Pocket Apocalypse

Yesterday was a big day for Once Human: the long-promised launch of the mobile client. The highly-anticipated event came with a lot of freebies. I got an email telling me they were giving away more than a thousand cosmetics and there were Twitch drops and multiple in-game giveaways on top of that.

Obviously, I logged in to grab what I could. I thought I hadn't been gone that long and in fact it was only a couple of weeks but that was still long enough for me to get yet more freebies as a returnee. I won't say is possible to have too much free stuff but when it takes the best part of a session just to claim it all and sort through your haul to see what's worth having, things might be getting just a little out of hand.

So, what did I get? Honestly, I wish I could tell you. By the time I'd finished grabbing stuff and going through my inventory to see what was there, I wasn't a hundred per cent sure which pieces were new and which I'd had for a while but hadn't noticed or didn't remember getting.

The "1016 Free Cosmetics" headline offer is a tad misleading in that you don't get them all at once. Probably just as well, although the way storage works in Once Human they wouldn't all go into inventory. Most would appear as options on menus instead.

I'm by no means certain about any of this because there's a ferocious amount of information available in-game, so much that it becomes confusing to try and assimilate it all in one go, but I think the full range of giveaways is spread across a Log-In event that goes on for several months. I'm pretty sure I saw a time-line that had August on it at one point.

Even if that's right, you do get a big drop the first time you log in. It's my impression than most of those are specials or giveaways from previous events or cash-shop promotions, so dedicated players may be disappointed to find they already have a lot of them. I didn't, so I was very happy.

Among other things, I got a full set, all pieces, of an outfit called Black Rhinoceros. It's impressive although it's not really the sort of thing I'd wear. Still, nice to have the option. 

More interesting to me were the separates, including several T-shirts, jackets and pants that my character definitely will wear. Shoes, gloves and masks rarely seem to make that much difference to a look, mostly  because they're too small to be seen clearly much of the time, so I wasn't so excited by the new options there. Even so, you can ruin a look with the wrong shoes so more variety is always welcome.

Hats and eyewear, on the other hand, absolutely make a look. I want as many of both as I can get and there were two or three good ones. When I was done claiming and I'd had a chance to go through everything, I was pretty pleased with what I'd got.

I was disappointed not to be able to find the bag charm I thought I'd been given anywhere in my bags or on the appearance tabs. I was sure I'd seen one when I was claiming. I particularly noticed it because don't have a bag charm in Once Human and I would very much like one. Fortunately, one showed up this morning, while I was logged in to take some screenshots. It just popped up in the mail, another pre-registration freebie. What the delay was I have no idea but better late...

Last but most definitely not least, I got a dog. Well, a box of dogs, to be precise. A choice of three - Labrador, Doberman or Blackback. I'm pretty good on dog breeds as a rule but Blackback was a new one on me. The illustration made it look like a German Shepherd, which would have been my preference if true, so I took a risk and picked it.

It is a German Shepherd or as near as makes no difference. It's also a Deviation so I had to make a storage unit for it, then a blue light to hang over the case because that's what the dog likes. Very quickly he was ready and out he popped. He (Or she. Didn't check.) is playful and loyal, as in he follows me everywhere, very closely, which might get annoying. 

He also barks. A lot. Which definitely will. Still, a dog is a dog. 

All in all, I was very satisfied with my haul and there's more to come if I've interpreted the instructions  correctly. My favorite MMORPG for playing dress-up by a wide, wide margin is The Secret World. Or Secret World Legends, I guess, since the revamp didn't change anything about the way appearance works in the game, as far as I can recall but Once Human is first runner-up. Fantasy and Sci-Fi is all very well for story and setting but for playing Barbies, give me something roughly contemporary, every time.

The recent change to the game that made many, probably most, things account rather than character based meant I didn't have to work out who should claim anything. I just grabbed the lot on my new character, in the safe knowledge that any other character I ever play will be able to wear it all too. 

Thanks to that very welcome mechanic, my new character was already kitted out in gear I thought looked spiffy, even though she's only Level 8, but although I was perfectly happy with that look, I couldn't resist giving her a new one. There were several pieces, all predominately pink, that just begged to be put together, so that's what I did. 

Then I spent fifteen minutes posing and taking selfies. It is why we play these games, after all. May as well admit it.

After that, I did a little bit of actual gameplay. Not a lot. First I had some reconstruction to do.

Because I'd not logged in for a while, my house had been packed up and put away but I was still standing on the spot where it had been and despite a whole cluster of messages from other players pointing out what a great spot that was, no-one had built on it, so I put my house back where it had been. It's a flawless, one-click process. Can't fault it.

Then I ran around for a while, shooting and skinning deer, mining copper, chopping down trees and reporting back on various missions I'd finished to Mary and Claire and that suave guy in the suit, the one who likes to sit at wooden tables in the pouring rain as if he's on the terrace of a high-class brasserie. All my old pals, anyway.

I can always tell when an MMORPG has bedded itself down in my umwelt. Going back starts to feel much like when you return to somewhere you used to live or where you studied or had a great holiday. It feels familiar and comfortable and somehow just right.

That doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to play Once Human a lot again. It just means I know I could, if I wanted to. I'm at home there. I might make a list of MMORPGs that fall into that category someday. I bet there are a couple of dozen, at least. 

What I don't imagine I'll be doing much of, though, is playing Once Human on mobile. Still, having taken the freebies, I thought it would be rude not to at least take a look. Plus I was curious to see if it would run on my Samsung Galaxy A16, by no means a gaming phone.

And it does. Quite smoothly, in fact. I received a warning that my device was not supported but I'm pretty sure that if my phone couldn't run the game at all, Google Play would have blocked me from downloading it. I didn't try to do anything taxing - no combat, for example - but moving around and interacting with the world seemed fine and my phone didn't catch fire so I think we're good.

Getting the game installed was very straightforward as was linking it with my Steam account. There's a FAQ on the website about cross-platform play and like most official information about the game, it's more confusing than it should be. Starry really are not good at explaining things in simple terms. They make everything far more complicated than necessary.

The gist is that if you were playing before the Mobile launch, you can link whatever platform you were using to the mobile client and it will work. The game was available on PC via Steam, Epic and Starry's own Loading Bay launcher. If you only began playing with the arrival of the game on Mobile, however, you are obligated to use Loading Bay, whatever device you play on, if you want cross-platform access. Well, I think that's how it works, anyway. Read it for yourself and see what you think.

