Playing Catch-Up

Since I was so uncomplimentary about the scenery at the start of Dragonflight last time, I thought it only fair I give some praise where it's due. Yesterday I finally got back to playing again (So much for the Winds of Mysterious Fortune - I really dropped the ball on that one...) and after I'd cleared up a couple more quests, the breadcrumb trail took me over the hill and out of the grey-red-black hellscape into a beautiful, lush valley.

Why they wouldn't start with somewhere this lovely I have no idea. Or, wait, yes I do. Someone at Blizzard either has an emotional age of about twelve or thirteen or believes most WoW players do. That'll be it. Also I bet they all listen to some stripe of metal. In the office, likely as not. They all think red and black is cool. 

Okay, red and black is cool. But only in clothes, not in landscapes. Glad we got that cleared up, at least. 

In contrast to what happened the first time I arrived in the Dragon Isles, when I took no screenshots at all, this time I took...  hang on, wait a moment while I count them... eighteen. Could have been a lot more, too.

That was this morning but I got to the new area last night, so why the wait? Ah, well that makes a very nice example of why veterans and developers don't always remember what things are like for a new player. Or a returning player. Or someone who just plain doesn't know what they're doing. You can guess where I fit in.

Here's what happened. I got the quest from the over-enthusiastic but inexperienced dragon cadet outside the Embassy (Nice bit of characterization there.). She'd been deputed by the Majordomo to take me to the camp where there'd been some trouble with some ancestral enemy of the dragons. They'd (Conveniently or inconveniently, depending which way you look at it.) just woken up from... I don't know, hibernation? Stasis? Deep meditation? They hadn't been seen for a long time, anyway, but now they were back.

Before I get to the next part, I have to ask. Why? I mean, why a Majordomo? It's an obscure choice of rank, isn't it? There's an option to have him explain what it means , which I already knew, which was why I wanted to ask him. My not-that-extensive experience of majordomos (Majordomi?)suggest it would be kinda weird to see one commanding an army in the field. More likely to find them organizing the help for a big party in the palace, I'd have thought.

His explanation didn't hold much water but maybe it's different for dragons. Whatever, he was there and he was giving... not so much orders as rather avuncular suggestions it felt like it would be unwise to ignore. So off I went with the cadet, who set off at a jog-trot towards a gap in the hills I hadn't even noticed.

And that was where the problem arose. I was on foot because I generally only mount up in games if I'm planning on going some distance, not if I'm walking (Or running, because it's always running in games, isn't it?) around town. I jogged along behind but the dragon was a lot taller than my vulpera (Isn't everyone? Okay, not gnomes.) and I fell further and further behind.

Waaaiiit! I only have little legs!

The cadet was yammering away to herself the whole way. She never stops monologuing. I was trying to read her speech bubbles although I think she was voice-acted as well. I thought about mounting up but I decided by the time I worked out how to do it she'd be completely out of sight.

Luckily she stopped at the brow of the hill to wax lyrical about something or other and I was able to catch her up. Then, just as I was about to follow her, she shot off and before I could get started she disappeared. I carried on down to the camp but no-one there would talk to me. The quest tracker still told me I needed to be following the cadet to the camp, even though I was already in it and she was nowhere to be seen.

I spent about five minutes looking all around for her. No luck. I figured I was either going to have to drop the quest and start again, if you can do that in WoW, or else go all the way back to the Embassy to see if she'd reset. It was getting late, though, so I decided to leave it til the morning and logged out.

That was last night. This morning I logged back in, hoping maybe the quest would have sorted itself out while I was asleep but it hadn't. I was obviously going to have to go back to where I started but before I did that I thought I'd better mount up so the whole thing didn't just happen all over again. 

And I could not remember how to do it. I must have summoned a mount in WOW scores of times. Hundreds, probably. I was convinced I'd always done it by clicking an icon on a hot bar. And I'm sure that's just what I have done in the past. Only before you can click an icon on a hot bar it has to be on one and as I mentioned last time, all my hot bars were cleansed while I was away.

Now, in retrospect I'm willing to concede that the permanent services hot bar that comes as part of the default UI does include a pretty obvious horseshoe, which should have been a clue. In my defense, it's really small and if you mouse over it it doesn't say anything about a mount. It says something about Collections.

So sue me but I don't think of my mounts first and foremost as something to be collected. I think of them as something to ride. I concede that collecting mounts in WoW is a thing. I've read enough blog posts where people talk about their collection of mounts. It's not, however, one of my things so I didn't make the connection.

What I did do was go through all the keybinds looking for one to summon a ride. There isn't one. Or if there is, it's not included in the in-game information. I also looked through my bags in case there was something in there I was supposed to click but that's not how it works in Azeroth. (How it does work, as in where all those mounts hang out when you're not using them, probably best not to think about.)

In the end I had to google it.  And that's why MMORPGs are so confusing and frustrating for people who aren't intimately familiar with them. Nothing is ever as simple and straightforward as the people who play every day and the people who design the content imagine.

Once I'd found my "Collection" of mounts and pulled one of the icons onto a hot bar, I was ready to carry on. I rode back to the last place I'd seen the cadet (She has a name. I just don't remember what it is. I think it was something like Sarsaparilla.) and there she was. I spoke to her and the whole thing started up again, except this time I was on my Felsteed (Which it occurs to me suddenly I shouldn't have at Level 13, should I?) so instead of struggling to keep up with her, I had to keep stopping so the cadet could catch up to me.

All of which I found quite entertaining and even more so when I finally got to the camp and picked up my next set of quests. I did a couple and then just went exploring. I took all those screenshots with no interruptions because the whole area seems to be remarkably quiet, not to say idyllic.

There's an abundance of curious and interesting wildlife but almost none of it is aggressive. Whole valleys seem to be entirely devoid of threat or danger of any kind. It looks like it would be an excellent place to build a spa hotel. Or to take a party of Playable Worlds devs so they could get an idea of what makes for a fun environment.

After about twenty minutes, I ended up on the coast. I could see the Horde zeppelin service pulling away in the distance so I trotted down the beach in that general direction and in no time ended up back where I'd started. I have made this observation before but it bears repeating: a lot of MMORPGs, WoW being no exception, are more fun when you stop acting like everybody's gofer and just wander off and do your own thing.

I do find it surprising that, in the midst of my current lack of enthusiasm for games in general, it's WoW I most feel drawn to but that's how it is. I was quite looking forward to playing today and I'm quite looking forward to playing some more. I think the very pointlessness of it all is part of the charm.

Lastly, I just wanted to thank Shintar, who left a comment on the previous post with a link to a reddit thread explaining how to free up some of the hard disk space the WoW patcher leaves stuffed with unnecessary clutter. I'm very bad at checking older posts for late comments so I only saw it today, when I opened that one to get the link.

At first, I thought the tip wasn't going to be of any help. I checked the relevant location as advised but the folders in question were measurable in mere megabytes. I was about to forget it, when I noticed there was a folder called "World of Warcraft" inside my "World of Warcraft" folder. 

