What Are The Chances?

It's going to be slim pickings here for the next few days because we have a lot going on, one way or another, but I'll try and get something together. Don't be surprised if there are gaps, though.

One thing I was going to do was record another success in the lottery that is adding a new character to the roster in Neverness To Everness. I have had a modicum of luck with gacha draws in the past. In Genshin Impact, back when it started, when the fist banner arrived I got Diluc, a highly desirable five-star character (Although not, according to the search I've just done, an S-Class.) almost on my first roll, which certainly gave me the impression it was going to be easier than it was.

I didn't stick with Genshin long enough to see my luck change and in Noah's Heart, the gacha I played the longest, they gave so many free rolls all the time I still had hundreds left when the closure of the game was announced. I think I had pretty much everybody by then. And even if I didn't, I certainly had far more characters than I needed.

 I can't remember who I rolled on in Wuthering Waves. Whatever was going on there, I don't seem to have made a big deal of it. There are 43 posts labeled "Wuthering Waves" here and the only one that seems to be about a successful roll is the one where I say "I only had to spend a fraction of the tokens I already had to get a couple of new Resonators, one of whom, Encore, was my first five-star pull."

At that point I was clearly still figuring out how it all worked, which is odd considering it was the third gacha game I'd played. You'd have thought I'd have known by then. 

Part of the problem, if it can be called a problem, is that I don't much like swapping teams around for combat. And in the open world I almost always want to play the character I started with. That's "my" character. None of that fits very well with a game design that assumes you'll constantly flip between characters, always looking to play the best one at any given time. Although it is interesting that, in cut scenes and quest dialog, the game usually shows the player-character as the Appraiser, regardless of who was being played before.

 It's a little bit different in Neverness To Everness in that some of the characters seem to have more obvious roles than I noticed in previous games, both in and out of combat. I was keen to get Iroi, for example, because I thought she'd make a good team healer. I wanted Hotori because her time-stop outside combat looked like it would be fun. I wanted Lacrimosa because she's fricken' vampire. And Nanally can run up skyscrapers...

Hotori, and Lacrimosa, I got extremely cheaply. Nanally, I haven't yet rolled for. Iroi, I tried to get and failed.

Then there was Linko. I wanted Linko because... I have no idea why I wanted her. Because she has a backpack? Because I found her conversations with her devil-doll funny? You tell me. I don't even know what she does. 

But I wanted her anyway, so I skipped rolling on Zankou, the first character in the current update, who I had no interest in and waited for Linko.

 I did not get Linko. Not on my first roll. Or my tenth. Or my twentieth. 

I wasn't keeping a close count but it probably took about thirty goes before i got her. I went in with a tally of about forty unsuccessful rolls behind me, following my unsuccessful attempt to snag Iroi. I used ten Fabricated Dice out of the thirty-five I had, then I bought another twenty-five or so with various currencies I had saved up.

Before I'd used all of those, I hit the threshold at seventy failures, where the chance of winning increases substantially. I won Linko on my first roll after that. 

It was very exciting but once the thrill wore off I realised I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with her, now I've got her. For now, I'm just working on building a bond of affection between us so she can come and live in my apartment, along with Lacrimosa and Chiz. Mint is still living in my old apartment.

The more I think about this, the less sense it makes. But I'm doing it anyway. 

Next time a character turns up that I want to roll on, I won't have a feather-bed of forty failures to fall back on. But if I don't get that one, I will for the one after that. It looks like every other character is an odds-on win. 

Seems like decent odds to me. 

Murder In The Palace, Riders At The Gate

Just a quick grab-bag today. Bits and pieces. Nothing that merits a post of its own. Yet. And for once it's all about the games. New games. Or old games coming back. They will keep doing that, won't they?

Starting off with one I will not be playing:

MurderCartel.  

Yeah, I know! What kind of a name is that?

MassivelyOP does this annoying series called MMOs You Never Heard Of or something like that. It actually used to be good but that was when a) MassivelyOP only wrote about MMOs and b) there were still MMOs I both hadn't heard of and would have liked to. 

In the old days, the column appeared sporadically. It only turned up when there was an actual MMO to write about. Now it seems to be on some kind of schedule or at least it pops up a lot and hardly any of the games it features ever seem to be MMOs any more. Mostly it's vaguely multi-player titles that are obviously unknown for good reason.

MurderCartel is an MMO, apparently. It's free and you can play it in a browser so there's not even a client to download (Although you can download one if you want.) Here's the website if you want to try.

I was intrigued by the name; even more so when I read in MOP's brief piece about it that it seems to be a straightforward fantasy game. Why would you give something like that a title that makes it sound like... well, I don't know what it makes it sound like. A 1930s gangland shooter? Some kind of kill-your-friends party game?

Anyway, out of curiosity, I got as far as making an account and a character and logging in. It's good-looking and slick and it played very smoothly, for the ninety seconds I gave it. 

It's very much not my sort of thing. I knew it was 2D but that can mean anything. In this case it means one of those flat, map-like backgrounds with little pixelated characters zipping about like they're on wheels. I never liked those. There are absolutely tons of MMORPGs like that. I've never bothered with any of those and I'm not going to start with this one.

 

If it's your sort of thing, though, you might like to know that, as well as the website I already linked, as of yesterday you can also play it on Steam. It currently has two reviews, one positive and one negative so I guess the jury is hung. It's also capitalized differently there, where it's styled as Murdercartel. Why? Not a clue.

Oh, and the game uses AI in the development process. Pretty heavily, I'd guess.

 "This game uses pre-generated AI-assisted content during development, including some artwork and visual assets. All AI-generated content has been reviewed, edited, and integrated by the developer. The game does not generate AI content during gameplay."

That probably settles it for most people. Not sure why I mentioned it at all, really, but you have to write about something, don't you?

Also, I thought it would make a good opening act for the rest of the bill. No-one really pays much attention to the first band in in a four-act line-up, do they? Most people are still coming into the venue, getting a drink, chatting to their friends. The first band is lucky if anyone even notices they're on stage.

If I was going to follow that analogy, the next section would be about the third most-interesting game I'm going to talk about but I'm not going to follow the analogy. It was just a passing observation. 

There is a structure to the post, all the same. It's in two haves. The first half, which is this one, is about brand-new games and the second half, which is the next one, is about old games that either closed down or never launched that are coming back. Or, in the case of the one that never got here in the first place, just coming. Which, I suppose, makes that one a "new" game by some definitions.

I may be over-thinking this...

Silver Palace

Now this is more like it. The success of Genshin Impact and several similar games has led to a boom in what I've lazily been calling "Gacha Games". MMOBomb somewhat more meaningfully refers to them as "open world action RPGs" because it's not really the payment model that's the most interesting part, is it? Is it?

I'm confounded not just by the quantity of these games but the quality, especially considering they seem to have a significantly shorter development time than MMOs. They're not all masterpieces (Although some certainly are.) but there don't seem to be a lot of duffers, either.

It's not always easy to tell which ones are going to be the really good ones from the promotional material because if there's one thing the people behind these titles are very, very good at it's making them look astonishing in videos. With that in mind, here's what's they're calling a gameplay trailer, although if that's true then cut-scenes must count as gameplay. Which, I guess, they are...

Silver Palace does look a little adrift from the main flotilla of gacha games. It has an avowedly Victorian setting and I find it interesting that they seem to be avoiding calling it "Steampunk". I wonder if that descriptor has lost some of its value through overuse?

There are other open-world RPGs with something of the same look but I'm not sure there are any with a detection theme. All these kinds of games have a generic identifier for the player-character and it's usually a doing word. In Wuthering Waves it's "Rover", in Neverness To Everness it's "Appraiser". In Silver Palace it's "Detective".

How the detection element will work in practice I can't say. I did spot one of those clue-boards with the string and the photos in the trailer so maybe there's some of that. I never get on well with those things. Or maybe it'll just be shooting things in the face and cleaving them with an axe. That's in the video too. I'm a lot better with that kind of detective work.

