Postcards From Pukaland

 In what seems like it might be an attempt to break the world record for widest range of content in a single drop, the same update that brought a harrowing version of the Salem Witch Trials to Neverness To Everness also saw the opening of Hethereau's candy-themed amusement park, the unfortunately but probably accurately-named Pukaland. 

As far as I can tell, Puka is Hethereau's answer to Haribo, not that that's a question anyone ever needed to ask. The theme park, named for the brand of tooth-destroying sweets sold all over the city, has been standing, empty and shuttered, on a promontory to the south-east of the city ever since the game began. Now, after a major redesign, it's finally open.

If the latest update took us on a tour from tragic to trivial with this latest update, it's not as if Hotta just bundled the two together without thinking about the friction. It's more as though they meant to rub up against each other to make some kind of abrasive point. At least, I found it hard to miss the subtext, when "The Witch" ended and a new storyline started right away, taking the Appraiser and Blackbird straight to the fairground.

At first I thought it was nothing more than a charming opportunity for the two of them to decompress after their traumatic experiences in the nested Anomalous Realms, and to a large extent that's indeed what it is, but as the short storyline developed, I couldn't help feeling there was a little more to it than that. 

I'd go into detail but unfortunately, I didn't document exactly what happened while I was playing and now, as is becoming annoyingly common with NTE, when I go online to refresh my memory, I find no-one else has posted a walkthrough I can crib from. 

I can't even find a video on YouTube where someone plays through it all, although there must be about a gazillion rating the rides and telling you how best to exploit them for the new currency. It's almost like no-one gives a damn about the story.

I'll just have to do the precis from memory. It oughtn't to be too hard. I played through some of it last night and the rest this morning. Even my memory's not that bad. Do feel free to correct any errors or add anything I've forgotten in the comments, though.

It's not like it's a lot to remember, anyway. The storyline part probably didn't take me more than fifteen or twenty minutes. The rest of the couple of hours in Pukaland, I spent gawping and taking pictures. And going on the rides, of course.

The whole thing begins with some story on Bagel about urban legends. Apparently, mysterious shadows, doors to other worlds and similar apparitions have been seen at Pukaland since it opened, often showing up after some specific trigger, like taking photos in a precise spot or staying on a ride for a particular number of times.

 

The Appraiser and Blackbird begin by visiting one of the people who posted about their experiences and having talked to her, agree to go check it out for themselves. The Appraiser, naturally, figures there may be some Anomaly behind it which, honestly, sounds like the Occam's Razor explanation for any odd, unexplained activity in the city.

Flora agrees to meet Blackbird at the gates but when she gets there Blackbird is already feeling a little overwhelmed, as well she might. Pukaland is busy. 

It looks like the park's off to a great start. The wide avenues are teeming with excited visitors. It's busy day and night, in fact. I stayed there all the way through a full day-night cycle and apart from the sun going down and the lights coming on, you'd hardly know the difference. Everything's open 24-7, in the way of video game worlds and, while I thought I noticed a slight reduction in numbers in the small hours, there's more than enough business to justify the added overhead in staffing costs.

Flora uses her Esper ability to sense anomalies but finds nothing. Blackbird has no more luck with her divination. The place seems to be no more than just what it looks like: a harmless entertainment complex.  

They explore the park, looking for anything out of place and trying to replicate the kinds of events they read about on Bagel. Flora takes a picture of Blackbird, waving to her from the supposed one of the supposed hot-spots but no strange shadows appear in the photograph. The two of them talk to some other customers, one of whom suggests inexplicable things often appear in the background of such images but after they all have another look, no-one can see anything.

One couple Flora and Blackbird interview makes the point that even though they live in a city famous for its Anomalies, they've never actually encountered one. That theme recurs in other conversations, reminding us that although all the characters we, the players, usually interact with have plenty of hands-on experience with these bizarre and sometimes terrifying entities, for many people living ordinary lives, all they know about them is what they see on social media.

They ride the big wheel thirteen times, another reported trigger, but nothing happens. They explore the hedge maze (Oddly called a "Flora Maze" in the game, which amused me and must have come as a surprise to Flora herself.) where strange things are supposed to occur quite reliably but again they see nothing out of the ordinary.

Eventually Blackbird and the Appraiser decide there's nothing to the rumors but as they're about to leave, they spot a couple of visitors acting strangely. Being the responsible citizens they are, they ask the two what they're up to. I mean, I wouldn't, I'd mind my own business, but then I'm not a Witch or a secret government agent...

It turns out the two suspicious strangers are influencers on Bagel. They've also heard about the urban legend rumors and, like our heroes, have come to see if they can find out what's going on. Unlike Flora and Blackbird, though, having struck out, they've decided to fake some evidence so they can give their followers something to get excited about.

Blackbird is very put out by this, being the innocent shut-in she is. Let's not forget, almost her only knowledge and understanding of the outside world over the past couple of hundred years has come from watching a screen. The Appraiser, more worldly, isn't shocked but she gently suggests to the two would-be deceivers that it might be better to let their fans know that what they're showing them isn't really real.

And that's about the end of it. It's a small, gentle story but it comes with a moral. The whole thing is undoubtedly a commentary on social media and the responsibility it brings to be truthful and transparent. It takes a position on conspiracy theories and it's agin' 'em. The more NTE I play, the more lessons it tries to teach me. 

Having tried and failed to find any public account of the storyline I just attempted to recreate from memory, I have to wonder who's listening. As far as I can tell, the main interest most people using social media have in Pukaland lies in telling others how to get in and out of it as fast as possible with the highest rewards for the lowest level of effort.

Which is a shame because Pukaland is amazing. It's a huge area, the size of a whole city district, and it's teeming with things to do and see. It's not only that there'ssomething to do around every corner, on every avenue and plaza, but there are hundreds of NPCs there with you, doing it too. The illusion of an actual place filled with real activity is more than impressive. 

As for the games and rides, there's plenty of variety, something for everyone. I played darts, which I very much enjoyed and shot at plushies, which was fun, too. I rode the Ferris Wheel and the Merry-Go-Round, got lost in the maze and hurtled around on the roller coaster and all that scarcely scraped the surface of what there is to do.

I wanted to go into the Fun House, which looked like it would be a hoot, but it was closed for renovations. The middle-aged man throwing up outside was likely the clue things weren't quite as they should be in there. I hear there's also a balloon ride that takes you higher above Hethereau even than the Skytower. I'd very much like to try that.

Trust me, I'll be back. I skimmed a reddit thread where redditors were being as cynical and dismissive about the rides and activities as you'd expect but for once I think their cynicism is misplaced. On first impressions, I'd say Pukaland is as good a collection of mini games as I've seen anywhere.

