Progress Is An Illusion

This is barely even going to be a placeholder post so don't expect too much. Or much at all. It's only here because if it wasn't there'd be a gap where a post should be and there's been altogether too much of that sort of thing lately. 

What I'm about to talk about wouldn't normally merit a whole post of its own, either, but I'm going to see if I can eke it into one, somehow. It's a topic I'd most likely have given a couple of paragraphs to in a "What I'm Playing" post. Just a little oddity that struck me as curious enough to mention, since I'd happened upon it.

It came across it while I was playing EverQuest II on Sunday. After hitting the cap I decided, as I often do on such occasions, that it was probably about time I sorted my bags. It's not as if I keep them tidy at the best of times but in a leveling frenzy I tend to let anything and everything fall into inventory, to be sorted out later. After a while it turns into a problem that can't be ignored.

One nice feature that came with the Rage of Cthurath expansion was the Illusion Keyring. Even more useful than the Petamorph Keyring we got with the expansion before that, I guess, because everyone can use illusions but only pet classes use Petamorph wands. (Probably. Don't quote me on that. Cf the rest of this post.)

EQII is very generous with illusions. They come to you from all directions; holiday events, collections, crafting and quests are among the many possibilities sources. The problem is, apart from the spells that some classes get, illusions are all attached to items that take up inventory. I have a ton of the things stashed in banks and I keep plenty more - the ones I always think I might use - in various characters' bags.

But of course I never do use them because it would take me an hour to find any of the ones I wanted. Even the thought makes me not want to bother, so I don't.

The exact same thing used to happen with Petamorph wands. At best I'd keep one on hand and make do with that but unless I had a particularly annoying pet, I wouldn't even do that much. I'd just put up with whatever dumb-looking undead or elemental or beast my current best-in-class spell gave me, however hideous to look at or annoying to listen to it was.

Actually, that's not 100% true. There's another mechanic that was added who knows how long ago, whereby you can set any of the appearances attached to any of the pet spells to which you have access to be the look of the one you're actually using. I used to do that, long ago, but when I picked up with Mordita again last year, it'd been a while since I played a pet class and until I started typing this paragraph I'd completely forgotten it was a thing you could do. (Cf the rest of this post.)

And it needs to be a thing because some of the pets you get are blimmin' annoying!. Some of them are so big you can barely see what they're fighting, for a start. I hate that. 

Again, you get a spell to do something about it - Shrink Pet or some such - but I've been forgetting  to use that one, too. There was a time when I'd cast it automatically every time I summoned a pet but that was a long time ago. Use your skills, folks, or you will lose them!

More annoying than being too big is being too noisy. Or too flappy. Or both. Pets of all kinds in EQII, cosmetic or combat, come with a full set of animations and behaviors, which is great for authenticity and ambience, sure, but also fricken' annoying, when you have to listen to them grunt or whinny or bark for the ten thousandth time or when they're flying around your head, making a noise like a broken umbrella in a thunderstorm and getting in your line of sight every two seconds.

Mordita's best tank pet is hideously ugly and it's asthmatic. It groans and wheezes all the time. You wouldn't want it anywhere near you if you had the choice, which you don't. All pets of every stripe in EQII love to cling to you as closely as they can, shuffling around to be near to you every time you move. I had a cat like that once and I had to give it away to someone who appreciated the attention.

Having Petamorph wands on a Keyring means I have all the ones I own, ready to hand and easy to find. Granted, I still have to mouse over them to see what they are but at least they're all in the same place. Before the Keyring, I tried doing something similar by keeping them all in one backpack but I begrudged the space and anyway they always ended up in the wrong place no matter how I tried to keep them together.

So, anyway, to get back to the point, back in the  last expansion, the arrival of the Petamorph Keyring meant I suddenly got interested in Petamorph Wands in a way I never had been before. I went through everyone's inventory, sent them all to Mordita and I even did some holiday quests just to get new ones. Mord hooked them onto her keyring and now she uses them all the time, swapping from one sort of pet to another as the mood takes her.

The addition of the Illusion Keyring means I'm just beginning to do the same thing with all the illusion items I've picked up over the years. And there are a lot, not least because it seems every quest that includes a bit where you have to pretend to be something other than yourself leaves the item in your inventory to keep forever. 

I went through Mord's bags and added all the ones I could find in there, then I went through the shared bank looking for the good ones I'd left for everyone on the team to grab, which of course none of them ever did...

And about now, I'm betting you're thinking this is a post about appearance items, aren't you? Yes, well, it probably would have been, if I'd thought of that at the start, but I didn't. This is just some scene-setting aside that got out of hand.

The only reason I mentioned it was to put a bit of context on why I was going through Mordita's stuff so carefully in the first place. I was clearing her bags, as I said, and one reason I tend to avoid doing it for far too long is that it means examining every single item and making an assessment of its worth and usefulness. It's fun for about an hour and then it's progressively less fun and unfortunately an hour barely clears a couple of bags these days. Bags in EQII are big.