That seemed weird so I had a good look at both of them and guess what? It was the whole dam' lot again. I had the entire installation, twice, on the same drive. I mean, I knew in the past I'd had multiple installations on different drives but this was a whole new way to waste space.

I deleted everything from the spare installation except the screenshots and that freed up almost 100GB. Then I logged back into WoW in case it might need to replace a few files but it worked perfectly. How that bonus client got there I have no idea but I'm happy to have the space back.

I'll just have to remember to keep an eye on things to make sure it doesn't come back. I certainly don't trust Blizzard to do its own housekeeping. 

Who Will Look After The Mounts?

Yesterday brought some gaming news that should have been at least mildly upsetting but somehow felt more confusing than emotional. The game in question is Riders of Icarus, which I played for a good few months back in...

... hang on a moment. 

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post for a technical announcement. It appears there's now some kind of limit to the number of Labels that Blogger can list at the foot of a post. 

For many years I've been used to skimming down the ever-growing list to find the Label I want. Until today that list has always gone all the way to the end of the alphabet. Now it only goes as far as "E". 

To ESO, to be precise. Then it just says "Analytics" and stops. I checked the maximum number of Labels per blog allowed by Blogger and it's 5,000. Even I'm nowhere near that. A quick check shows nothing has changed in the Layout and a google search doesn't find anyone else complaining about it so I have no idea what's happened. 

Whatever it is, I hope it sorts itself out soon because I use that function a lot to check how frequently topics have appeared here. I can still find out what I wrote by using the Search facility but I'm damned if I'm going to go through and count all the posts individually.

We'll have to take it on faith, then, that I did post about Riders of Icarus quite a few times. It was back around the time of the pandemic or maybe just before that I spent the most time with the game. I liked it and said so. I wouldn't claim it was a great MMORPG in any way but it was pretty to look at, fun to play and seemed particularly generous with its giveaways.

You'll remember the USP was flight. Unlike all those games that added flight as an afterthought or because everyone else was doing it, only to find it caused all kinds of problems, RoI was built around the idea that you'd be flying everywhere right from the start. Lots of locations were only accessible from the air and aerial combat was a big part of the gameplay.

There were plenty of flying mounts to collect, some of them quite spectacular. I had a skywhale with a gondola that I liked for posing, although for practical purposes I preferred my various birds or my flying inflatable dolphin. There were plenty of nice-looking ground mounts too. It was a very mount-oriented game.

Character design was solid and there were lots of cosmetic options you didn't need to pay real money for. I spent quite a while playing dress-up, which was more fun than the questing or the combat, at least for the most part. I have fond memories of the game, to which I returned several times for short runs but by the time I stopped playing I'd pretty much done as much as I wanted there.

The game had a very checkered development and ownership history. I remember losing access to it completely for several months when it changed hands although I did eventually get my account back. There was some nonsense abut it becoming a "Pay-to-Earn" title with some crypto-blockchain baggage attached but by that time I wasn't really paying close attention any more. 

A week or two back, I read that there were going to be server merges, then that those had been cancelled. Now the sad news is that the game will sunset on 15 May. 

I say "sad" and I'm sure it will be for the relatively small number of people still playing (Around a hundred at peak on Steam these days but I'm not at all sure most players would be going through Steam. I wasn't.) but I can't say it's making me feel anything stronger than mild disappointment.

Puzzled, too. MMOBomb reports that at almost the same time Valofe were announcing the end of the game they were also sending out press releases and trailers for new content. That seems about par for the course with this game, whose messaging has been chaotic for several years.

I have no idea whether Riders of Icarus has the kind of fans who would be likely to respond to this kind of existential threat by setting up some kind of emulator or private server but I do think the game deserves it. It's exactly the sort of MMORPG that could potentially improve under collective administration by people who play it. It would certainly be hard for a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs to be worse custodians than the professionals who ran it into the ground.

It's not that unlikely an outcome, either. The game had over a million players once. That's easily a big enough pool of former players to justify and support an afterlife in the grey space of the emulation world. Twin Saga managed it so I see no reason why RoI shouldn't.

Even if it happens, it's still unlikely I'd play again. Or, I should say, it's unlikely I'd play in any way that could be called "serious", even in the context of casual gameplay. I have plenty of better games I'm not playing seriously before I'd get to this one.

It is, however, entirely possible - likely, even - that I might make the effort to re-install the game and give it a final fly-by before the servers shut down for good. There are a few farewell events scheduled. Those might be fun.

It would depend on whether I could get my old characters back. As I said, I never played through Steam. I imagine I have my old login details somewhere but I've uninstalled the original client. It is still downloadable from the website but who knows how long that will last? If I'm going to bother, I guess I should get on with it.

The thing is, whereas once the news of a game I once enjoyed closing down would have disturbed me more than somewhat, these days I barely feel a frisson of anxiety. I think it's experience rather than ennui. This sort of thing has happened a lot in the quarter of a century I've been playing MMORPGs. It doesn't feel shocking any more. It barely feels worrisome at all.

I was thinking about it the other day and I couldn't think of a single game that I'd be truly upset over not being able to play any more. Not in the way I was disturbed by the disappearance of Vanguard or City of Steam or Rubies of Eventide, all games I still sometimes miss even now. 

Partly it's because experience suggests almost every MMORPG above a certain size (And a fair few a lot smaller, too.) will still be playable in some form long after the legal owners shut them down. There are exceptions, like Wildstar, but nearly every game you can remember closing probably has an emulator running somewhere.

Mostly, though, it's that I don't play MMORPGs in the serially-obsessive way I used to. My days are no longer structured around those sessions. If I couldn't play any of them, I'd find other things to do.

Mostly, I'd miss my characters. I would have some issues if I couldn't drop in on them and see how they're getting along, whenever the mood takes me. 

Even there, though, it's something I think about doing far more often than actually doing it. I have all those characters in Guild Wars 2 that I lived with daily for a decade and I haven't popped by to check on a single one of them since I dropped the game three years ago.

I'd have to say I think it's a healthier outlook. I can remember that feeling, when you learn a game you love is going to close down. It's disproportionately unpleasant when considered objectively. Playing games shouldn't be that important, should it? Especially not playing specific games.

We'll see how sanguine I am about it when EG7 goes down the pan and all the Daybreak titles close down overnight. That'll be a test of emotional separation, alright.

Until then, I'm sorry to see Riders of Icarus go. The game deserved better than Valofe gave it. They weren't good custodians. Maybe something better lies ahead for the game in someone else's care. Let's hope so.

What Are You Complaining About? It Flies, Doesn't It?

With a truly ridiculous number of highly tempting choices vying for my attention all across summer and right into autumn this year, some of the old stand-bys have all but dropped off my gaming radar. I don't believe I logged into EverQuest II even once last month and if it hadn't been for my EQ25 series of posts, I doubt I'd have set foot in Norrath at all.

I've been so lax in attendance during this Year of Darkpaw that I haven't really noticed most of the special events, let alone taken part in any of them. I visited that big tower in EverQuest back in the spring and did one of the floors but I think I have to accept that I no longer play EQ with any real intent and most likely never will again. (Cue whole new series of posts where I suddenly start playing nothing but EQ for a month...)