I got my Steam account linked with no problems. There was a substantial download, well over a gigabyte, which seems a lot for a mobile game, and the usual wait for shaders to compile but then I was able to log my new character in and take her for a stroll down the road. Oddly, she was wearing a different jacket and no pants. 

I took a few screenshots to note the fact but before I logged out she'd magically acquired her full, pink look so I assume there was just some lead-time required to get everything synced. When I checked just now, those screenshots aren't in the Album on PC, either. I think you might need to use the Cloud option for that.

The mobile controls on a phone seem crazy small to me but so does everything on a phone. I could see some advantages to the mobile UI - I'd certainly prefer to have similar on-screen icons to click for dodge and crouch on PC, for example - but in general I'm sure I'd find the whole thing just too fiddly to be enjoyable, especially in any kind of combat situation.

I wouldn't rule out logging in on the phone to do some non-critical housekeeping tasks, though. And it might be interesting to see how the building works. That's the sort of thing that might be fun to do in bed some night, when there's nothing on the streams I feel like watching .

Mostly, though, I' think I'll be sticking to PC for my Once Human fix, assuming I'm playing at all. Which I will be, although I can't say how often. 

It occurs to me, though, that the game I really ought to be playing on Mobile is Wuthering Waves, which will run on my phone. Given most of the gameplay revolves around watching cut-scenes, it ought to be ideal.

Sometimes It Pays Not To Play

Since I'm not playing any games right now, about the best I can manage in the way of posts about gaming is either to poke at the news or to talk about the games I would be playing, if I was playing games. I have a couple of ideas for the first but I'm saving those until I have enough for a Grab Bag. Or until I'm desperate for something to write about, which could be very soon, the way things are going.

This morning, though, I'm going with the second option: games I might start playing any day now, if the weather wasn't so damn glorious and I didn't have this unquenchable obsession with creating an imaginary past where I really did something with all those songs I wrote in the 'eighties. 

And the game in the spotlight today is, once again, Once Human.

I got an email from Starry this morning. It was one of those "Come back! We miss you!" ones that all the good PR departments toss out like old toddlers throwing bread to the ducks. Bread, as we all know, is really bad for ducks but most ducks are too dim to know that, so they all pile in and scarf it up anyway. 

I'd like to think of myself as smarter than the average duck and even if I wasn't I'd hope at least to have better self-control and more discernment. In order to maintain that delusion, I try not to hurl myself at every inducement to return to games I stopped playing for what were probably very good reasons, if only I could remember what they were. 

The litter of past posts here, chortling over freebies I've claimed for games I went on never to play again, or at best that I played only for a desultory number of sessions after I filled my imaginary pockets, is all the evidence anyone could need to convict me of self-deception and maybe even hypocrisy. I say one thing and do another all the time although not, I hope, when it involves anything that actually matters.

It's true, then, that I'm a sucker for a freebie but it's also true that there are plenty of offers I can easily resist. And most of the "Please come back" offers plop squarely into that pot. Blizzard send me begging letters pretty much every week and so do ArenaNet but I haven't touched World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2 for years now. 

Of course, that might be because their offers aren't all that. Certainly ANet's aren't. The best they ever seem to be able to come up with is long notes about what I'm missing and promises to sell me stuff for a bit less than they usually ask. Blizzard occasionally tempt me with some kind of "Play for a while for Free" but they largely scuppered their own ship there, when they came up with the endless free trial.

I try to avoid regionalist generalizations on the lines of "Asian games be like this but Western games be like that" but there are times when it's hard. Cultures do differ and its daft to pretend they don't. 

And one way the Eastern and Western gaming cultures definitely differ is that the Eastern ones give better freebies. They hand out more stuff, more often and it's better stuff. I've been taking their largess happily for years and it still puzzles me why they're so generous. It makes it completely unnecessary to give any of them any money at all. 

Cultural differences aside, as has been pointed out by angry players on both sides of the continental divide many times, developers are prone to giving you more stuff if you don't play their games than if you do. I receive a continual stream of inducements to return to games I haven't played in years but do I get any "Thank You for being a Loyal Customer" emails from the games I'm actively playing?

No, I do not. I get emails telling me what's new and suggesting I log in and enjoy it but they rarely, indeed almost never, come with rewards attached. The theory seems to be that if you play the game already, you can damn well log in and play it if you want stuff.  

It's no surprise. It's the way the world works now. Apparently I'm an idiot for not changing my utility suppliers at least every six months and I should be swapping my savings from bank to bank every time the interest rates change.

Well, screw that. There was a time - and I'm old enough to remember it - when the norm was to find something you were happy with and stick with it and that suits my personality a lot better than all this chopping and changing. I'm fundamentally lazy and I don't mind paying a small surcharge just to be left alone.

Unless, of course, all it involves is my pressing a few buttons. If it's that simple, why not? 

I pressed a few this morning and now Once Human is downloading to my external SSD. Again. Let's hope it's easier to keep updated this time.

To be fair to myself, it wasn't just the "10+ cosmetics" that hooked me back in. Or the 40k Starchrom currency. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Starry have finally seen sense and opted for permanent servers. They've also added a Scenario in which the whole of the map is available. Those two moves directly address and to some extent resolve my two biggest problems with the game: impermanence and artificial boundaries.

So, I was going to come back at some point. What the latest offer did was bring that point forward to "Now". Whether I'll do any more, once the game has finally downloaded and installed itself, than log in to claim my loot, I can't predict. I suspect not but at least the client will be back on my hard drive and the possibility will be there again.

Since I was thinking about the game and since it was right there in the email, I also took a moment to pre-register for the upcoming Mobile version. I thought I'd done it already but it seems not. More than thirty million people have, though. Once Human is a popular and successful game.

There are freebies for pre-registering, naturally, along with a draw for real-world prizes ranging from in-game goods to computer peripherals and money. Top prize is an iPhone 16 Pro Max. 

You get draws for various "tasks" - registering your interest, providing an email or a phone number, following the game on social media and so on. I got two draws for registering with an email address and I won... a thank-you. That's an actual prize. I got thanked twice.

