It's Only Rock 'n' Roll - Life In Hethereau

It's been three weeks, give or take, since Neverness To Everness went live and I believe I've played every day. If I was playing the game through Steam, I'd know how many hours I've put in but NTE isn't on Steam so I don't. 

I guess if I was that interested, I could download and install one of those game-time trackers I see people blogging about now and then but I think that really would be taking the whole thing too seriously. I'll just take a guess instead.

Let's see... I doubt I've played any less than an hour most days. Once or twice, like yesterday, I was so busy I really didn't have time to do more than log in, collect my minimum activity rewards and log out again but usually I get involved in something that takes at least a short session to finish and a short session these days would indeed be about an hour.

Often, though, I've played a lot longer than that. This morning, for example, I played for a couple of hours and it's odds-on I'll play for a couple more later today. There have been a few days where I played for three or four hours. Let's say that, over the course of the three weeks the game's been out, I've averaged two hours a day. That seems about right.

So, over forty hours so far. And after all of that, I'm a smidgeon from dinging Hunter Level 24, which is when the next chapter of the main storyline becomes available. I'll get enough xp from tomorrow's basic log-in reward, although I might do something before then that dings me sooner.

As Mailvaltar explained in the comments the other day, Hunter xp is quite specific. You don't get it from everything you do. It mostly comes from log-in dailies and quests. Not all quests, though, and mostly not the ones I've been doing.  

Thinking about it, 24 levels (Almost...) in 21 days in a game where the level cap is 40 (Yes, alright, technically it's 60, but 40 seems to be the de facto practical cap for now.) seems pretty slow by modern standards. And yet it feels anything but. Too fast, if anything, given that I've really made no attempt to chase xp.

If you stand on the fountains, it stops the water spurting up. Ask me how I know...

So what have I been doing? Ah, that's the question, isn't it? I'm not sure I have much of an answer. A bit of this... a bit of that...

Let's take this morning's session, for example. It was probably about average. It should give a fair impression of how most of my sessions turn out.

I logged in with the intention of collecting my basic "Here I am again!" rewards. Other than that, I didn't have much of a plan. I was thinking I might take a look at the clothing options, see if there was anything I could do about getting something different to wear, but that was about as far as I'd taken it.

And I did do some of that, eventually, but not until right at the end, just before I had to stop for lunch. As usual, I ended up spending most of my time trotting around the streets of Hethereau, admiring the view, taking screenshots and getting caught up in the quotidian life of what has to be the best-realized city I've had the pleasure of visiting in any game yet.

I wasn't just roaming around at random, although that is what I find myself doing, often as not. I did have some sort of goal in mind. I was going to stock up on coffee and food supplies to keep my three cafes going.

This is not anything I'd expected to be doing when I imagined playing the surreal, high-paced, action-packed magitech rpg, Neverness To Everness. It's definitely not the game I was expecting. It's a lot better than that.

Come on! It's on Moomin Street! Who'd say no to that?

Still, as a cafe manager, I'd have to admit my involvement so far has been something less than hands-on. Each time I pay the lease on a property and open a new cafe, I somehow manage to convince a couple of my friends into working there for nothing, while I bugger off and leave them to it. About the only active part I play in the running of the business is setting the menu and collecting the money.

I don't do the cooking. I don't think that's even an option. I don't serve customers either, although that definitely is something you can choose to do - if you're clinically insane. And since the first day, I haven't even done my own shopping. 

I do the ordering, That much I can manage. Even then, though, I've been opting to have the supplies delivered. I've been taking the largest available shipment each time, meaning it only takes me a couple of clicks once every three days to keep the place stocked, but I pay through the nose for doing it that way. Delivery charges are obviously part of one of the city's many extortion rackets.

This morning, for no good reason other than miserliness, I decided I'd go pick up my own supplies from the store and save myself some money. How hard could it be? 

As it happens, not very hard at all. NTE has some exemplary systems to support doing your own shopping. You can add everything you need, automatically, to a shopping list that appears on screen and if you click on each item it will tell you which stores, in which parts of town, stock it. It will even open the map for you and show you where to go. And when you get to the store, you can have the shopping list and the store's inventory open at the same time to see each item being checked off as you buy it.

Aand... it took me about an hour to figure all that out. I started off just working purely from memory, as in "Oh, that 24-hour convenience store where I helped the guy with his Fluffy problem probably sells what I need. I vaguely remember how to get there..." Well, he did sell me some milk, when I eventually found him...

Can you believe that other guy only had milk?!

As I was wandering about looking for food stores I just happened to notice a possible new location for my growing coffee shop empire. I'd been ignoring the prompts for ages but I had the cash and I was right there, so...

Now I rent and run four coffee shops. Is that too many? (Probably, yes. By about four, I'd say.) Not sure who's making the coffee and taking the money at the new one because I don't have any more friends left who aren't already working at one of my other sweatshops cafes. I'm probably going to have to split up one of the teams and send someone over to the new place, I guess. #Livinthemanagementlife, amiright?

I had to visit three different stores, one of which was in a part of town I'd never been to before, so that took a while, not least because of all the new photo opportunities. I got it all done, though, and with the money I was saving by not paying sky-high delivery charges, I was able to buy double what I needed of everything. 

It means next time I have to restock, in three days time, I can just do it from inventory. I'm restocking once a week, now, nearly. I imagine once you have the money, you could buy in bulk and barely ever have to shop again. I don't think anything ever expires. There's no item decay in the game.

All of that took me a while but of course I also had to deal with the various protection rackets, muggings and other street crimes that plague the streets of Hethereau, night and day. Not to mention stopping to check what all those crows and seagulls were carrying and to pick up all those lost wallets... 

You just keep telling yourself that, Rabi.

As I was jogging through the big square near Eidon, I saw a girl with a cute-looking Oddity so I stopped to take a photo and ended up agreeing to try a free sample of cake they were handing out, which led me to pick up some kind of quest or other from her father but then before I could do anything about it I'd found this amazing record store up some back alley and agreed with the slacker in charge to go look for an anomaly that had stolen the store's record player...

Obviously not before I took a bunch of screenshots. Priorities! I can only think of two games I've played where there's a record store you can go into and look at the album sleeves: this one and The Secret World. The one in TSW has the edge in terms of the music that's playing but this one is bigger and has more to look at, not to mention do there.

It's called Exile on Main Street, which is a great name for a record store. It would be even better if the store was actually on Main Street, of course, but bonus points for ambition, I guess. Also bonus points for the Pink Floyd quote on the wall. 