Whatever it is, it'll be a change from the usual techno-fantasy. There's no official release date, although there's placeholder for January 31 on the iOS App store. Ananta comes out two weeks before that, though, so it'd suit me if it was a month or two later.

Pre-Registration is up now at the website. It takes thirty seconds. No idea if you get anything in the game for registering your interest but I've registered anyway. 

Now all I have to do is find time to play all these open-world action RPGs I keep signing up for...

 

Stargate Worlds

I never watched Stargate. I know nothing abut it. I can guess it was a show set in space that had some kind of portals people went through. Is that right? <Looks it up... yep, that's it.>

I do remember, though, that there was going to be an MMORPG based on the IP. And I know as little about that as I do about the show. Or the movie the show was spun out of. Off from. Whatever prepositional pairing the verb "To Spin" takes.

The game never made it out of beta but as anyone who's been around the scene a while knows, not launching doesn't mean not existing. Apparently a bunch of people with unusual life priorities fans have spent the last few months polishing and cleaning the beta client to the point that it's now not only playable again but available for anyone who cares to sign up at the website to give it a try.

The website describes it as "a fan-made private server" and there are instructions on how to download, install and run the game. I have not done any of that. As I said, I barely know what Stargate even is. Why would I want to play the beta for the MMO about it that never happened?

I mention it mostly because I like all these examples of failed MMOs that just won't go away. It always gives me hope. I feel as if there's always a chance that if any game I like closes down, it might pop back up again like a gopher, daring someone to hit it with a mallet.

It would be lovely if that happened for New World. I don't think it will, sadly. Although, and I almost hesitate to mention it, Stargate is an Amazon IP, too. If they don't move to close this one down, will that have positive implications for any future effort to resurrect Aeternum?

 

Riders of Icarus

And finally, a game I've actually played! There are just shy of two dozen posts about it here and it was my main MMORPG for a couple of months, sometime back before the pandemic. 

The last time I posted about Riders of Icarus here was about eighteen months ago, when I reported on the sad news that the game was closing down. And it was. 

But now it's not. 

RoI managed to stay dead for less than two years. The Pre-Registration page for the revived version went up at the official website today. There's a closed beta test at the end of the month and the game is set to return to public availability, rebranded as Icarus Online, in "the Fall."

It's a strange sort of closed beta because "There is no limit to the number of participants." I don't want to get technical but that sure sounds like an open beta to me. It's also slightly unusual in that you can spend money in the beta, even though there will be a full wipe at the end, but that's a better deal than it sounds because "At the official service launch, you will receive an amount equivalent to 110% of the JEWEL or GCOIN spent during the CBT."

Valofe were publishing Riders of Icarus when it closed down and they're still publishing it now it's coming back.  They weren't the best of guardians last time they were in charge. They tried to turn the game into some kind of Pay-To-Earn money-mill at the tail end of the NFT/Metaverse feeding frenzy, when a lot of people thought gamers were very much greedier and more gullible than they turned out to be.

What Icarus Online will be like in terms of predatory monetization remains to be seen but I managed to have a perfectly good time there for a while without spending anything so I'm optimistic. Unfortunately, I can't see any indication it'll be possible to recover old characters so all my fabulous flying creatures, like my skywhale and my inflatable dolphin, are likely gone for good.

I just hope the login rewards in the new version are as generous as they used to be. RoI had the best rewards for doing absolutely nothing of any MMORPG I ever played. I'd happily not play it for the free loot again! 

Out Of The Fogden

The big finale of Fogden Game takes place in some kind of derelict coliseum. At one end there's the Fog Coffin and in front of it stands Inanna, flanked by Zankou and Poinsette. At the other, there's everyone else.

I took screenshots of each group as they appeared and then another of the full complement. That's the whole crew up there at the top of the post. From Right to left: Adler, Daffodil, The Appraiser, Hotori, Linko, Chaos and Thyme. It's such a classic stand-off. I loved the drama of it all.

There's a couple of things to say about the line-up. Firstly, Adler. I didn't even mention him in the previous post. I'd completely forgotten he was there and even now I can't remember who he was with or what he did. I try to find him interesting because on paper he ought to be but the way the character is written and voiced makes it hard.

Secondly, there are seven people on our side and only three on the opposing team, assuming the Fog Coffin is the referee, not a competitor. Eight, in fact, because although Nitsa isn't in shot, she came in with Adler and Linko so she must be there, somewhere. Maybe she's behind Hotori. With those numbers, surely this fight can only go one way?

Yeah, well, about that. When the fighting starts, you can only have four in your team. And you don't get to pick who they are. In the first phase the team is yourself (Zero/the Appraiser), Linko, Chaos and Adler and in phase two Adler tags out in favor of Hotori. Daffodil, Thyme and Nitsa are somewhere else, presumably fighting Zankou and Poinsette.

First, though, let's backtrack just a little. The final two set pieces in the prelude to the big fight are both quite strange, one in a much more meaningful manner than the other. 

Linko and Nitsa's adventure, which has always felt like the lighthearted end of the story, changes from a homage to the Indiana Jones movies to a spoof of the Kaiju genre. The two girls find themselves stomping through a 1/50th scale version of Hethereau like Godzilla's cuter little sisters. 

That was pure fun but Flora's sliding doors trip to a variety of future versions of Eibon goes much darker. In a series of bleak tableaus, presented in washed-out sepia like a badly-stored celluloid movie, the Appraiser gets to see what might happen if she wins. Or loses. Or merely survives.

None of it is good. In one scenario, three months after the Fogden Game, Alphard has been forced to resign and Eibon is closing down. In another, the Appraiser is the only one left in a still-functioning Eibon a hundred years after the end of the game. And in a third everything seems to be going splendidly and Alphard has just given her blessing on the Appraiser remaining at Eibon permanently.

All of these turn out to be either possible futures or imaginary ones conjured up by Poinsette via her somewhat vaguely-defined ability to create doorways through dimensions and/or time. Poinsette appears and a lengthy discussion takes place between her and the Appraiser during which some thought-provoking observations about the nature of reality, predestination and fate are made.

Poinsette, it transpires, hasn't specifically raised these phantoms to freak Flora out. She's been tasked by Inanna with revealing Flora's future to her but Poinsette, having rifled through a lot more futures than she's shown the Apprasier, is herself freaking out that she can't find a single one in which she survives the Fogden Game.

I found this sequence particularly enjoyable. It revealed a bit more of Poinsette's character and in doing so augmented the impression I'd already formed that the girl wasn't entirely beyond redemption, unlike her so-say sister, Zankou. 

Given the tone of the writing and the direction, I was fairly sure we wouldn't be killing Poinsette. I certainly hoped not. She has potential both as a character and a colleague. It would certainly be handy to have a team-mate who could open doors you could walk through to appear in another place or time.

So much for the philosophy. On with the fighting.

The big battle with Inanna is suitably spectacular but if I said I could remember much about the details, I'd be lying. It's all a bit of an impressionistic blur after a couple of days. I remember she levitated and grew extra legs like a spider. There was a lot of swooping around and some massive light-show explosions. 

We killed her once and she got back up, as arch-villains all too often do. The Fog Coffin, with whom Inanna has an Anomaly Contract, which seems to be the Hethereau equivalent of a deal with the devil, came clambering over the rubble like a titanic golem and I was just thinking "Oh FFS! Do I have to fight that thing now?" when Code Zero, the ultra-mysterious Rules Anomaly from a previous episode, turned up out of nowhere and started a King Kong vs Godzilla style battle with the Fog Coffin.

I was very much hoping that would be the end of it but Inanna underwent another transformation into an even more distorted arachnid form and we had to kill her a second time. I'd lost track by then of what the two giant anomalies were doing. It was hellish.