I imagine most people get a thank-you, unlike the Lone Ranger, who famously never did. I would hope quite a few people also get the "In-Game Bundle", whatever's in that. As for the rest, well they have been kind enough to reveal the probabilities. Not that I can make much sense of them. I'm not sure how there can be a 60% chance of a "Redeem Code" if there are only 30,000 of them and more than thirty million people have pre-registered...

For once, though, I'm not in it for the freebies. I want to see if the game will run on my phone. I don't imagine it will but it will be an interesting experiment, provided it doesn't catch fire trying. 

Steam is still working on getting the PC version up and running as I type and the mobile game doesn't go live until 23 April so for now it's back to what I really want to do - enjoy the spring sunshine and start work on another music video for my new YouTube channel. 

Once Human can wait. It's not going anywhere and anyway, if I leave it long enough, they'll almost certainly give me more stuff. 

Picking At Scars And Other Questionable Activities

I've written a lot of long posts this week so I'm going to try and keep this one really short. Place your bets now...

Should be easy enough. It's just a recap of where I am with the games I'm playing and that's mostly been EverQuest II these last few days. 

I finished the Tradeskill Signature Questline from Scars of Destruction on Tuesday. It was short and simple and I'd be lying if I told you I really followed what it was supposed to be about. 

There was a bit with the Open Hand, the new, cultish organization introduced with the expansion, about whose background and motivation I still have no more idea than when I started. Nothing I saw or heard in the crafting quests made any of it any clearer.

Then there was some business with Raffik, the ratonga introduced long ago in an excellent crafting storyline devised by the much-missed Domino. Raffik was an orphaned child when we first met him, then he became a pirate and now he seems to be the captain of a merchant ship, working with the Far Seas Trading Company. It was good to see him again but I thought he seemed a bit less exuberant and more downbeat than usual, which didn't feel great, especially when his ship sank.

The last part of the questline involves yet another snarky gnome who thinks everyone else is an idiot, which is par for the course with gnomes in Norrath. They either behave like hyperactive, sugared-up toddlers or that one sarcastic teacher everyone loathed in school. If you haven't played EQII, just replace "Gnome" with "Asura" and you'll know exactly what I mean.

I didn't have a clock on it but I doubt the whole thing took me more than three hours, not counting the extra faction work in Port Woe, most of which I did as an adventurer. It certainly helped that my Weaponsmith, who was doing the quests, is also a max level Berserker. 

There are long sections when the narrative assumes you're going to be sneaking about or using the W.H.A.T. device that lets you astrally-project as a giant, non-aggro hand that can gather for you but mostly I didn't bother with any of that. I just plowed through the mobs and killed everything that got in my way. It was a lot faster.

The main reason I wanted to get the crafting timeline done first is that you get full flight privileges for the expansion at the end of it. That makes a truly enormous difference when you do the Adventure timeline, for which you don't get flight until all the hard work is over. It makes so much difference, in fact, it's hard to imagine there's anyone who doesn't max a craft skill on their main adventuring character just for the head start on flying, even if they actively hate crafting.

Once I had that out of the way, I went back to the Adventure Sig, on which I spent a couple of hours each day for the rest of the week. It's been fun, mostly because the fights are really easy. Either I've set myself up better this time around or the instances have been tuned almost exactly to my preferences for a change.

It's so lenient now that mobs in the instances, including bosses, are easier than stuff in the open world, which is a bit weird. The way it works in EQII these days, and has for a few years now, is that almost everything outdoors is an actual, solo mob but all the mobs in solo instances are heroic. You get a huge buff when you zone in so you can handle them. 

In the past that's been a slog at times but in Scars the "heroics" actually die much faster than the genuine solo mobs outside. It seems like a back-assward way to do things but I'll take it, especially now I can just fly over everything I don't want to waste time on outdoors.

Drops in the instances are good this time around, too. Lots of upgrades, some cosmetics and yesterday I even saw an Adept spell book! Those are like hen's teeth nowadays. It wasn't for my class, of course, but you can't have everything.

After what must be ten or twelve hours altogether by now, I'm still in the first of the two overland zones doing the Adventure questline. I've done three "dungeons", I think, and I'm about to start the fourth. I'm guessing that will probably move me on to the second zone, Western Wastes, which of course I have already explored as a crafter. 

Western Wastes quite attractive, for a Velious zone, particularly the mob density, which is generously sparse. I'm looking forward to adventuring there.

I'm also looking forward to the story beginning to make some kind of sense because it certainly doesn't yet. All I know is that Lucan d'Lere, the undead Overlord of Freeport, is in Western Wastes, possibly looking for a Dragon's Soul. Why, and more importantly why I should care, is not explained, other than by some very vague scaremongering along the lines of "Well it would be bad for everyone if he got his hands on one, even Freeport". 

My Ratonga Berserker is not convinced. He thinks it might be quite a good thing if Lucan got even more powerful - and why wouldn't he? He's met Lucan several times and Lucan has generally played straight with him. As for the Open Hand, the ones whispering all the bile about Lucan into his ear, who the hell are they, anyway, and why should he trust them?

I know no-one plays EQII for the plot but generally the expansion plotlines are at least coherent and convincing within their own terms of reference. This one, so far at least, is anything but. Paradoxically, that actually makes me more interested to get to the end of it, to find out if there's some twist coming or if it all comes together in the end. At the moment I'd bet against it but it does give me some motivation to push on and find out.

Other than EQII, I've not played much. I did buy Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete Edition as I said I probably would. It was £8.99, slightly less than I expected, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I knew I was too late to transfer my old character across but I made a Nintendo account anyway, just in case. No joy there but maybe it'll come in handy for something later. 

I can't say I'm sorry to be starting over. I wasn't very emotionally attached to my one and only character (Can you even have more than one per account? I don't think you can.) so I was quite happy to begin again without all the impedimenta of the past.

What did surprise me was how good it felt to see the good old campsite again. I'd be lying if I said I'd missed it but it felt nice to be back, all the same. 

The game runs beautifully on my new phone. The image is super-sharp, gameplay is very smooth and the phone barely seems to notice the game is running. I played the online version on my Kindle Fire and it was fine there but this looks and feels noticeably better. The experience feels so comfortable, in fact, that it's encouraging me to consider the possibility of playing more games that way. 

I might install Wuthering Waves. It should run well enough. It allows crossplay, so I could swap between phone and PC on the same character, which would work very well for all the talking that makes up more than fifty per cent of the gameplay, although I can't imagine doing the fighting or the fancy gliding and jumping and climbing with mobile controls. I mean, I'm sure some people can but I can't imagine it being anything I'd enjoy or even manage.