Sure, some of them might not be as polished as you'd get in a full game dedicated to such things but these are throwaway activities in a game that has a million other things going on. Granted, they'll presumably be permanent additions to the game but no-one's expecting any of this to become anyone's full-time gaming habit. It's an add-on and a very impressive one it is, too.

From what I've seen so far, many of the games and rides justify their existence purely in respect of the fun they offer in the moment but the rewards you get for doing them aren't at all bad, either. The entry fee in Fons for each activity is low, the number of Puka Tickets you can win is generous and the range of activities ought to have something to suit everyone. 

I went to one of the booths where you can redeem your tickets for prizes, just to see what was on offer, and I was quite impressed with what was on offer there. The prices aren't too high for a start. I already had enough for a few things but looking through the options I soon found something worth saving up for - a boat!

The boat, which from the description looks like it can be substantially upgraded, and the glider that looks like a biplane are both on my wishlist now. The former costs 10k tickets for the basic model, the latter just half of that. I'd already earned 1300 tickets in less than half an hour so both sound eminently doable.

I'll probably have do what's needed to get the rest before the next content drop though. As 999 Nights proved, no matter how engaging, satisfying and enjoyable a new addition to the game can seem when it arrives, as soon as the next update comes, it's all but forgotten. 

How long Hotta can keep pumping out content at this rate and how long it will continue to engage players if they do is an unknown quantity but my worry is that they'll be caught in a Catch 22 whatever happens. If they fail to keep up the pace, players will call it a "Daed Game" and  move on but if they succeed, those same players will take the flood of new content for granted, expect it never to end. burn through it in no time and then complain it's not enough. As players, we often talk about the grind but it probably feels just as much like a treadmill on the other side of the screen.

That's about all I have to say for now but since every story in Hethereau comes with a moral, I'll add one for this post, too.

Enjoy it while you can. 

Help This Blackbird - The Witch's Tale

 This  morning I finished the latest instalment of the main story in Neverness To Everness. It's called, very simply, "The Witch" and it's one of the best I've seen in any game of its kind or, for that matter, any other sort of game I've played.

It does start with a significant advantage over most gacha game or MMORPG stories in that it's based on a familiar tale, one that's been very successfully adapted several times before. Still, building on sound foundations doesn't always mean that what you're building is going to stand. This is solid.

The narrative adapts the horrifying events of the Salem witch trials, particularly as they were presented by Arthur Miller in The Crucible. Like many people, I read the play at school, when I was in my teens, and I also went to see it performed. I found it disturbing enough, back then. I found this adaptation even more so. 

Miller wrote The Crucible as a response to the McCarthyite witch hunts and show trials of the fifties. None of his fears have been alleviated in the slightest over the years.The lessons he'd have wanted the audience to learn are as relevant now, as crucial as ever.

Games, like movies and television and pretty much every other medium, often take their ideas directly from pre-existing works. The results can range from travesty to transcendence. The Witch may not eclipse a classic like The Crucible but it more than justifies the decision to take on such difficult, challenging and disturbing subject matter. It succeeds on almost every level in both honoring and interpreting its source.

As must be obvious, I was very impressed. I'd say I loved it but the themes and implications hit too hard and probe too deeply to inspire affection. Respect and admiration feel like more appropriate responses. But I did love it, all the same.

The story begins when Blackbird, the mysterious Esper who lives at the Witch's House, contacts the Appraiser  to offer her a commission. Blackbird has received a letter from someone by the name of Merula, who says Blackbird is the only one who can help her.

At this point, I'd love to link to a full walk-through so anyone interested in finding out the full details of what happens next can go read the precis. I'd love to but I can't because as far as I can tell, there isn't one. I'd say that's an ill omen for the game but it also might just be because the quest, if we're comfortable with calling it that, is very long. Maybe no-one's gotten around to writing it all down yet.

There are several full-length videos of the whole thing on YouTube. I haven't watched any of them myself but I'll link to a couple in case anyone has a few hours to spare. I can't vouch for the presentation. Here's one with the male Appraiser. And one with the female version.

I played through the whole thing in two sessions. There are eight chapters. Thanks to GeForce Now giving me a summary every time I log out, I can say with accuracy that first session took me two hours and fifteen minutes and the second an hour. Allowing for a very small amount of housekeeping, from start to finish, "The Witch" takes about three hours.

Of those three hours, I'd estimate about two hours and forty-five minutes involve cut scenes and conversations. The whole thing feels like a long movie or a full season of a TV show. 

There's very little combat indeed, just a short and easy boss fight close to the start and another, only slightly harder, right at the end. A couple of times, a handful of ordinary mobs need to be dispatched but those fights are so trivial they amount to not much more than shouldering past someone blocking your path.

There aren't any puzzles. No objects to manipulate, devices to use, doors to unlock... nothing. There isn't even much running around. Most of the action takes place in St Arbor, a small village, where everyone you need to speak to lives right around the corner or just down the street - and you get a marker to show you exactly where they are.

Almost the entirety of the action involves either eavesdropping on townspeople talking then discussing what they've said and deciding what to do about it. There's a lot of talking. And it's rivetting. 

It wouldn't work if the writing wasn't so good. It's uniformly excellent, managing to find a tone that feels authentically appropriate to the time period and the setting, while never coming across as awkwardly archaic or forced. 

That's no small achievement. I've seen many games attempt to find this tone. "18th century New England witch trial" has been a very popular quest setting for as long as I've been playing online games. Few writers manage to catch the tone they're seeking. Usually it falls flat.

Here, it works particularly well, partly because The Appraiser and Blackbird both already have somewhat formal speech patterns, more so than many video game characters and certainly much more so than most of the other characters in NTE. I'm not sure how well Mint or Chiz would have fitted into the milieu.

Assuming the original writing wasn't in English, the translation is exemplary. There's still the occasional hint of that unmistakable "Translated from Korean" syntax but by now I hear that as a charming inflection, almost a dialect or an accent, never a flaw. 

Which isn't to say the writing is flawless. There are a couple of slips but they're barely noticeable. A word, pluralised in the text, when it's singular in the voice-over. Tiny things like that, easy to ignore.

The voice acting, as always, is solid-to-excellent. Blackbird is very charming and I really love the way the Appraiser sounds. I'm not sure now, whether it sounds like my character's voice would sound in my head or if her voice sounds that way in there because of the voice acting. Either way, it's perfect.

Blackbird, in whom I'd previously had very little interest, emerges as a fascinating, complex character. Apparently she's lived in the Witch House for hundreds of years, only very rarely stepping outside. She know little of modern life other than what she's gleaned from anime, to which she's addicted. 

