociously detailed walkthrough up on the wiki already. It gives some idea of the nit-picking complexity of the whole affair but you can't get the full, vertiginous effect just by reading two-dimensional text. For that you need to be corkscrewing up a column of water, trying to fend off guards and sharks while watching for the almost invisible exits.

I would say "Thank Prexus someone took the trouble to write such a comprehensive walkthrough" but it's actually not as much help as you might think. For a start, the map references don't really play all that well with the three-dimensional space and as it turns out there's no need to do most of it in the specific order listed. I didn't and all the portals still opened and the named spawned anyway.

In the end I just used tracking to find the guardians, once I'd killed the first and knew what they were called, then swam about almost randomly until I found the portals. Not efficient but it was quicker than trying to follow the bloody locs.

The first boss was annoying. The second boss is very annoying. She's actually the final boss by the walkthrough's reckoning, which might explain the extra level of difficulty. I guess I won't know for sure until I've found the two that come inbetween. 

 

At least they are doable. I know it's my inexperience with the mechanics that's the problem, not a straightforward gear lockout. I'd rather the walkthrough went into detail about how to kill the bosses instead of noting every last twist and turn of the path leading up to the fight. Trying to mouseover the tiny buff icons on the boss in the middle of a fight to see what immunities she has, while scrolling back the through the chat box to see what warnings she emoted isn't my idea of entertainment. I'd rather read the Cliff Notes version from someone who's done it already.

The drops from the first boss were good enough to make it worth the effort, though. 315 Resolve we're up to now on this solo, holiday stuff. That's an upgrade to most of what any of my characters are wearing. 

Aesthetically, the entire zone is gorgeous, although we have seen it before. It's from an earlier expansion, abeit slightly tweaked. The best thing about the whole instance has to be the manta ray at the beginning, the one you have to stand on and ride to the platform. If Daybreak don't make that into a mount and add it to the cash shop they must not like money.

There's also an interesting crafting opportunity you have to find for yourself. It is mentioned in the preamble to the walkthrough but not, as far as I can see, inside the game itself. I thought it was odd that there were fishing nodes inside a dungeon, even one in the Plane of Water, so I got out my rod and after a few casts I somehow managed to fish up a fishing rod, or rather the recipe to make one.

The Oceansfull Fishing Rod lets you breathe underwater, which is something my Bruiser currently needs to buy Totems of the Otter to do, so it's going to be well worth having. Three of the items he needs to make it can only be found in the instance itself. So far he hasn't seen any of them. I hope they don't drop off the bosses...

There's some other new stuff in this year's festival, including nine new items in the clam shells that spawn all around the coast of every major landmass at this time of year. I always enjoy prying those open. There's also a collection from previous years the Bruiser hasn't finished, as I discovered when he was doing the short, fun access quest to the new dungeon.

Given the way yesterday's session debrief got completely out of hand, I'm going to leave it at that. If you play EQII you'll certainly want to go check Oceansfull out for yourself and if you don't you've probably already heard more than you ever wanted to know about it.

I'm off to open some clams. Finger crossed I get something good, not just twenty different kinds of coral.

Thursday Night FIsh Fry

That blur above is my Elementalist, killing a shark. I suppose I should really call her my Tempest. She's been using the Heart of Thorns elite specialization since it first became available. I still think of her as a Staff Ele. She carries a staff and mostly uses core Elementalist spells. She only uses Tempest for the Overloads. She doesn't even have the Tempest's signature Shouts in her build at all.

I dabbled with the Weaver elite specialization when it was added to the Elementalist's toolkit with Path of Fire but although it was powerful I found it a bit too hands-on for my tastes. I don't like to have to time things to perfection and the Weaver needs a certain amount of finesse to shine.

Then, the Elementalist has always been reckoned a fairly challenging class by Guild Wars 2's admittedly lenient standards. It makes it a strange choice for someone as self-avowedly lazy, not to mention old and fat-fingered as myself. 

Over the first year or two of the game's life I tried all the classes, spending probably the majority of my time with the notoriously easy-mode Ranger but once I started playing World vs World regularly, for reasons I can't now remember or even easily reconstruct, the Elementalist became my favorite. I think I just like setting things on fire. Especially other players.

Fire looks different underwater. I guess it would, wouldn't it?