I also might consider Once Human on the phone, when the game eventually come to mobile. Not because I think it would be good that way - I very much doubt it will - but because I'm having huge problems updating it on Steam. 

I tried several times this week and it failed over and over again, something that's happened more than once before. I uninstalled and re-installed it and it still failed so now I've uninstalled it, possibly for good. It's a great game in everything but the patching, which has always been a problem. Maybe it'll update more fluently on mobile.

Other than that, I haven't really played anything. There's a Stars Reach testing session tomorrow evening that I hope to find time to attend. I caused a bit of a stir on a Massively OP comment thread about the game recently, when I mentioned I'd been invited to the test on three different email accounts. 

That got the attention of both Raph Koster and Carneros. I didn't realize it was going to be a big deal - I assumed it must be happening all the time but maybe other people just stick to a single email address and don't get themselves into these awkward situations.

The Kickstarter-proper should be up in a week or so, anyway, and at that point I imagine the current testing phase will become somewhat moot as we wait to learn the outcome of the campaign and what happens after. If nothing else, it's going to be interesting to see the level of attention the whole thing draws. Here's hoping it all turns out well.

And that, I think, is about it for today. Was that a short post or not? It was quick to write, which is what matters. 1,500 words in just over an hour. Wish I could knock these things out that fast every day...

On A Journey

There's been a lot going on Chez Bhagpuss recently, one way and another so I haven't been able to put anything substantial together for a while. I don't want to miss my regular cadence so I'm going to keep tossing stuff up as I can but posts might get a little random. Fair warning. 

Also, really, would anyone have noticed if I hadn't said anything?

Today's little pleasure is a bounce off a post by Aywren about a game I hadn't heard of, called AFK Journey. That, I have to say, is not an inspiring name for any game but Aywren made it sound pretty interesting, the screenshots in her post looked pretty and it seemed like it might make a possible replacement for the recently-shuttered Noah's Heart, so I downloaded it and gave it a try.

The first thing I'd say about it is that it's absolutely gorgeous to look at. I spent more time staring at the pictures and admiring the art than I did playing the game. I don't really need to describe it because the look comes over well in screenshots and I took a few of those.

Secondly, the writing isn't at all bad. As Aywren mentioned, the plot isn't anything new but the prose is sprightly, the dialog sparkles and the characters have plenty of personality. It's a fun read, although reading is optional because all dialog is also fully voiced and the voice acting is convincing and enjoyable to listen to. I didn't skip ahead once, which is always a recommendation.

As for gameplay, I played for an hour or so, enjoying the view and the chat. Other than that, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

Most of what I saw seemed to be an extended tutorial but it didn't teach me anything much beyond how to use the virtual joystick to move. AFK Journey is a cross-platform title but it was clearly designed with Mobile in mind. Few concessions seem to have been made to convert it to a format familiar to PC players.

During the tutorial, messages kept popping up telling me to click on things so I clicked where I was told and on we went. Unfortunately, I rarely had much of an idea why I was clicking ,so when it came time to do something on my own I was often none the wiser.

Following the main storyline had me traveling through the world in three-quarter perspective, stopping mostly talk to people, which seemed straightforward enough. Coins popped into my bag occasionally for no reason I could fathom but who complains about free money? As I trotted through the delightful, if sadly fire-ravaged countryside, there were allies to gather, fires to put out (of course.) and baddies to fight (Or were they?) At no point did I feel remotely in control of any of it.

After a while, I worked out how to auto-run to the next quest objective, something I would have appreciated if I hadn't been able to see chests in the hedgerows just waiting to be opened or teleport stones just waiting to be added to my map. If I allowed the game to whisk me on to my next appointment, it ran me straight past all of them, so I kept jumping off auto-run to go grab loot or open a waystone. Then I'd get into random encounters and fights with bandits and wildlife so in the end I decided it would be easier to do my own navigating.

Fights were frequent and incomprehensible. There can be up to five of you in the team and any number of opponents and if you click some icons on the right of the screen, little pointers appear over peoples' heads. What they mean, I have no idea. Luckily, there's one button you can press that seems to make everyone sort themselves out and get on with it so I just used that every time and sat back to watch.

I'm one hundred per cent sure that's not how it's meant to work. I'm certain there are tactical elements you're supposed to be concerning yourself with, if only because the whole point of gacha games is to build teams and swap your cards in and out for maximum effect. Usually it's quite clear how you do that. Not this time. Or not to me, at any rate.

That said, the game does get off to a fairly steady and manageable start. After a while, though, the windows and prompts and suggestions begin and then it's everyone for themselves. 

Games of this kind generally have a ridiculous range of features, mini-games, rewards and gimmicks. AFK Journey is no exception. I generally do anything that's quick, easy and gives you free stuff and or that I find fun in and of itself. After that, I ignore the rest but in this case I ignored everything because once again I was having difficulty figuring out what I was supposed to do.

I realize all of that would probably work itself out over time. I've played plenty of games that confused the hell out of me to begin with but which turned out, in the end, to be much simpler than they seemed. Normally, I'd be happy to carry on for a few more sessions; see if the fog lifted; let the shape of the game make itself known.

In this case, I'm not sure I'm going to stick around that long. The game has potential but there are a lot of games with potential out there, some of them at least as pretty or well-written and many a lot more comfortable for me to play. 

Still, I have AFK Journey installed now and I don't not like it... We'll have to see how it goes from here.

Maybe Some Day

I gave myself the day off blogging yesterday to play Nightingale. I think I'm circling in on the primary reason why I'm finding it so compelling but I'll let that percolate a while longer. In the meantime, I thought I'd make good on a promises I made in a previous post.

I started writing about games Palworld and Nightingale had stopped me from playing but then ended up writing about just one of them, Allods, which I actually had played, a little, somewhat defeating my own argument. I said then I'd do post something about the rest later and here we are. It's later already!

Games I'm Not Playing

Obviously, that could be an extremely long list. If you want to be literal about it, it would be all games ever made except Nightingale. That would be kind of a lengthy post even for me, though, so I'll stick to the handful I quite possibly would have been playing, if it hadn't been for (Insert ironically struck-through reference to meme from ancient Hanna-Barbera cartoon old people still somehow expect anyone who didn't grow up watching Saturday Morning Cartoons to get and then shake their heads wearily when they don't here.) two survival games on Steam.