Perhaps most surprisingly, I haven't even been bothering to check the marketplace to see what's being given away in EQII each month. I had actually forgotten that was going to be a thing for the whole year. It's not like me to miss free stuff. I must be slipping.

Neither had I pre-ordered the forthcoming expansion, even though I believe I said I had. I meant to, after I last posted about it, but then I just forgot. It shows how far down my list of priorities the game has fallen. I have now pre-ordered. For real this time.

At least my annual subscription has renewed. That's automatic, for which I'm very grateful because I would have forgotten otherwise. With the expansion, I've paid almost exactly a hundred pounds up front for my sporadic enjoyment of the two EverQuest titles (And DCUO, I guess.) going into late 2025. It seems like a pretty good deal to me, even though I could actually play all of them for nothing, since they're Free To Play.

This post was going to be all about the current giveaways and holiday events in EverQuest II but I can already feel it lurching off the rails so why fight it? If you want to skip a lengthy digression on spending money and the associated mental health issues you're welcome to drop out now and pick things up below, with the paragraph that starts "Getting back to the original point ..."

Anyone still with me? Okay, on we go. As I wrote that last paragraph, it occurred to me to wonder why it might be that I'd be willing to pay for enhanced access to one set of F2P games even though I play them only rarely or in fits and starts, while at the same time categorically refusing to pay anything at all for games I play far more often, sometimes almost obsessively.

I play a lot of F2P games that offer some kind of extra benefits you can pay for. The exact names and mechanics vary - Seasons, Membership, Bonus, whatever - but they all work much the same. Usually there's a monthly package of perks, sometimes with differing Tiers of cost and content. Always there's a cash shop for ad hoc, individual purchases. I never use any of them. 

I think that's literally true. I can't recall a single instance where I ever paid money for anything in any one of these games. The only money any of them ever got from me was for the game itself, if it was Buy To Play. Why is that? And does it make any sense?

Thinking about it, I believe I can pare the reasons down to three: miserliness, paranoia and inertia.

#1. Firstly, I really don't like spending money. If I don't have to, I don't and that doesn't apply only to games. I find it very easy to say no to anything that I don't feel I need. Just wanting something is no reason to buy it. What's more, I get considerable pleasure from being abstemious. Not buying things gives me almost as much pleasure as buying them. Possibly more. 

#2. Secondly, I have an irrational distrust of giving my credit card details to any company that doesn't have a physical presence in my local area. Somewhere, if necessary, I could go in and yell at someone if anything went wrong. Not that I ever do that but I like to imagine I could, if I needed to. As for my debit card details, I give those to no-one other than major utilities and financial institutions. I don't trust most businesses, even offline, and the smaller they are, the less I trust them. Not saying it's rational.

#3. Thirdly, I'm lazy and I hate filling in forms. Especially online forms. I force myself to make new accounts to see new games but I hate doing it more and more as time goes on and the least awkwardness or difficulty these days is enough to make me give up on the whole idea. Signing up for free to play access to some new game is generally just simple enough that I push through but the extra effort involved in setting up a paid account is too much to even think about.

#s 2 and 3 are alleviated considerably by Steam and PayPal. Having made the decision to trust them years ago and having taken the trouble to fill out all the paperwork already, I'm far more likely to try a game that can be purchased using one or the other than anything that requires a separate set-up.

Buying things on Steam takes almost no effort and I've already trusted Valve and PayPal with my financial details. I figure if either of those get compromised it's going to be such a huge deal we're all screwed anyway so why not?

Even with paranoia and inertia out of the way, I'm still stymied by miserliness. No matter how amazing an outfit looks, it's very, very hard for me to convince myself to pay money for it. Not infrequently, I won't even be willing to spend in-game money on cosmetics so what chance is there for a cash shop to persuade me to open my wallet?

I might just possibly be able to convince myself that some practical function like inventory space or faster travel represented a justified expenditure in a game but that's a dangerous gamble for the developer to take. It's as likely I'll decide the game isn't worth playing at all, if you have to buy essentials to enjoy it. 

Kind of a Catch 22 from the developer's point of view. I won't buy cosmetics because I don't need them but I won't buy essentials because they ought to be included for free. How are they supposed to make money? Don't look at me. Not my problem.

In my more rational moments, I do see the logical flaws in most of these arguments. It's undeniable, even to me, that $5 or $10 spent on a really spiffy outfit for a character I may spend dozens of hours looking at and of whom I may take hundreds of screenshots I'll stare at as desktop backgrounds for months, would offer a much better return on investment than any number of similarly-priced real life purchases of supposedly practical items I think I need but then, having bought, never actually use. I could give examples but we'd be here all day. The house is full of them.

Given all of the above, why then do I not only feel it's fine to pay Daybreak almost £80 a year to play their F2P games but even thank them for taking my money without asking? That's... complicated.

For one thing, having an All Access account is part of my identity. I've had one since they were invented and before then I had an EverQuest account so in continuity terms I've been a member of that club for a quarter of a century. And everyone knows you pay your dues to be in a club so you can say you're in a club, not necessarily because you're going to use the facilities. That's such a widely-acknowledged experience, comedians base entire stand-up routines on it.

If I let my All Access account lapse it would suggest I'd become a different person and unless I was sure it was a kind of person I preferred to the old one, why would I want to do that? I know this isn't an outlying position among MMORPG players, either. I've read enough of people debating with themselves in public over whether or not to drop a subscription to World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV to recognize a common pattern.

Then there are the actual perks in All Access. I'm not going to go through them - I've done that before - but I will re-affirm that, when I'm playing EQII regularly, the benefits that come from being a member feel more than substantial and significant enough to justify the cost. I always thought it was a good offer and if anything I feel it may have gotten better still in recent years.

Of course, that only kicks in if I do, in fact, play the game(s). Which, as I said, right now I don't. But even when I'm not playing regularly, I'm still covered by the "it's part of my identity" clause so as you see it all makes perfect sense! 

I'm so glad we got that sorted out. I was worried for a moment there I was doing something crazy but now I see it was all perfectly rational all along...

Getting back to the original point of the post and in the unlikely event anyone's still reading after that lengthy and rather disturbing open-therapy session, we are now, at last, getting close to the EQII portion of the Year of Darkpaw, the part where we celebrate the junior game's twentieth anniversary. Twenty years is a one hell of a good run and it would be an even bigger deal if older sibling EverQuest hadn't just spent the last six months bigging up its twenty-fifth. 

You do have to feel a bit sorry for EQII, I guess, especially as it also has to share its 20th with its much better-known, more successful contemporary, WoW. It's not so much always the bridesmaid as always the usher...

Still, EQII is the one I play, when I'm playing any of them, which means free stuff in that game matters more, at least to me. And I do now wish I'd been paying more attention to the free stuff because it seems I might have missed quite a lot of it.

In that spirit, I'm pleased to say that this month's giveaway, which I am going to get, is a good one. Or it will be, when they've fixed it. This is really burying the lede but for what it's worth here it is anyway.