The line is "We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl" from "Wish You Were Here"

I was pretty curious to see how the musical theme developed, not least since Flora is now the (Very, very bad..) drummer in Haniel's band. That's not some head-cannon thing. It's an actual storyline in the game, one where you go to a dive club with Haniel, meet the woman behind the bar, Akane, who Haniel thinks is her friend but who's really just humoring her, and you both end up jamming on stage after the club closes, meaning Akane can't go home... 

That storyline is ongoing. Flora has jammed with Haniel twice and now Sakiri and Nanally look like they're going to get in on the act so we might have a full band soon. God help us.  

Anyway, I mention it only because, after a trip round half the shops in the area, following the trail of some mysterious, loud "Rock Music", I ended up back at Eidon, where I was fully expecting to find Sakiri and Nunally "rehearsing" in the TV room upstairs. 

I guess it'll be okay to leave her. I put her in the recovery position...

Instead, what I found was Hotori, passed out on the sofa, surrounded by empty wine bottles, drunk as a fucking skunk. This is why I love her! Also, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the quest I was on, which is why I love this game.

When I went over to see if she was OK, a sweet cut-scene triggered in which Flora covered her boss with a blanket and cleared up the mess. That was apparently from another quest I had running but about which I had completely forgotten. 

Once I was sure the boss wasn't going to choke on her own vomit, I went out onto the balcony where I found Sakiri with her Oddity, Kiroumarou, the one that eats everything then sicks it up later.

Naturally it transpired that Kiramourou had eaten the record player and then gone all round town with the music still playing from inside its stomach because that's something that happens. And the record was even still playing when Kiramourou threw it back up! I took the record-player and the record back to the shop and span some sort of tale to Sidd, the dope-head owner, so Sakiri and her pet wouldn't get into trouble.

Geez, Sakiri! Chill, won't you? He's just an oddity!

I just want to say at this point that Sakiri treats Kiramourou abominably. She yells at him, abuses him, threatens him... so far I've never seen her say one single nice thing to or about him. And yet he's always there with her, defending her, helping her, fighting for her. Granted, he's a complete liability, with no self-control whatsoever when it comes to stuffing his face full of anything he can grab hold of, but even so! 

She could be nicer to him. She should be nicer to him! There's no excuse for Oddity abuse and you can put that on a T-shirt.

By the time I'd done all that, I'd been playing for over two hours. I'd also filled out all the dailies without trying so when I claimed the rewards, I got a huge chunk of xp and it all but dinged me. 

When Flora does level up, which will be tomorrow, if it's not later today, I can get her back to the main quest line, at which point I suppose it's not impossible some kind of coherent narrative might start to develop, although I certainly haven't seen any sign of one yet.

Then again, as you can see from the above, I don't really need one. The game's more than entertaining enough as it is.

Strolling Through The Void - Rage of Cthurath On EZ-Mode

I haven't exactly finished the latest EverQuest II expansion, Rage of Cthurath. In many ways I've barely started. But I have finished the two Signature Questlines for both Crafters and Adventurers. It's enough, I think, for me to give some kind of appraisal, even if it's not enough for a full review.

The first thing I'd say is that I like this expansion a lot. It's been fun. I'll get to why that is in a bit but I'll say up front that I'm speaking very specifically from the perspective of a fairly casual solo player. What it's been like for group-oriented players or raiders I have no idea.

It's also been pretty good value, I'd say, although it's incredibly hard to judge whether any expansion for any MMORPG offers a good return on however much you paid for it. With single-player games you can get to the end and do that "hours-per-dollar" calculation. On top of that, especially if it's one of those multiple ending deals, you might make some allowances for replayability.

With an MMORPG, the expansion provides a springboard for other content as much as it represents anything complete in itself. And then there's the question of alts. If you play a number of characters, as many people do, it's likely you'll take more than one of them through the expansion and also that other characters on your account will benefit from hand-me-downs and account-level flags and unlocks.

In my case, I've started three characters on the two Signatures already. Eventually I'll probably take as many as half a dozen through both. Does that mean I should multiply the value by the number of characters who complete one or the other or both?

Probably not but it does suggest any hours-per-dollar calculation shouldn't just work off a single run. And even if it did, I'm most likely already getting close to the traditional dollar-an-hour break-even.

So, I'm very happy with the quality and the quantity, then, am I? It certainly sounds like it, the way I'm talking. 

Yeah, no, maybe not really... I'm not sure...

The Signature quests are definitely getting shorter. I don't think there can be any doubt about that. There was a time when it took me longer to to finish one instance than it takes me now to do the entire thing. Or it felt like it, anyway. And there were those couple of expansions where absolutely everything seemed to revolve around raising multiple factions before you could even get anyone to give you the damn quests.

Is that what I want? No, it's not. What that did was put me right off the idea of taking multiple characters through the storyline. It took ages, it felt like a grind, it didn't seem to get any faster with experience and it wasn't anything I'd want to repeat. I was mostly just glad to have gotten it done at all..

That's not the case here. It's fast and entertaining, even though the storyline in Rage of Cthurath is thin, there's no denying it. And obviously, it makes no sense. That's a given. No EQII expansion's storyline has made sense for years. It's fine. It's expected. This tale, though, seems perfunctory even by recent standards. 

Here's my best attempt at a spoiler, based on what I can remember, without looking anything up. 

Lord Lucan, in his never-ending search for a means of world-domination, has gotten his hands on a McGuffin that's turned out to be more than he bargained for. Somehow, it attracted the attention of a Lovecraftian Elder God and now he's a puppet.

Meanwhile Lady Najena, who used to be a villain, has somehow gotten involved, only this time she's on our side. A whole load of spooky portals have popped up all around Norrath, spewing out Void entities we're all familiar with from previous invasions. She's trying to put a stop to it because I have no idea why. I guess she's just annoyed it's not her that's doing it.

She recruits the Player Character because of course she does or there wouldn't be much of a story, would there? She sends the PC on a mission through a portal of her own and some space-goats hijack it and divert the PC into the Void so they can get some help to escape.

This inevitably leads to a big, exciting adventure... Hahaha! I'm kidding! No, it doesn't! It leads to a bunch of trivial errands, things like pulling up weeds and making dinner for a dog (Alright, a wolf. Does that make it any better?) before Najena herself arrives in The Void and gets things back on track.

From then on it's mostly a series of dungeons instances in which the PC has to plant a whole load of runes so as to... erm... I don't know. Protect something? I think I drifted off when Najena was explaining that part.