Just as I thought we had her beaten for the second time, she somehow grabbed Daffodil and held her trapped in her tentacles as she monologued something extremely disturbing about taking her eyes. Hotori went in for a rescue but before she could get there Zankou dropped out of the sky and skewered her so-called Mother, yelling "I told you! Daffodil. Is. Mine!"

Inanna finally goes down for a second time and we all stand around, wheezing and gasping and bleeding, while the whole Fogden starts to collapse around us. Chaos somehow gets a connection to the outside world on his magic phone that's been out of service the whole time until now. He calmly starts making a report because he's cool as hell and we all need to know about it and as all that's going on, Zankou moves over to Poinsette and tells her it's time to go.

Then the Helm of Odysseus drops out of the sky, bounces a couple of times and ends up in the middle of the arena. Everyone looks at it. For a second, no-one moves, then Code Zero reaches for it with its fifty foot long arm but Thyme gets there first and next thing we're all on the ghost ship somehow, with Thyme steering and Flora hanging over the side and Hotori trying to haul her onboard and Code Zero is trying to grab the stern and letting loose some sort of doomsday attack and then Hotori counters with something even more powerful and then the ship goes through a portal and the Appraiser slumps to the deck and...

It was all very exciting. I'd be lying if I said I remembered it as clearly as I've just described and I'm aware I haven't described it clearly at all. What I actually remembered were lots of fragmented images and moments. I had to go watch someone else's recording on YouTube to put all the pieces into the right order.

Here it is, in case you want to watch it, too. The big fight's at the end. Or watch the whole thing. It'll only take you two and a half hours.

I remember the coda well enough. It's so much calmer and less frenzied. One of those silent cinema intertitles so beloved of video game designers pops up, saying "A Few Days Later", and next thing I know, Flora's waking up in the dormitory at Eibon with everyone crowding around to see her because she's been asleep for three days straight.

It turns out everyone got home safely. Nanally's fully recovered and all's well until Daffodil turns up and goes on an apology jag that ends with everyone in the room in floods of tears. That was the weirdest part of the whole storyline for me. After everyone gets it together and stops emoting, there's one of those bits where you get to have a private chat with some of the others, one on one. If anything significant was said I've forgotten it.

The final scene takes place in Alphard's office at BAC HQ, where the Director and Chaos debrief the Appraiser. That's when we find out what happened to Zankou and Poinsette. 

I thought they'd vanish for the time being, to return at some some future turn in the storyline. That may well happen at some point but not yet a while. As Alphard explains, they're both now in custody, having failed to make a clean getaway.

Apparently, Poinsette gated all the surviving competitors from the Fogden Game to safety and in doing so drained most of her esper ability. She went to ground in a Scarlet Letter safe house but the BAC tracked her down and she gave up without a fight, since when she's been co-operating with the authorities and hasn't been any trouble..

Zankou was a lot less less co-operative but she too was taken into custody by Chaos after what he describes as a tough fight. Alphard says Zankou will be going to Ghroth Island for a lengthy spell of incarceration. Poinsette, however, has earned some credit with BAC thanks to saving the competitors and being so very docile after being arrested. She's also deemed to have acted, at least in part, under duress while she was with the Scarlet letter.

Poinsette is now going to be trained at the Esper Academy "under supervision". When she passes a series of special tests designed for her, she'll be given the choice of either becoming a regular citizen of Hethereau or joining BAC. I'd bet on the latter.

And that was that. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, confusing though it was at times. I thought it moved the plot on nicely although, since I'd expected the Scarlet Letter would become the main opposition for some time to come, it was a bit of a surprise to see the whole organization broken up and rendered obsolete so quickly.

It's quite hard to define just what the central plot is in Neverness To Everness. I think of the MSQ being clearer in other gacha games I've played but then, when I think back, at the stage we're at, I'm not sure I had a clear idea what was going on in any of those either. Telling long, complex stories in movie-lenght episodes every six weeks is an odd format for a narrative. It takes a while for everything to come together.

It seems like the real concern is Rules Anomalies in general and Code Zero in particular. That's the kind of extinction level existential threat that most video games like to have running in the background as they task you, the player, with sorting out a whole lot of more manageable problems. As I said last time, I think Rules Anomalies are an extremely scary and highly original concept and the potential certainly exists for an apocalyptic climax to the storyline at some future time.

I suspect, though, that what we'll get for a good while are a lot of smaller-scale crises on a more human scale, at least while the game beds in. I hope so. I'm never entirely at home when the conflicts my characters involve themselves in verge on the mythical.

Clearing The Fog From The Fogden Game

 

Yesterday I mentioned I'd played through the latest story episode in Neverness To Everness but I didn't say much about it, other than that I enjoyed it. Let's fix that.

The episode goes by the name "Fogden Game" and when I saw that I did wonder for a moment whether it was going to be a second game-within-a-game, like 999 Nights. That was a worrying moment. I think they got away with it once but...

Luckily, it's nothing of the kind. The story carries on from exactly where it left off, at the end of Dreamwalk Corridor, almost three months ago. Only, as we learn, in the game not much more than a week has passed. Nanally is still very much not herself, as anyone wouldn't be, if they only had half their soul. It's past time for us to do something about that, instead of playing 3DD&D with Mint!

A note left by Hotori tells us she's going to be away for a while and we should all look after the store while she's gone. Obviously she's up to something and equally obviously she's going to need our help. Otherwise why would it be in the story? 

Do you have trouble keeping your metadata straight in these situations? I know I do. What do I know? What does my character know? What have I read outside the game? It's a narrative minefield.

Luckily, somehow - I forget exactly how - the Appraiser knows just where to find Hotori, who for some equally unknowable reason, Flora (And everyone else.) has suddenly decided to refer to as "The Shopkeeper". This brought me up short the first time it happened. I wondered if I'd missed something but no, apparently it's new to this chapter. 

 

Whether it'll stick remains to be seen. I quite like it. I also like the idea that everyone at Eibon gets a job title. There's the Appraiser, the Shopkeeper, the Butler (Adler), Eibon's Handyman (Taygedo), the Bodyguard (Daffodil) and the Ichi Daimi (Nanally, although that one's very much a self-appointed title rather than something that describes her role in the shop.) 

Edgar could be the Researcher, which just leaves Sakiri. I have no idea what her official title would be. She fights and she sets her pet anomaly, Kiroumaru, on people. Apparently she also posts lists of rules on the fridge. I guess we could call her the Enforcer. 

As it transpires, Hotori is about to go rescue Daffodil from the Scarlet Letter along with a team from BAC, specifically from ETD6. This plays into the part of the game I find the most fascinating - the enmeshed, interlinked networks of professional and personal relationships that suffuse the world with both nuance and confusion. I purely love it when I don't know what's going on but I know it's something.

Hotori has some kind of history with the Director of BAC, Alphard. That's how come the Appraiser, the player character, ends up at Eibon in the first place. Alphard has a very heavy professional rep while Hotori is barely ever sober, so they seem like a total mismatch but they're both exceptionally heavy hitters when it comes to a fight and they go back a long way. Theirs is a history about which we know next to nothing. Catnip laced with cocaine to me.

 

The ETD6 team is Chaos, another character I find increasingly enigmatic and intriguing, Nitsa, who I can't remember much about except she's quite sweet and Linko, who we haven't met before. Linko is a pathfinder of some kind. She has a huge backpack and she gets hunches that the game signals by having a lock of hair on the top of her head wiggle about. She's cartoonish and cute and - surprise, surprise - she's one of the two banner characters in this episode, the other being Zankou, one of the villains.

I'm going to jump out of chronology here to question that last part. We can roll for Zankou right now and if we win her, we can add her to our team. How, exactly, is that supposed to work? I already have enough issues with the way the team-building mechanic allows characters who aren't present and have nothing to do with whatever it is you're doing to magically appear and fight with you, wherever you happen to be, but at least so far they've all been friends or colleagues.