Luckily for her - and me - she hasn't even started to look at the latest elite spec, Catalyst, yet. According to the latest patch notes, people were just having too much fun with it so it had to be nerfed into the ground. 

I will get to it. All in good time. I'm working steadily through my End of Dragons to-do list and it's on there, somewhere.

Yesterday I completed the fourth and final EoD map, Dragon's End. I'm sorry to have finished. I wish there were more. The first two maps were relatively straightforward but Echovald Wilds and Dragon's End were so convoluted I would still be working on them if I hadn't had the benefit of advice from some helpful people on YouTube. 

I would strongly recommend getting outside help when doing map completion in GW2. Either that or hire a local guide. Unless you enjoy spending hours examining maps with a magnifying glass, that is. And even then, you can't know just by looking whether a particular point of interest is locked behind some event that needs to be completed or accessed via a tunnel, whose only opening is on the far side of the map.

Why yes, I bet I do look good on the dance floor. Thank you for noticing.

If you like both puzzles and exploring, though, it can be good time.  I've certainly been enjoying it. After finishing the Dragon's End map I gave myself a little victory lap by finding all the PoIs in the new hub zone, Arborstone. It doesn't officially count as a "Map" in the completion stakes. There's no reward for filling out all the blanks other than your own satisfaction but in a way that makes it even more appealing.

Also, that last PoI, the one that's seemingly impossible to find? It's Canach's casino and it's a nice treat when you get there. I won't spoil it by telling you how find the way in but I will say it's not through a broken stained glass window. Been there, done that, got the splinters.

The vendors at the bar sell all the fish recipes I'd been looking for, there are moa races and a some gambling machines and if you have the patience to collect a thousand of Canach's coins (I got about thirty in an hour so it'll take a while.) there are a few rather spiffy backpacks you can buy.

That really is a long-term project. I'll get back to it. Right now I'm working on my Masteries. That's how I came to be killing sharks.

Sharks, Naga, I'm not fussy.

Back in Heart of Thorns, the last time I worked on Masteries with any intent, I found the easiest, albeit not the fastest, way to get the necessary XP was to buff up with every XP bonus I could grab then go find some mobs in an out of the way place that hadn't been killed for a while and slaughter the lot. 

There's a huge bonus for fresh meat in GW2 although the exact nature of the calculations involved isn't always entirely apparent. Some mobs in the same spot give massive bonuses while others give less or sometimes none at all. Kill em all anyway is my motto.

It took me a while to find a good spot. I tried Echovald but it gets hectic there and it can be too easy to get more mobs than you bargained for. As usual, the neutral, non-agressive animals that everyone ignores are great for bonuses but for every crane and deer I killed, I got a bunch of rebels or jadebots of various kinds shooting at me from a distance. It was good xp but exhausting.

6.5K XP Bonus. That's the bunny!

After a while I jacked that in and tried Dragon's End. The meta had just started so I joined a tag and ran with the pack for a bit. The XP from the big mobs and events was good but there was too much downtime moving from place to place for it to feel efficient. Then we failed on the penultimate phase and the map closed and we all got kicked out so that was the end of that.

It's no wonder people are complaining non-stop about the Dragon's End meta event. I like it but it is very badly judged. It takes a long time, requires a great number of people, has a lot of moving parts and multiple fail states. As someone said in map chat just before we failed, it would go a long way in a two-hour event if there was some reward for trying. There isn't. If you fail you get nothing. That is not a great way to motivate people to keep coming back and if they don't come back they'll never learn to do it better.

Not that it's all that easy to work out how to do it at all. Belghast, a recent convert to GW2, pointed out how badly the game explains just about everything and it's absolutely true. It's always been that way and this latest meta demonstrates that, whatever else ANet have learned over the years, how to let players in on the secret of what they're supposed to be doing isn't one of them.

Naga in the hole!

Killing fish might be a lot less exciting but it's easy to understand and it's steady work. That's what I ended up doing, rather poetically, to fil out the XP for my final Fishing Mastery. I took the waypoint back to Seitung Province and spent a couple of hours in the calm waters just off the coast.

I had the place to myself. Judging by the multi-thousand XP bonuses for every tuna and jellyfish I killed, no-one had been there for a good, long while. I didn't see another player the whole time I was down there. 