After a while, I was done with the illusion items and I'd moved on to checking for gear upgrades. I'd picked up a few things before I dinged that you had to be 135 to use, so there were some good ones. Most of the decision were very straightforward: check the Resolve. If it's higher, swap it in.

As I was going through them all, though, I came across a couple of items that seemed slightly unusual. They had an extra line of description for a start. It read

 "An upgraded version of this item can be purchased from the Norrathian Armory Merchant Sirius". 

And it had a passive effect. Sick Star II, that adds 32.5 Fervor.

I couldn't recall seeing anything like that before so I googled it. And guess what? There's a whole feature that got added to the game back in July 2024 that I've never even heard of!

It's called the Norrathian Armory and there was a press release about it at the time. It explains the whole thing. The tl:dr is that it's a cash shop deal that lets you share specific items across the account. You buy a token from the cash shop and then your alts can use it to buy any of the items you've found as a drop.

Bloody stupid idea if you ask me. It's Heirloom items you have to pay real money for, as far as I can see. Granted, the items are better than Heirloom items would be but even so...

My point, though, isn't to moan on about Darkpaw trying to screw a few extra dollars out of the hardcore. This isn't the official forums. That's the name of the game when the name of your game is EverQuest II, anyway; when most of your money comes from the same few thousand people. 

No, my point is how very complicated older MMORPGs become and how very easy it is for even regular players to miss whole features and mechanics. You just have look away for a minute and there you are, out of touch.

It's lack of knowledge of these kinds of systems that puts new and returning players at such a huge disadvantage. Hard to know what you don't know. And even when you do know it, hard to know if it's worth knowing.

Here's another one I found while going through my loot. Several pieces of armor in my bags that were upgrades for me came with the note

 "This item may be converted to an alternate version using Matter Mallea". 

Really? Converted to what alternate version? And what is Matter Mallea? None of it meant anything to me but apparently it's a feature that came with the Rage of Cthurath expansion. As per the wiki, it exists "primarily to allow players to convert excess blue stat Critical Bonus into much-needed additional orange stat Critical Bonus Overcap". 

Riight...

As for the Matter Mallea itself, it's "crafted by players, from uncommon recipes that drop from the Cthurath-era Invaders of The Unknown Public Quests scattered across lvl 110+ Norrath zones (and The Unknown) ". I guess if I'd done any PQs in this expansion, I'd probably have known that.

The idea seems to be that committed players will have hit the cap on Crit Bonus and will be willing to pay in cash to convert the wasted points to Crit Bonus Overcap. That raises a whole load of awkward questions for me, like for example, how many non-hardcore players even know there is a cap on Crit Bonus, let alone what the cap is? And more importantly, why even have a cap if you're then going to create another stat that raises it? Why not just raise the cap?

Those last couple of questions have been answered by the devs already, I'm pretty sure. I vaguely remember reading about the logic of it a few years ago. But who can keep up with all this stuff? Clearly not me.

It's no wonder returning players tend to bounce. And it's no wonder the most popular server is Anashti Sul, the Origins server. The quasi-Classic ruleset there is so much easier to understand. Everything makes more sense. And there's a lot less catching-up to do.

The other side of that coin, of course, is that on Anashti Sul, a casual player most likely has to work harder and take more care just to do regular content. As I've been saying, on Live, at least as a Necromancer, nothing puts up much of a challenge even when you aren't especially well-geared, even as a soloist. Those complicated systems and mechanics designed to min-max your combat efficiency don't really mean all that much when you're winning all the fights easily already.

The main effect unfamiliar mechanics have on me is to make me curious. I don't like people writing mysterious messages on my boots. I want to know what they mean. Over the years I've invested quite a lot of time, learning how to use systems that I probably could have quite safely ignored. It's fun learning but a lot less fun using what I've learned.

The evidence is right there in my thousands of storage slots - all those arcane materials and devices I used to think I needed but never quite got around to using. I threw a few of them out on Sunday but then I decided better safe than sorry so I woke up someone I hadn't seen for a while and told her to store them for me. In the end, that always seems like the easier option and EQII gives you so much storage space.

Speaking of which, Mordita has over two hundred free slots in her inventory now. Should be good for a couple of weeks before she needs another clear-out. There's no knowing what she might find then...

Oh, There You Are!

This is one of those days when I wouldn't normally be posting so I don't feel too bad about popping up a few screenshots and a couple of paragraphs on something I just posted about yesterday. In fact, in normal (Read: Not Blaugust.) circumstances I'd probably just have made this an edit to Saturday's post but why waste the opportunity to carve another notch on the Blaugust tally-stick?

It probably won't surprise anyone who's ever played an MMORPG to hear that no sooner had I complained about how I couldn't find Merchant Samwe to finish a quest, or Merchant somebody-or-other to buy my missing Level 1 to 5 Magician spells, the moment I logged back into EQOA I found both of them pretty much immediately.