Zankou is an enemy. Granted, she's conflicted in her loyalties but she's very much not any kind of friend or ally. But putting even that aside, at the debriefing at the end, Alphard tells the Appraiser Zankou's crimes are so heinous there's no deal to be cut and she's going away for a long, long time. 

If she's in prison, how does she get to pop up whenever she's called to fight alongside the player? Does she get day release? It's a step too far for any kind of hand-waving lore explanation to wish away. It's just Game Logic and we have to accept it and ignore the implications, the way you can swim in plate armor in every MMORPG ever made, I guess.

Getting back to the plot, the Appraiser invites herself along and because she's universally considered both a wild card no-one knows anything much about and a Good Egg, of course that's fine. I mean, who knows what she mightn't be able to do? Everyone goes into a disused industrial facility out in the woods somewhere and a lengthy puzzle sequence follows. 

I like the puzzles in NTE, for the most part. They're easy enough to understand, not too fiddly to execute and don't outstay their welcome. This one involves a lot of running along derelict corridors and up stairwells, looking for messages and being taunted by Inanna, the really nasty boss of the Scarlet Letter, who appears in television screens all over the place.

This was one of my favorite parts. I could write a whole post about the way every game goes straight to old, boxy cathode-ray television sets whenever they want some way to present a sinister, remote presence. Flat-screen TVs might as well never have existed. 

They all do it but NTE is the first I've ever seen dig into that trope and open it up. There's a whole conversation about how Inanna had to scour second-hand electronics stores all across Hethereau to source enough old but still-working TVs for her dramatics. I think she says she could only find a dozen in the entire city. (Six, in fact...) That's the kind of commitment to the bit that really sells it for me. 

Eventually, we find our way to the top of the building, deactivate the final, taunting TV, get in the elevator and go all the way back down to the lobby and go through the door in the tree. (Didn't I mention there was a tree with a locked door in it? Well, there was and now the door is open.). And on the other side of the door is the Fogden. Where the game happens.

So, what is the Fogden Game? Ah, that's the question. Here's how I remember it without looking it up. It might not be accurate but it'll be an accurate impression of what I got from it. Very much not the same thing. The more important thing.

The Fogden Game is a game that takes place in the Fogden, an anomalous realm under the control of a Rules Anomaly called the Fog Coffin. A Rules Anomaly is an entity that both sets and enforces rules within its sphere of control and is one of the most terrifying concepts I've happened on in the whole of my gaming career. Seriously, these things would give Harlan Ellison nightmares.

Every so often the game starts up. I don't know the cadence  but it's apparently been happening for at least two hundred years. This is telling. It's easy to think of anomalies as only having been in the world for a few decades but the Fifth High-Level Anomaly Outbreak that occurred forty years before the time the game is set was only the trigger for anomalies becoming widely known to the general public. Prior to that they were a government secret, controlled by the agencies. Inanni tells us she has a couple of hundred years history with the Fog Coffin so she's clearly an insider. 

The game itself involves a whole load of people entering the realm and hunting each other until only one is left alive. Whoever wins gets to ask the Fog Coffin for any one thing that's in the Fogden. It can be material or immaterial.  

 

As we learn later, Inanni has set the whole thing up to get Hotori into the game so she can win and ask the Fog Coffin to give her Hotori's esper ability to manipulate time. Inanni believes this will make her truly immortal instead of whatever bargain basement version of living forever she has now. I mean, she's the one who tells us the Fogden Game was happening two hundred years ago, which she knows because she was there, so her current immortality mod can't be that shoddy but arch-villains never will settle.

That's the plot in a nutshell. Obviously, we have to make sure it doesn't happen, especially because only one person can leave the Fogden alive once the game starts and even though we didn't sign up, we're in it now. 

We get introduced, visually at least, to the other competitors, a motley crew ranging from small children to an old guy in a wheelchair. In theory, we're going to have to kill all of them but of course that's never going to happen. They can sure kill each other, though, and they do, although mostly off-camera. 

Or maybe they don't. It gets very confusing from here on in. Up to the point where the actual game begins, I'd been able to stay on top of the plot quite comfortably but once it all starts, it's everyone for themselves and it's hard to know just where you are. 

Or who, because Fogden Game is one of those episodes where you spend a lot of time not playing your own character. I used to dread those in MMORPGs but they make a lot more sense in gacha games, where you play a gestalt a lot of the time anyway. And I'd have to say that, in the gacha games I've played, which is, like, three, so I'm no expert, the whole body-swap deal is much better-handled than in any MMORPG I ever played. 

 

In this episode you get to play as the Appraiser, as Daffodil and as Linko. I think that was all. There's not a huge amount of fighting although there are several boss and sub-boss fights. Mostly it's talking, running, collecting and puzzles.

Anyone can do all of those. Doesn't matter if you never saw the character before. You can run, talk, pick stuff up and figure out puzzles just as well as if you were on your main. Usually the problem with having to play unfamiliar characters is having no chance to figure out what their abilities are, something that matters a lot in most MMORPGs. In gacha games, though, there's a good chance you'll have the character on your team already so you'll know what they do and even if you don't, button mashing is going to get you through. At least, it will in NTE.

It got me through just fine, anyway. Daffodil felt overpowered and Linko and Nitsa did more running away than they did fighting. In their big, set-piece fight with a giant, flying, skeletal snake, I barely ever managed to target the damn thing, let alone hit it and we still won. 

In fact, I never died once in the whole thing. Didn't even come close. Some of the fights looked hard going in but turned out not to be. I don't think they're actually scripted so you can't lose but there seems to be a big margin for error and a lot of "sit back and watch and let the characters show you what they can do" moments. I found it all very well-paced. 

 

Daffodil's segment mostly involves her travelling through a seemingly endless series of bleak, wet caverns, taking Lumen Circles from the petrified corpses of failed competitors from previous games. I never did figure out what the Lumen Circles were or why Daffodil wanted them, except that they somehow figured in getting her to where she needed to be, namely facing down Inanni.

Along the way, Daffodil fights a pair of siblings or lovers or friends or business partners (Missed the relationship but they're a couple.) and the guy in the wheelchair. The couple are bittersweet. The old guy is obnoxious. Both were memorable. She also spends some time talking to a girl who, I think, is a contestant in the game who's given up to protect her injured sister. Then Daffodil meets her own "sister", Zankou.

Daffodil's history with the Scarlet Letter is fascinating. I don't believe she and her sisters are blood-related. Ananni adopted them, presumably without benefit of paperwork, and brought them up to be assassins, murderers and all-round villains. Daffodil escaped. Zankou and Poinsette stayed. 

Zankou is not happy about Daffodil's defection. Poinsette is conflicted. I found both their stories quite affecting. I was pulling hard for Poinsette to switch sides and eventually she kind of does. It was very satisfying.

While all that's going on, Chaos, his team and the Appraiser and Hotori are heading through a different part of the Fogden. Chaos, the Appraiser, Hotori and Thyme, the enemy-turned ally from the Dreamwalk Corridor episode, who's also turned up somewhere along the line, all get separated from Linko and Nitsa, who spend most of their time trying not to be squashed by falling boulders and edging along narrow ledges with their backs to the cliffs as the entire part of the Fogden they're in tries to kill them. It's intense!

Eventually, after a great deal of exploring, emoting and fighting, everyone ends up in the same place for the final battle. But I think that's enough for one post. 

Let's make it a two-parter.

6-5 - Mint To Serve...

 Summer's here! No, wait, that's not right... summer's nearly over. But not in Hethereau!

It does seem odd, dropping a summer-themed update in late August, but then a lot of games do it. It seems even odder when you consider that the big Summer Break in virtually all the regions where these games are played is just about to come to an end in a couple of weeks, whereas the beach-themed content is likely to be with us for a month and a half, well into the start of the new school year.