What I did see, apart from countless fish and a lot of coral were plenty of chests to open. The sea bed is littered with them. I found an event, too, while I was poking around in a little hole. A bunch of Naga spawned and tried to eat me. That was fun. I did wonder what optimistic developer decided to put an event trigger down a coral tube on the bottom of the sea and just who they thought would set it off but then I thought, well I just did, didn't I? I guess they knew what they were doing after all.

Just as I emerged from the waters like the world's shortest Venus to claim my reward, the final Fishing Mastery, the map meta event kicked off right next to where I was standing. Someone tagged up and started a squad so I joined in just to see what it was all about.

Unlike Dragon's End, the Seitung Province meta takes about twenty minutes, most of it good, knockabout fun. There are even rides! It ends with a big boss fight that we won quite easily. The crowd was in a good mood throughout and everyone went home with presents. That's how to do a meta.

Okay, it's one way. Dragon's End will be a lot more memorable when it's tuned more sensitively and players understand what's expected of them. If anyone's still interested by then, that is. GW2 history shows players will learn if they feel there's a fair chance of success but also that for most of them the bar needs to be set relatively low before they'll make the effort. There are only so many elitie gamers to go around, after all, and right now I imagine most of them are still playing Elden Ring.

Next up on my dance card, Jade Bot Mastery. I'm about three-quarters of the way through. I think that should be something like five thousand sharks.

I'm Going To Need A Bigger Boat

Less than two weeks after the launch of Guild Wars 2's third expansion, End of Dragons, I find myself in the unexpected position of feeling as if I've almost finished it. Given that it took ArenaNet nearly four and a half years to produce and that they've only managed three expansions in a decade, that would present a serious problem for me as a regular player. If it was true.

It's not true, of course. As I said, it just feels that way. It's just that I seem to have done a lot by this stage, compared to what I remember from the first two expansions. So far, I've

• Finished the storyline.
• Got the 250 Hero Points required to open all the skills on the new Elementalist specialization, Catalyst.
• Completed map exploration on two of the four new maps, with the third almost finished.
• Gained enough Mastery Points to complete the full Mastery lines for the three that interest me, Fishing, Skiff Piloting and Jade Bots

For many GW2 players that would barely count as a scratch on the surface but for me it already completes most of the vague goals I had in mind when the expansion launched. I'm not really a "goals" kind of player but even I need some kind of loose framework to keep my whims and fancies in check.

I didn't pay a lot of attention to the promotional push for EoD. I didn't watch any of the livestreams or follow any of the discussions on the forums or Reddit. I didn't play most of the so-called "betas" which, as far as I could see, consisted mostly of running around the live game exploiting a bunch of half-tested new abilities in whatever way would annoy other players as much as possible. I did try out the new Elementalist weapon, hammer, for all of five minutes but that was it.

Running flat-out!

Coming in, about all I knew about the storyline was the title of the expansion itself, which I figured had to be some kind of clue. I also knew we were getting some kind of boats called skiffs and that there would be fishing, possibly from those self-same skiffs. 

Other than that there would be an indeterminate number of new maps, I was guessing four or five, and a whole bunch of stuff I didn't give a damn about, like new Legendary weapons, the stupid turtle thing and some hub zone you were expected to waste time building up until it was nearly as good as whatever hub zone you were already in the habit of using.

The whole thing seemed less than thrilling. I figured I'd pick away at it over a few months, slowly fill out the few bits that interested me, then maybe, if it was any good, go back a few times with other characters over the next few years until ANet ponied up either a fourth expansion or Guild Wars 3.

What I didn't expect was to find the story both interesting and accessible enough that I wanted to finish it in a series of big bites. Nor was I imagining the maps would be so enjoyable to explore I'd find myself so close to map completion just poking around that it seemed rude not to finish.

Does the attitude come with the spec?

If I had any plans at all for becoming a Catalyst they revolved around playing World vs World enough to get the 250 points I needed there, which is what Mrs. Bhagpuss is doing. There's a handy vendor who sells them for the Testimonies of Jade Heroics you can get out of skirmish chests, dozens of which I stack up in a normal week's play anyway.