Her affairs are managed by Lavinia, a severe and somewhat unnerving character, a kind of dark reflection of the more amenable Adler at Eibon. It's curious how almost every grouping in the game has these sorts of quasi-familial structures in place, flattened hierarchies in which authority is hard to define.

At the conclusion of the story, which I won't attempt to recount or spoil, Lavinia offers the Appraiser another commission: take Blackbird out and show her all the good things there are to see and do in Hethereau. As Blackbird puts it:

It's a bittersweet way to end what's most likely felt like a solid three hours watching an anime. You have to wonder how much irony was intended.

The story itself is as dark as the village of St Arbor, a place where the sun never seems to shine and where almost everything of consequence happens at night. Anyone who's seen or read The Crucible ought to be prepared for the psychological horror, although I must say my own inoculation against the sensation of existential threat had long worn off. And at least, when I saw the play, no-one actually got burned alive on stage. 

It's a hard watch at times. In deference to the game's PEGI 12 rating, the camera cuts away for what I found to be the most disturbing scene, the one where live animals are fed to the fire. When it's the humans' turn it's similarly over in a moment with a short scream and a flare of light. Towards the climax, though, there are some prolonged scenes of immolation that don't bear much thinking about if you want a good night's sleep afterwards.

Unlike the graphics, the dialog pulls no punches. There's no skipping lightly over the actions of the villagers or the impact of the choices they make. People die for no reason other than that someone bears them a grudge or wants their property or to save their own skin. 

And since it's a ll a pre-ordained story, nothing anyone can do, note even the Appraiser and Blackbird, can change a thing. It's not exactly what I'd call entertainment but The Witch absolutely earns its right to be taken seriously.

Even so, it's still an adventure story in a video game about extra-dimensional entities and psychic powers. It takes some doing to integrate something like that, successfully and convincingly, into a real-world historical setting, much less layer it with some heavy social commentary. The Witch not only manages to do that - it makes it seem almost easy. 

Perhaps the hardest disbelief to suspend is the repeated, confident assertion that the best way to nullify the Inquisitor, the anomaly behind the terrible events locked inside an anomalous realm, inside another anomalous realm, just to make it even harder, is to release it into Hethereau, where society has advanced to such a stage that no witch hunting anomaly could hope to gain enough traction to prosper. In other words, humanity has outgrown the kind of fear and hatred that feeds such a phenomenon. 

Nice to think so. But then, Hethereau is, self-evidently, a much nicer place to live than anywhere in this real world. I'd move there tomorrow, given the chance.

I've enjoyed all the stories in Neverness To Everness I've seen so far but this is without a doubt the most tightly constructed and the most successful in what it seems to want to achieve. Assuming, that is, that what the writers set out to do was give moral instruction. It seems hard to think any player of the game could come away from The Witch without a clearer idea of what fear of the other leads to and how moral courage is imperative in standing up against prejudice.

Unless, that is, that player opted to skip all the dialog. Which is an option although I can't say I understand why. It might make sense in other games that rely much more on combat and action but, given that the eight chapters are pretty much all dialog, hitting the "Skip" button wouldn't leave a lot left for anyone to do.

I didn't skip. I lapped up every last word. I watched all the cut scenes. I crouched behind bushes and listened to all the conversations I wasn't supposed to be listening to. And I never once wished anything would go faster or that anyone would just get to the point. I found both the pacing and the content entirely to my liking. I'm very much hoping for more of the same as the game goes on.

It's also becoming a little clearer to me that the way Neverness To Everness has been conceived gives the writers more leeway to tell the story of Hethereau in this episodic fashion. The city isn't under imminent threat in the way we're so familiar with from other games. The characters aren't fighting a war or for their very existence. There's no sense of pressure of time.

The Appraiser, as is frequently emphasized, has a job. All the characters have jobs. Each storyline so far has either been a day's work or a day off. If NTE was an anime, it'd be a hybrid between a detective show and a slice-of-life drama with the cast investigating anomalies by day and playing games or going to the movies after work. 

That a gamelike that  can also encompass such a difficult and dark tale as The Witch and make it seem like an integral part of the setting is a tribute to the skill of the writers. A tip of the witch's hat to all of them.  

I Want To Ride My Bicycle

 I was in my late teens when I learned to ride a bicycle. I think I only ever owned one, a heavy, green Hercules with white plastic handlebars and a comfy, padded seat. When that fell apart, I never replaced it. I doubt I've been on a bike since the 90s.

They do say you never forget how to ride a bike, though, and that's certainly true for Neverness To Everness. I get myself into all kinds of trouble on the streets of Hethereau in anything on four wheels but motor-scooters and even motorbikes feel like a much safer way to get around.

When I saw that pushbikes were going to be added to the game with the last update, I knew I wanted one. Pedal power. That should suit me fine. Going too fast around corners is my downfall.

Not that I did anything much about it. Not at first, anyway. As soon as the update dropped, I forgot all about the bike in all the excitment. My only excuse is that there's always so much to do I just lose track. When I eventually remembered, I couldn't seem to find any way to get one other than through the Mystery Boxes, the drop rates for which are not great.

Fortunately, Mailvaltar mentioned in the comments yesterday that there's a bike shop somewhere in the north-east of the city where you can buy a bike for the bargain price of 800k Fons. That makes a bicycle eight times the price of the cheapest car! More than three times as expensive as a motorcycle! As Mailvaltar says, that's got to be one hell of a bike.

Even at such an outrageous mark-up, I bought one without a moment's hesitation. I must've really wanted one. 

 

I'd just finished the Breezy Ride event, in which you get to cart ten different characters about the city on the back of your bike. I loved this event. It might be my favorite in the game so far. It has a delicious disregard for logic that's like catnip to me. 

As I said, I didn't buy a bicycle until after I'd finished the whole thing but apparently Flora already had a bike and she's been riding it all around Hethereau without letting me know. 

Every step in the quest chain, if we can call it that, involves the Appraiser just happening to run into one of her friends or acquaintances, standing around on a street corner or siting in a bar somewhere in the city. Conversation ensues, as it would, and inevitably concludes with the Appraiser offering to give whoever it is a ride to wherever they're going. 

On her bike. That I had no idea she had.

What bike, Flora?! When did you get a bike? Why didn't you tell me? I guess there's a lot about our characters we don't know but this really brought home to me how they must all have their own lives, about which we know nothing.. 

Flora even seems to have given her bike a name. It's called Yesteryear. You can see the name next to it when it's parked in the street. 

Wherever, whenever and however she got it, it's hers, not mine. She can summon it when she needs it for a quest but if I want her to ride it to go somewhere I'd like her to go, forget it. For that she needs a different bike altogether. One I'll have to pay for. Albeit with her money. Sometimes I think you need a degree in Metaphysics to play these games.