Samwe, it turns out, is exactly where the Prima Guide map says he is, except for one vital fact they neglected to mention: he's at the top of a tower. It seems the z-axis differential was enough to occlude his presence from showing up on Right Button targeting until I was actually in the room next to him!

I'd logged out in pretty much the spot where he was meant to be and as soon as I logged in and had another look around, I noticed a ramp going up. Ramps are really hard to navigate with a controller (Well, for me...) so I haven't been exploring the upper stories much but once I spotted that ramp I would have bet money he was going to be at the top and he was. 

He tried to sucker me into buying the wrong spring by putting a gold one in his visible inventory and making me scrol down to find the correct, copper one but I'm wise to those sorts of gnomish tricks.

I bought the spring, which was the last thing I needed for the quest, then trotted back into Klick (Which I notice I have been spelling wrong up to now. It has a "C" in it.) I did the hand in, which got me 17k XP and a new staff, a huge upgrade to the one I'd been using.

In one of the screenshots here you can see someone by the name of Starcrusher talking about the class quests. He was complaining about the inaccuracy of such online information on the class quests as he'd been able to find and also that he hadn't even wanted to do the quests in the first place but his guild had told him they were essential. Everyone agreed with both propositions - the info is hard to find but you have to do them anyway. I'm assuming that's for the gear they give, which certainly seems nice to me.

Those class quests had also given me my only spells so far, a grand total of three. And one of those was Return Home, which barely counts. I was pretty desperate for more, particularly my pet spells, without which a gnome can hardly claim to be a Magician, but I looked at all the vendors in the caster guilds the other day and the lowest-level Magician spells I found were in the thirties.

I must have missed one because after the hand-in I had another look and found the right vendor almost straight away. She also tried to play the "scroll down" trick but I wasn't having any of it. I scrolled down until I found this:

She had several new spell scrolls for me including the Earth and Water pets and the pet buff and heal. I bought everything. The good thing about having to wait so long and having to kill so many mobs for quests and XP is that I had plenty of money from selling body parts. 

I scribed all my spells and then memmed them and in doing so finally figured out how to set up my hot bars and select the spells I want to cast. No more accidentally returning home when I'm trying to kill something. 

Then I summoned my Water Elementaling, buffed him and took him out to kill stuff. The pet models are excellent. A lot better than the basic starter Mage pets in EverQuest. Or EverQuest II for that matter. The water pet is a big, floating globe of water with a skull in the middle. Makes some weird noises, too.

The spell effects are also excellent but that is something EQ got right. I'm not sure if many people who haven't played would know but EQ spell effects are ridiculously spectacular for a game of its vintage and they always have been. It's like a bunch of fireworks going off in a neon striplight factory sometimes and that's just when people are buffing.

Anyway, I now have a pet and a staff and a new Level 5 quest to go kill some Mindwhippers, whatever they are. My guildmaster says I should team up with other apprentices to do it. Which, of course, I am not going to do. If they're too tough I'll just grind levels until they're not.

It's so nice to be playing a game where that's an option again... 

Crystal Of Atlan: The Fleet's In!

I was out for much of the day and I didn't have any particular ideas for a post so I was going to skip a day but then I thought why not just do something quick about Crystal of Atlan? So here it is.

Last time I wrote about the game I was level 27. Now I'm Level 32. I did notice that the last level took about as long as the three before it, so maybe the pace is slowing down. Or maybe I just wasn't doing anything that gave much xp. 

In the caption to one of the screenshots last time, I mentioned I hadn't found out what the Fleet thing was about yet. Well, I have now. A Fleet is CoA's version of a Guild. There's a short quest that explains it and sends you to look at a notice board where Fleets recruit. 

Being an antisocial git, I usually don't bother with guilds or clans or whatever the local jargon is but if the game allows me to make one and keep it to myself, I always take advantage. CoA does that, so I made my regular guild of one and with it I got an airship.

I was quite excited about that. Who wouldn't be? It turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax though. The airship consists of the upper deck and that's about all. It's in a private instance and you can wander about the deck and look at the view, which is nice, but you can't go inside. 

As far as I can tell, you can't decorate it either, so it isn't what I'd call housing. The little room you get in the starting town is more of a home than the airship. At least that has a bed youcan lie down on and a gramaphone that actually works.

The airship does have some facilities. There's an NPC that gives Fleet missions and another that runs a shop where you can spend the currency you get for doing them. Since they most likely are tuned for actual fleets with more than one member, I don't imagine I'll be doing many, but who knows?

As you can see from the screenshots above, the in-game camera doesn't seem to work on the airship or in dungeons, either, so I'm thinking it may not work in any instances. If they offer me the chance to give feedback on any of the surveys (I've already completed two of those.) then that's the first thing I'll be asking them to fix.

It's a shame because the dungeons are really rather nice to look at, even the sewers. I do find Crystal of Atlan very pleasant company visually. 