As for the Masteries, I liked the sound of the skiff and fishing seemed like something I might enjoy (Although I think, if we're honest, we'd probably all have to admit that fishing in most mmorpgs is hardly thrilling.) The one I was probably most interested in was the Jade Bot Mastery, if only for the on-call updraft it was supposed to add to gliding.

Based on my previous experiences, I didn't expect the mastery points to be all that difficult to come by but to get enough for three full masteries would, I thought, take either some time or some effort or most probably both. I seem to remember taking quite a few weeks to get enough points for the ones I wanted in HoT and working quite hard at it, too.

In retrospect, HoT, my benchmark for Masteries, now looks like something of an outlier. To fully complete all five Heart of Thorns mastery tracks requires 142 Mastery points. Path of Fire only asks for about half of that. End of Dragons probably comes between the two but a lot closer to PoF than HoT.

Someone really likes the idea of hiding mastery points on ledges. I  must have found a dozen at least.

If I sound uncertain on that it's because one of my End of Dragons' Mastery tracks is still locked. I do not have access to the Stupid Turtle. That suits me fine because I don't want the idiotic creature. I would rather have a Mastery track that allowed me to hide the damn thing on my screen when anyone else was using it. That would be a Mastery worth having!

As of now, Turtle Blight isn't a big problem in GW2. The big controversy of the expansion is the way access to the two-seater eyesore is gated behind the Dragon's End meta, a massive event that until several recent nerfs almost no-one could finish. Now it's been bug-fixed and toned down and a lot of people still can't finish it. Even if they can, then they have to do a hard mode strike mission...

From an entirely selfish point of view, that should at least keep the number of turtles to a manageable level for a while longer. They will be a huge problem when everyone has them. I saw my very first siege turtle at The Maw last night. The player riding it parked it right on the Shaman and it was so big you couldn't see the boss at all.

From an objective point of view, though, the hoops players are being asked to jump through to get the thing are ludicrous, something that seems to be a theme of the expansion. I looked at the Collection for the Catalyst specialist weapon today and was stunned to find out it requires you to complete the storyline as a Catalyst. 

 And if it can be in a hidden room off a ledge, even better!

Since I just completed the storyline as an Elementalist, that means I'd have to do the entire storyline again, on the same character! And then, if I wanted to get the specialist weapon for the other eight classes, I'd have to do the bloody thing eight more times!

Unsurprisingly, there's a thread about that, too. I would be surprised if there aren't adjustments to both issues over time, although ANet can be both extremely stubborn and glacially slow, so it might not be this year.

Luckily for me, neither issue is crucial or even tangential to my enjoyment of the game at the moment. It does speak badly of the underlying design, though, with many players already suspecting shenanigans. Like Wilhelm, I tend to favor cock-up over conspiracy but I guess we shouldn't really be surprised. In a game known for its soul-destroying grinds, what are a few more?

My own grind, such as it is, looks set to focus on xp, at least in the immediate future. I may have the Mastery Points I need, thirty-two of them at time of writing, but I also need another seven full bars of EoD experience to spend them all. Filling xp bars is something I enjoy so that's not likely to be a problem and seven "levels" shouldn't take more than a few sessions.

All worth having, I think, if only for the exta 2,500 hit points each one adds to your skiff. I've been sunk by sea creatures three times already today.

The real problem is going to be what then? I have a couple of minor goals - getting my two rangers their new pets, for example - and I guess I might fill out the mastery for that hub zone just for convenience. 

After that there's the question of which, if any, of the other classes I care enough about to get the Hero Points for the Specializations. I hear the Engineer spec, the Mechanist, is good. In fact, what I hear is that it's so good it's due a massive nerf. I should probably get that before ANet sand it down and take off all the sharp edges. 

If I'm realistic, though, despite having all the classes, some of them multiple times (There are eleven characters on my EoD account.) I spend about 90% of my time playing my Ele and I'm more than happy with the Tempest build she uses already. I just finished all the EoD content I listed above in that spec so why would I want to change it?

I do sometimes play one or other of my two rangers, one in the base game Ranger configuration, the other as a Druid, so I'll probably try the new Untamed spec for one of them. In fact, as I check on it now it seems that's required to get the new pets so I guess I'll have no choice but to get it for both.

Yes, it's a PoF pet. I only got it yesterday, four years late. It took EoD to remind I'd never gotten round to it.