 

The Breezy Rides themselves are wonderful. I loved all of them. Not just the bike-riding itself, although that was always fun, but the little stories and the conversations along the way. There's always a bit of chat at the start to set things up and then whoever's on the back of the bike carries on talking for the first few minutes before conversation eventually runs down. 

Then, when we get to wherever we're going, there's a little coda at the end of which we both, inevitably, decide we'll do something together again, soon. It's all just so nice. 

I would literally play a whole game based on this concept. Actually, come to think of it, I already have, kind of. It's basically Neo Cab but without the commercial interactions and on two wheels instead of four.

When I say this series of quests is "nice", I maybe ought to caveat that a little. Most of the encounters are really sweet but not exactly all of them. The really charming ones involve the younger characters. Linko and Iroi are positively childlike. Chiz is shy and a little bit lonely; Shinku is funny; Mint and Nanally are confident and effervescent as they always are...

Lacrimosa would probably have been the most bittersweet. She's an enigma. 

I did the quests in the order they came up and she was the last. I was really looking forward to seeing what she had to say but I was interrupted by real life just as she was about to get on the back of the bike and I had to log out briefly. I thought I'd be able to pick up where I left off but when I got back in, Yesteryear and the little vampire were nowhere to be seen. 

Luckily, most quests in NTE that involve travel can be completed just by teleporting to the end-point so I was able to finish it easily enough but I missed out on all of Lacrimosa's on-bike dialog. I just watched it on YouTube and it's possibly the weakest of the lot so I didn't miss much. All the best bits are before and after the actual ride. Her very best line comes just after she gets off, when she says

 

Lacrimosa really is not of this world. 

The other three characters aren't quite as "nice" as the rest, though. Not to say they're unfriendly in any way. It's just that there's something a little darker about all of them.

When the Appraiser meets Hotori she is, as you might expect, drunk. Very drunk. The woman has a problem, there's no hiding it. 

The main reason the Appraiser offers her boss a lift is because she's worried she's too out of it to get home safely on her own. Hotori warns the Appraiser to take it slowly because she wouldn't want to throw up over the bike but when they get back to Eibon she's sobered up enough to tell Flora she needs to be ready for work tomorrow, which even the easy-going Appraiser finds a tad awkward.

Jiuyuan, another business owner with one eye always on the account book,  has an ulterior motive for accepting the offer of a ride to a good place to watch the sun set. She cheerfully tells Flora, when they get there, that her main reason for going was to have another opportunity to make a psychological assessment of her. She's clearly still thinking about what use she can make of the Appraiser in future. Flora isn't entirely happy about that and Jiuyuan's promise never to use the intel she's gathered against her isn't as reassuring as it could be.

Finally, there's Fadia. Fadia is always scary. Flora comes across her drinking alone at a bar. Not, I believe, the first time that's happened. Fadia, as always, is flirtatious and that's being generous. She comes across as a borderline sexual predator sometimes. 

Again, as we've become used to from her, all her talk is drenched with subtext. She purrs about how everything feels so much freer under cover of darkness and suggests the two of them go "do something more fun". As she says, "The city has fallen asleep and no-one will ever know what we did together..."

 

Unsurprisingly, Flora is wary but it turns out Fadia just wants go to the Hethereau Sky Tower. When Flora expresses surprise that it's something so innocent, Fadia makes it very clear it could be something more "dangerous" - if the Appraiser's up for it. 

Which she is not. In the end, nothing untoward happens, despite a bleak aside about mortality from Fadia on the journey. But who knows what goes on ion Fadia's mind? As Flora says right at the end "Fadia, it's hard to get you, sometimes."

As with many of the character quests in NTE, there's a lot going on under the surface but one thing that's hard to miss is all the drinking and sexual tension. I just looked up the game's PEGI rating, which is 12 for "for moderate violence, simulated gambling, in-game purchases involving random items, and online user interaction." and I can't help feeling whoever did the assessment might not have gone deep enough.

It's also very noticeable where the divisions between the characters lie. All the potentially problematic behavior, the drinking, the sexual innuendo, the general louche moral attitudes, comes from the mature female characters. I think that means something but I haven't got a handle yet on what it might be.

It's always been very clear who the grown-ups are in NTE. While there's often some confusion over exactly how old the younger characters might be, it's always been clear which are children, which are young adults and who is fully mature. 

In that regard, there's no questioning the maturity of Hotori, Jiuyuan and Fadia. Allowing for the inevitable perfect skin and lack age lines peculiar to the graphical style, Hotori and Jiuyuan are most likely in their thirties or even forties. Fadia is at least in her late twenties. 

 

The mature male characters - Baicang, Chaos, Adler and Skia - are distinctly less prone to drinking and flirting than their female counterparts. In fact, they're mostly so stiff as to be made out of cardboard. Only Baicang really steps outside of his professional persona in any of storylines I've seen and he's a lot milder in his rebellion than any of the three women I just mentioned.

All of which seems like a long way to go on a bike ride. It's another reason why I like this game so much. There's a depth to the triviality that makes an impact. And there's so much subtext, all the time.

A couple more examples before I go. Things that speak to the complexity of the world-building here. 

I'd forgotten all about Shinku, the "dragon" who we met in the fantasy land of 999 Nights. When Flora met her outside Little Sparrow, the maid cafe, I had to stop a moment to think who she was.

 There's a whole bit where the Appraiser teases Shinku for her interest in whatever the heck happens in Little Sparrow, an interest Shinku most unconvincingly denies, but more interestingly perhaps, as Flora gives Shinku a ride back to her home in the suburbs, Shinku talks about how her house isn't really all that messy and how she knows where everything in her collections is. It's a beautifully natural, organic conversation and it told me a lot I didn't know about the character.

After Shinku got off the bike and disappeared inside and Flora was standing outside the house, I noticed the door was open. I was curious to see if I could look at Shinku's place so I took Flora inside. It turns out you can go into her apartment and look around. It feels a tad transgressive because Shinku isn't there but it's highly revealing. The whole place is exactly as I imagined it from the conversation. 

 

It's quite untidy, with all kinds of things lying about all over the place, but it's clean and feels pleasantly lived-in. And there are a lot of collectibles. Shinku has display cabinets filled with figures and dioramas and there's a whole wall of board games stacked semi-neatly on shelves al the way to the ceiling. I didn't spend a long time there but the detail is impeccable. Someone's clearly taken a lot of trouble mirroring  Shinku's personality as it's written. I don't know if there's a storyline that supports that level of effort or if it's just someone having fun but either way it's powerfully immersive.

And finally, there's Linko and her Tamachi obsession. When you meet her, she's near the coast, talking to herself. It transpires she has a day off and she's going to spend it looking for rare water Tamachis.