I'm not even going to bother listing the obvious ones, the ones I was already playing before I got de-railed or, more accurately, ran my own train off the tracks, like both EverQuest titles or the many single-player games I'm in the middle of on Steam. This is just a short list of games I have bookmarked, meaning to try, added over the last few weeks either because they looked interesting or because I thought I might get a post out of them. More likely both.

Eterspire

Syp did a short piece on this one for MassivelyOP back in January and I thought it looked interesting enough to bookmark for possible further investigation. It's a mobile title, available for Android and iOS, which self-describes as "the best mobile MMORPG in the history of the universe!!" Look, they even bolded "best" so it must be true!

Really, when you see a claim like that, you have to check it out, don't you? And there's more...

"With engaging combat, tons of rare items to collect, and no overly complicated systems to slow you down, Eterspire cuts through the fluff and takes you straight to the action."

Good, 'cos I really hate being slowed down by those darn overly complicated systems. That's why I've played fifty-five hours of Nightingale these last two weeks. 

Looking at the screenshots and taking the temperature of the extensive patch notes, I get the feeling this is something along the lines of AdventureQuest 3D. I like AQ3D a lot but I still hardly ever play it, so why I'd think I needed another like it beats me. I'd have to play it through BlueStacks or Nox, too, which is another hurdle it will probably never pass but even so it's on the "Maybe One Day" list now. 

Hello Kitty Around The World

I can't now recall where or why I was reading about this. I didn't bookmark my original source, only the Bluestacks entry for the game, which was as far as I got in my attempt to play it. I do remember seeing something that suggested this was an important title for some reason. If I knew what was important about it, I'd tell you. 

Oh, wait, maybe Google knows...

Aha! Now I remember! Or at least, I remember what started it all. It was something I read at NME, because of course a music site was going to be my go-to for important news about Hello Kitty games.

From the NME, I learned that 2024 is Hello Kitty's fiftieth birthday. She really doesn't look her age, does she? That was how I started looking at at Hello Kitty stuff again, but how I ended up with Around The World specifically, I have no clue. 

It's what I bookmarked, anyway, so I'll have to assume I wanted to check it out for something. Maybe if I ever actually play it I'll find out what it was.

My personal history with Japan's most famous feline (And that's a highly competitive title, let me tell you.) doesn't go back quite as far as half a century but it does stretch all the way to the late 1990s, which is when I bought a Hello Kitty pencil case in the El Corte Ingles department store in Barcelona. A few weeks later, I gave that pencil case to a work colleague as a leaving present, when she decided to go to back to America. 

We were the only two people in the office who knew both who Buffy the Vampire Slayer was and that the show was fit viewing for adults, so a Hello Kitty pencil case seemed to be the obvious choice to give her to remember me by. Plus it was all I happened to have with me at her leaving do in the pub after work. God, remember when we used to do things like that? Another world...

A little bit later, I briefly played the Hello Kitty MMORPG,Hello Kitty Online, mostly out of spite. I wanted to be able to hit back at anyone who used it as a lazy diss to put down any other MMORPG they happened not to like, which was very much a trope of the early 'aughts. 

It's always a more effective put-down if you can open with "Have you actually played HKO? Because I have." 

I don't think I ever did that, by the way, but I always thought I might. I guess it could still happen, but I doubt it. After all, I'm not a hot-tempered kid of forty any more.

Of course, the Hello Kitty game I really want to play is Hello Kitty Island Adventure, which is basically Hello Kitty meets Animal Crosssing as far as I can see. Unfortunately, that one is only available via Apple Arcade, which not only requires an iOS device capable of running the game but also charges a subscription. Never gonna happen.

Embers Adrift

Finally, a game you can play on the PC! Embers Adrift is one of those uphill in the snow both ways, retro "golden age" MMORPGs that were all the rage a few years ago, only it's one that both actually launched and hung around. I'm pretty sure it used to be called something else and there was probably some drama involved at some point but I neither remember the details nor care enough to go look them up.

The important part is that from the start of this month it's getting one of those endless free trials I like. The way I play, those might as well be free games. It's not like I often get much further than the starting zones in most MMORPGs, and anyway those are usually the best bits.

The devs also recently made some changes to the early stages that apparently mean you don't have to get a group before you can even take on a kill ten rats quest any more. Oh, it's still laser-focused on "Group-based Gameplay" with all the usual promises and reasons, but like just about every similar game ever, it has finally occured to someone that players occasionally either want or need to do stuff on their own, if only for the sake of their sanity. 

As the patch notes from a preparatory update for the free trial last month put it "A new solo loop has been added to the Meadowlands' Noxious Bog Ember Vein." Now, doesn't that sound inviting?

MOP reported back in January that the recent changes were just the beginning of a new approach to solo play in the game:

"“One of our primary goals in 2024 is to deliver more structured gameplay for those who begin their adventures alone,” the studio says. “We hope that by providing more tangible goals with meaningful rewards to solo adventurers they will stick around longer increasing the likelihood of forming a group to tackle a dungeon or complete a quest. To start the year off we are launching three new EV solo loops and our new Bulletin Board System!"

Amazing how every new developer has to re-invent the wheel, isn't it?

I don't know how well Embers Adrift is doing but generally these kinds of changes only come in response to either player demand or demographic decline. It seems the old school B2P + Sub payment model was the first thing to give. That would be a really hard sell in 2024. 

It's still $39.99 for the full game but the subscription is now one of those optional deals that give you perks of various kinds. A change like that wouldn't have moved the dial on my interest but the combination of not having to pay $40 plus the prospect of at least some content I might actually be able to see without having to make a whole bunch of new friends I'd never meet again did at least motivate me to bookmark the game to have a look at later. 

Op success for the Marketing Dept. I guess..

Tower of Fantasy

Aka the game I didn't play when everyone else was playing it because I was too busy playing Noah's Heart. So, if I didn't bother then, why would I consider it now?

This is why. The prospect of meeting Asuka, Shinji, Rai and the rest in a game is enticing - although I notice the promo only mentions Asuka by name. I guess she is everyone's favorite...

The crossover event begins on in exactly a week on 12 March but I'm unclear as to whether it will then become permanent content or if there's a date set after which it goes away. 