The giveaway in the Cash Shop this month is supposed to be a Griffin mount called Arisata the Noble. It looks great and apparently griffin mounts are relatively scarce so a lot of people would like this one, especially since it's not only free but available for every character on the account.

I wanted one. I logged in to get one. I was ready to log all my characters in so they could have one each and that's quite a lot of work, let me tell you, especially if the freebie applies to all accounts not just to members, which I've just checked and it does. That's like fifty characters on seven accounts if I logged them all in. It'd take all day.

So far I've just tried with my Berserker on my main account and there is indeed a free mount in the Cash Shop waiting there for him. A really nice one. 

It's just not the one that was advertised. It's not Arisata the Noble, the griffin. It's Stratos Aralez Skyvoyager, a mount from the current Ballads of Zimara expansion who looks kinda griffinny to me but since the forum is full of people either saying they already have a griffin so they'd like to keep this mount even if it's the wrong one or that they don't want it because they've already got it and they'd rather have the griffin they were promised, I have to assume whatever Stratos' species might be it's not Griffin. Or Gryphon for that matter.

As it happens, I don't already have Stratos. I believe that requires more progress in the storyline than I've managed, or more research, or possibly both. I'm quite happy to take him (Her. Them. It. Where Stratos is concerned, the appropriate pronouns remain, like the species, uncertain. Also, it's really hard to construct an elegant sentence about not knowing what pronouns to use while also not using pronouns.) 

Whatever and whoever Stratos may be, one thing I do know is that there are other ways to get the mount. I just need to get on and finish the damn expansion. I'd rather have the Griffin, please and thank you, since that one's entirely new as far as I can tell, so I'm holding fire for now.

How long it will be until the issue is addressed is hard to say. There's a thread about it on the forums, to which the estimable Ttoby has replied, saying he'll bring the issue to the notice of the relevant people, so presumably it will get resolved eventually, but that was last Friday and no other dev has popped into the thread to confirm anything's being done as yet. Until I hear news, I am not claiming the mount on any of my characters, so that's a couple of hours of my time I'll get back today. I think I'll use it playing more Once Human.

I did take the trouble to log in one of my several unsubscribed accounts just to check if free players also get the giveaways and I'm happy to confirm that they do. I can also let anyone who might be thinking "Oh, I used to play EQII - maybe if I can remember my password I'll log in and grab that sweet free ride." (Because I know that's how you all talk...) know to give it a day or two. Your character needs to be level 126 before they can even equip Stratos Aralez Skyvoyager and if you haven't played for a while they're not going to qualify so if you take that one and they never swap it out you'll be lumbered with a duff mount you can't even sit on to pose for pictures.

Hopefully, the griffin, when it finally arrives, will have a much more lenient level requirement. In the meantime, we'll all have to content ourselves with the other freebie for November .Yes, there's another. Did I not say? It's a statue of Wuoshi, the infamous dragon from original EverQuest, the one who used to guard the portal to Wakening Lands and who I was at one time so scared of meeting I parked a character I didn't much care about at the druid ring so I could log him to check if Wuoshi was up before porting in someone who mattered.

Or rather it's a statue of Woushi, a Wuoshi tribute act who presumably had to spell her name differently after the real Wuoshi's legal team sent her a Cease and Desist notice. That has to be the explanation, right? It couldn't just be that whoever was given the job of designing the statue didn't know how to spell the name of one of the most iconic NPCs in the entire franchise? 

Nah. Couldn't be that.

Whover the statue is of, it looks great in my Berserker's Mara Village home. Goes beautifully with the architectural style. Even if it may not be such a great fit for a Qeynos inn room, I'll probably pick one up for everyone, all the same. 

I mean, I may as well. I'll be logging them all in for the mount anyway, so why not?

PS: It took me so long to finish this post (Started before nine this morning, typing this at just before seven in the evening.) that there have now been corrections to the announcement and the correct mount will be available after the weekly update tomorrow. So that was all a complete waste of time...

Craft Your Way To The Skies In Ballads Of Zimara

As an addendum to yesterday's post, I thought I ought to add a little more detail to my account of the Crafting Signature Questline in EverQuest II's latest expansion, Ballads of Zimara, now I've finished it. Yep, already.

I didn't put a stopwatch on it but I'd be surprised if the whole thing took ninety minutes and that would include a lot of faffing about on my part. I'm going to do it with my Berserker/Weaponsmith next and I'm guessing if I don't read the quest dialog for a second time I'll be done in less than an hour.

I understand that for some people reading that's going to make it sound as though Darkpaw have really skimped on the crafting content this expansion. You can do the entire questline in a couple of hours, tops? When it probably takes an adventure five times that? At least. Scandal!

That's an Adventurer talking, that is. Most crafters will probably be happy to have the whole thing over with as soon as possible. 

By and large, it's always been my impression that what most Crafters want to do is craft. In the olden days, that's all you could do if you wanted to level up a craft skill. You stood at the crafting station and made stuff. 

You got big experience for making new things for the first time and a lot less for making the same things again, so you made everything in your Recipe books once and then picked the easiest or cheapest thing and made it over and over until you dinged and got a new Recipe Book so you could start all over again. Obviously, you also made stuff to sell on the broker and stuff for your guildmates and friends but basically you just ground out crap no-one wanted and sold it back to the vendor at something close to cost, hoping to break even if you were lucky.

Over time, all of that changed. Crafters got Tradeskill Writs - repeatable orders from NPCs that gave better XP than making random stuff. They got quests and then whole questlines. There were NPC factions to work on and gear to upgrade. Crafters even got "raids".

During the reign of Domino, Queen of the Crafting Devs, Tradeskilling became a fully-fledged, genuinely complete, wholly discrete playstyle. She added enough questlines to cover the entire level range so you could make a character and go out into the world and adventure as a crafter. You could level all the way to the cap without ever having to kill anything, do writs or make stuff to sell or give to other players.

In retrospect it was all a bit strange but Domino was so good at what she did I think everyone just bought into her vision. And then she left. 

After that, various developers did their best to keep to the plan. Every expansion came with a new, detailed, lengthy Tradeskill Signature Questline. Or it did if the resources permitted it. At least once the quests weren't ready by launch and we didn't get the Signature line until well into the New Year. 

There was clearly an effort being made to keep Crafting in line with Adventuring but as a Crafter and an Adventurer I'd have to say it was always significantly easier to level to the new cap as a the former. On characters who did both, I got into the habit of doing the Crafting timeline first. 

There were some definite advantages in doing it that way, the biggest of which being flight. It's been a very long time since flying mounts have been able to take to the skies on Day One of a new expansion. How long it's taken has varied a little but the rule of thumb is for the final Sig Line quest in a zone to grant the ability to fly in that zone.

It can feel like a bit of a pyrrhic victory sometimes. You can fly in a zone you're about to leave. You'll be grounded again as soon as you take the next quest.