The story is better than I initially gave it credit for, too. It's nothing out of the ordinary but it does zip along and the plot, entirely unoriginal though it is, has its moments. The character writing is decent, too, which makes the whole thing feel quite jolly. 

As for combat, the difficulty for a mostly unskilled player who's not willing to put in much effort to get any better, as I was describing last time, is somewhat mitigated by the option to revive yourself at full health every time you die. Your opponents don't get the same option, thank heaven, so you can just throw yourself at them and keep getting up every time they knock you down until eventually you just wear them out.

That takes a consumable every time so I imagine it's not a viable, long-term strategy but it's working for me at the moment. I wouldn't need to be doing it at all if I could remember to get my pet fox to heal me in ample time but I keep forgetting until it's too late.

That certainly seems to put the mockers on the idea that CoA isn't a Gacha game. "Premium" pets are Gacha pulls and they have a big part to play in combat. It seems like a fairly arbitrary line to draw, saying your game isn't gacha because there are no gacha characters when there other key systems use the mechanic but fine lines are what these distinctions are all about.

I have yet to get the hang of swapping between my two pets in a fight. Or more to the point, I know the game swaps them for me but I don't really know what either of them can do apart from heal. The fox does that. I think the rabbit is DPS but I really need to look into it.

The rabbit also talks but not in any language you can understand. The fox doesn't seem to talk at all. Lots of NPCs have dialog options if you go up to them and start a conversation, just like they do in Wuthering Waves, although what they have to say isn't as complex and detailed as in the older game. Still, it does make the place feel a bit more lived in, knowing you can strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone.

As you can see from the screenshots, CoA comes with the typical visual clutter of its peers. The last game I played that placed quite so much emphasis on huge overhead titles in over-dramatic fonts was Noah's Heart. 

Strangely, as someone who habitually turns off almost every overhead name and title in any game, I kind of enjoy these. They're so over-the-top I find it endearing. In Noah's Heart, I put some considerable effort into getting the titles I liked and I may well do the same here. 

I certainly don't want to be running around forever with "We're Scaling" over my head, that being the only title I have at the moment. What the heck does it even mean?

I also don't want to spend a moment longer than I have to dressed as a kind of Whitehall farce version of French maid. It's embarassing. Unfortunately, although I do have another, much more suitable outfit I could wear, these "cosmetic" outfits are bursting with combat stats and the maid one is a lot better, so I'm stuck with it. There may be some way to tweak appearance so I don't have to see it. I ought to look into that as well. Or just work on getting something else that's not so dodgy.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say for now. I said it was going to be short and for once it really was! 

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.

Scars Of Destruction - A Key Feature

When the details of the latest EverQuest II expansion, Scars of Destruction, were revealed, I was weirdly excited by one minor feature - the Petamorph Keyring. For anyone who doesn't play the game that phrase is going to require a little explaining.

EQII is and has always been a game that makes enormous play of illusions. Whatever you choose to make your character look like at creation doesn't even represent a baseline for what you'll be looking at for most of your time in the game. You can look like just about anything.

There are many, many ways to change your appearance including but not limited to your gender, species or even your kingdom. You can start out as a human and end up as a rock. This happens all the time, whether you like it or not, because quest after quest has you turn into something other than what you were when you spoke to the questgiver.

There are spells and abilities that allow you to change your form and also an enormous number of objects you can use to impersonate anything from a tiny rat to a full-size dragon. You can change size and shape until you shrink yourself so small you can barely be seen - I was at the bank last night next to someone who'd managed to make themselves both look like a mushroom and be the actual size of one.

You're looking at the highest quality, highest level Necro pet and that's what someone thought the default should be. Is it any wonder illusions are so popular?

Since this can understandably get to be a bit much after a while, you can toggle the whole thing off in Options, something I tend to do after the novelty wears off. From then on you will look like yourself no matter what illusion you're under, even though every NPC will treat you as though you're still in costume.

Something very similar also applies to Familiars, Mounts and Combat Pets. There's both an Appearance and an Equipped slot for Familiars and Mounts, allowing you to combine the best stats withthe best looks.

Combat pets, by which I mostly mean the undead summoned by Necromancers, elementals by Conjurors and warders by Beastlords, can all be switched between the different appearances provided both by the different levels of ability and the various qualities of spells. At least Necros and Mages can do it that way. I forget exactly what it is that Beastlords can do but it's something along the same lines.

That's about all I can think of without looking it up. I'm aware it's by no means all the ways the game allows or compels you to change your form - or the forms of the entourage that swirls around you, like a family of ducklings following their mother. And that's just the bodies. I haven't even mentioned what you - and they - could be wearing...

There, now! Isn't that better?

Many of those illusions are accessed either through the UI or from your spellbook, where they take up no space and get in no-one's way. Some, however, far too many in my opinion, come in the form of items you need to click to activate. These all take up bag space.