That probably just leaves the Necromancer, whose new spec is the Harbinger, which is, at least, a decent name. I did try to play as both a Reaper and a Scourge, the two previous specs, but I got bored of both after a while and went back to Core Necro. Chances are the same will happen this time.

Other than going round and round the maps grabbing the same Hero Points over and over (Actually a more appealing prospect for me than I'm making it sound.) there's also Fishing to consider. If I'm bothering to master the skill, shouldn't I use it as well?

Fishing's one of those things, though, isn't it? It turns up in pretty much ever mmorpg ever made, eventually. If it's not there at the start you can bet someone will get around to adding it later. 

I first encountered it in EverQuest, where it was a single key press and a random result, a limitation that didn't stop most of us enjoying it anyway. EQ fishing got fleshed out a lot more later, with bait and tackle boxes and hooks and all sorts but it never turned into the kind of mini-game players expect in their mmorpgs today.

Finally! A use for all these jetties and piers.

GW2's fishing looks to be aligned with the industry standard. Lots of fish of different kinds and qualities, different baits and lures you can use, a variety of difficulties in sundry locations. You can use the fish for recipes and every new species you catch goes into a collection. 

Catching the fish or losing it depends on your skill with one of those mini-games I mentioned. It's about as enjoyable as any of them. I spent an hour or so fishing in various seas and lakes across Tyria this afternoon. I was planning on writing a whole post about it but then I ended up writing this one instead. In my experience that's what always happens when I sit down to write a post about fishing in an mmorpg. If anyone really wants to know how it works, I recommend this guide.

It was enough fun that I can imagine carrying long enough on to fill out those collections. That should keep me busy for a while. I think I have enough mini-goals to keep me going and no doubt new ones will occur to me as I play.

I don't think it'll be like Heart of Thorns, where I played non-stop, taking character after character through the maps and the weapon specs, but it's not going to be one and done like Path of Fire either. I think End of Dragons is settling down to be a nice, cosy, middle of the road experience, which I suppose is what you might have expected from an expansion that listed Fishing and Messing Around In Boats as two of its key features.

Just so long as you weren't expecting an easy ride on that turtle, I think it's going to be fine.

Don't Tell Me! I'll Figure It Out!

Chimeraland is really good. There, I've said it. 

I know. I'm always saying new mmorpgs are really good. It's not because I'm easily pleased or because I have low standards. (Although I am and I might...) It's because a lot of them just are. 

Of course, a whole lot of the attraction comes from novelty. We all know that. It's why every new release attracts a flurry of tourists. It's not just the new scenery, either. For a lot of people who obsess about these kinds of games (Everyone reading this, by definition.) a huge proportion of the appeal comes from figuring out the systems, then mastering them.

Well, in my case, just the first part. I rarely get to "master" anything in video games, or try to. Only this morning, as I was trotting around Aeternum, picking up presents from the side of the road, I found myself musing on just how much I didn't want to get to sixty in New World. 

That's going to be the starting-point for an entirely different post, assuming I ever get around to writing it,  but the pertinent fact is I sometimes enjoy learning how to do stuff more than I enjoy doing it when I know how. A lot of the mmorpgs I've written about enthusiastically here, for a few days or weeks, only never to mention them again, have faded only when I finally felt I had a reasonably sound grip on how they worked and was able to see quite clearly where that was leading. 

To give you a sense of scale, the tiny one with the red dot over it is the same model as my mount.

Chimeraland is a good way from that plateau still. An awful lot doesn't make much sense yet and plenty of what does is confusing anyway. It also has a lot of systems and mechanics. A lot. It's going to be a while before I have much of a clue where the game is going.

I mean, all these kinds of games are over-complicated and convoluted but this one takes it to the next level. I keep running into concepts I don't quite get or mechanics that don't seem to make sense. I just love it. It keeps me thinking all the time I'm playing. That's a huge draw for me.

It's not that the game's short of explanations. It has a pretty good in-game play-guide and just about everything has properly informative tool-tips. It's more that the information only ever goes so far and that's never quite far enough. There's always a bit more you have to figure out for yourself. It adds value in my book, although I can see how it might do quite the opposite for some. 

The other side of the mountain.

 

The UI is well-designed, comfortable, intuitive, all of that and yet there are so many menus and windows and pop-ups to navigate. When it turns out what I read didn't mean what I thought it did and I need to read it again, I frequently can't find my way back.