If you do the craft line first, though, you'll be able to fly in all the zones as soon as you begin adventuring. The Tradeskill Sig Line follows the same pattern, letting you fly as soon as you complete each zonal set of quests. Since that typically takes a fraction of the time it would take to complete the same zone as an Adventurer... well, as they say, you do the math.

For some reason, in last year's expansion, Renewal of Ro, this policy was reversed. Crafters didn't get to get to fly at the end of each zone. They didn't even get to fly at the end of the whole Sig line. They had to do all of that and then also complete fifteen research missions - and the missions were on two-hour timers.

As I remember, the effect of all of that was to make it faster to do the Adventure line to get flight for once. Since I was going to be doing both anyway it didn't make much difference to me but I imagine it must have annoyed the heck out of pure crafters.

This year, the finely-crafted boot is very firmly back on the other foot. And then some. As I mentioned yesterday, while Adventurers have had their XP rates trimmed back to levels not seen for many years, crafters are still getting half a level per turn-in. 

Added to that, the questline itself is much shorter than usual. As Naimi Denmother, who designed it, confirms in a forum post, it comprises just eight quests and as I can confirm, having done them, some of the eighte pretty much involve walking ten feet, making a combine that takes a few seconds, then walking back. 

So why isn't the Tradeskill forum full of threads complaining about crafters being stiffed on content in BoZ?  Because crafters mostly just want to craft is my guess. Even as Domino strived to bring the entire profession into equivalance with Adventuring, there was always a vocal demographic that just wanted to stand at the crafting station and grind out writs. Not everyone likes quests. Or going outdoors.

And of course, for both Adventurers and Crafters, getting to max level is just the start. Adventurers have to run dungeons for gear if they want to be truly endgame; Crafters have to get all of their recipes. In this expansion they do it through Research Missions, which unlock once the Signature questline is complete. Since those are time-gated, that should keep everyone busy for a while.

Having seen how it works and how long it takes - or should that be how short? - my own plans have changed. I'm going to take the Berserker through his Weaponsmith levels before I go back to adventuring with him. Not only will that allow him to fly in all the new zones, the mount he'll get is a huge upgrade on the free one he got only a few days ago. And it has both Adventuring and Tradeskill stats. 

And most importantly, it looks amazing!

After that, I'll most likely take my Warlock/Sage through the craft line so he can make spells for himself, my Necromancer and my Wizard. Neither of them crafts, so they'll have to do the Adventure line, which is going to put them at the back of the line.

Since they'll both have the advantage of flight, the Warlock/Sage and the Bruiser/Alchemist will go through the Adventure line second and third, although not necessarily in that order. There's a 20% bonus to XP for each max level Adventurer and Crafter, calculated separately, so it'll get faster each time. By the time the Necro gets to go, she should have at least a 60% bonus, which I hope will make up for not being able to fly.

The wild card in all of this is my Inquisitor/Carpenter. I'll probably slip her in before the Necro, just because of the crafting and the flight, even though it's always the Necro I really want to play. Or maybe I'll just succumb to the call of Necrotic fun and leave the Inquisitor as a max-level furniture maker for now.

All of which, I think, explains why the expansion not having enough content isn't likely to be a problem for me. It never has been before and I certainly don't think it will be now. I'm very happy to have a quick and easy route to flight for almost everyone. In fact, maybe I ought to think about getting those slacker casters into a crafting training program.

I could always use a Jeweller, for the scout skills. And a Provisioner. Everyone has to eat!

Through Splendor Sky By Cloud And Owl

EverQuest II's latest expansion, Ballads of Zimara, continues to be both a delight and a surprise. My progress has been slow, for which I can only blame my increasingly poor sense of time management. It seems the more free time I have, the less I get done and anything labelled "Inessential" goes right to the back of the line. I swear I found it easier to make time for playing games when I worked full-time, which is just ridiculous.

Because of all that, I'm still in the opening zone of the expansion, Splendor Sky Aerie. It's charming, open, airy and vast; a perfectly lovely place to explore. It's also precipitous and twisty, making the lack of flight a potential drawback.

Fortunately, there's a workaround to not being able to fly: my Featherfall cloak. Wearing one of those is almost exactly like having Levitation cast on you in EverQuest. All you need to do to get from one side of the zone to the other is climb up somewhere high and then drift slowly down. You can move freely in all directions at a good speed and it feels just like flying - just so long as you don't need to go upwards again.

The last several expansions have handily provided plenty of mountains and cliffs to launch yourself from and this one's no exception. I've been riding my Tishan's Fluffy Transport, the free big white cat mount, through the air in style, although not as much in style as when I've been riding the official Kingdom of Sky public transport system - clouds - or better yet, travelling about the Aerie the way the locals do, on the back of a giant owl.

Experience gain is, as promised, very slow. I just dinged 126 this morning after completing the first instance and doing the hand-in. I found that instance itself something of a surprise in that I didn't need to kill any of the bosses to complete the quest I was on. I just had to do regular stuff inside the instance, killing a set number of ordinary mobs, freeing some trapped apprentices and escorting the senior trainee back to the zoneline.

I can't remember the last time a Signature quest took me into a new instance and let me come out again without completing the zone and killing all the bosses. It felt really good, like someone was actually thinking about what a solo player might enjoy doing rather than just giving them the cut-down version of the Heroic instance and telling them to get on with it.

Since I wasn't being forced to, naturally I decided to try the first boss anyway, just to see how it went. I'd already been using the regular instance mobs to see how reliable my new Mercenary might be and he was doing fine but a boss would be a much better test.

I couldn't find a specific walkthrough for the boss so I just pinged him with an arrow and went toe-to-toe. If he had any tricks I missed them although I did notice Valek announce several times that he'd cured me, so I guess there must have been something going on. 

There was one moment when my Merc looked like he was getting behind on his healing duties but as  Berserker I have a bunch of self-heals. I popped a couple of those and we were back on top right away. 

For the first boss-fight of an expansion it all went very well. Add to that the open world solo Named I took on and beat (Close fight!) a couple of days ago and I'd say so far things are just about perfectly tuned to my particular tastes and my character's abilities. I'm pretty sure there will be people claiming it's all gotten far too easy but I rememember a few expansions back I literally couldn't kill even a solo overland named until well after the mid-year update so I'm definitely not complaining.

Whether the difficulty ramps up later in the Sig line or in subsequent zones I'll wait to see but normal practice has generally been for things to get easier, not harder, as you'd expect when you acquire better gear from the quests and drops, so I'm optimistic.

One thing that has always made a big difference, of course, is upgrading your spells or combat arts, which is why as a solo player I take some care always to have crafters on my account who can make them for all my adventurers. 

If I'd had some kind of ten-year plan all those years ago, when I rolled a Berserker on a whim to try out the new Free to Play server, Freeport, I'd have made him an Alchemist so he could make his own upgrades. Obviously, at the time I had no inkling he'd become my main character and stay that way for more than a decade, so I made him a Weaponsmith because it seemed like a craft a Berserker might do. Bloody roleplayers, eh?

I've long since rectified that error of judgment by giving my Bruiser the Alchemy job. He's also a max-level Adventurer, or he will be when he does this Sig line, but I thought he might as well get on with the Tradeskill Signature in the meanwhile, so he could make new spells for the Berserker going through ahead of him.