Anyway, it's all very important (And repetitive.) and means you have to kill a lot of named mobs, all of whom drop gear better than what you got out of the Tishan's Box at the start, so there's plenty in it for you even if you're not entirely clear on why you're doing it.

Eventually you stick the final rune where it's supposed to go and that severs the connection between Lucan and the Consumer, which is the really rather ill-considered name someone chose to give the Big Bad. There's one final confrontation in which the PC gets to fight The Consumer and Najena gets to summon some big rocks for the PC to hide behind when it all gets a bit much.

The Consumer disappears back to whatever nether-hell he came from, issuing dire threats of retribution, and Lucan is a free sociopath again. Except apparently he's had some kind of existential experience while under the influence because instead of getting straight back to the world domination, he announces he can't go back in case The Consumer has another go at him, mentally weakened as he is. Like he ever cared about Norrath before. other than to be in charge of it all.

The PC wonders, not unreasonably, what that means for Freeport, which Lucan has ruled with an iron fist inside an iron glove since at least 2004, Earth time. Najena tells them not to worry their pretty little head about it because she'll sort it all out and it'll all be fine, which isn't anything like as reassuring to hear as she thinks it is.

Credits roll. End of Episode One. To be continued in next expansion, probably. Oh, except do just pop off to the Unknown and see if you can find this other McGuffin, would you? You weren't doing anything important, right now, were you?

It was just as well there was a post-credit sequence because the main questline only took Mordita to level 133. There are two more levels to go so any quests are welcome, however trivial. No other way to get the xp, these days.

The Tradeskill Signature line is basically the same only without nearly everything I just said. If the Adventure Sig is thin, the Crafting one is positively skeletal. Mostly it's gathering mats, making stuff out of them and waiting several hours until you can do it again. 

What do you want from a crafting questline, though? Narrative? I just want the recipes for the five new levels, mostly. And I have them now, so I'm happy.

And I'm happy about the Adventure timeline, too, because the fighting was actually fun for once! How many expansions are there where I would have been able to say that with a straight face? Not very many.

Why was it fun? Because it was very, very easy, that's why. And I like easy. If you like challenge, you are not going to be anything like as happy as I was. There isn't any.

Okay, a slight caveat. I have never taken a Necromancer through the Sig Line of an expansion before. Not first up, anyway. I don't have a benchmark for how easy that would usually be.

And it's true that the main reason I wanted to swap from my Berserker was to make things easier for myself. I totally did not expect it to be this much easier, though, and I can't help but think there's more going on than better DPS.

Midnight : tiny but mighty.

There's one thing I noticed that I find very hard to explain: Mordita's combat pet never seemed to take any damage. None at all. Ever. 

A Necro has excellent healing options. I also had a healer mercenary ready to heal both Mordita and her pet. Neither I nor the NPC needed to heal the pet at all.

After a while I started to wonder what was going on so I began paying close attention to the pet's health bar. It didn't move. Not a pixel. 

It was 100% all the time. I never saw it drop even one per cent. I moused over it to see the numbers. I never saw them change. Not on huge overpulls. Not on bosses. Not if I just stood back and watched to see what would happen. The pet seemed to be effectively invulnerable throughout the entire Signature line. It was also extremely good at getting and holding aggro, allowing Mordita to chain-cast every damage spell in her artillery without a pause.

It's not like the mobs weren't putting out the damage, either. Mordita needed plenty of healing when adds got onto her before the pet grabbed them. The Mercenary even managed to get himself killed a couple of times. The pet, though? Didn't take the tiniest scratch that I ever saw.

So that can't be working as intended, surely. Maybe it's one of those good bugs. I've had invulnerable pets before. Just for a session, though, not for weeks on end. 

Even without the invulnerable pet, though, the whole thing seemed much easier than usual. For one thing, none of the bosses had any really irritating tricks. No mana drain, either, which is a huge improvement, although it's been a few expansions since that was in fashion.

Even the tricks they did have mostly involved running about, standing in certain spots or clicking on things. Nothing that wasn't immediately easy to understand and simple to do. 

Who are you and what have you done
with the real Lucan?

Bosses didn't have ludicrous health pools, either. They took damage at a very satisfying rate. I don't think any boss fight took more than a couple of minutes. I remember expansions where the trash took longer than that and the bosses took more like a quarter of an hour. As for the regular mobs, TTK was two or three seconds for most of them. 

All of that made me actively look forward to every instance, something I very rarely do. When I messed
something up in one of them (Only for a side-quest.) the thought of having to do the whole instance again didn't make me want to give up and play something else instead - it made feel like that might be fun.

All the instances are also quite compact and easy to navigate. There are lots of teleports and portals so you don't need to slog through miles of empty corridors to get anywhere. And visually the whole thing is spectacular. It doesn't come over in screenshots but in game there's a huge amount of three-dimensionality, lots of particle effects and movement. It's a pleasure to spend time there. 

There have been complaints about the pacing, particularly the way players have been left to cobble together a path to the cap involving side quests and repeatables but I'm quite happy to meander through those final two levels. It'll give me a chance to gather enough rares to upgrade Mordita's spells. 

Not that there's much sign of her needing the extra power. She went into the expansion with almost every spell at Expert level from the tier below and it seemed to give her more than enough firepower, not just to get the job done but to get it done quickly and easily. 

Rather than try to race through the last two levels with her, I think I might take a couple more characters through both the Adventure and Tradeskill Signatures first. The crafters should have a very easy time of it, what with every capped character giving a 20% xp bonus to those coming after and those also getting a reduction in waiting-time on the gatekeeping quests.

All in all, I'm very satisfied with Rage of Cthurath so far. I think it might be my favorite expansion for quite a while. But then I always say that, don't I? I'm a cheap date when it comes to expansions.

I Wasn't In That Much Of A Hurry Anyway - Time-Gating In EQII's Rage of Cthurath Tradeskill Timeline

Rage of Cthurath is shaping up very nicely. Then again, almost all EverQuest II expansions do. I think I usually come here in December, singing their praises in the first few days and weeks, before wandering off to play with some shiny new toy in the New Year.

The whole way I play MMORPGs has completely changed over the last five years or so, though. Before, even including most of my time in Guild Wars 2 (Which was hardly overburdened with the expansions while I was there, let's be honest.), a new expansion for my current game generally meant I'd be doing little or nothing else until I'd at least finished the storyline and quite possibly for several months after.

Now, I don't even seem to be able to stick at it until the end of the main story quest. I do finish in the end but sometimes it takes two or three goes, separated by weeks or even months, usually when I'm off playing other games. Last year, if I'm remembering correctly, it was Spring by the time I wrapped things up on the first character. 