I had never heard of Tamachis [Edit: I must have because apparently both Linko and Mint talk about them a lot but it obviously didn't stick in my mind.] but it quickly became clear from context that they're Hethereau's equivalent of Pokemon and Linko was playing the local equivalent of Pokemon Go. Flora gave Linko a ride around the bay and Linko caught several Tamachi. 

It was an entertaining insight into the hidden life of the characters who live in this world we, as players,only get to visit. In fact, the entire Breezy Ride event was like that. I'm very happy I spotted it be.

Now Flora has her bike and she can invite any of those ten characters to ride on the back of it, whenever she likes. As soon as I bought it, I had her ride around Hethereau for half an hour with the UI off. It's the most fun I've had just riding around in a game since I stopped playing Once Human. Next time I might ask Chiz to come with her. Or Linko. Or Mint. Just not Hotori or Jiuyuan. 

And definitely not Fadia...

800k well-spent, I'd say. 

 

Notes On AI Used In This Post

None. But I did look a few things up on Google and Gemini always gets its two cents in first, which almost caused an upset. I was googling to see if Tamachi is an actual game of some kind and it was pretty clear it wasn't but just to be absolutely sure I googled "tamachi neverness" and this is what Gemini told me:

In the supernatural urban open-world RPG Neverness to Everness (NTE), Tamachis are collectible virtual pets or digital creatures that players can hunt, collect, and raise throughout the city of Hethereau. Heavily inspired by real-world Tamagotchis, they function as a core slice-of-life minigame and collection system.

 The AI then went on to give me bullet points on how to play Tamachi in NTE.:

Key Features of Tamachis in NTE

The Tamachi Index: Players track their findings in an in-game Index. Finding every standard version and unlocking the elusive secret variants is required to fully complete it. 
Tamachi Hunting: These digital creatures emit signals across Hethereau. Players must explore the map—often climbing skyscrapers or navigating hidden urban spots—to track down rare variants.  
Linko's Specialization: The playable S-class character Linko is deeply connected to this mechanic. Known as one of the top "Tamachi pros" in Hethereau, he features unique outfits and abilities that make tracking and picking up rare Tamachi signals much easier.

Let me make it clear right away, almost none of this is true. 

Oh, it's true that Linko plays Tamachi. So does Mint. But I can't and neither can you. There is no "in-game index" where players track their findings. Players do not "explore the map—often climbing skyscrapers or navigating hidden urban spots—to track down rare variants" because there's no Tamachi game a player can play. I wish there was. Gemini makes it sound like it would be a lot of fun.

The sources that Gemini quotes to back up these claims are from in-character posts by Linko on Instagram, a beta video on YouTube and a reddit thread where a bunch of people talk about how cool it would be if the Tamachi game ever became playable. Which it would. So get on that, Hotta!

Honestly, it's a textbook example of why you should never trust an AI summary without carefully checking the sources it cites. I actually had half a paragraph written about how I must somehow have missed it when they added creature collecting to NTE, when I thought "hold on a minute..." 

I do find it very amusing that an AI, which is effectively a fictional entity, finds it difficult to tell the difference between the social media posts of real people and those of other fictional entities. I know it's fashionable to hate this sort of thing but it's getting to feel like the future I imagined living in, back when I was younger, and it's not that far from being the reality that's existed in my head all my life. 

Who can say what's really real, after all? 

Ask Not For Whom The Verses Mourn Because I Have No Clue!

The next big content drop for Neverness To Everness is due in less than a week. It's called For Whom The Verses Mourn because of course it is. I don't know which of the gacha games started this trend for incomprehensible, enigmatic chapter titles but hats off to whoever it was. To paraphrase Jeanette Winterson's mother, why be sensible when you can be weird?

The last update was called Rising From The Moonlit Fog and I did the preview post for that one on August 12. The pace is relentless. Is anyone playing an MMORPG that gets major content drops every six weeks? All year round? No, I didn't think so.

Perhaps a better question is would you want to be? And an even better question than that would be wouldn't it depend on what content it was?

I'm beginning to wonder if NTE might have an identity problem. The game's been out for five months now. This will be the fourth big update. They're running at around one every six weeks, which is par for the genre. So far we've had:

 

Dreamwalk Corridor (June) - The main storyline continues via the Corridor of Echoes episode, which expands on the Scarlet Letter plot and sees Nanally lose part of her soul. It also added a largely pointless and now forgotten resort island just off the coast of Hethereau. Has anyone been back there since? I know I haven't. Oh, and there was the Porsche collab, which was just weird.

999 Nights (July) - If you thought adding a resort island was a strange choice for the first update, the follow-up invites you to hold its beer. This one added a whole new game from a completely different genre. Not just some mini-game or holiday event, either - a complete fantasy RPG that could quite reasonably have been launched as a standalone title. It's now permanent content, so if you ever feel like playing a high-fantasy ARPG using NTE as the lobby for it, well now you can! As for the main plot, that had to wait until next time. Poor old Nanally.

Rising from the Moonlight Fog - (August): Back to the plot at last. In fact, not just back to it but through it and out the other side. The whole Scarlet Letter plotline concluded with what felt like unseemly haste, with the entire organization broken up and whatever threat it represented nullified. At this point it's unclear whether there even is a "main plotline" any more. We're left with some vague hints and sense of unease and that's about it. As for new territory, this one added a vast tract of largely empty countryside and... a resort beach. Are you sensing a theme here? If not, you should be.

For Whom The Verses Mourn - (September) : And here we are again, anticipating what's coming next. According to the seven-minute promo video, we'll be starting a new storyline involving Blackbird, the witch from the Witch's House, who popped up at some point earlier as a consultant but now takes point for a tale involving a mysterious letter and a trip to a new location called St. Arbor. Does it have anything to do with anything else that's happened? I don't know but I very much doubt it. We're also getting a new district of Hethereau. Well, kind of. We're getting a theme park. And the bloody Porsche collab is back.

There's an hour-long "Preview Special" video that might make a bit more sense of all of that but I haven't watched it and I'm not about to. I have watched the seven-minute PV though and I'll watch again right now, to refresh my memory. Here, why don't you watch along with me? 

Yeah, well, that's seven minutes etc.

I didn't get the stopwatch out (I don't own a stopwatch, before you get any ideas...) but I'd estimate the story gets maybe thirty seconds of that seven minutes. About half the running time goes to showing off the new costumes. Pukaland, the unfortunately-named theme park, and the stupid racing cars get most of the rest.

It's becoming hard to ignore the priorities here. In four updates we've had three new open-world zones or areas, all of them focusing on leisure activities: two beach resorts and a theme park. Everything else is just open countryside. For a game originally predicated on life in the big city it seems like an odd choice.