This actually isn't too much of an issue for most of my characters, who tend to have far greater issues with hoarding to worry about a few illusions. Before the expansion dropped, for example, I spent an hour clearing some space in my Berserker's bags in readiness. It was a horrific task.

EQII is insanely generous with storage space and I've made quite an effort to take advantage of every opportunity to expand my storage capacity. In just the packs he carries around with him, my Berserker has 502 slots. When I went to check on Tuesday evening fewer than a dozen of those were free. 

Even when I'd cleared out everything that didn't require a lot of thinking about, he'd only managed to empty 88, the equivalent of a single bag. The other seven (You get six regular slots plus two for specific kinds of items, not counting your quiver.) were all still stuffed with junk that "might come in useful one day".

Of the remaining four hundred and some slots, only a dozen were taken up with illusions and just one by a Petamorph Wand, which the Berserker can't actually use, not having access to any combat pets. This feature does nothing for him. 

It's different for pet classes.

When I checked in with my Necromancer this morning, she had more than twenty-five slots taken up with Petamorph Wands. And I realise now that I still haven't explained what they are, although the name pretty much explains the function.

They're clickies that change the appearance of combat pets. Yes, combat pets already have an innate ability to change form, as discussed above, but these handy doodads let you turn them into totally different creatures altogether.

According to EQ2Wire, there are more than a hundred and fifty of these things. More are being added all the time. You can buy them in the cash shop, they get given away as holiday rewards, you get them from quests...

Until now, I've been wary of collecting them because of the space they take up but I'd like to have as many as I can get. They're fun but they're practical, too. Many of the default pets are annoying in one way or another and it's often useful to be able to change them into something that crawls or flies or just doesn't make a really annoying sound in the background all the frickin' time.

That was why I was excited to hear we'd be able to add them to a Keyring. A keyring is effectively a UI element in which you can store items that would otherwise take up bag space. Originally, if I'm remembering correctly, it was added to EverQuest to store the actual keys that were needed to access certain zones, particularly Planar instances, but over the years it's become the generic term for any UI-based storage solution, no matter what you put in it.

EverQuest has made great play of the "Keyring" conceit over the years but I have a feeling this might be the first so-named in EQII. Lots of things you'd think might have used a keyring, like Mounts and Familiars, already have their own UI tabs, so I guess it hasn't been deemed necessary until now.

Almost the first thing I did when I was able to log into the expansion was to get my Necro out and start playing with the new toy. There didn't seem to be any hints or explanations so i just started clicking things and that worked nicely.

All you have to do is right-click a Petamorph Wand and the context menu now offers the option to add it to the keyring. There's a warning that it's an irreversible action but since you can only add Attuned or No Trade wands to the ring that seems like an unnecessarily cautious step. I mean, what else are you going to do with them?

I started adding all of the Necro's wands, one after another, until without warning it stopped working. There weren't any error messages so at first I thought there was something different about the wands I was trying to add. A close look didn't suggest anything but after a while I figured out the reason.

The process had stalled because the Petamorph Keyring operates on the same principle as the Wardrobe, meaning it has a limited number of slots. I'd filled them all, which was why no more wands were going in.

The basic allowance is ten slots, which shows up as five rows. You can expand that a row at a time at the cost of 50DBC per. What the upper limit might be or if there is one I don't know but I would imagine you'll be able to add enough slots for all those hundred and fifty wands and more. 

I'm sure there will be people who'll complain about the cost and claim it's some kind of money grab. For subscribers, though, who get 500DBC as a stipend every month, and who also get a 10% discount on all cash shop purchases, it seems pretty harmless to me.

In fact, as I've said many times, I'm always glad of something to spend my Daybreak Cash on. I have almost 35k on my main account now and I rarely find much I want to buy. There are only so many Prestige Homes you can decorate, after all.

I bought another twenty slots immediately and started filling them up. Unfortunately, I attuned all my wands without looking at them and only after I'd done it did I discover I had a few duplicates. The keyring helpfully tells you when you try to add a wand it's already holding but by then I'd rendered them all untradeable so I just had to destroy them.

Never mind. Plenty more where those came from. And I'll be looking out for them now. I have Mages and Beastlords who can make good use of them and they all heve keyrings of their own. Yes, the keyring is character-based, not account based. I'm sure that will annoy some people as well but I personally prefer to keep my characters cleanly separated whenever possible so it suits me just fine.

And with that out of the way, I suppose I'd better go take a look at the actual content of the expansion. I got an in-game letter from the Far Seas Traders, asking me to go help with something in the new place so I'm going to start off with the Crafting Timeline.

I pretty much have to. I still don't have a max level Adventurer to start the main quest. Although I do have a level 130 boost...

Anyone Have A Really Big Can Of Tuna?

Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, what with all my talk about the busy summer of gaming ahead. Now it's here and I find myself with more to play than I have time for and no time at all to blog about it. Maybe not ideal with Blaugust coming up...