Or maybe I'm imagining that. It's a bit fuzzy when you take multiple characters through the same content. Perhaps I did finish the Signature Timeline on my Berserker before I moved on to something else. I'm pretty sure I would at least have finished the Tradeskill line, if only because those always take a fraction of the time the Adventure ones need. 

[Hi! I'm the Inventory Full Fact Checker. I'd just like to jump in here and say that, actually, that's not quite correct. More to the point, it's totally wrong. As this post confirms, the Berserker (Whose name is Conkers so why not call him that?) didn't get around to completing the Tradeskill Signature Questline for last year's expansion, Scars of Destruction, until nearly the end of January. January 24th to be precise. And let's face it, precision is what I'm here for...)

Okay. Fine! Thank you for your service. Now bugger off. 

But that post is very helpful in making the point I was about to make, namely that this year, in keeping with the loophole-closing I was talking about only on Friday, someone at Darkpaw obviously cottoned on to the way people like to race through the crafting timeline just so they can get flying in all the new zones, before going back and doing the Adventure timeline on the same character. Being able to fly for that makes it so much faster and easier. It totally makes sense to do it that way round.

Only two problems with that plan this year. For one, I forgot to do it that way around. I was so eager to see how my necromancer would handle promotion to Expansion Lead, I never even gave a thought to the Tradeskill quests. I just slammed her into the first zone and started killing stuff to see how it went. 

And since it went really well, I kept on doing it. Right up until she dinged Level 131 yesterday, at which point I thought to myself, you know what? It would be really handy if my Sage, Barnabus, was high enough level to make Mordita's new spells for her as she was ready for them.

With that in mind, I swapped over yesterday and had him start on the Tradeskill line. It was exactly as expected. Some chatting, some sneaking, a lot of gathering and loads of crafting. All very entertaining and enjoyable. I was having a great time.

XP was rattling in, too. I thought about using an xp potion to speed things up even more but it hardly seemed worth it. It looked as though it might take about as long to do the whole tradeskill line as it had taken to do just the first zone as an Adventurer. I hadn't made my mind up whether to keep swapping between the two or to blitz through the crafting quests and get that finished first, when this happened: Problem #2.

That's the final part of Quest Four (Of Eight.) Halfway through the full questline. On paper, anyway. 

It took me about ninety minutes to get there. Maybe a couple of hours. I wasn't timing it. At that rate I'd have had it finished this evening. 

I will not have it finished this evening. I might not have it finished this week.

The final part of the fourth quest is very heavily time-gated. You have to "prove your worth" to the goat-folk of Yon Gorroth before you can get any further and boy, are they hard to impress. In the old days, you'd probably just have had to grind out some crafted item they wanted until your fingers bled, taking the same repeatable quests over and over again. Not any more.

Well, yes, still that, sort of... You still have to make them stuff they're too lazy/snotty to make for themselves, just so they can do you the favor of treating you like a hired hand rather than a potential criminal but now they're being a lot more controlling about it. And exploitative, too.

First, they want to charge you a fortune just for giving you the opportunity to work for them. Five hundred platinum pieces and a rare before they'll even consider giving you the work. Then they tell you it's going to take a full week, real time, before they're going to hand you the merit badge that lets everyone else know you're fit to be trusted with even more menial labor.

At this point you could just sit the week out, if you had the patience. The timer will tick down with no help from you. Feel free to log out and go play someone - or something - else for  few days. 

Is it just me or is that a bit of a risky mechanic for a genre that generally likes to keep people logging in every day? 

There is something you can do about it, assuming you'd quite like to play your character before this time next week. You can take a repeatable quest from the same guy and do that for an eight-hour reduction in waiting time. 

It's not obvious. If I hadn't had the walkthorugh on the wiki open, I would never have known. You have to Hail the goat to get him tell you there even is a repeatable quest. Who hails NPCs these days? Is it 2005 all over again? It's like they don't want you to know. 

Once you find out it's there, though, the quest only takes a few minutes. That's not so bad, is it? You could probably get the whole thing done in a couple of hours and be on your way to the next level and the end of the questline in no time. 

Yeah... nope. You can only take the repeatable quest once every three hours.  

Even if you were insane enough to stay up all day and all night, grabbing each opportunity as it came, it would take you a couple of days. Any normal person is only going to manage three or four of those time-cutting quests a day, if that. Maybe you'd get it finished in three or four days, assuming you played every day or at least remembered to log in every time the damn quest was up. 

Unsurprisingly, there's a thread complaining about it on the forums, hyperbolically entitled  The Tradeskill Timeline Sucks In This Expansion Like Never Before. Having played through every one of those Timelines I would  categorically deny that. There have been plenty of worse ones. 

Then again, I am a Crafter and an Adventurer. This doesn't critically affect my enjoyment. My immediate response was to make my mind up to carry on with the Adventure timeline and just do the repeatables as and when I think of it. I don't really care if it takes all week.

I might be a little more irritated if I only played a Crafter but I can guarantee that almost every player who does also has a whole stable of them, so it's not like they haven't got something else to do while they wait. Plus there's all that gathering to do if you want to have enough Rares to make anything worthwhile.

I really don't see what the rush is, anyway. The expansion is with us for a year. Does everyone really want to be done with it by Christmas? There are people in the thread speculating that someone might have "taken time off from work just do the TS signature quest" and now they're screwed, to which I'd say if they did then the problem probably lies more with that person's life choices than any flaws in quest design.

The upshot for me is that I'll get back to adventuring for now and shelve the plan to make spell upgrades as I go. So far there's no sign Mordita needs them and anyway. The way spell upgrades work in EQII now means even the Expert versions of the new tier that Barnabus could make for her probably won't be better than the researched versions she has of older ones. It's a very unintuitive process in some ways. Experts used to be the gold standard for casual soloing but now you mainly need them as a stage in a much longer upgrade path.

As for progress in the Adventure questline, Mordita can now fly in the opening zone and she's just arrived at the first solo instance in the second. I need a clear couple of hours when I can count on not being interrupted for that one, which isn't guaranteed to happen... ever.

If it's time gating your worried about, you should try living with a dog... 

(Oh, and in case you're wondering what the weird pictures of a fiery, disembodied hand are all about, that's the device you craft that allows high level crafters who don't have an equivalently elevated Adventure level to wander about the map in complete safety. It's slow but it gets the job done. Eventually. 

It's also a great way to take close-ups of mobs, something I hadn't realized until today. I may make more use of it for that.)