I started on that a few hours ago, which was how I learned two things. 

1. The Bruiser never did the follow-up quest to swap his Gathering Goblin for a gathering speed increase so he gathers at a painfully slow rate compared to the Berserker.
2. All that stuff about reduced XP and slower levelling in Ballads of Zimara? Does not apply to crafters!

I did one quest in the TS Sig line. It took me about five minutes, most of which was zoning. I handed it in and it gave me about half a level. 

Then I did the next part, most of which was doing a handful of combines at a workbench right next to the questgiver, using materials he'd just given me. I handed that in and dinged 126. 

The whole level probably took me ten minutes. Fifteen at the outside. Half of that was reading the lengthy quest dialog. If it carries on like this, I'll have a 130 Alchemist long before I have a 127 Berserker.

All of which works for me. I have half a dozen adventurers and four or five crafters I'd like to get to max level. I'm very happy to have it go faster. 

There's already a structural problem with alts in EQII in that the first hundred levels offer multiple paths to avoid repeating content but after 100 everyone pretty much has to do the same thing. I almost always enjoy the Adventure Sig line in each expansion but rarely so much I want to do it half a dozen times. When the XP  rate was jacked up, it wasn't too bad but I'm already starting to dread having to go through it all at this pace again and again. At least it's nice to think I won't have the same problem with the crafters.

That said, looking at the walkthrough and bearing in mind what I read on the Beta forums, I think both questlines are probably quite a bit shorter than they have been the last few times. That might sound like a negative in that it might mean there's less content but if, as I hope, it really means there's less padding, I'd say it's actually a positive move.

Once again, we'll know when we get there. So far, I'm having a great time. If it carries on this way, I'll be a very satisfied customer.

Before I get any further through the storyline, though, I really need to go back and do that Gathering Goblin quest I missed. I have two hundred and forty assorted mats to gather for the next stage of the TS questline and I'm jiggered if I'm doing it all at half speed!

The More You Don't Know...

Here's a problem I have with blogging. It's quite specific to me, I think, but do please chime in if it affects you, too. 

I seem to play quite a lot of games no-one else in the blogosphere is playing at the moment. Sometimes it seems like I'm playing games hardly anyone else is playing. If they are, they certainly aren't writing about them. 

Quite often, they're new games. They're likely to be either MMORPGs or, increasingly these days, the plethora of survival/MMO/cosy hybrids that seem to be popping up all over. It reminds me of the WoW clone era, except it seems to be going a lot better, so far.

The games that make it are no trouble to post about. Palia, for example, despite a bit of side-eye for perhaps opening its doors to the world before it was fully prepared, has generally been well-received. Lots of people tried it, plenty are still playing and some of them are writing about their experiences. 

There are also plenty of guides to Palia. If I was writing a post and wanted to look something up or fact-check it before I hit publish, there'd be no problem. 

Well, actually, there might. That's down to the way I like to play my games. I straddle an uncomfortable fence between not wanting to spoil my own fun and not wanting to waste more time than I have to, which means I tend to try and work out how to do things on my own before looking them up, something I try to do only if and when I get stuck.

I find that works very well for me in terms of engagement and immersion. One of the big reasons I play so many new games isn't that I have a butterfly mind and can't settle anywhere; it's that a huge part of the fun for me is uncovering and understanding the systems and mechanics that make the games work. 

I kind of think there has to be a way to cook more than one sausage at a time but if so, I just don't know what it is.

It's all part of being a primary Explorer archetype. I don't just want to explore new worlds, I want to explore new systems and processes and as something of an academic manqué I also want to compare and contrast what I find with what I've seen elsewhere and maybe even draw some conclusions.

All of which is fine, when I do in fact understand what's going on. Often, though, I really don't. I muddle along, making assumptions and playing the game as I understand it, all the time not realising my understanding is flawed. 

It wouldn't matter so much if I wasn't continually committing my mistaken impressions to print. It still doesn't matter a lot because almost no-one who reads them will ever know they were mistakes. They'll never play the games to find out for themselves I was wrong.

Nevertheless, I am conscious of the very slight chance that someone googling for information on a game that no-one else is talking about might end up here and leave with the mistaken belief they'd found a source of useful information.

To be fair to myself, some of it is useful. The bits where I've gotten it right, anyway. I don't do guides as a rule but I do include factual information in reviews and tell stories that have descriptions of how I got past obstacles that were preventing me making progress. Someone might find some of it helpful.

Not if it's plain wrong, though. That's just annoying. I've done it a few times myself, gone to some website that seemed very authorative and tried to follow the advice there only to find it didn't work, either because something in the game had changed since it was written or things had never worked that way in the first place.

I found this giant, stone ball you can roll around but I have no idea why you'd want to. Treat it as a metaphor for this entire post.

That's why I tend to caveat a lot of things I write with cautionary warnings about my ignorance.The least I can do if I'm aware what I'm saying may not be wholly accurate is to make that clear up front. Only, as I said, when it comes to games no-one else is playing or writing about, that's not always as easy as it should be. If you think you're right you're not going to think you might be wrong. Or say so.

It's been a particular problem with Noah's Heart, a game about which almost no-one seems to care but me. If you try to look up information about even the most obvious parts of the game, like which are the Phantoms you should be trying to five-star, an absolutely basic piece of data about any Gacha game, you'll be lucky to find anything at all. 

Only, naturally, I just did. In typical sod's law style, the last time I checked I couldn't find anything more recent than last November but today I found this guide, written on August 15. Honestly, reading it does not fill me with confidence about its accuracy but it's something, at least.

In general, though, I think my point holds. For smaller, less popular games, the information available is both harder to find and harder to trust when you do. 

Dawnlands isn't quite as obscure as Noah's Heart. There's a fair amount of traffic around the game. Almost all of it seems to come from the mobile side, though, and not surprisingly it's mainly in the form of videos on YouTube.

YouTube videos are really handy when you want to research something like how to handle a boss fight. It's easier to understand and copy tactics and strategies for something like that when you can watch someone doing it. When it comes to things like how to plant and grow cotton, though, watching someone doing it for a few minutes doesn't feel like the best use of your time. Especially when it comes with a rinky-dink backing track and no commentary.

That video I embedded above, however, while it doesn't really explain all that much, is immensely helpful in revealing some potential aspects of the building systems I wasn't even aware existed.

Maybe I haven't just reached that part yet but nothing in the game itself has introduced me to the concept of Blueprints or the Advanced building techniques. Not that I plan on going to the extremes this guy has but it's as well to be cognizant of the possibilities.

Even when the game does include instructions, I don't always follow them. I tamed my horse when I was told but I never made the hitching post to tie him up to because, as I said in an earlier post, all you have to do is press "Y" and he appears right beside you.

Yesterday I got an achievement for something or other and when I claimed my diamonds for doing it, I happened to notice that all I needed to round out the whole section was to make that hitching post. So I made it and discovered it's not just a decorative addition to your home, as I'd assumed, but the item that provides functionality for your Mount collection.