Of course, it's not only kids or even college students who play these games but given the kind of events and activities that feature in many of them, it's hard not to believe that's the target audience. If it was intended to appeal to an older demographic, there'd be a lot more alcohol involved.

The new update for Neverness To Everness brings a bunch of seaside fun, as I mentioned in a post a week or so ago. What I didn't mention then, because I didn't know, is that the seaside resort where it all takes place is in a new part of the city. 

The district is called Duskmoor, which doesn't sound remotely like anywhere you'd go to eat ice-cream and stroll along the promenade. It's described as "a vast mountainous region north of the Miguel District" and they are not kidding. It's gigantic, although I suspect a lot of it is open country.

I'd be a bit more authoritative but I've only taken a quick look so far and that was on the laptop, in bed the other night, so I don't even have the few screenshots I took, near to hand. (And I'm too lazy to go into the bedroom, power up the laptop and mail them to myself...)

 

I didn't do anything while I was there anyway, other than run all the way to the Wertheimer Tower to register the teleport and get the region opened on my map, which was when it became immediately obvious just how big the place is. It's damn near as big as all the rest of the districts put together. I'm very much looking forward to exploring the whole thing.

But first there's a story to get through. I started it this morning although that wasn't my plan. What I was going to do was try out some of the new summer events and I did, for a while, starting with the volleyball because when I logged in the intro quest for it, Jade Star, was already up on my tracker. 

I have no idea why it was there. I must have been looking at it when I was on the laptop, I imagine, although I can't remember doing it. Anyway, Flora was in Duskwood, next to the Anomaly Tower, and the blue quest marker was pointing towards the beach half a kilometer away, so I just went with it. I was curious, anyway, to see how this volleyball thing was going to work.

I did wonder if it might be player vs player. It's very easy to forget, but NTE is a an online co-op title and it seems a four-person sport like beach volleyball would be a perfect fit for four-person co-op. 

It might be yet, for all I know, but that's not how the event starts out.

Sidebar: By a synchronicitous co-incidence, a very odd thing happened as I was running through Duskwood today. A window popped up on screen, asking me if I wanted to accept a request from someone called Jana to join me in my world. This is the first time anything like that's happened since I started playing the game. I had no idea it was even possible. Jana was waiting for a Yes or No but the whole thing took me completely by surprise and I just stared at the pop-up, not responding, trying to figure out what was happening, until the timer ran down and it vanished. Sorry, Jana.

After it was gone I rummaged around in the settings until I found the section that tells you who else is playing and allows you to set parameters on invites. You can have Private, Friends or Confirmation Required. I had no idea any of that was there until this morning. I considered setting it to Private but in the end, considering I've only had one in several months, I figured I might as well leave it as it was. Next time, if there ever is one, I might even accept a request, just to see what happens. It might be someone wanting to play volleyball...

The volleyball event starts with a conversation with someone going by the highly unlikely name of Uncle Loong. I know, thanks to playing the MMORPG Loong many years ago, that a loong is some kind of traditional Chinese dragon. Any time I meet an NPC in a game and they have a name like that, it makes me suspicious. 

I don't think "Uncle" Loong is a dragon in human form but you can never be sure. As to whose uncle he might be, your guess is as good as Flora's. He looks about twenty-two, though, so that makes me even more suspicious...

Whoever or whatever he is, he sets you up for a warm-up match so you can learn how the game is played and show him how good you are. You need a partner but luckily Mint volunteers so fast you don't even have time to finish asking her. 

She's there in a nanosecond, dressed for the part. I had actually been wondering if Flora was going to have to play beach volleyball dressed in her pant-suit. She looked bad enough trotting along the sand dressed that way, weaving between all the beachgoers in their bikinis and cut-offs. Luckily, once the game starts, Flora magically re-appeared, dressed in some suitable beach-wear I had no idea she owned. It's absolutely hideous but that's by-the-by.

The game itself has quite a few controls to master. I haven't yet mastered any of them. By the time I'd played two matches, I just about knew how to serve and that was it. 

The Warm-Up is the lowest possible level of difficulty and I still only won one of the two maches. The first was a close-run thing that Mint and Flora eventually won 9-7. You need to get to seven and then be two points clear for a victory.

 

In the second match we were doing much better. We served to open and I seemed to have gotten the hang of that to the extent that we were 6-1 up by the time we lost serve. Unfortunately, I very much had not gotten the hang of returning serve, so we lost our massive lead and ended up losing 8-6. 

At that point I felt like I'd probably had enough beach volleyball for the time being. It seemed like something I'd probably be able to get to be at least passable at, with practice, but I wasn't convinced I had the motivation. It is fun and it's beautifully animated. I could do without Mint apologizing every time she misses a shot but other than that I enjoyed it a fair bit.

I was very surprised to find, when I spoke to Uncle Loong again, that we'd somehow met with his satisfaction, despite only winning one match. The quest completed and immediately another replaced it, telling Flora she needed to go to Eibon right away. So she did.

That turned out to be the start of the new Main Story Quest. I spent the next hour and a half on it and it was excellent. But that's a tale for another post. 

Rising From The Moonlit Fog... It's... It's... A Bicycle!

Rising From The Moonlit Fog is the next milestone update for Neverness To Everness. Don't you just love these titles? MassivelyOP had a compendium report on three upcoming gacha game content drops yesterday and they all had names that sound like Jon Anderson might have considered them a little too much, when he was drafting the lyrics for Tales From Topographic Oceans.

Alongside the title I just mentioned, there was Tower of Fantasy's relatively tame Dreamland Beyond The Void and Wuthering Waves' frankly bananas Lamplight in Mirage, Sword’s Resolve in Heart. What does it all mean? And what drugs are these people on?

The NTE update comes out in exactly a week, on August 19th. I'm really looking forward to it. Inconveniently for me, since I'm currently attempting to play both of them, Wuthering Waves drops its new content the day after, on August 20th.

It would be a problem if I really was trying to stay up to date in both games but since I'm already about six months behind in WW, it's not going to make much practical difference. I'll be focusing on NTE and plugging away at the storyline I've missed in WW when I either want a change or if I run out of things to do in Hethereau.

Looking at the six-minute YouTube trailer for Rising From The Moonlit Fog, that doesn't seem too likely. There's a lot in there. Let me break it down a little.

First, here's the video. Take your time. I'll wait. 

And now I'll tell you what you would have seen if you'd watched it, which I'm betting hardly any of you did. Top Tip for Blaugust: if you find yourself short of original content, find something someone else has done and summarize it. 

We open with just over a minute of excerpts from the main storyline. I found it extremely confusing. There's some sort of game, arranged by that sociopathic woman from Daffodil's past, which looks like it takes place in some Anomalous Realm. Apparently we may "choose one thing in the Fogden as a reward" but we have to beat out all comers because "the Fog Coffin only allows one victor."

Is anyyone getting this? And if so, would they care to explain it to me? 

It looks like there are lot of people on the Appraiser's team. A whole gang. In one long shot I think I can count seven of them. Of us, I guess that should be. 

Two of them are the new draws, Zankou and Linko. They look like they've been selected to appeal to very different parts of the audience. Also, why do so many characters in NTE have names that make them sound like they used to be in the Marx Bros?

Honestly, you could start putting the characters into teams just by archetype, now. Zankou looks like one of the sultry, grown-up femme fatales in the mold of Hotori and Jiyuan while Linko is obviously Team Cute 'n' Crazy along with the likes of Chiz, Iroi and Haniel. 

Yet again, there are no new male characters. Hotta knows its audience. Looking at the wiki, including the two about to be added, the roster is now five male to fifteen female. A three to one ratio in favor of the girls, although you could subdivide that again into adults, adolescents and children. All we need now are a couple of robots and a few cuddly animals and we'll be all set.

 

Also looking at that wiki list, I see Zankou is supposedly a member of The Scarlet Letter, which makes her a baddie. Can she be one of the bad guys and a playable character? I guess we're about to find out.