For example, I have about a gazillion things I want to say about Once Human, some of which I don't even think I've said already, but it would take hours to write them all up in the kind of detail they deserve and I'd really much rather just play the damn game. Which is just what I have been doing, to the extent of fifteen hours so far.

Full disclosure: at least half of that has been spent working on my beach house and most of the rest was foraging materials to build it. I have done a goodly amount of fighting along the way but only because pesky mobs keep jumping me when I'm exploring abandoned factories and shopping malls in search of plastic, beryllium crystals and the like.

I have at least managed to get far enough through the story to kill the first instanced boss, the Ravenous Hunter. I've done that fight at least four times since the first beta I was in and I'm happy to report it's much easier than it was at the begining. 

One of the unfortunate - or possibly fortunate, I'm not quite sure - side-effects of having done most of the early content in beta is that I know where everything is already so half the time I've been getting quests telling me to go explore places I've just come from. Luckily, the game is excellent at giving you credit when you do stuff out of sequence so it all works out the same in the end.

What I probably ought to be doing, if I was going to play the game properly, is concentrating on the current Season and the Scenario in progress, along with all the many attendant Events. There was a lttle of that in the betas I was in but now the game is Live there's one holy hell of a lot going on, way more than I can follow. We're already on Phase Two and I don't think I intentionally touched Phase One.

Once again, luckily for me, a fair bit of it seems to be filling itself in as I potter around doing whatever takes my fancy so I'm not entirely missing out. At some point, if and when I figure out how the whole thing works, I might try and write something about it but for now I'm quite happy to just let it all wash over me like weather.

One thing I can confirm is the number of people currently playing. When I logged in this morning there was an in-game mail waiting for me with some rewards attached in celebration of Once Human hitting a high-water mark of 300,000 players all logged in at the same time. The Steam charts show a Peak Concurrency of just over 231k so they would seem to have the bulk of the trade so far.

As I mentioned last time, there may be a lot of people playing but I hardly see any of them. It's weird. I definitely saw far more people running around in beta. I think that must be why I was able to snag the really excellent spot I picked to build my house. 

It's not just by the sea, it's on the beach. I've been spending most of my Memetics on building and crafting and yesterday I unlocked the one that gives you a much bigger plot of land so now I own most of the beachfront. I even have the tables, chairs and umbrellas that were already there, which add a lovely holiday touch to the property.

Building in Once Human is top class although getting parts to snap together can be a tad fiddly sometimes. It always works in the end but it can be frustrating in the moment. Still, that's part of the fun of these things, I always think. It gives you that spurious sense of achievement, when you get the parts to fit. Something you'd never have it all went perfectly every time.

I had to extend my home significantly because I have guests. Quite a few of them now. 

In beta, I never paid much attention to the Pet Collecting mini-game. I knew it was there but it didn't seem to have anything like the breadth and depth it does now. I do wonder if the incredible success of Palworld might not have something to do with the way it's grown. 

Whether that was the inspiration or not, I have to say I like Once Human's interpretation of the theme much better. It's simpler, more elegant and aesthetically much more stylish.

I had to build a whole wing onto my house just to find room for the containment facilities to hold the Deviations I'd collected. I have seven already. I had to spend a Memetic on increasing the number of display cases I could place from five to ten just to give them all somewhere to live. I suspect it won't be too long before I have to expand again. I think the maximum is twenty.

Among my collection I have several Deviations that can help me in combat, none of which I've used. At Level Ten I'm still happily slicing things up with the machete I got in the introduction. I wore it out and had to repair it. I don't believe you can craft another and I like it better than the baseball bat so it's just as well it can be fixed.

The time may come when I'm grateful to have a little buddy alongside me in a fight but for the moment I'm more interested in the ones that help around the house. 

There's one really useful one that absolutely everybody seems to have, a
Minecraftesque homunculus known as the Digby Boy. He trots about in the area around my house, bashing rocks with his tiny pick. Somehow he manages to get copper and tin out of them in considerable quantities. I've hardly had to go mining since I got him. Another, the Disco Ball, makes potions that extend the duration of Whims, which I'm sure will come in handy if I ever I get any.

My favorite so far, though, is the Extradimensional Cat, a cat the size of a carthorse, who wanders around your home being generally cute and cat-like, if also somewhat terrifying. You can pet him and pick him up and move him about but the best part comes when you go to sleep in your bed, something you need to do periodically for practical reasons. 

Once you lie down, the giant cat comes wandering in from wherever he was and curls up beside your bed. It's just as well he doesn't try to get on it with you because he's bigger than either you or the mattress! You do get a buff from him when you wake up but really they could have just gone with the animation and that would have been more than enough reward.

And that's where I'm going to stop because for once, I really would rather be playing than writing. Not just Once Human, either. I'm very much enjoying Solasta and I'm missing Wuthering Waves quite a bit since I haven't logged in for a couple of days. 