If it's the latter, I'll probably never get to try it but if it's staying for good then maybe I'll eventually find a window to take a look at a game I probably should have played already, anyway.

And that's all of them for now.  Not counting the games on my Steam wishlist I almost bought or the Prime games I almost downloaded. 

If I ever get around to trying any of them, I imagine you'll read about it here. Meanwhile, it's back to Nightingale.

The First Thirty Seconds Are Pretty Good...

I'm always saying I wish I could write shorter posts. Well, here's one.

It's a First Impressions piece on a new MMORPG-related game. It would be a much longer post if could play more than thirty seconds at a stretch. 

So far that's all I've managed. 

It's not because the game's difficult. It's not difficult at all. 

It's because it keeps crashing.

It's probably my fault. I'm not playing the game in the way it's intended. 

It's a mobile title, available for Android and iOS. I'm playing it on PC, using Bluestacks. 

It installs normally. It starts up just fine.

Every time I play I get a couple of fights in or I open my bags or I click on a reward and the whole thing freezes.

It's frustrating. It looks like it might be fun. 

From the little I've seen (The first three fights, mostly; the map up to what you could think of as the second screen) the mechanics are simple but satisfying. 

It feels good to play. Just not for long.

Gameplay is simple. It's just as well.

There seem to be absolutely no instructions at all. 

No tutorial, no tool-tips, no cut scenes, no explanatory notes. It just... starts.

The PC controls on Bluestacks work well. Your character follows the mouse pointer as you drag it. 

You click on two buttons (A sword for melee, a pistol for range.) to fight. 

To do everything else, you click on a Backpack icon to open a menu. Rewards, quests, level-ups and so on. 

Clicking stuff there is what caused most of my crashes.

I'd stop clicking there but it's hard to avoid. The fighting is sedate and steady but the rewards you get for doing it are manic. 

Mobile games seem to thrive on hurling rewards and power-ups at you. This one's no exception.

I'm guessing it must either slow down eventually or start costing money but it's only a guess. I can't keep the game going for long enough to find out. 

I think I started it seven or eight times before I gave up. More, probably. 

I tried different virtual machines, different settings. Nothing made any difference.

I suppose I should try it in NOX, just for the sake of science. Hold on a moment... 

Nope. Crashed there after about ten seconds.

Until I can get the thing to run, I think that's all I have to say about it. 

These are my First Impressions: Might be fun if it worked.

Oh, I suppose I should say what it is. It's Pirate101: Plunder Hunt.

Let me know if you get it to run, won't you?

Let's Get Ready To... No, I Can't. I Just Can't. Warcraft Rumble First Impressions

After I finished writing yesterday's post I did indeed go take a look at Blizzard's newest venture, a mobile game called Warcraft Rumble. As you might expect from the name, it's set in the world of Azeroth and stuffed with characters the developers are clearly hoping you'll recognize from World of Warcraft or the rest of the franchise.

The cute wrinkle this time is that the characters aren't the original NPCs but their "Minis". I wasn't aware minis were a thing in WoW. I associate the term wholly and solely with Guild Wars 2, where no-one is anyone without a whole entourage of tiny clones of mobs and NPCs trailing along behind them like an unruly school outing. 

Actually, plausible though that sounds, it's not remotely accurate. You'd think an AI had written this. Sadly, you can only have one mini out at a time in GW2. I wish you could have more but there you go. We don't always get what we want, even when it's something trivial.

Sorry. Where was I? Oh yes, Warcraft Rumble. So, the idea seems to be that you control an army of NPCs...

...No, wait, we'll have to stop again. I'm not entirely sure who "you" is in that last sentence. It's not explained in the game or if it was I missed it. 

There's no "Player Character". It could just be you, the Player, but that seems a little shaky as a peg to hang the whole thing on. There is a framing device that alleges the game is being played by NPCs in inns and taverns inside the gameworld itself: "Throughout Azeroth people can’t get enough of this mysterious new machine. A new strategic sensation has swept the land..." so I guess it could be your WoW character in the game, in an inn, playing Warcraft Rumble on a gnometech arcade machine...

It's all a bit meta, frankly, which naturally I liked. Or I may be overthinking it. It's probably that.

Going back to the "army"of NPCs I mentioned, that is literally what it's called in the game: your Army. There's no explanation of whose army it is, either. It looks like a random bunch of NPCs and monsters to me...

Okay, I'm definitely overthinking this...

Your army fights... other minis. Not another Army as far as I can see. Villains, maybe. Bad guys? Whoever gets in their way. 

Honestly, I feel like it would have been more realistic to give your "Army" some sort of superhero style team name. The Azerothian Avengers, maybe, although I guess that might have caused some copyright issues. 

They certainly seem to act more like a bunch of superheroes than an army. They all act independently of each other for a start and most of their fights seem to be duels and skirmishes rather than formal battles. Then again, I guess modern warfare can be a bit like that. 

I withdraw my earlier objection. "Army" it is.

The gameplay is described as "mobile action strategy" by Blizzard, who ought to know. They also call it "frantic" and sum the whole thing up as "joyful chaos". Having played for about half an hour, I can't fault the language. It's non-stop, crazy action. You can have that if you want, Blizz.

It goes without saying I don't have any hand-held devices capable of playing Warcraft Rumble. Mobile games these days require the kind of processing power that would have put Neil Armstong on the moon five years earlier, had NASA had it in the 60s. 

That's a ludicrous analogy that bears no scrutiny whatsoever, by the way. Please don't scrutinize it. 

The point I'm trying to make is, I can't run any modern mobile games on my Kindle Fire or my aging and faulty phone and don't expect to. That's fine because I don't much enjoy playing mobile games on phones or tablets anyway. I'd rather play them on PC, which is what I did with Warcraft Rumble.

I had a bit of trouble getting it to run. I tried Bluestacks first. It took three goes to get it started and then it crashed during the opening cinematic. I swapped to Nox, which wouldn't run it at all. I went back to Bluestacks and that time it worked on the second attempt, after which it ran flawlessly for as long as I wanted to play, which ended up being about half an hour.

The game is formatted for a phone in portrait mode. It seems most people use their phones in vertical alignment, which mystifies me. I've seen a few GenZ jokes about old people (That's anyone over 25.) using phones in landscape mode so it seems to be an age thing but to me it just seems counter to the way eyes work. 