So much for the story, about which I feel like I now know less than I did before I watched the video. On to the non-story content. There are a few very interesting additions to the game there.

Before I get to those, though, there's a whole racing "Expansion" to get through, if we're following along with the video. I don't think they mean expansion as in Wrath of the Lich King or Ruins of Kunark. I think what they mean is they've literally expanded the course. Made the race tracks longer. Or added more of them. Or both.

I wouldn't know. I don't race in Neverness To Everness. As I've said before, I find steering  four-wheeled vehicles in the game difficult to the point of being stressful and I do absolutely as little of it as possible. I am not the target market for any expansion of the racing side of the game. Although as we're about to find out, I'm not averse to more vehicular options.

After the video's done showcasing the new tracks and challenges it's on to the catwalk. There's almost a minute and a half of fresh fashion, beginning with outfits for the new characters. There's a clear explanation of how to get each of them, which is nice. It's good to be able to set goals. 

Unfortunately, few of those goals will be easily achievable or cheap and never both at the same time. You can roll for them or grind for them or pay real money. Them's your choices.

Fortunately for me, I don't much like any of the new clothes except for Linko's Couch Potato outfit, which is just a sweatshirt and shorts. I really would like some ordinary, unpretentious, casual clothes for my characters; things that don't make them look like they're cosplaying anime characters at an off-brand comic convention.

 

Then again, it could be worse. Much, much  worse. Until my recent return to the game, I'd forgotten - or more probably driven from my mind for the sake of my mental well-being - what the player-character is forced to wear as a default outfit in Wuthering Waves. It's hideous beyond belief. The default PC look in NTE is orders of magnitude more acceptable.

Still, I'd like that sweatshirt. Only there are two problems. No, three. First, I'd have to roll for and win Linko. Second, I'd have to grind to Bond Level 10 with her. And third, I'm guessing only Linko can wear it, so I'd have to be Linko. I don't imagine any of that is going to happen.

The second half of the fashion show is all beachwear. In my opinion, they could have more usefully introduced this with the last update. Summer will be nearly over by the time this one arrives. Not to mention the last update was actually set on a frigging holiday beach resort island! Does no-one think these things through?

The beachwear itself is okay, although it seems odd that it's character-specific. What's everyone else supposed to do? Stay at home? Or maybe sit at the beach cafe and watch while the lucky few have fun on the sand. 

For once, the boys get by far the best of it. The male Appraiser outfit is nicely ordinary but the best of the lot is Chaos's wetsuit, which really does look good. Other than that, I like Mint's big straw hat and that's about it. Oh, and the female Appraiser look is awful. She seems to have put her bra on over the rest of her clothes. Is that a thing, now?

After the outfits comes the first Very Interesting Addition: Beach Volleyball. I have no clue how this is going to work. Since NTE is primarily a single-player game, I assume it's something you play with NPCs but it would obviously make a great co-op game. I seem to remember playing soccer in an MMORPG before (Free Realms, I think...) but never volleyball. I'm extremely curious to try this one out.

 

If you thought volleyball was a left-field choice for a new activity, Hotta would like you to hold their beer. Next up is another mini-game. It's called Brick By Brick and from the video it would appear to involve driving a fork-lift in a warehouse. 

I know what you're going to ask... WHY!!!??? For the sake of all that's holy, why? Did someone fill in that box at the end of one of the surveys, saying "I really like the game but it's lacking one, vital element - repetitive manual labor, preferably warehouse work". Who wants to drive a fucking forklift truck when they could be doing literally anything else in the game?

I bet I end up loving it. 

But from here, I'm a lot more interested in the next section - new vehicles. Yes, I don't get on very well with cars in NTE but these aren't cars. 

For a start, one of them's a jet ski. Which, for some reason, the video doesn't call a jet ski. It just calls it "New Water Vehicle". It even has a name: Tide. Guys, we can see it's a jet ski! 

And it looks great. The big advantage the sea around Hethereau has over Hethereau itself, when it comes to driving a vehicle, is that there are no roads in the sea. And no walls, buildings, bushes, central reservation barriers, buses or zebra crossings. I'm not saying it'll be impossible to crash into anything but it's going to be a lot harder.

Jet skis are not uncommon in video games. I've ridden one or two before. I'll tell you what I've never ridden in any game though and that's a bicycle.

Which is odd, when you come to think of it. Loads of games have motorcycles but I can't think of a single game I've ever played that had pushbikes.The mechanics must be the same, mustn't they? Once you've done the work for the motorbike, it's just a different skin, isn't it?

Well, no, I guess there's the leg animation to consider. You have to pedal a bicycle. They're famous for it. Maybe that's why no-one bothers to add them. 

 

The animation looks excellent. Very convincing. And you can give someone a ride on the back, too. Can you have another NPC ride pillion on the motorbike? If so, I hadn't noticed the option. 

There's also a kind of dune buggy/quad bike deal called Sirocco that looks like it might be fun, especially if you like running people over. Seriously, that thing's going to be a menace, on and off the beach. 

The bikes (There's more than one model.) and the buggy can be bought with Fons but the jet ski comes from "Mystery Boxes", which I assume means loot boxes you buy. If these are a thing in the game already, I hadn't noticed. Since I would like the jet ski, I'm going to have to look into it. Maybe it's like the sports car event. I never even looked at that one.

After the vehicles comes housing. Normally, I'd be all over a new housing option but NTE is one of those rare games that's already too generous when it comes to setting up home. You can get five massive houses now and the only real obstacle is amassing enough in-game cash to buy them. I have two and even that feels like it's one too many.

Consequently, I wasn't very hyped to see we were getting a sixth... until I saw what it was. It's on a completely different scale to the others, by which I mean it's much smaller and more manageable. It's down to earth and best of all it's an actual house, not an apartment. 

Stillmeadow House has a garden and a car-port and a lovely, suburban setting and I want it. It's buyable with Fons so I can have it, too. I just have to stop going to the Catzebo every day.

Finally in the video we come to the "And also..." section, which is really pretty interesting. I had to freeze-frame this part because it all flips by too fast to take in and not all of it has been translated but when I was able to read the tiny English text along the bottom, I saw quite a few things I liked the look of.

Nanally gets optional glasses to go with her Popular Kid outfit. I don't have Nanally's Popular Kid outfit. In fact, I don't have Nanally. If and when I do, though, I will certainly have her wear them. Glasses are second only to hats as essential accessories in games.

 

There's a bonus to speed of city stamina consumption coming with Tycoon Level 16. Until very recently I had no interest in City Stamina and had no idea why people seemed so fussed about it. I still don't really understand how it works but I do know it's a way to make money and as of this update I'm going to need a lot more of that. Anything that makes it come faster is welcome.

Speaking of which, you'll be able to grow crops in your garden in the new house and sell those for Fons. And so farming comes to Hethereau. I am not a fan of farming, as a rule, but it does depend on the implementation. I reserve judgment until I try it.

Also on the money-making trail, Pink Paws Heist is getting a mini-map. That's very good news. I have no idea where I am in that damn bank. Not even with a walk-through. With a map, I might actually be able to grab some cash and get out in time. 

But then, there's an incomprehensible rules change to Pink Paws that now somehow ties it to a weekly volleyeball challenge match... What do beach volleyball and bank robbery have to do with each other? Will I ever get my one million Fons? I very much doubt it.

One coming feature that sounds half-baked at best is "Random Outfits". As of the update "Characters will automatically swap to a random outfit from their wardrobe whenever you log in or change scenes." 

Excuse me? So I spend either time or money or both getting the look I want and then the game randomly swaps it for something else? Is that good business sense? Did anyone ask for it?

It'll be fine if it's optional. It had better be optional! Although at the moment, since I only have two outfits, it's hardly going to be a pressing issue for me. But if I get more, the damn game had better let me wear the ones I want, whenever I want!