Nice problem to have, if you even can call it a problem...

Feeling Twitchy

This is somewhat of a makeshift post. I spent two hours composing a much longer, more detailed one, then I managed to delete it by accident. Unrecoverably. Not for the first time, either, and I don't suppose it will be the last. It's amazing how you can just brush two or three keys at once as you reach across the keyboard and something like that happens. 

The post you're not reading right now was about graphical fidelity and appearance gear in Nightingale. Don't get excited. There is no appearance gear in Nightingale. That was one of the points I was making.

Since I'm stuffed if I'm going to re-write the whole thing and since I'm even less inclined to spend another two hours writing another one, we're just going to have to make do with some pictures of the Twitch Drops I got myself by having Gladd's channel tabbed out and muted for six hours today. There's a promotion on.

Acquiring Twitch Drops was a new experience for me but I imagine I'll be doing it again, now I know how easy it is. The hardest part was finding a channel that didn't keep dropping out all the time. I tried three yesterday and they all did it, repeatedly, so it was good to find one today that didn't.

Other than that, it seems like something for nothing. The promotion goes on until the 27th but it only takes eight hours of "viewing" to get everything. You can easily do it in a day.

Here's what's on offer. The outfit splits into five pieces - gloves, shoes, pants, shirt and hat. The dress swaps in for the shirt. Altogether there's something for every clothing slot. You also get the recipes to make them all - so you can replace them if they wear out, I guess.

As well as the clothes, there's an umbrella. Umbrellas are kind of a big deal in Nightingale. Did you know they double as parachutes? Well, they do

You could even use one as a makeshift glider at a push, although they use stamina to float so you wouldn't be gliding far.

The final reward, the one that takes the full eight hours to get, is a dog. A Distinguished Puppy. It's a dachshund wearing a top hat.

I'm not sure how he'll work with Dora, my trusty help-meet. Are there cosmetic pets in the game? Maybe you can have more than one companion out at a time.

I think he's about ready. Hold on... let me just log in and claim him. I'll find out how he works and take a screenshot... 

Ah! I didn't think of that. The Distinguished Puppy is a house item. It took me a while to work it out. Unlike the other rewards, he doesn't just pop up in your pack. You have to craft him from the Building menu. 

More specifically, you craft his bed. It's under the "Rest" sub-category and it's an actual, tiny bed. You can sleep in it yourself if you want, although I can't imagine how that works. 

As soon as you place it, the dog appears nearby. He roams around a little, lies down, sits up... generally acts like a dog.

About the one thing he doesn't do as far as I can see is use his bed. I was expecting him to lie down in it but I don't think he does. 

He's also quite disturbingly realistic. He looks like an actual motion-capture of a genuine dachshund. He's creepy, frankly, especially with that hat.

At least he's purely decorative. The problem I have with the outfit and the umbrella is that it's all proper stat gear and much better than what Flora had. If you can get major upgrades just by not watching someone else live-stream the game, it does kind of blow a hole in the progression mechanics. And since gear upgrades are a huge part of the motivation in this genre, that can't be good.

Then again, it is very early days. Just because the "Simple" clothes Flora's wearing don't match up to these freebies, either visually or statistically, doesn't mean the next crafted set won't make the free stuff  obsolete. Just so long as the developers don't make a habit of giving away the farm, I think we'll be okay.

As for me, it's not the first time I fat-fingered an entire post into oblivion and I don't imagine it'll be the last. I might re-do the post I lost tomorrow or I might just take the hint and move on. It had a few good lines but I don't think we'll be missing all that much.

The main point I was making was that all new games ought to come with two things as standard: a way to take screenshots without the UI and an appearance system for clothing. If the endgame is Fashion Wars or Playing Barbies, which let's be honest, it always is, and if developers want their game to look great in every screenshot, which of course they do, why wait?

I mean, you don't want people to know they're really going to be running around looking like this, do you?

I rest my case.

Well, that turned out to be a better post than the one I lost, I think. Shame to lose that line about the cruel younger son who dresses the housemaid up as a lady for a joke. I was pleased with that one but I'm sure I'll find another chance to shoehorn it in, somewhere.

Oh, I just did, didn't I? Well, there we go!

Don't Applaud. Just Throw Money.

What with all the other exciting new games, betas and demos flying around of late, I feel I've been neglecting the only game I pay a subscription for: EverQuest II. Okay, technically the All Access Membership isn't a "subscription" as such and it also applies to EverQuest, DCUO and Planetside 2 but even on the odd occasions I play any of those other games, I don't take advantage of my membership perks. I pretty much only use those in EQII.

I haven't forgotten about the old game entirely, though. Towards the end of last month, just before Blaugust began, I managed to creep a little further towards the end of the Signature Adventure questline from last year's expansion. I finished two more instances and a couple of open-world segments. I think I have maybe four more instances left and I'm reasonably confident I'll get them done before the next expansion arrives.