Bless Me Padre, For I Have Killed You. A Dozen Levels Too Late But Who's Counting?

I wouldn't normally be posting on a Sunday. I'd be at work. It's coming up Christmas, though, and my work pattern has been shunted around a little, so here I am. I thought I might do a little catch-up on where I am with New World.

Still playing, for a start. Every day, almost. Longer sessions than I've been used to lately, too, although that still only means a couple of hours, most days. 

It's an incredibly comfortable game, New World. Cozy, almost. It shouldn't be, given the bleak lore, heavy focus on combat and over-saturated mob density, all things that usually make a game feel enervating after a while. And yet, somehow, it's always felt like a pleasant place to pass some time.

It has for me, anyway. Even back in pre-alpha, when Amazon Games still thought they were making a PvP sandbox, I remember trotting around the beautiful countryside, taking screenshots no-one but me would ever see, thanks to the very strict NDA, and generally enjoying the peaceful vibe.

Yes, there are zombies everywhere (Not what they like to call them but it's what they are, all the same.) but they move slowly and don't react until you're past them. Everything's a bit that way, slow on the uptake, except maybe some of the animals. Boars and big cats are particularly quick to engage and you really, really don't want to tangle with the bears.

But mostly you don't have to. There's an excellent road system. If you stick to the highways you won't run into much trouble. Not until you have to cross one of the many bridges, that is. They all seem to be positively infested with skeletons. And there are some checkpoints, gates, tollbooths and the like. They might need a detour through the shrubbery.

It's hard not to keep veering off the road, though. The pickings are so good. There's stuff just lying around everywhere for the taking. It's a kleptomaniac's paradise. There are chests and boxes and stashes of all kinds in and around every building. Not just the ruins. The intact homes, too. Go into someone's house and, provided they've been corrupted or tainted or whatever the hell it is, you can kill them and steal their stuff. It's not just socially acceptable, it's positively encouraged.

 

What with the sightseeing, the stealing, the murdering and the foraging (Did I not mention the endless supply of herbs, ores, skins and timber?) it's easy to while away hours without really doing anything much. That's mostly how I played on my first post-launch run, a couple of hundred hours, with sessions that lasted twice or three times as long as they do now.

Back then, I did somehow find the time to follow the main storyline as well. And do a bunch of side quests. But it was a rare session when I didn't lose track of the plot as I veered off course to see what I could fill my bags with. That, plus the crafting and the rep grind to buy a house and then decorating it... it all made for a slow meander to the level cap.

I must have been weeks, months, behind the bubble. In the end I did get there somehow but by then the game was out of fashion and I'd had enough for a while, so I moved on. And now I'm back, of course, the cap has gone up. 

One of the perks of maintenance mode is that returning players only have to play catch-up once, I guess. I can't count the number of times I've had to do it in some MMORPGs that had the nerve to keep on adding content every time I took a break.

This time it didn't seem to matter much. I got all wrapped up in the mount questline, which didn't appear to care what level I was. Actually, that's not entirely true. It does give you a recommended level for each stage but I don't think it's hard-locked. In any case, at Level 60, I was well over the height limit.

Well, for a while. A few days ago, though, I finished the last of the wolf-riding races and the woman who set the courses told me I ought to go to Brimstone Sands to speak to the next race organizer. Brimstone Sands is that big zone they added a while back, the one before Nighthaven and it's designed for levels 60 plus. (I think when it was added 60 was still the cap, so it's probably all doable at sixty. Not easily, though.)

So now I'm back to doing "at level" content, or I will be if I do the next set of time trials. Which would be fine if I didn't have to fight anything. The races themselves are strictly non-combat but they frequently take you right through the middle of those thick clusters of mobs at gates and on bridges. 

It didn't matter when the mobs were in the thirties and forties. If I had to, I could just hop off and slaughter them all. When the archers (And there are no shortage of archers in this game. And snipers.) took pot-shots at me as I rode through, they either missed me or did very little damage. I certainly never fell off my pony. Or my wolf.

In Brimstone Sands it's different. Arrows, bullets and musket balls hit hard enough to dismount me and you can't remount until you're out of combat. Killing the mobs takes a while. Running away on foot until they leash takes even longer. Get knocked off your mount more than once and there's no chance you'll finish the race before the timer runs out.

Time to get back on the treadmill, I guess. Gear and levels both. 

One good thing that always happens when you've been away a while in many MMORPGs is that all the stuff you couldn't afford to buy on the auction house last time you were there is suddenly on sale at a fraction of the price. No-one wants gear for ten or fifteen levels below the cap.

Except me, of course. What is the cap now, anyway? 70? Let me check... yes, it went to seventy with the Angry Earth expansion that I didn't buy, which explains why I stopped at sixty. And now they're giving that expansion away for free, I have another ten levels to do.

Or, more to the point, I have another two levels to do right away, because gear in New World has level requirements and from browsing the traders last night it looks like there's a big step-change at Level 62. I ended up buying a load of very cheap upgrades with a minimum level of 56 or 57 just to be going on with but I'll be replacing those as soon as I do another level and a half.

I did go test it to see if the new gear was sufficient to make Brimstone Sands as easy as I'd like. It wasn't. It's fine, I could do it, but I'd have to take the fights seriously and I have no desire whatever to do anything of the kind.  

Instead, I thought I'd go clear up my quest journal. I have a ton of old quests in there I can go finish up in lower zones. Mid-40s quests give decent xp and they're pleasantly unchallenging. Except for one.

Padre Nuñez. I hate Padre Nuñez! He's a Level 48 boss and I've needed him for a quest since... I don't know... it must be years now. I got the quest when I was in the mid-40s and I've tried to do it easily a dozen times. 

Sometimes I can't find the bastard at all. He wanders along the roads on his estate but half the time I go there he's nowhere to be found. Those are the lucky times.

When I do find him, he kicks my ass. He pretty much one-shot me when I was the same level as him and it's barely gotten any better since I've outleveled him. He's one of those gravedigger mobs that walks around with a coffin strapped to his back, which means you have to break the damn box before you can hurt him if he turns his back on you. 

That's bad enough but he also heals himself and drops some weird spinning scythe thing made out of light that whirls around and takes huge chunks off your health if you don't get out of its way. Which would be fine, except if you try to back off he pulls you to him somehow and if you manage to resist and get out of range he often breaks combat, goes into "Retreating" mode, runs away and heals to full health.

So he's fun...

Still, I thought at Level 60, with the best gear I could find for my level on the Trading Post, surely I'd be able to get the better of him. 