There are, of course, a whole raft of limited-time events, some tied to the new stuff I've been talking about. But then there always are. Let's not bother with any of those.

No, I've left the very best part of the entire update to last. Here it comes! Ready...?

 

"A button will be added to the main screen to hide the UI with a single tap"

OMG! That's exactly what I wanted! That one change will make a massive difference to my gameplay. I know that for absolute certain because Wuthering Waves has it and it's been transformative for me there.

The issue is that because I play both NTE and WW on GeForce Now, any screenshot I take with the in-game camera gets sent to Nvidia's servers not to my PC. In order to take screenshots I can use on the blog, I have to use Win+PrtScr, which works perfectly, but which captures the full screen as it appears on my monitor, UI and all.

To get clean screenshots in Wuthering Waves I just have to toggle the UI off using Alt-C but in NTE I have to hit Escape to get to the "Mobile Phone" menu, open Settings, click on the Video tab and push the UI Opacity slider back to zero. And then, when I'm done taking screenshots, I have to do it all again in to put the UI back.

Being able to click one button on the screen instead of doing all of that is going to be so much easier. Huge quality of life improvement.

I'm really looking forward to Rising From The Moonlit Fog just for that.

Okay, not just for that... 

Fish On Friday

 

I said we'd get there! And we have. Took a while but it won't be worth it.

Well, how could it be? It's a post about a limited-time event in a game that, by my count, two people who follow this blog might be playing. And all the event involves is fishing.

It's not proper fishing, either. Not even by the standards of the game itself, which aren't exactly rigorous to begin with. Fishing in Neverness To Everness isn't one of the most sophisticated representations of the pastime I've seen in a game. It's more of a caricature than a photo-realist painting.

To fish in Hetherau you need three things:

1. A rod
2. Some bait
3. A chair.

Every game demands the first two but that last one does make it stand out from most fishing mini-games I've played, I will admit. Usually it's enough to get close to the shoreline or the riverbank and cast. Sometimes you might need to wade in a ways to reach the fish. I can't offhand recall another game where I could only fish when seated in a canvas chair.

There are fishing chairs in numerous spots around the city although I couldn't say exactly where. They're all marked n the map, though. 

I do know there's one at the marina and several along the coastal city's long shoreline. There are probably some along the banks of the large lake at the edge of town, on the way to the mountains. I believe you can catch different kinds of fish at the various spots. 

There are certainly plenty of different species, all of which are waiting to be ticked off in your fish collection. Some can be placed in aquariums (Aquaria?) in your house. All can be sold for a shells, a currency you can then use to buy better rods and bait.

And that, vague as it is, is about all I know about fishing in NTE. I tried it when the option opened up in the Hobbies section at Tycoon Level 3 but I only stuck with it long enough to tick whatever box I was supposed to be ticking at the time.

It's not that I didn't like it. I generally find fishing a mildly diverting pastime in any game that has it, although some implementations are certainly more enjoyable than others. Here, the mini-game uses the ever-popular "wear the fish out by pressing a couple of keys" method, whereby you use A and D to chase a bubble back and forth across a bar at the top of the screen. It's meant to represent using the rod to force the fish to swim against the pull of the line and thereby become exhausted, I think.

I wouldn't really know. The last time I fished in real life, I was ten years old. And I wasn't even really fishing. My cousin was fishing and I was watching him. He let me have a go sometimes but I can't say I was pushing for a turn. I thought fishing was a tedious practice even then and I haven't had any fish-based epiphanies since to change my mind. 

And anyway, the fish we were catching were about four inches long at most. They couldn't put up much - or any - of a struggle.

I guess that's how it works, though. Seems logical. It's certainly how it works in games.

And that's fine. I quite enjoy trying to keep the marker in the bubble, especially when it's easy. It's easy here or it has been for me, so far. In some games it's easy to lose a fish or break the line, which is supposed to add some challenge or skill I guess, but if you can lose the fish in NTE, it hasn't happened to me yet. 

I'd done enough fishing before the  event to get to Level 2. There are Fishing Levels because of course there are Fishing Levels. I know we call these"gacha games" but they're RPGs under the shiny surface and what's an RPG if it isn't a massive, squirming nest of levels?

The problem with fishing in Neverness To Everness - and there is a well-known problem - is that it's grindingly, excruciatingly slow. Again, not at all unusual for an RPG but quite odd for NTE, where very little else seems grindy. I wouldn't care but one of the few outfits you can get for the player character without having to spend real money is locked behind Level 10 Fishing.

It's  not a great outfit but it's not bad and Flora would wear it so I want it. But do I want it enough to spend the estimated thirty hours it takes? Someone on Reddit claimed they heard it took someone else nine hours just to get from Level 9 to level 10 and as we all know, anything someone on Reddit says they heard someone else say is easily as reliable evidence as anything an AI will tell you.

It sounds about right, though. As I say, there's been a lot of complaining about the time it takes to level fishing since the game began. It seems as though someone at Hotta has noticed because the new event, Fishing Frenzy, removes a huge amount of the grind from leveling. Or it does on day one, at least. After that it's less spectacular but still well worth doing.

On the first day you get to catch an incredible four hundred fish, in a matter of minutes. I'd estimate it would normally take maybe three hours to catch that many. It would take the same in Fishing Frenzy, if you had to use a rod. But you don't.

The "frenzy" part of the event comes from the gear you use and the fact that you're on a timer. You start off with a harpoon. That only catches one fish at a time but you can throw the harpoon way, way faster than you can cast a line. 

At Fishing Level 3 you get a net. The net catches multiple fish each time, as you might expect. 

And at Fishing Level 5 you get... a bomb! I mean, they could have gone with the traditional dynamite but I'll take a bomb. 

(These are different fishing levels to the ones I was talking about earlier, by the way. They should have called them Frenzy Levels or something. It's confusing.)

So there you are, throwing your net and your bomb and ignoring your harpoon, because who uses a harpoon when they have a bomb, right? These days, I barely bother with the net. The fish are swarming, the timer (Which as far as I can tell is completely irrelevant and I have no idea why it's even there.) is ticking away and the experience is positively rolling in. Good times!

I went from (Real) Fishing Level 2 to 5 on the first day. It took me maybe fifteen minutes, tops. That would have been days and days of tedious casting and reeling and I would never have done it. I'm already capped on Frenzy Fishing.

I also got an unbelievable 500,000 Fons when I sold the first lot of fish. That actually excited me more than the xp. I was imagining making back all the money I've lost at the Catzebo (It's a lot.) and more. 

Unfortunately, on the second day the Fish Pool drops to just a hundred fish, which is the daily limit for the duration of the event. In total you can catch 1500 fish, which means you can drop a few days and still max out. 

It means the xp drops from a flood to, if not a trickle, then a stream. Still totally worth it, though, and miles faster than regular fishing. I'm Level 6 in Proper Fishing now. I'd guess I'll be close to Level 8 by the end. Not all the way to Flora's outfit but getting there.

The money, though, is a bit of a mystery. After that first windfall, I haven't seen any Fons at all from the event. The fish make you a pile of shells, which will be handy for real fishing later, but of Fons there is no sign. Anyone know what that's all about? [Edit: I just googled it and it seems to be related to using up your City Stamina, which explains why people go on about doing that. I've never bothered with it before. I might have to start...]

It's a topic for a separate post, really, but I will just mention that the gacha games in general and NTE and Wuthering Waves in particular suffer from what might be called a content glut. Coming from MMORPGs, and especially from a decade in Guild Wars 2, where the constant complaint was that there was far too little to do most of the time, I find it one of the hardest things to get used to.

Now I'm back in WW, I find myself looking at literally screen after screen of potential activities I could do. The menus scroll right off the page on some of them. It's overwhelming. NTE isn't that daunting yet but give it time. 