Even though I haven't done much to upgrade my gear this year, what with the current season of Overseer rewards being very much less overpowered than in previous years, I still found the instances significantly easier than I was expecting. Even the small, incremental increase in power afforded by the gear I've received from doing holiday content made quite a difference.

It was so much easier, in fact, that I was able to ignore most of the bosses' special attacks and just stand there pummeling them. That is absolutely my preferred combat style. There was a fair amount of being thrown up in the air but I use one of my cloaks with the Featherfall effect if I suspect I'm going to get kicked around and it works wonders.

I was enjoying myself and making progress, which is always a heady combo, so I might have expected to do a little more but these days I have to limit my serious game-playing to the times when I can guarantee I won't be interrupted by a small dog jumping up and battering at my mouse-hand with her paws.

Beryl has an almost supernatural ability to be fast asleep for hours until the precise moment when I begin doing something that can't easily be interrupted, whereupon she seems to teleport to my side and begin her "You must come NOW!! It can't WAIT!!" routine. It's a strong contributory factor to my current preference for low-stakes gameplay that can be dropped at a moment's notice, although I admit it was pushing at an already open door.

For the same reason, I thought at first I'd have some difficulty fitting in the required minimum ten runs through the Summer Jubilee dungeon to get my new Plume but luckily I discovered early on that you can cheese the whole thing by mentoring down. Even so, I still didn't manage to get it done during the first two holidays, Tinkerfest and Scorched Skies. 

The third and final holiday of the summer, Oceansfull, was my last chance so when I saw this morning that it had started I thought I'd better waste no time and get on with it. I couldn't remember how many runs I'd done already. I guessed it had been at least three in each festival, maybe four, so I was expecting to have to do it two or possibly three more times.

It turned out to be just the once! I was very surprised when Meldrath's battle-suit thingy crumpled at the end on my first try today and the "A Jubilee For You And Me" achievement popped. I didn't even realize what it was for a moment but then I saw the plume and realised I was done.

Well, not really. If I wanted to do it properly I'd need another ten ticks on my Trial of Elements dance card. That gets you the upgraded version. Given that Oceansfull is here until 23 August and you can do the instance every three hours, obviously I have time to fit it in. I can rip through it in barely a quarter of an hour so it wouldn't take me much more than a couple of hours in total.

It's not very likely I'll bother. Doing it ten times got me three Plumes, one for each of three key combat stats (Crit Bonus, Health and Ability Doublecast.) and also the Plumes of Inspired Jubilation recipe book that lets me make (Inferior.) versions of all three for any of my other characters, should I decide they might need them. It's exceedingly unlikely I'll be doing any content that needs anything better before the next expansion comes out and by then I imagine we'll already be looking at upgrades.

Doing the instances those ten times, plus whatever other holiday content I did, which wasn't much but also wasn't none, I somehow amassed exactly one hundred Silver Jubilation Medals. Since I was at the vendor getting my plumes (Which are free.) anyway, I thought I might as well have a look at what else was on offer.

I'd already bought a couple of odds and ends when I spotted that you can buy this year's silver medals with last year's copper ones - at an exchange rate of three to one. When I saw that I decided it was probably best to spend mine now instead of just hanging on to them in the vague possibility that I might want them for something next year.

I bought some paintings and several potted plants along with another bag of teleportation pads. Those always come in handy. It still left me with plenty of medals so I chucked caution to the wind and bought myself a dog.

The dog, a cosmetic pet, goes by the description of Wire Haired Retriever, which someone with an extremely literal turn of mind felt necessary to correct on the forums, claiming it should really be called an English Setter. My aunt had an English Setter for many years and whatever this dog is meant to be I can guarantee it's not one of those.

It doesn't have to be any recognizeable breed, of course, because this is fricken' Norrath! Have you seen the kind of animals they have there? Why would anyone take issue with a specific breed of dog? Just be glad the thing's not part hell-hound.

I tried to get a decent picture of him but for all the game's many merits, one feature EQII distinctly lacks is one of those in-game photo suites I've come to love. Seriously, if they'd just release a good on as an add-on feature, I'd happily pay Daybreak $20 for it. I'd take it over an expansion, frankly. I know I'd get more use out it, long-term.

Failing that, you'll just have to squint and see if you can make out what my dog looks like. His name is Scruff because he is one. He barks very convincingly, which is probably going to give me even more problems with Beryl at some point.

There's some new content for Oceansfull I'd like to do so I'll try to get another session in before the Othmir pack up their conch-shell caravanserai and move on, taking the Summer Jubilee with them. Next stop on the carousel is probably the expansion prelude, followed by Panda Panda Panda. 

My All Access Membership expires next month. I will be renewing for the nineteenth consecutive year. I may not get as much use out of it as I once did but I'd hate to be without it. 

I guess on that basis we can add this post to the Blaugust Creator's Appreciation Week pile. Thanks again, Daybreak!