Or should I say a series of odd choices. Two playgrounds might be counted a co-incidence but three makes a trend. 

And I'm not even mentioning the wealth of ancillary content that's been added since launch, the vast majority of which also revolves around mini-games, gambling and the kind of thing you might find yourself doing on vacation or at the weekend. As a working city, Hethereau sure takes its playtime seriously.

About this time in a post about an upcoming update to a game I'm playing, I'd normally start digging into the details to try and figure out where the story might be going. I'm not going to do that this time. It's increasingly obvious there's not much point in doing it for NTE. That's not how the game works.

It's taken me a while to figure it out. Coming from Wuthering Waves and before it Genshin Impact, I'd made an automatic, unconscious assumption that what would be driving player interest and retention would be the story. All the big gacha open-world games build a good deal of their reputation on the quality of the writing, which has frequently been exemplary. 

And the the writing in Neverness To Everness is excellent. There's no questioning the quality of the individual stories or the authenticity of the dialog. The voice actors bring the writers' words to life with flair and authority. All of that remains demonstrably superior to almost anything I've been used to seeing in a quarter of a century playing MMORPGs, where the standards are so much lower.

No, the thing that makes NTE quite different from all those other gacha games is the apparent lack of a through-line or even a structure designed to facilitate the telling of an epic tale. What, after all, is going on in Hethereau? Really, not all that much. 

In most games there's a crisis of some kind or at least we enter the world at some moment of decision. There's tension and threat. Not so in Hethereau. It's a peaceful city where everything seems to be trucking along nicely with no dark clouds looming on the horizon.

The crisis happened forty years ago. It's long over now. The Appraiser, who suffers from the inevitable amnesia trope, hasn't woken up to an ongoing conflict in which she plays a key part so much as she's been rounded up by social services. They've found her a place to live and given her a job to do. There are suggestions that there might be some government work to come later but so far, in nearly six months, all she's had to deal with is a series of minor family crises, most of which affect no-one much outside of Eibon Antiques.

I ought to make it clear I have no problem with a game having a central plot that never rises above the quotidian. On the contrary: it's very refreshing not to have to go out and save the world every goddam time. 

What I do find problematic is the randomness of it all. It's not as though there's even an episodic or picaresque storyline, where the pieces slowly start to fall into place and the bigger picture becomes clear.

Or not yet, at least. I did have the sense last time that there might be something brewing along those lines, with the Rules Anomalies starting to cause some existential issues for BAC and the rest of the authorities. I can only hope the Blackbird plotline ties in to that somehow but looking at the video I get the much stronger impression it's going to be something they've cooked up for Halloween. I mean, witches, bonfires, creepy, spooky, shadowy villages... in October?

 

And then the next update, six weeks after that, is going to be the Christmas one, isn't it? Are we going to go heavy on the storyline then, in the biggest of all holiday seasons? I doubt it. I'd put my money on some kind of winter sports resort opening up, somewhere off  in those snow-capped mountains we can see in the distance.

It seems so much more likely that way. NTE is all about the fun, not the drama. That's where it's pitched. Sure, there's a story for those that like that sort of thing but I don't get the sense that story is driving anything. If you look at the promo video, it's not even pushing the new characters' combat skills. It's far more interested in what they're wearing, most of which looks like it's meant for going clubbing or lounging around at home.

I didn't even mention the characters, did I? Obviously, as a gacha game, every update has to come with characters to roll on (And their weapons, but I'd have to say that weapons in NTE really are very much an afterthought. They barely get a mention in the promotional material.).

The two characters this time are Blackbird, of course, and Akane. I may be jumping the gun here because I have no foreknowledge of the plot for St. Arbor but I'd be very surprised if Akane plays much of a part in it. There's a major side-story in the update involving Nanally's band, The Whoots!!!. Akane will be in that and, I'd predict, only in that. 

If I'm right, it makes the whole team-building aspect of the game even more abstract than it already was. Last time I wondered how Zankou could be in the player's team when she's a) a baddie and b) in prison. Now we're adding Akane, a retired rock musician currently tending bar in a cellar club. What, exactly, does she know about combat?  Is she even an Esper?

It might sound like I'm complaining about all of this but I'm not. Not really. In a way, all of this chaos and confusion is a big part of what makes Neverness To Everness so appealing in the first place. You never know what's going to happen because none of it makes any sense. And I've always liked entertainments that don't make sense.

 

The entire set-up is fraught with inconsistencies, of course. Not only is all the action forty years in the past but there's the whole thing about how a government agency sends the player character to work for a drunk, who employs children to fight extra-dimensional entities, the logic of which remains as fuzzy as ever. I guess with that kind of background, having a guitar-playing bartender tag along for the fights isn't exactly going to break immersion.

In the end, perhaps the only problem is applying real-world logic and values to a fantasy world. We don't have any experience to go on so how can we judge? Who knows what it would be like if extra-dimensional entities popped up anywhere and everywhere and half the population mutated at puberty, grew tails and horns and started reading minds and throwing energy bolts. Who knows what might seem normal and logical after nearly half a century of that?

For all my apparent skepticism, I'm still very much looking forward to For Whom The verses mourn. I'll be rolling for Akane, not that I'll have any idea what to do with her if I get her, other than that it would be cool if she could hang out with Flora. I'm also very much looking forward to seeing where The Whoots!!! go next, event though the music they make is really terrible and Flora can't play the drums to save her life. Which, I suppose, might be something she ends up having to do.

Blackbird isn't a character I've ever had much time for but maybe she'll show something more of her personality now she has the spotlight. And as for Pukaland, well, who doesn't love a trip to the fairground? 

I think as long as I can keep reminding myself the plot's almost certainly going nowhere, it'll all be fine. And then, if it actually turns out I'm wrong about that, it'll be a lovely surprise. 

What Are The Chances?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seems like decent odds to me. 

Some Random Observations On Games I've Been Playing

This is not going to be neat, structured essay like the one on AI. It has nothing to do with artificial intelligence, even though that was what I was planning on writing about next time, when I finished that one. I still have a couple more posts on the topic in mind but I think I'll let the AI flames die down a little before I stoke them up again.

This is also not going to be a post about the various problems I'm still having with my PC. Progress has been made on that front but I think I'll leave it until I reach something that looks like a conclusion there. I know it's not the most interesting topic to read about. Or write about for that matter.

And on that theme, the other thing I won't be writing about today is blogging. Once again, I have some ideas on the hobby that might get an airing at some point but now, I think, is not the time. Blaugust leaves a long shadow. 

Having crossed my first three possibles off the list, I was scratching around for something to write about today and as it so often is, my go-to for inspiration was my screenshot folder. I take a lot of screenshots, many for the sheer pleasure of looking at them, others with a post in mind. It's a good place to start when I'm low on ideas. 