Clicking on the hitching post opens the Mount interface, where you can see the stats of your mounts, name them and swap between them. It also makes it clear, if only by implication, that mounts vary in speed and robustness, so I've been doing myself no favors by sticking loyally with the first one I happened upon. 

I feel an unreasoning loyalty towards mounts that have their own names. Naming them is almost always a mistake.

There are horses in each of the biomes so it seems logical that they'd improve in quality as the difficulty levels go up. Again, though, that's an assumption. If I state it here as a fact, I'm doing anyone who reads this a disservice. A quick Google on "Dawnlands mounts" brings up almost nothing of value so the only way I'm going to know for sure is to go tame a Plains horse for myself and compare it with my current Grasslands ride.

Once I've done that, if I write it up here in any kind of detail, as likely as not it will be the only account available. I mean, if there was another I wouldn't be doing it, would I? Whether whatever I say about it will be comprehensive or even correct is another matter. It'll tell anyone who reads it what I know about the topic but that may not be much.

For example, I thought I knew a fair bit about how the instant travel system works. I wrote about it in some detail in this post, where I also talk about mounts (And probably get most of that wrong, too.) Here's how I thought it worked:

 "As far as I can make out, there's a network of Teleport Beacons you can find and, if necessary, cleanse of corruption so you can move between them. The Teleport Beacons are very few and far between, which would be highly restrictive if it wasn't for the fact that you can also teleport to all kinds of other locations as well - any of the icons marked on the map, in fact, which in practical terms means just about everywhere. 

Unfortunately, teleporting to any of them requires a Teleportation Potion every time. The potion is consumed on use and the only place I've found them is on vendors in the Shelters. They're cheap but there's only one vendor in each village, each vendor only has five potions to sell and they're never restocked. If there's a recipe to craft them, I haven't found it yet."

Bits of that are correct but some extremely important aspects are flat-out wrong. For a start, you do not need Teleport potions to travel between Shelters, Activated Teleport Beacons or pretty much any of the large icons on the map that represent some kind of portal or special event. All of those are free and they have no cooldown, either, so free, instant map travel is widely available.

I'm not going to try to be any more specific because there may be limitations I don't know about. I really don't know exactly how it all works. What I do know is that The key thing to remember is that when you click on any icon on the map it will open a panel that tells you if you need a potion or not. If there's a Teleport button and no picture of a potion next to it, travel is free. How it took me so long to notice this is not a subject I wish to discuss.

My original plantation. It's three times the size now I know how to port to and fro for free.

This discovery, inevitably, made a huge difference to my gameplay. Before then, I'd been spending long periods riding between locations, often finding myself away from shelter at night and having to fight a lot of monsters I didn't want to be fighting. I'd been ruing the lack of craftable teleport gates like they have in Valheim, when in actuality the functionality was already baked into most of the locations where I needed it, especially my house and all the vendors I needed to visit.

Now I can just zap myself instantly between my home in the Grasslands Shelter and the vendor in the Plains Shelter to buy seeds as and when I need them, then back again to plant them in the garden I've laid out right down the main street. It makes life much easier.

(And just to prove the point, since I wrote this post I've learned yet another very significant fact about teleportation options, which will now have to wait for yet another post I'm planning... None of which would have happened if this had been a game everyone else was playing, because someone would have put me straight in the comments weeks ago.)

Another feature I know a little about but don't even begin to understand fully are trinkets and the tinkering station you can use to merge and change them. I've just been throwing stuff in and pressing the button like we used to do in the Mystic Forge in Guild Wars 2 and I've had a couple of succeses.

I got some goggles that mark the position of animals on the mini-map and an anchor that increases sailing speed but as this video, by the same YouTube creator, Kazeyo, shows, you can make a huge range of much better trinkets. 

The problem with the video is, it doesn't really explain very much about how to control the process beyond merge blue trinkets to get purple ones. If there's a way to control the outcome or get the effects you're after, it's not clear to me what it is.

This is just the kind of thing that could be explained more helpfully in a written guide. I'm not saying I'd want to write one but if I knew how the whole thing worked I could at least give a few examples from experience that might be of some help to somebody.

As must be clear, though, Dawnlands is a very complex game. They all bloody are! That's both the joy and the terror of it. I played Chimeraland for weeks and never really understood much of what I was doing. Noah's Heart is a lot less complex and I've played it for a year but I still don't feel confident to talk in detail aboout some of the systems it employs.

None of this is going to stop me writing about the games I play but I am going to have to keep adding warnings that even if it sounds as if I know what I'm talking about, I most probably don't. I'm more interested in keeping a record for myself about what I've done and trying to make it entertaining for anyone who happens to read it. Giving people useful tips on how to play the game comes a distant third.

And if anyone can tell me what good "Accurate Time-Telling" is on a trinket, I'd love to know. I've got two fob-watches that buff it and I have no idea what it even is.

Time Flies By (When You're The Rider Of A Horse)

Dawnlands continues to take up most of my gaming time. Steam tells me I've played for sixteen hours in the last two weeks, although since the game only launched a week ago that can't be right. More accurately, I've played sixteen hours in less than seven days. It would have been more but  I didn't play at all yesterday thanks to having to go to work.

Playing anything for more than two hours a day counts as heavy rotation for me these days. What with walking the dog and keeping up with my self-imposed Blaugust commitments, two hours is about all I can fit in, most days.

I can't blame my shorter sessions entirely on Blaugust and Beryl. I believe I have a natural limit for gaming nowadays that begins to make itself felt around the 100 minute mark. A kind of itch to stop and do something else kicks in around then, even when I'm thoroughly immersed and having a great time. 

It's not a new phenomenon. When I think back, even when I sometimes played MMORPGs all day long, I still rarely played for more than a couple of hours at a stretch before taking a break. Maybe three, if I was in a really good group in Velks or Chardok. I rarely indulged in the kind of marathon sessions I've read about, staying up until dawn without a thought for the consequences.

More appropriately dressed this time. Although not by all that much...

The big difference is that back then I'd string those two-hour sessions together, linked by shorter breaks, until I'd racked up six or eight hours gaming in the day. Now it's more likely to be an hour or two in either the morning or afternoon, very rarely both, then another hour in the evening. 

It might come to three hours altogether but that'll be spread across a couple of games; sometimes three or more. Each day, I tend to do routine logins and dailies in whatever my current fancy or fancies might be. On top of that, I try to fit in one moderately significant thing - a couple of levels or some other form of measurable progression - maybe three or four times a week.

In the daytime I play MMORPGs (Or, now, survival-rpg hybrids as well, I guess...). For a long time I was in the habit of playing single-player games in the evening, usually point&click adventures or similar, but of late I seem to have fallen out of that habit. (I must get back to it. It's a nice change of pace.)

From that, it's clear that sixteen hours in one game in less than a week is out of the normal run of things for me. It's especially unusual in that none of that time at all has been spent on dailies or the like. Dawnlands does have daily quests but they're the kind you have to seek out at a board in the village and I generally forget. It has log-on rewards too but they're unobtrusive, at least by the standards of mobile games, and easily ignored.