Either way, as with YouTube Shorts or TikTok, the portrait form factor looks very wrong on a PC monitor. And yet I got used to it surprisingly quickly. It took about five minutes before I forgot about it altogether. Well, almost.

The one reason I wasn't quite able to forget about it completely was the need to scroll up to see the full playing-field. The only time I lost a round was when I was concentrating on the top of the screen without scrolling down to see what was happening at the bottom and my harpoon gun blew up.

Remember when I said there's no Player Character? That might not be strictly true. The harpoon gun is you, basically. It has hit points and when they reach zero, you lose. It has its icon at the top of the screen opposite your opponent. I think that makes it your avatar.

Why they picked an inanimate object as the PC I have no idea. It seems very uncommercial. Wouldn't it have been better to have a little person you could dress and buy expensive cosmetics for in the Cash Shop? 

Gameplay consists of defending your harpoon gun, while trying to kill whoever's at the top of the screen, sending minis down to destroy it. Sometimes they also have a harpoon gun. Sometimes they don't.

There's a tutorial of sorts and although it's mostly tips and suggestions it's enough to get you started. The mechanics are very simple. You pick minis off the bench at the foot of the screen and drop them onto a blue area where they spawn into the gamefield. They then march or fly or waddle off to do whatever it is they do and that's just about the end of your control over them. There are some switches you can flick to get them to change direction but that's it. There may be more options later but I only completed the first zone and that's all I saw.

Minis do a lot of different things. There are melee minis, ranged minis, flying minis, mining minis. There are also Effects like Chain Lightning and minis like the S.A.F.E. Pilot, either of which you can aim at any part of the playing field without them having to travel there first.

There are Meeting Stones you can take control of to allow minis to spawn in at forward staging zones, and the aforementioned switches to send your minis going in different directions. Your melees and ranged minis fight while your miners dig up gold that you use to... I didn't get that part. You need gold though. Of course you do.

Your supply of minis is infinite although sometimes all of them are greyed out. That might be what the gold is for. Not sure. All of them level up and get different abilities and there are points to spend doing that and you can buy more and different types of minis for your army in the store and swap them in and out and the whole thing started out slowly but by the time I got to the end of the first zone there was so much going on at once I felt like my head was going to explode.

Frantic? Chaos? Yes!

Joyful? Not sure. Maybe. 

It was fun but the kind of fun that makes me nervous. I kept wishing there was a pause button so I could stop and consider strategy. In the absence of that I just kept throwing minis at other minis and as I did it I could feel a rhythm building. I can see how gameplay could become both intuitive and addictive. 

The first zone is Elwynn Forest. There are five missions, beginning with Goldtooth and ending with Hogger. I imagine you can see what the idea is already. 

The second zone is Westfall. Now you know for sure!

Even as a WoW casual I can see the appeal here. It's a trip through Azeroth, zone by zone, meeting all your favorites and whacking them in the head, just like in the real game. There's no pretense at a plot or a narrative or any of that dumb stuff that gets in the way of fun. Just pure name recognition and non-stop clicking. It's the Haribo Family Fun Multipack of the Warcraft franchise.

I really enjoyed it. I'm definitely going to play some more. It's frenetic and exhausting but you get rewards win or lose and anyway I only lost once. The final mission in the first zone, the one with Hogger, is flagged "Hard", as you might expect but it wasn't hard at all. I don't know if the game does get genuinely hard later. I don't even know what "genuinely hard" in the context of a mobile game like this would mean.

There's a full PvE campaign involving 70 zones. There are dungeons and raids. You can play solo or co-op. There's PvP. It's basically WoW without all of the stuff that makes WoW meaningful or significant, assuming you think it is or was. 

If I had a phone that could play modern mobile games and if I was minded to play modern mobile games on my phone at all, I might very well play Warcraft Rumble. Then again, if all of that were true, I might play any number of games and I'm not sure I'd pick this one over dozens of others. 

If it was on Steam, I'd play it for sure. A PC port would be nice. I might need a lie down after a few missions but that's okay. My reaction time could use a good work-out, once in a while. 

All told, it looks like a pretty good game if you know the characters and the locations. I'm not convinced it would stand out if you didn't but that's probably not going to be an issue. I don't imagine anyone other than Warcraft fans are going to be playing it. 

You Can't Keep A Good Dragon Down

In the extremely unlikely event someone were to ask me if a particular new game from SquareEnix had been released yet, in theory I'd be able to tell them immediately, even though I haven't played an SE game in a long while. That's because Square delight in bombarding me with information about every last little thing they do. 

In practice, of course, I never read any of their press releases or bother to remember any of the names so I wouldn't be able to help anyone out on the latest Final Fantasy game or whatever it might be.  I have next to no interest in anything Square Enix is ever likely to produce.

I find it almost painfully ironic, then, that I didn't find out about the launch of a game I would have loved to have known about until I read about it at MassivelyOP almost a week after said game went live. I should make it clear, I'm not complaining about MOP's tardiness. At least they got around to covering the launch eventually. The other MMO-specific news site I follow, MMOBomb, still hasn't seen fit to mention the game at all.

The game in question, as you'll already have gathered from the picture at the top of the post, is Dragon Nest 2: Evolution. Anyone who's been around this blog for a while will have heard me mention Dragon Nest a number of times. It's one of my favorite MMORPG franchises and one I've been playing on and off - mostly off - for many years. 

The last time I posted about Dragon Nest was a couple of years ago, when I helpfully recapped my history with the game, saving me the trouble of having to do it again now. I will just re-iterate the surprising - even to me - fact that I've been playing various versions of Dragon Nest for longer than this blog has existed.

Next time I do a recap like that I'm going to have to add another chapter. Dragon Nest, despite having barely been mentioned by any MMO news outlet I've ever read, let alone by any other bloggers in this part of the blog forest, is a pretty big deal in some parts of the world. There have been many iterations of the IP on both PC and mobile. There are often multiple versions running simultaneously in different regions. Dragon Nest is very much A Thing.

The MOP news story reports that the newest addition to the stable collected more than three million pre-registrations of which I would have been one if I'd know there was anything to pre-register for. I'm aware these big numbers can sound specious but I did some research on the worldwide popularity of Dragon Nest a few years back and all the data I was able to find spoke to a global audience measured in millions. The current iteration is even tagged as a "Global" release so I find this new figure convincingly consistent.