I'm very untidy when it comes to storing my screenshots but I have a folder now specifically for lock screen images, which is where all the best ones go. I used to pick a screenshot folder from an individual game and point the slideshow function at that but this summer it finally occurred to me I could collate and curate them so I'd only get to see the good ones.

I particularly wanted to avoid having images on my desktop that were more UI than scenery or characters. I try to avoid shots with the UI in general but some games make it so fiddly to hide I just accept the clutter and edit it out if I want to use it in a post. Of course, sometimes I need the UI to be in shot because that's what I'm posting about.

Oh look. Here I am, talking about blogging after all. So much for promises.

But since I've gotten myself onto the subject of UIs, why don't I start there? I was browsing through the shots from the last week or so and I saw this:

Just look at it! And it's by no means the worst example from that game. It's Black Desert Online, in case you didn't immediately recognize it. I logged in for the first time in several years last week because I was wondering if it might make a suitable replacement for New World when that game sunsets next year and BDO is right there on GeForce Now, already set up and waiting.

It might work as a substitute, all though they aren't all that similar, but first I'd have to do something about the UI. Not counting the ones on the left, which are my character's vital stats, there are twenty-eight icons along the top of the screen and eleven along the bottom. There are also eight under the character's vitals and another five randomly floating in the middle of the screen.

By contrast, New World has sixteen and that's only if you count everything.Nearly all of them are for combat. 

That said, even then, it still looks pretty ugly.

 I'm sure many of the on-screen icons in both games could be switched off, if I dug into the controls. Or maybe they couldn't. It's odd that I haven't already tried, if so. 

The thing is, both of these games can be played quite comfortably with no UI at all and I've played them both that way, for long stretches too, when I've been doing nothing but traveling, gathering and fighting. Which, let's face it, is much of the time in almost every MMORPG..

I'm really in no position to complain about screen clutter anyway. I mean, I play EverQuest II! I'm pretty sure it has to be the all-time champion of clutter. 

Here's a typical screenshot, taken in the last couple of weeks:

 In that image I count one hundred and forty-five buttons you can press and another thirty-eight that just provide passive information. The scary part is that I know pretty much what every one of them does without even having to mouse-over them.

That, I think, is why I found the BDO screen so intimidating when I logged in the other evening. I'm fine having a hundred buttons I recognize immediately but ten that mean absolutely nothing is enough to make me think I ought to log out and play something else instead. 

I do like Black Desert, though, and I'm sure it'll all come back to me after a session or two. The sensible thing would be to roll a new character and start over but I already have four and they've all been through the same low-level content. Even though it was a while ago, I can still remember a lot of it. I don't think I want to give it a fifth go.

It's quite disturbing to remember how amazing Black Desert's graphics were thought to be, back when the game came out a decade ago. They look kinda funky now. That attempt at visual realism seems a tad old-fashioned, even though it looks a lot more convincing in New World. 

Speaking of Amazon's doomed MMORPG,  things have been going nicely for me in Aeternum. Or at least they have since I looked up how to get started on the Nighthaven storyline. 

Silly me! I thought just going there would be enough but no. If you turn up without an introduction, absolutely no-one will talk to you at all.

I had to go all the way back to Compass Keys and speak to someone there, then get on a boat to get back to where I'd just come from before I could get the plot moving. 

After that it was fine. The fights weren't too bad provided I didn't let myself get mobbed. The scenery was stunning.

And I do like fighting werewolves. It's funny how some mobs just feel good to fight and others less so. I've never been mad keen on fighting skeletons in any game and there are a lot of skeletons in Aeternum. Ditto zombies, which I find I can have more than enough of very quickly, too.

Other opponents I can do without include boars, bears and bats but I'm fine with any amount of wolves, big cats, bandits, or pirates. The occasional crocodile isn't unwelcome, either.. Were-creatures, though, I'm particularly partial to beating up and there are, as you'd expect, plenty of those in Nighthaven.

There's probably also a story although I'd be lying if I said I could remember what it was. I have the same problem with most high fantasy games these days. It all just blurs into one. 

I think I reached saturation point with this sort of thing about five years ago. That's one reason why I seem to get so much more out of the more contemporary-themed storylines in the gacha games I've been playing.

 

Take, for example, the side-quest I did in Neverness To Everness yesterday. It was one of the bond quests that pop up in the open world, when you run into someone you know on the streets of Hethereau. In this case, it was Fadia, who Flora happened to bump into in a bar. 

It was one of those bars that's mostly open to the street. Flora was just passing by and she spotted Fadia inside, It would have been rude to keep on walking. 

Flora wasn't day-drinking, I'd like to make that clear. Well, she wasn't until she met Fadia. But then the two of them started putting away the shots until Fadia was drunk enough to make a pass. Flora very gently indicated that she wasn't interested and called Fadia a taxi, which she pretty much had to pour her into.

Last seen, Fadia was hanging out of the window of the cab, making a final play for some physical contact next time they met.

The weird thing is, this is exactly the sort of writing I dislike in fantasy games, where I always find it completely inappropriate and unconvincing, but it comes across very differently in a modern setting, where it just seems to fit in with life in a big city. I still tend to rebuff any advances but I don't begrudge their having been made in the same way, especially when they make me laugh like this one did.

I also did a longish side-quest in which a talking bag of french fries had me polling the local neighborhood to find out how good it tasted. Or something like that. That ended up being a lovely, bittersweet tale about belonging and friendship. The sunset at the end was just sublime. 

And that's what I've been up to in my games of late. 

Oh, I also played through the first episode of Dispatch on Luna. But that can have a post of its own sometime, when I've played a bit more. As a spoiler for that, though, so far I've found it a bit on the annoying side.

Hethereau Across The River - New District Or New Backdrop?

Malvaltar mentioned in the comments the other day that the inaccessible part of the city of Hethereau, to the east of the river, had been redeveloped. It's a large area, easily as big as any of the existing districts, and it's been there since the game started but we've never been able to go there.

It supposedly can't be visited by NPCs either since the two bridges are closed, although only one is physically blocked to traffic. I guess an NPC could walk across even if none of them seem to be doing it. There are a couple of small boys watching the construction workers but that's all.

Flora can't cross the bridge or the river. She's tried but a big, red barrier pops up to tell her there's No Access. There are clearly people living and working over there, though, because you can see vehicles moving around the streets. No people but maybe they're just too far away to spot.

Since I'd heard something was apparently happening over there, I thought I'd go take a look from as close as I could get. I started off by porting into one of the ReRo Boxes to the south-east and from there Flora did her usual jog-scramble-glide to get to the coast. I still find it much faster to get around that way than to drive. When you can climb over any fence, scale even the tallest buildings in a few bounds and then throw yourself off to glide across the rooftops, who needs a car?