Judging by the "Busy" sign that hangs over all the servers and the ever-increasing sprawl of half-built houses across the countryside, Chimeraland looks to be quite successful. Normally, a game in that happy state would be spawning all kinds of online, third-party "How Tos" and "Guides" by now. It's not, or if it is I'm not finding them. 

I bet they exist, just in the languages of the countries where those servers are based. The game may be global but I don't imagine it has much market penetration in the West just yet.  

If you'd rezzed me faster, Ape, we might have gotten some loot.

 

It should. It's a good game. I'm enjoying it a lot. And no-one's killed me. Yet.

Just the opposite, in fact. Well, I suppose the opposite would be that someone had rezzed me, which hasn't happened, although you do get a "Call for Help" option when you fall over. 

I was about to use it yesterday, after some giant beast let fly with an AE and downed me. Again. It served me right. I was trying to leech at the time. Some higher-levels had the massive fluffball down to a few percent when I arrived and I thought I could pop a few bolts into the back of the thing and take the credit. (Will he never learn?)

I thought I'd gotten away with it but just as the monster went down, so did I. Before I could humiliate myself further by begging for someone to pick me up, my pet ape came barreling over and rezzed me. 

It was news to me he knew how and there's another of the complexities of the game, right there. I looked him up on the list of companions and there it is. He rezzes. 

Hey! You with the wagon! How come these AEs don't hit you?

The pets or companions or whtever you want to call them all do different things. So do the mounts. It's probably just as well there only a handful of gear slots because there's more than enough to balance with the plethora of abilities bolted on from pets, mounts, vehicles, star signs and who knows what else.  

Browsing down the list of possible pets (All of which, like every object and entity in the game, come with details of where and how to "obtain" them.) I spotted a couple I really liked. A short while later something really weird happened. The pet I'd earmarked as the first I might go looking for turned up in my bed.

That's a thing that happens in Chimeraland. As soon as you claim a plot of land and start building it's open house for NPCs. Literally. They appear in your house, stand on your terrace, sit on your chairs and, as I found as soon as I made myself somewhere to lie down, sleep in your bed.

The first to take forty winks in my brand-new double bed was a Cthuuluesqe squid-headed creature. He wanted paying to go away, like most of them. When I got back after another hunting trip to find a cat sitting cross-legged on the counterpane I expected the same routine but no, he turned out to be the very same companion I'd been thinking of tracking down. 

Just don't shed, that's all I ask.

 

I had a chat with him. I offered him an entry-level post in my organization. He said he'd think about if I could come up with a signing-on fee, payable in "Drunken Fish". 

That led to me spending the next half-hour waist-deep in the clear water at the foot of my property, rod in hand, casting into the river, reeling in anything that bit. Until then I hadn't been planning on learning how to fish, even though I'd somehow acquired not one but two fishing rods. 

It turns out be much like fishing in every mmorpg. You equip the rod like a weapon, hit LMB to cast, wait til the float bounces around to tell you you've got a bite, then hit LMB a few more times in a mini-game until your fish is landed. Or gets away. Mostly gets away.

It took me a while to get the feel of it. There's a clear explanation in game, with anotated screenshots, yet it still manages to leave out a couple of essential points, like which button to press to "Reel In" and, crucially, how you need to wait a fraction of a second between the bite and hitting that button or you'll fail every time. Or I guess that could have been lag.

Have I really been at this since lunchtime?

 

Once I'd got the rhythm it was easy. I came home with a selection of fish and started throwing them into the Stove, the home cooking station I'd made for expressly for the purpose. 

Cooking in Chimeraland works a little like it does in Guild Wars 2 in that you can put any ingredients you like into the pot and hope it makes something edible. If it does, you get the recipe. Sometimes, you also get completely unrelated recipes for things you definitely didn't put in, even for things you don't have. I have no idea how that works.

What you don't get, if you're me, is a recipe for "Drunken Fish". By the time I'd used up all my fish with nothing to show for it other than some quite tasty fish stew, the cat had gone. I have his agreement to join me, if I can come up with what he wants, safely signed and sealed in my quest journal, so I'm sure he'll be back... assuming I can ever find those pesky Drunken Fish.