Pushing my luck in a dungeon well above my level.

What I do in my two hours is play the game and it's a time-consuming process. I don't seem to have achieved as much as you might expect. Mostly that's because there's a lot to do but it's also because doing some of it can take a while. 

For a start, just getting around can fill up most of a session, something that I'm sure will sound very familiar to all veterans of Valheim. It's not quite as simple as that, though. While you're doing it, everything in Dawnlands seems to happen a lot faster than it did in Valheim and yet when you've finished doing it, time seems to have passed just as slowly. It's a curious paradox.

Exploration is the key to everything. The map is a square of featureless blue with the starting point somewhere near the center. The world it conceals is vast and filled with interest, all of which remains invisible and unknown until you go and find it. In this respect, Dawnlands follows the Valheim template almost exactly.

The chart below suggests there are ten biomes, although I'm fairly sure there are only five available in the game right now. I only know the names of two of them (Grassland and Forest.). I've set foot in one more, a wintery snowscape, and I've seen a parched-looking desert from a distance. I'm betting the fifth is "Swampland".

Although I did very tentatively take a look at the snowy place, I'm not planning on exploring any of the rest just yet. Dawnlands employs the exact same progression mechanic as Valheim, in which you need to find a key in a dungeon to mark the location in each biome of a named creature, which you then have to summon using several items you've collected.

As in Valheim, your reward when you defeat each of these creatures is a new tier of crafting recipes, allowing you to make the gear you need to take on the next boss. That already acts as a kind of Must Be This High To Ride mechanic but in Dawnlands the effect is multiplied by the addition of levels, ten more of which become available for each boss you kill.

Kenda, the Grasslands boss was easy. Guya, the Forest boss... not so much.

So far, after sixteen hours I've killed the first boss, located the second, failed to seal him away first time and explored a grand total of 1.22% of the full map. I'm unclear as yet whether every single-player and multiplayer world is procedurally generated as per Valheim or whether we all get the same layout. Either way, I have a lot left to do.

Unlike Valheim, as you slowly push back the fog of war you are at least supplied with some iconography representing what's been revealed. There are symbols for dungeons, settlements, teleporters, monster camps, docks and more. You can also add your own markers although you can't, as I routinely did in Valheim, annotate them with supposedly helpful notes that a few days later will mean little or nothing.

Travel in Dawnlands is much faster than in Valheim. For a start, you can ride a horse. 

The implementation of mounts, like much in the game, has an endearingly idiosyncratic texture.Whoever designed the system doesn't seem to have been able to decide between the absolute convenience of World of Warcraft, where your mount is a weightless, intangible appurtenance that appears and disappears on command, and the worldliness of Fallen Earth, where a horse has to be tethered and stabled and can be attacked by passing predators in just the same way as the player character.

Being unable to choose between these entirely discrete and incompatible approaches, the unknown designer clearly thought "I'll just use both." 

A horse can be summoned at any time, from anywhere, simply by pressing "Y", whereupon it  manifests instantly beside you.  Once summoned, to ride the horse you first have to mount by pressing "F". Then, when you want to dismount, you just press "X". 

At this point your horse does not vanish, as it would in WoW. He merely stands there, cropping whatever passes for grass around his feet. As far as I can tell, he'll stay there indefinitely. There's even a marker on the map to show where he is, just in case you forget, although since you can whistle him to you in a nanosecond I don't know why you'd bother.

Oh, wait... yes I do! It'd be to save his life. Your horse can be attacked and killed by any passing monster. As soon as a goblin spots an unattended horse they'll immediately set upon it, presumably looking for the same things I'm after when I pick off a passing deer or boar - hides and meat.

It's alright for you, Sparky.
You don't have to run back.

Unlike the deer, who run away, or the boars, who fight back, your dumb horse will just stand there, oblivious, until either the monsters kill him or you kill the monsters. When this first happened to me, I was at great pains to intervene, fearing I'd lose ol' Sparky for good, but now I tend to finish whatever I'm doing first before going back to rescue him. 

It turns out that dying does nothing more to my horse than it does to me. Less, in fact, since he doesn't drop any saddlebags he has to go back for. You can watch him expire then hit "Y" and see him re-appear right next to you as though nothing at all had happened.

The logic behind having the mount fully "in the world" while also making him indestructable and instantly available through the UI defeats me but I love it. It combines all the granularity of those Fallen Earth mounts with all the convenience of WoW, it makes absolutely no sense and it's genius.

You can push it even further if you want. Literally. Like all mobs in Dawlands, horses have full collision so you can physically shove them around if you feel the need. 

I tried it once, just for science. Horses despawn in deep water, re-appearing on the nearest bank or shore they just left, but if you're quick, you can dismount and leave them standing in the river up to their fetlocks. I was able to jump off my horse in mid-stream then push him back to dry land. It was pointless but it was fun!

Riding or running aren't the only ways to get about. There's an instant travel system, too. I'd explain exactly how it works but first I'd have to know, myself. 

As far as I can make out, there's a network of Teleport Beacons you can find and, if necessary, cleanse of corruption so you can move between them. The Teleport Beacons are very few and far between, which would be highly restrictive if it wasn't for the fact that you can also teleport to all kinds of other locations as well - any of the icons marked on the map, in fact, which in practical terms means just about everywhere. 

Unfortunately, teleporting to any of them requires a Teleportation Potion every time. The potion is consumed on use and the only place I've found them is on vendors in the Shelters. They're cheap but there's only one vendor in each village, each vendor only has five potions to sell and they're never restocked. If there's a recipe to craft them, I haven't found it yet.

There is another, craftable consumable, called a Reverie Stone. It claims to be able to return you to your last-visited resurrection point, which would normally be wherever you last slept. That's probably your current house, where you keep all your stuff, so it would be very useful. Unfortunately, when I tried one that I'd made, it didn't work. 

It might have been because the specific Reverie Stone I used was bugged or because the system itself was but it could also be that I don't know how to use it properly. The materials to make the stones aren't common but, when and if I get a few more, I'll try to figure out whose fault it is the thing isn't working.

The upshot of all of this is that even though you can theoretically zap about all over the map at will, in practice you end up hoarding your precious potions and going everywhere on horseback instead. You can, of course, also make boats of various kinds and travel longer distances over water but so far I haven't opened any of the recipes past the basic raft nor found any bodies of water large enough to require transportation by vessel. I can swim across a river or ride around a lake!

These are the kinds of quirks that make a game both memorable and absorbing. Or bloody irritating, depending on your point of view. Personally, I love it.

Since this is a post about why I don't seem to have all that much to show for my sixteen hours in the game, I had been meaning to say something about crafting. Making the items themselves is almost instantaneous but refining the raw resources can take quite a while. In a game that's almost wholly reliant on crafted gear, that does tend to slow things down a little.

Looking at how long this post is already, though, and how long it's taken me to write it, I think I'll leave that for another time. Which makes this post something of a metaphor for the game itself, really, now I come to think of it...