Nope. I found him (Eventually.) and launched a full-on frontal assault. Shock and awe tactics. It was a lot closer than usual but when it came down to the wire and we had about 5% health each, he outlasted me and I died. 

I was not happy. When it's that close, you know it's just a matter of either luck or slightly better tactics so I tried again. And this time, for the first time ever in all the times I've visited his estate, I discovered  he has a fixed spawn at some kind of outdoor shrine or altar. 

Well, he is a priest...

How I never saw it before I can't explain. I also don't recall ever seeing it mentioned in any walk-through I read. There he was, though, with two guards. He had his back to me. I think he was praying.

Having learned nothing from all the other times, I launched myself at him from behind. I killed his two guards and backed off as he dropped his stupid blue lights. And this time, for whatever reason, he followed me without reeling me in or breaking combat. His health was dropping fast! And he didn't self-heal! Or turn around so his coffin would protect him!

He just fought like a regular person, face to face, no tricks and I kicked the crap out of him. It was super easy. Barely an inconvenience!

Maybe that's how you're meant to do it. Fight him at his altar. Maybe he buffs himself there and I caught him before he had time to finish. Maybe the leashing is more generous in that area. Maybe I just got lucky.

Don't know. Don't care. Never have to see him again. Well, unless I ever level up another character but I don't think there's much chance of that...

What with that quest and a few others much less stressful, I made it about two-thirds of the way through Level 60. I can't say it feels quick but it's certainly enjoyable. My plan now is to trundle steadily through a bunch of mid-40s/low-50s quests until I ding 62, then buy a whole new set of gear and get back to the races.

Looks like I'm playing New World again. For a while, anyway.

Lost In The Dark

An update on where I am with EverQuest Online Adventures. I wish I knew! This may be the darkest game I've ever played. Not dark as in edgy and unsettling. Dark is in I can't see where the heck I'm going nearly all of the time.

At first I thought it was just at night. Then the sun came up and it barely made a difference. This is outdoors I'm talking about, by the way. Out in Steamfont. Or Steamfont Mountains if you prefer. Sometimes people call it that although given most of it is flat as a pool table, I'm not sure why. 

At least, that's what they call it in the Norrath I know but then, this isn't that Norrath. Here, the gnomish capital is called Klik`Anon not Klak'Anon so who knows what the locals call the countryside. Maybe it's just the gnomish accent.

Anyway, can you even call it a capital when there's just the one city? I guess that'd be a city-state and those don't have capital cities by definition. Come to think of it, most nations in most MMORPGs are city-states, aren't they? How many have more than one city? Freeport and Qeynos are supposed to be the centers of empires but apart from a few villages and trading posts, what other towns and cities do they control? 

Dragging myself back to the point, Klik itself isn't too bad. It's underground so it's not exactly sunny but at least there's decent street-lighting. Not to mention the glow from the lava pool. 

There's another thing. When did the gnomish homeland turn into an offshoot of Lavastorm?  There must be an active volcano somewhere in the area, judging from the burning embers constantly falling from the sky. 

That's outside, obviously. Inside the city there's just this great pool of seething lava. It's not even cordoned off but then gnomes never were big on health and safety.

The same screenshot from the top of the post, with the black borders removed and the rest "auto-leveled" to show what it would look like without the filters. I'd take this version any day. Or night.

 

After several hours running around the tunnels, mostly looking for merchants who aren't even there, I have a vague sense of the size and layout of the city although, if I'm honest, I wouldn't even have that much if it wasn't for the Prima Guide. 

Remember those? I could never see the point of them back when EverQuest was a big enough success to attract third-party publishing. They only told you what you could already read in the manual or get for free from online resources like EQAtlas and Allakhazam. 

Well, I'm glad of them now, I can tell you. Online resources decay fast when a game ceases to be as popular as it used to be and if that game shuts down altogether...

So it's very helpful of Project Return Home to have posted a PDF of the entire Prima Guide to EQOA.  I've been making much use of it, especially the maps, without which I'd probably still be wandering around the Magicians' Guild, which turns out to be stuck right at the back.

I wish I'd consulted it sooner last night. It might have saved me an hour of fruitless searching through the byways of Klik for the merchant who sells copper springs. He's called Merchant Samwe, which I know from looking up the details of the quest on the EQOA wiki, another resource without which I would be both figuratively and literally lost because the game itself tells you nothing.

There's no map, neither full screen nor mini. There's only the most basic quest journal that gives you minimal, static information and doesn't update as you progress. The NPCs do talk quite a bit when you get the quests from them but you can't go back over the dialog so if they offer any hints you'd best not miss them and, if your memory is like mine, better write them down as well. Which obviously I haven't been doing.

So far I have completed precisely three quests. The starting quests you get as a Gnome Magician. Here they are, as detailed in the Wiki, with notes from me appended:

Lvl 01
Starting NPC: Werlib Quackook
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
You need to go get a Student's uniform from Tailor Nokar (it's free).

Could not find Nokar at all until I got the map from Prima. Even then it took ages.

Lvl 02
Starting NPC: Werlip Quackook
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
Werlip sends you to Spiritmaster Lacy, who binds you and sends you to Coachman Rizkar.

This would have foxed me because Rizkar is outside the city and Quackook doesn't think to mention it. By sheer chance, I'd already bumped into the Coachman when I was exploring so I at least knew he wasn't in Klik. I still had a lot of trouble finding him again, all the same.

Lvl 03
Starting NPC: Werlip Quackook
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
Werlip sends you to out of town to kill rats, return with two strands of rat fur.

Again, I'd seen rats as I was wandering around outside. And this time Quackook does mention they're common outside the city. What he doesn't tell you, and what you'd never believe if he did, is that rat fur is rare on a rat. I had to kill half a dozen before I got my first strand. 

As you can see, you get one quest at each level. I am now Level 5 and still stuck on Starting Quest #4:

Lvl 04
Starting NPC: Professor Dandersoft
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
Dandersoft will make you a new staff if you bring him the following items: A Copper Spring - Purchase from Merchant Samwe, Bottle - Purchase from Grocer Guzzlewugs, Snake fang, Ant Chitin 

Again, I happened to have seen Guzzlewugs already, although in the event I bought an empty bottle off some other merchant because several of them seem to sell them. I was most likely just lucky that the first snake I killed dropped a fang. As for the chitin and the spring... read on.

Each of these ultra-basic starting quests has taken me about an hour, almost all of it trying to find the relevant NPCs. Without the Prima Guide I'd still be looking, mainly because the NPCs who hand out the quests never bother to mention if one of the people they want you to visit is outside the city. 