As an example, just a day or two after Fishing Frenzy started, another new, time-limited event called Warren Lucky Flip appeared. It's only a screen where you turn over cards but it's still more new content on top of the new content we only just got.

I did yet another survey for Wuthering Waves yesterday. It was a Returning Player survey so I had some proper answers this time. All of the questions are multiple choice and one gave me a long list of possibilities why I might have stopped playing. Hardly any of them were relevant because I love WW and can't find much fault with it. They didn't have one for "I stopped because it was too good and it was doing my head in, man" but I did tick a couple.

I ticked the one about wanting to play new games (Neverness To Everness, of course, the name of which came up in a couple of the other questions so it's definitely on Kuro's radar as some kind of competition.). The other box I ticked was "Too much new content". 

Yes, they had a box for that. They had one for too little new content, too, but there's always one of those. "Are we giving you too much to do?" is not something devs often ask but yes, now I come to think of it, I think you might be.

Not that I want them to stop. I made sure to make that clear in the "Any other things you want to tell us?" box at the end. Keep pumping it out and let me sift it. I'll find the things I like and leave the rest for someone else.

And I like Fishing Frenzy. I like it a lot more than I like fishing, that's for sure. But who wouldn't?

They give you a bomb! 

It's All Just A Little Bit Of History Repeating

Well, this is embarrassing... 

Remember when I complained about not being able to remember my login details for Wuthering Waves? I wrote a whole post about it under the (entirely intentionally) click-baity title "Wuthering Waves Is Dead To Me Now." Remember how, in that post, I said "I've tried everything and every account I can think of and nothing works"?

Yes. Well. About that...

It turns out either I didn't try every account after all or else my capacity for thinking is so diminished I probably shouldn't be allowed out on my own. Either way, I now have my account back. 

So that's good.

This morning, for absolutely no good reason other than that I was idly fiddling around on the desktop while I was trying to come up with something to write about today, my attention settled on the Wuthering Waves icon. Since it was there, I thought I might as well update the game, just in case I decided to start over from the beginning again some day or something crazy like that.

I figured there might be a biggish update waiting but it couldn't be very big, surely, given I'd patched up about six weeks ago. I was half right. 

There was an update and it was huge. 56GB. WW (I refuse to call it WuWa. It reminds me too much of Al Pacino going "Hoo-ah!" in Scent of a Woman.) seems to be one of those annoying titles that insists on re-downloading the entire game every time it patches. 

That annoyed me a little but what it mostly did was remind me that even if I could play the game, which I couldn't, I'd be playing it on GeForce Now anyway, not on my own PC, so  I wouldn't need to update it at all. Let some NVidia technician worry about that. Otherwise what am I paying my £6.99 a month for, right? 

I logged into GFN and started WW going and then I noticed a link that said something about registering your character to see more. Well, you always want to see more, don't you? Unless it's body horror...

The link, when I clicked it, opened a dialog that offered me two accounts that were both, apparently, logged in already. I could tell by the names which email addresses they were using and it momentarily made me think one of them might be my original account to which I'd lost access. 

I went through the various stages to log each of them in and of course neither of them was The One. They were the two new accounts I'd made the last time I did this, each with a single, unplayed Level One character and nothing else. 

In the process of logging them in to check, though, I reminded myself which two email addresses they were. And neither of them was the one I'd say was the most obvious choice. The one I'd have been likely to use when starting a new game I wasn't planning to play for long.

Imagine the screen going all misty as we wind back to how I got started in Wuthering Waves in the first place. It was all because of a passing mention by Naithin, who'd tried the game and not thought all that much of it, mostly because of certain issues he had with the quality of the sound recording as I recall. For some reason. that spurred me to take a look at this oddly-named gacha title and the rest is... well, it's forty posts about the game on this blog for a start.

Back then, I wouldn't have been expecting to do much more than take a quick a look, which is why I didn't bother to set up a proper account. I just used Google's very convenient handshake protocol, the one UltrViolet has just implemented to handle comments on his blog. I tend to use it wherever it's offered because it's so easy and saves so much time. This is how billionaires groom us, isn't it? (Adjusts tin-foil hat...)

And I'm sure it's very nearly foolproof - if you just use the one gmail address for everything, like a normal person. As I'm only just beginning to realize, though, it's a lot less reliable if you have a couple of dozen of them. I'm really going to need to make a note of which address I use for which application in future and if I'm going to have to do that, I might as well just make a regular account the old-fashioned way.

All of this is there and thereabouts a repeat of the process I went through back in June. The one I wrote about in excruciating detail back then. So why am I repeating myself, other than for the sheer, visceral joy of listening to myself talk, of course, always a given on this blog. (I throw that in for any New Blaugustians that may still be plowing through this wall of text in the fading hope some point or purpose might eventually emerge. It won't. Or if it does, it won't be for a while.)

Sidebar - New Blaugustians sounds either like the name of a second-tier superhero team, likely made up of characters who never managed to hold down their own title or if they did it only lasted a dozen or so issues. They'd be based in a city like Denver or Omaha, a good way from either coast, which is where all the action in super-hero comics always happens. 

Or it could be an acid-jazz outfit from the '90s...

At this point, if I had any sense, I'd have admitted I was just repeating the same exact steps as last time and I was going to waste another morning on the hopeless task if I didn't accept the loss and move on. It's that saying about not learning from the mistakes of the past, isn't it? You keep on making them. And that other saying about people doing the same things over and over and expecting them to turn out differently...

 

Yeah, well, that's a bunch of crap. And I can prove it. I didn't learn the lesson and I did do the same thing again and it turned out differently!

Okay, maybe I didn't do exactly the same thing. Maybe, when  I said last time I'd tried "every account", what I really meant was "Every account except the most likely one. The one I should have tired first. The frickin' obvious one."

Or, I guess, maybe I did try that one but something else changed since I did it. I'll leave myself an out because who knows what happened? Not me. I won't say I don't care - it would be nice to know for sure - but I will say I'll never find out so there's no point worrying about it.

Whatever it was, I'm back in Wuthering Waves on my old character, Califlora. She's level 40 and almost at the end of the Riniscitta storyline. To be precise, she has the final Act and the Segue left to do before starting the next big chunk of main storyline, the one I've missed, which itself is the chapter before the current one, which has just begun.

I'm about an update and a quarter behind, I think. Not much further than I was the last time I had to catch up. It's doable.

And I've already started. After I spent what felt like half an hour opening a hundred windows to read about dozens of events I didn't understand and clicking on all the rewards that had been patiently awaiting my return, I looked up how to access the content I was trying to play through back in June, the Edgerunners Collab.

That event is over now but I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the Night City adventure itself was permanent content. I also seemed to recall you can jump straight into it without having done the MSQ first. 

It is and you can. It took me some googling to find out how, though. I couldn't figure it out in-game. And even when I did figure it out, I didn't do it.

I was about to and then I noticed you can get to Night City more organically by progressing the main story to the point where you reach "the transport dock" in a quest called "What Burns Beneath The Frostlands". I checked how much I'd have to do to get there and it was "only" four quests down the line, in the first Act of "To The Stars Yet To Shine". It's not like I'm in a mad rush. I thought I might as well walk there. 

Of course, first I'll need to remember how to play. To that end, I worked my way through an exploration quest Califlora had up. She must have been doing it when I last played her although I don't remember it. 

By the time I'd finished it, I had a vague idea of how things worked. Who I had in my team. Which buttons to press. That sort of thing. Annoyingly, the combat controls are just very slightly different from Neverness To Everness but it didn't seem to make too much difference. It was surprising how fast it all came back. 

Whether I can juggle two story-heavy gacha games at once is another question. That's a lot of cut-scenes and voice-overs to get through. But I ought to be able to get to Night City, at least. If I buckle down, I might even be there before the next big content drop in NTE, which ought to be in about two to three weeks. 

If nothing else, it'll give me something new to write about for Blaugust. Always provided I don't forget my login details again...