This is what it's like. This is why I like it. I love it when I don't know what's going on and then slowly I do.

Did I mention you can go on dream adventures from your bed? Well, you can.

 

I was fiddling about in the menus looking for something, when I noticed an exclamation mark against one of the tiny social icons. Red exclamation marks always mean you've done something that needs attention - set a flag, met a goal, earned an achievement. There's often a reward or points to spend so even though I normally keep well clear of the social functions in strange mmorpgs, I clicked on it to see what might be there.

Two people had sent me "Friend" invites. I thought about it for a bit. Again, normally I turn down those kinds of drive-bys. Then I noticed I also had three "Likes" for my house. 

I had no idea you could "Like" someone's house. I can also tell you now, after twenty minutes of trying to find out, I have no idea how you do it. I accepted the invites and went to visit my nearest neighbor to see if I could figure out how to "Like" her house. It deserves a "Like". It's very impressive.  

I like it. I just can't "Like" it.

 

I went all around it, clicking on everything, including the name panel that appears as you approach but nothing. I googled it with no more success. I'm wondering if it's a function of the social panel but I don't want to find myself accidentally starting a conversation with someone I haven't even met.

That, by the way, is what I meant earlier, when I suggested my experience in the game so far has been the opposite of being gamked by strangers. I'm not sure a friend invite is the exact mirror of a murder but it's close enough.

I played Chimeraland a lot yesterday. Four or five hours, at least. I would have played more if it hadn't been for the lag. My experience so far has been remarkably smooth, given the servers are on another continent, but yesterday afternoon I was rubber-banding all over the place and there were several disconnects.

It shows how much of a good time I must be having that I didn't just pack it in and go play something else instead. I weathered the storm, complained a lot (To myself.) and felt rewarded when I came back for a second session after tea to find everything as smooth as butter once again.

Does your Home Insurance cover damage from flying trees?

 

Speaking of storms, boy do they have them in Chimeraland! The rain lashes, lightning strikes, the wind whips whole trees out of the ground and hurls them into the sky. It's spectacular but it's more than just special effects.

Chimeraland has an extensive set of climactic conditions that directly affect your character's abilities. There are stats for cold, heat and humidity and gear, food and potions to offset the negative effects. When I got near the top of a mountain last night I could see my character shivering in the snow. It's yet another system I don't yet understand but just knowing it exists makes me want to dig in and get to grips.

I did manage to work out how to hatch a mount from an egg. It involves making a Hatcher, putting the egg in on it and then sitting on to of both of them. There's a timer and you have to sit on your egg until it runs out. 

I had an egg in my bag, from I have no idea where. I made a Hatcher, sat on the egg and hatched it. It took a few minutes. Now I have a Leoparbeak, which looks just like you'd think it would, with that name.

Inset is the hatch timer and the two temperature gauges. All I really had to do was sit and wait, though.

One of the few English-language guides I have been able to find says "Leoparbeak is undoubtedly one of the fastest pets that players get to use as a mount on land. " It certainly is a major improvement on the horse, that's for sure. It feels great to ride and it fairly zips around. 

Mount animations are very well done. They look convincing and feel solid, as do the mounts themselves. They should. - They appear to have full collision. If you run into a tree at speed sometimes the tree will break. Well, it happened once. I tried riding into some more trees after that but I couldn't get it to happen again. I did stun my horse, though.

Slopes have a more reliable effect. I tried riding my leoparbeak up a mountain and he balked and rolled over, throwing both of us onto the ground. Luckily, you tend to cling to sheer surfaces like you do in EverQuest and there's very little in the way of falling damage.  

Sometimes the graphics are mundane. Other times they're magical.

 

I'm painfully aware I'm just shotgunning facts and anecdotes about the game now. The trouble is, I don't know nearly enough to go into any of it in depth and if I did, no-one but me would care. I have to get something of my experience down on paper all the same because it's all whirring around in my mind.

I play mmorpgs for a lot of reasons - fun, entertainment, relaxation, excitement, socializing - but of all them I fancy the most compelling is this: to find out how they work. Sometimes, when you peel away the surface there's not much there beneath. Perhaps Chimeraland will turn out to be a hollow shell. A chimera, if you will.

I don't think so, though. Like the mounts, it feels solid. I'm going to keep on digging. I'll let you know what I find.