Even without all the aimless searching it would take a while because when someone sends you get ant chitin they not only don't tell you where the ants are, they also don't mention there are considerably fewer ants than you'd expect, or that most ants do not drop any chitin when you kill them.

I spent about an hour last night just trying to find an ant that would give me what I wanted. I made numerous circuits of the starting area outside the gates of Klik without seeing any ants at all so I followed a path - in the pitch black night - to who knows where until I finally found a couple, who of course didn't give me what I was after. 

In the course of an hour or so, I managed to find about half a dozen more and they dropped all kinds of body parts - legs, antennae, eyes - but not chitin. Eventually, out of frustration, I went through a guarded gate in the wall and wandered about in what I now know must be a higher-level part of Steamfont. It was too dark to see much but luckily hammering the Right Button targets nearby creatures so I was able to track down an ant, which finally gave me the chitin I was looking for.

And then a bigger ant ran up and killed me in one hit. Luckily, not before I'd looted his buddy. 

That gave me a handy ranger port home to Klik anyway so I was happy enough. No XP debt at level 5, either, which is the level my magician is now. 

XP comes in huge chunks. Handing a quest has dinged me every time so far but just killing mobs as I explore brings in a ton of XP, too. I'm not sure if that's how it always was or if the server admins have jacked up the gain. I'm very happy with it either way. I'm sure it won't last.

Since I was back in town and I had all the other bits and pieces the Prof wanted, I thought I'd just quickly find Merchant Samwe and get the spring, do the hand in and then quit for the night. Hah!

I did a couple of circuits of Klik, tapping RB to bring him up on target. No luck. I went round again, more carefully, stopping to cycle through everyone and going into all the buildings. Still no luck.

I went to the Prima Guide and looked at the map of Klik. Every NPC is listed and numbered with their location marked. Samwe is not one of them. He isn't in the fricking city at all.

Even in Klik it gets ridiculously dark away the main drag.

After some time searching online and in the guide I finally figured out he's somewhere in Steamfont, near the lake. I found him on a map and went to look for him. 

I'm still looking. I couldn't find him anywhere and it got so late I had to give up.

I did find the spot on the map where he was meant to be, or I thought I did. He wasn't there. Neither was the guy who sells low-level mage spells in the guild when I looked for him, which is why at Level 5 I still only have three spells and no pet. Which is a problem. Magicians get pets at Level One. It's kind of the point of the class...

The problem is, I don't know if my information is out-of-date or just plain wrong or if, this being an emulator, the merchants I'm looking for just don't exist. I find it unlikely an emu would be as functional and stable and well-populated as it is (Chat is like any live MMORPG - busy all the time, people trying to form groups or get rezzed...) yet still missing the most basic starter content like spell vendors but who knows?

What is plain to me is that EQOA is very old-school in its design  - much more so than modern EverQuest - and yet the old hooks that made EQ so infamously addictive in its day still work. I'm not remotely suggesting the gameplay I've been describing hasn't been frustrating - it very definitely has - but also weirdly compelling. 

I do wish I'd started in a city with some daylight, though. Maybe Freeport. The Deserts of Ro are usually glaring by day and starlit by night. That would be a big improvement on dark all the bloody time.

I'm considering making another character for that reason alone but there's every chance I'll end up making a character of each race anyway, just to see all the different starting cities. The not-exactly-nostalgia factor is very high with this one.

That's EQOA then: not the MMORPG I was expecting to be playing but the one I am. And may be for a while. 

Long Story Short(ish)

I'm always saying I'd like to do shorter posts. Turns out all I needed to do was not play any games and it happens naturally.

EverQuest II

Okay, it's not strictly true to say I haven't played any games. I have played a little EverQuest II. 

I logged in yesterday and finished another of Qho's supremely irritating gathering quests. That leaves just one more in the first set. Then it all starts up again, although from what I remember the second questline follows a different format and can be quite entertaining at times. Well, by comparison to the first, that is. But then it would pretty much have to be.

There's a lot going on in Norrath just now. Even though the Chronoportal event still has a few days to run, Brewday has already started. This is one of the busiest times of the year for holiday events. There are so many they start to overlap. 

I might do some more time-traveling with my Necromancer. I ought at least to take her to visit the vendors so she can spend her Ancient Coins. Not much point earnig them if you don't buy anything with them. 

Brewday, which I suppose comes in March to co-incide with St. Patrick's Day, although I can't recall ever seeing that connection made explicit, has never been a favorite of mine but there's a new tradeskill quest this year, so I'll definitely take a look at that.

It is interesting that the two quests I've seen added so far this year have both been crafting ones. I missed Erollisi Day completely, though. I wonder if there was a new tradeskill quest for that as well. Hold on and I'll check... no, there wasn't. 

I'm guessing the reason for the focus on crafting is either that these events were light on tradeskill content (Other than the inevitable new items that get added to the recipe list year on year.) or that Niami Denmother just really likes writing crafting quests. Both, probably.

The Chronoportal one is super-easy and very enjoyable, if you like very easy quests, which I do. All you have to do is go through a bunch of portals (Eight, I think it was. Might have been nine...) and pick up an item somewhere very near the entrance. All of them are in safe locations with no aggressive mobs nearby, so even crafters with a total aversion to combat can do it easily.

Then you just have to combine some of them to make sub-combines and combine those to make the final result, Grobb Liquidized Meat. It's a disgusting drink, enjoyed by trolls in the original EverQuest, which gives the quest its holiday-appropriate theme. You then trade the drink to a troll in exchange for Sir Fluffykins, the kidnapped cat. The troll hasn't been able to eat Sir Fluffykins because he has toothache and can't manage solids. The troll, that is. Not the cat.

Par for the course with tradeskill quests, really. Most of them are very light-hearted and generally very easy. They can be long and fiddly but they're rarely what you'd call challenging other than to your patience. 

Or they haven't been for a long time, anyway. There was that period when crafting "raids" were a thing and those were quite a performance, what with all the timers and the organization and a serious chance you'd fail. But that was a loooong time ago. I wonder if anyone still does those? I know you can easily solo them now because I've done it but does anyone actually get a team together and do them as they were intended? I bet someone does.

Another thing I hadn't particularly considered until I was summarizing the plot of the Chronoportal
quest just now is how very twee a lot of the crafting quests are. I don't think that was so much the case back in Domino's day, although even then many of them were far from serious. 