Naturally, as soon as I found out what I was missing, I moved to remedy my loss. There's a satisfying degree of synchronicity here in that Dragon Nest 2: Evolution is a mobile-only title that my Kindle would probably burst into flames if it had to try to run so it's incredibly good timing that it happens to have launched just as I've been updating my Mobile-On-PC capabilities.

First, I had to choose a platform. I discounted Google Play Games immediately on the grounds I'd already checked to see if I could play any of the earlier Dragon Nests there and come up blank. I've just done a due dilligence check to see if DN2:E might have been added to the GPG roster in the last few days; it hasn't.

My next choice was Bluestacks 5, where I was delighted to find the game right away. Unfortunately, when I installed it and pressed "Play", I got the introductory movie followed by a swift return to the game selection screen. 

Rather than fiddle around with that, I tried Nox. The current version of Nox has a horrible search function that seems to do nothing more than open a web browser. When you search for a game, most of the top results are for third-party websites that offer to install the game for you. Yeah, right. Nope.

I found the genuine Google Play link and used that but all I got was the dreaded "This phone isn't compatible with this app." Fortunately, I still wasn't out of options. 

When I was tinkering with Bluestacks the other day, trying to get Sky: Children of Light to run (Still no joy there...) I set up a couple of variants, each of which appears to register as a different "phone". I tried another and this time... 

It still didn't work. But that turned out to be because I'd refused to allow the game access to my photographs. 

I know. Why? Apparently you have to, though, if you want to play. I did want to play that much so I started over. Fine, you can look through all my pictures of Beryl if you really feel you must. Then is everything cool?

It was. I was in.

Since I hadn't even discovered Dragon Nest 2 : Evolution existed until about five minutes before I was about to close down the PC for the night and since getting it up and running had taken me about half an hour, there wasn't really time for me to log in, make a character and take a look around. 

So I logged in, made a character and took a look around.

Of course I did. It's Dragon Nest!

I'll most likely do a proper First Impressions piece at some point but for now I'll just bang out a few bullet points:

• Classes: There are only four: Warrior, Archer, Sorceror and Cleric. I picked Archer because for some reason I almost always pick someone with a bow and then almost always wish I hadn't. And yet I never learn.
  

• Character Creation: Isn't bad, especially for a mobile game. There are a reasonable number of choices in hairstyle and eye-makeup and you can make your character's face look round or pointy. So long as you want your character to look like a seven-year-old playing dress-up you'll be very comfortable with the results - and if you don't, remind me why you're playing a Dragon Nest game again?
  

• Controls: The screen is covered with dots which is weird. There's one for every location where there's some kind of command or trigger. I'm guessing on a touch screen that's where you'd tap and you can indeed click the icons there with your mouse pointer when they appear. They also tell you which keyboard shortcut you can use. All of which is fine except why they need to be permanently visible beats me. If there's a way to turn them off I haven't found it yet but since my brain was already refusing to notice them after half an hour I imagine I'll just forget they're there altogether in a while. * See comments below - this is actually a Bluestacks option that can be changed or removed, not a feature of DN2:E.
  
  

• Aesthetics: Those dots are going to be the least of your problems when it comes to screen clutter. What is it about mobile games that makes designers want to cover every inch of the screen with pop-ups and windows and notices? How does anyone play these games on a five inch screen? Can you even see your character on a phone? That said, Dragon Nest 2: Evolution is better in that respect than Dragon Nest M was and it's almost minimalist by comparison with something like Black Desert Mobile, which I found totally overwhelming.
  

• Translation: The big surprise to me is the translation. It's good! I'm so used to having to pick my way through the quaint, charming, fractured English in search of anything approximating a meaning in all the other Dragon Nests I've played, it's almost shocking to be able to understand everything completely, first time. Better still, all the English text I've seen in the game isn't just technically correct - it's idiomatic and characterful too. It's a miracle!
  

• Voice Acting: Maybe the reason the translation is so much better than usual is that they were able to hire a genuine English speaker with the money they saved on not hiring any English-speaking voice actors. The game seems to be fully-voiced - at least the tutorial is, which is as far as I've got - but all of the actors are speaking Korean (I think... could be something else... I'm not entirely clear on who made the game, which is published by Tencent subsidiary, Level Infinite.) It's a compromise that works quite nicely for me. I've always been fine with subtitles.

• Selfies: There's one of those in-game photo features that I like so much. I took some great shots of my character. At least I think I did. Unfortunately, the game doesn't tell you what directory it's using and I haven't been able to find them. I looked in all the usual places but nothing so far. All the shots in this post were taken using Windows own screenshot function.
  

• Authenticity: The game really looks and feels like Dragon Nest. The character design is the same as always, the NPCs are all familiar names and the tutorial opens in Carderock. I recognised the starting town immediately. It looks much the same as it did in all the other Dragon Nests. 

I'd have looked around town and taken some selfies but before I could orient myself the tutorial shunted me off into an instance and then another and then I died so I thought it was probably time for bed.

DN2:E has a lowish rating on Google Play (2.6 out of 5 from more than half a million downlaods as I write this, up from 2.5 last night.) following a rocky start when some things kept falling over or didn't work at all. It looks like most of that's been fixed since and some of it seems to have been no more than the usual mmorpg launch issue of everyone trying to log in at the same time, anyway. It ran smoothly for me is all I can say. 

Reddit is even less happy, though, and for reasons that have nothing to do with launch day blues. The general consensus there seems to be that the whole thing's just a blatant cash grab based on re-using existing assets to exploit any remaining pockets of nostalgia that aren't already tapped out from all the other Dragon Nest cash-grabs there've been.

I can't say I disagree. I am absolutely not going to recommend DN2:E to anyone who hasn't already played other games in the series and even then only if, like me, it feels like it still hasn't been enough. If it wasn't for the nostalgia factor I wouldn't be bothering with it myself and even with those warm fuzzies, it's pretty unlikely I'll play this iteration for more than a few sessions. 

Like all the later versions, it's like a photocopy of a photocopy of the original, just enough fidelity left that you can picture what it's supposed to be if you squint hard enough. I'm happy they keep making new Dragon Nests because I always enjoy trying them out but the best one was the first one. That's the game I really miss. It's been a slow roll downhill ever since.

I'm just a Dragon Nest tourist at this point and happy to be one. Or I will be, when I can find my holiday snaps...