Raffik's quests, for example, which I tend to think of now as a jolly romp, are quite sad, what with him having been orphaned and shipwrecked and being close to starving to death when you first meet him. 

He's a great character, always cheerful, even though nothing ever seems to go quite right for him. Over the years, he changes from a lost adolescent to a confident, successful adult but even in the latest expansion, where he plays a small but significant role as the captain of the ship that takes you to Western Wastes, his ship gets destroyed, leaving him once again having to start over from scratch.

That, though, is part of an adventure questline and in adventures things do sometimes go badly wrong. In crafting quests they pretty much never do. You get asked to make something, you go get the materials, you put them together, you give the thing you've made to the person who asked for it and there you are. Sometimes you have to repair something but the experience is much the same.

Now that I think about it, EQII is a very twee game all round. The pure adventure side isn't, so much, although it does tend very much towards the Gods, Dragons and Faerie Queens end of the fantasy spectrum, rather than the blood, gore and bits of goblin flying everywhere kind. Everything else, though, crafting, housing, familiars, vanity pets, mounts, holiday events and most especially all the fancy dressing-up, does often have something of the six-year old girl's birthday party about it.

That suits my sensibilities fairly well but I've also been boiled in the EQII water for so long I barely notice how pink I'm getting. I'm wondering now if the high tweeness quotient might be a contributory factor to so many people bouncing off the game when they try it.

By contrast, there's that huge part of the game I never see (And neither do those new players who give up quite quickly.). Heroic/Heroic II dungeons and Raiding, from everything I read, are really serious business, to the point that most of the commentary I've been seeing for years on that end of the game is about how it's 100% Pay-to-Win because of how impossible it is to keep up with the required gearing needed to handle the difficulty if you don't get your wallet out.

For me, that might just as well be a different game entirely. My EQII has no Pay-to-Win features at all. The opposite, really. I find it hard to spend the Daybreak Cash I already have before more comes in.

Like most older MMORPGs, EQII isn't just two games any more. The old Casual/Serious Player split is there still and so is the Leveling/Endgame divide but the game fractures into many more pieces than that these days. It's entirely possible to play full time in any one of a variety of playstyles and hardly come into contact with the others at all.

Lord of the Rings Online

The really odd thing about all these older MMORPGs is how hard it is to get away from them. EverQuest is twenty-six years old this year and tens of thousands of people still play it. Lord of the Rings Online turns eighteen next month and the MMO news sites have been full of stories this week about how Standing Stone Games radically underestimated the demand for the new 64-bit servers. 

More than a million characters have been transferred apparently. Or, rather, have requested transfers. The actual number moved is presumably far smaller since the whole thing has been quite a debacle. I was going to log in this morning and see if I could at least press the Transfer button, just so I'd have a screenshot of me doing it for this post. 

What I'd forgotten was that I took one of my hard drives out last week, when I was trying to fix some issue with Mrs Bhagpuss's PC and I haven't gotten around to putting it back in yet. I don't feel like doing it right now, either, so my characters will have to wait a little longer. Probably a good idea, all things considered.

That does suggest the question "Why even bother transferring if you're not going to play the game?" and there, right there, that's the nub of it. I didn't have any desire to play LotRO again but then everyone started going on about it and Wilhelm revealed his plan to create a new character and take them all the way to Mordor and that started me thinking about how I've never gotten past the end of the original game - or even to the end for that matter - and suddenly the thought of playing again began to seem oddly appealing.

Would that it were so simple

And that's how they get you, every time. All these older games. It's not FOMO so much as familiarity. They sunk their claws in years ago and they hang on. You think you're free of them but they can always come back. Like malaria or relatives.

I had another thought, too, while I was considering whether I really wanted to give the game another chance. If so many people are fleeing the existing servers for the sunlit uplands of 64-bit Middle Earth, doesn't that mean the old 32-bit servers will be under a great deal less strain? Will that reduce or even remove all the lag problems and so on that everyone has long been complaining about?

Maybe the smart move would be to stay put. The FAQ says 

"At this time we do not intend to close our 32-bit game worlds. Eventually, we would like players to experience the game on our 64-bit game worlds, but as long as the populations of our 32-bit game worlds remain healthy we intend to keep these worlds open." 

I'm sure the last thing they'll want to do after this round of self-inflicted chaos is to rush headlong into another potential disaster so I'd guess it'll be later rather than sooner before any forced migration of the stay-at-homes kicks off.

As for low population levels, one of the given reasons why people wanted to move in the first place, I've always had a liking for low-pop servers. If you mostly solo, the fewer people around the better, generally speaking. 

Maybe I'll leave my existing characters where they are and re-roll on one of the shiny, new servers. That might be fun. And that way I could have my choice of quiet or busy, depending on my mood.

Of course, that's exactly what I used to do, back in the old days, when I had characters on multiple servers in several MMORPGs and somehow managed to find time to play most of them. These days I struggle to play even one character in one game with any consistency so all this is probably idle speculation. Fun, though.

Erenshor

And finally, in this short round up of things I might do in games I might play, there was yesterday's announcement that Erenshor is going into Early Access on Steam next month. 

Erenshor, you may remember, is the single-player MMORPG. Or, as the Steam Store description puts it "A fully simulated MMORPG". I played the demo during a Next Fest in 2023 and wrote about it here, when I found it very odd indeed. I concluded by saying "Whether Erenshor turns out to be no more than a novelty or a harbinger of things to come, I guess we won't know for a year or two."

We know now! Or we don't, because what I was really referring to there wasn't whether the game would get anywhere but the potential it suggested for the use of generative AI in MMORPG game design. 

As it happens, though, Erenshor doesn't even use that kind of AI. When it says the NPCs are "AI-driven" it means the old-school AI we've always had, just a more up-to-date, sophisticated version:

"Note that SimPlayers do not use LLM or any other emerging AI model. They are run by a mixture of state machines and decision trees."

If you want to know more about it, Tipa has been part of the testing program for a while and she's posted about the game several times. (I applied but I never heard back. It's too late now!)  She found it both very enjoyable and extremely redolent of the traditional EverQuest experience. If anyone knows how that feels, it's Tipa so you can take her word for it.

Erenshor has been on my wishlist since I played the demo and I will definitely be buying it as soon as hits Early Access. As always, the question is what I'll do about it after I've bought it. I suspect I might actually play it, in which case you'll hear about it here, whether you like it or not!

And that's all for now. Was that even a shorter post? I'm not sure it was. It was shorter to write, though, and that's what I wanted. 

Op success, then, I guess. I obviously should spend less time playing games.