I came out opposite the huge funfair on the southern promontory. That's been a tease since the start. You can see the rides but you can't get to them, let alone get on them.

This time, as I was looking down on the fair from the clifftops, I noticed a huge dirigible in the sky that I didn't remember seeing before. As I got closer, I could see lots of large balloons and other aerial decorations that didn't seem familiar either. 

 "New" fairground, with balloons.

 

Who knows, though? For one thing, my memory is extremely unreliable and for another I'm playing on GeForce Now's servers, where the GPUs are a good deal more powerful than even my good graphic card, let alone the onboard graphics I'd been reduced to using until playing at all nearly killed my PC. There might always have been balloons and I might just have forgotten them or they could have been there all along, just not showing up on my graphics settings.

That latter possibility also makes any comparison between screenshots I took on my own machine, weeks ago, and ones I took today somewhat suspect, at least when it comes to the finer details. It's a moot point where the funfair is concerned anyway because although I remember taking some shots, I can't now find them.

That's not surprising. I have multiple folders of screenshots from Neverness To Everness. The game itself stores shots you take using the in-game camera in a folder in its own directory, while screenshots I take with Win+PrtScr go into the general "Screenshots" folder. I've also had to copy the folders off my old C drive that I'm no longer using, so I have a different location for all the old shots.

Meanwhile, for the new ones, I can't just use the in-game camera any more because those shots go to GFN's servers and get deleted at the end of each session. I'm now using Win+PrtScr for all my shots, something that's been made an order of magnitude easier by the addition of the F7 "Hide UI" command in the last update. (If I do use the in-game camera for the various features it offers, I then have to take a Windows screenshot of the image, which is a bit of an awkward workaround.)

Old fairground, no balloons.

 

Just to add another level of uncertainty over whether I did or did not take any particular shot, NTE doesn't automatically save your screenshots on your hard drive. You do have to remember to use the local download function, when using the in-game camera because NTE only keeps the shots in your in-game Gallery for 15 days. After that, they're automatically deleted. 

With all of that, it's hardly surprising I can't always find a specific shot from the past. I haven't been able to find the ones I thought I took of the fairground so I can't say for certain that it's been redeveloped but my feeling is that it has.

Looking across the river to the east, I wasn't sure anything had changed. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't been clued into it by Mailvaltar, I wouldn't have noticed. One thing that did strike me immediately was that there didn't seem to be any cranes over there. I did seem to remember some construction going on before.

I spent about fifteen or twenty minutes jogging along the riverside, peering across to the far side and trying to see if I could see anything different but it all looked much as I remembered. The bridges were still closed. There were still vehicles moving through the streets.  

After a while, I thought of checking my old screenshots and with some diligence I was able to find a few of the eastern district. I went up and down the riverside, trying to find the exact spots where they'd been taken, so I could get a clear comparison. That took long enough that Flora decided it was worth getting her scooter out, much to the dismay of people walking along the sidewalk.

Old district with forested hills and over-road walkway.

 

After a great deal of trial and error, I eventually managed to isolate two locations that seemed to be the right places. One was looking south-west, back towards the fairground, the other north-east into the hills. And both looked substantively different in game to what I was seeing in the record.

The whole of the cityscape on the far side of the river has changed. It's very interesting that I couldn't tell without the evidence in front of me because it's not a subtle change. It's a fairly radical re-interpretation. 

The buildings that used to be there were, now I come to examine them critically, really quite old-fashioned. They have quite a lot of the 1960s and '70s about them, the sort of pre-stressed concrete neo-brutalism that used to be so popular with local government architects when I was growing up. 

In the shot looking over the bridge, for example, you can see one of those completely enclosed over-the-roadway walkways that were a feature of the city nearest to me when I was in my teens. In fact, that whole square, boxy office-block waterfront could almost literally have been copied from a photograph of that town back in the seventies.

I'm very fond of that style of architecture, partly because it feels quite nostalgic but also because I find its clinical austerity quite soothing. The muted color and smooth-but-rough texture of concrete has a pleasant, tranquilizing effect, especially in the rain. 

I can see, though, why it might not be quite the right style for a near-future metropolis like Hethereau. The revised district is much more modern. The skyscrapers are much taller and the tallest have that edgy, knife-like look so familiar from the skylines of Dubai or even modern London. There's a lot of glass and the late afternoon sun glares back at you balefully as it sets. It's a mood.

New district with bare escarpment and completely revamped architecture.

 

Even so, there's still a surprising boxiness to it all. If the old version looked extremely mid-20th century, the new one hasn't quite shaken off its past. 

What it has done is grown. As you can see from the view behind the buildings, looking out to the countryside... well, there's not all that much countryside left. Where there used to be low hills covered in trees with higher, forested hills rising behind them, now there's just one escarpment, topped with trees but bare where there's clearly been felling and quite possibly quarrying.

To the east of that there are a couple of large blocks of offices or apartments. Below the rise, the valley floor is filled with what definitely look like apartment blocks. The city is growing.

In his comment, Mailvaltar hoped the redesign meant a new playable area on the way, not just a cosmetic uplift. Before I'd been to see it, I thought it would have to be the former. Surely no-one would waste resources on a changing the appearance of a part of the city players would never be able to visit?

Having seen it, though, I'm not quite so sure. The screenshots of the former version point up just how out of place it used to look. Or, perhaps, it makes me wonder just how old the rest of Hetherau is, if you stop to look at it properly. 

Old Hethereau, as we remember it. Fondly, even though we were never there.

 

It also makes me realize that one of the reasons the city has always felt so convincingly like a real place, right from the start, is that it has more than just a patina of age. Architecturally, culturally and aesthetically, Hethereau gives a very solid impression of a city that's developed organically over time. The center is very modern and slick but as you travel further out, you find yourself in what can only be smaller towns or villages that have been assimilated by the urban sprawl. Different districts, even streets, have a very different feel to them, just as they would in a real city.

It's extremely effective in evoking memories of actual places I've been and I haven't even been to the part of the world from where the designers are most likely drawing their inspiration. Nevertheless, I can all but name places I have visited in real life that parts of Hethereau remind me of, quite specifically.

In that context, it makes a great deal of sense for there to be an older, slightly more run-down district across the river. And the new version doesn't entirely dispel that impression. The buildings are newer, yes, but only some of them are flashier. Alongside those cutting-edge skyscrapers that have just appeared, there are ranks of more modest, more utilitarian buildings. 

From across the river, the eastern district looks like where the urban workers live, studded with enclaves of the rich, who look out from their massive windows, high above the gritty streets to the forested hills that they can still see but which the workers beneath them can now enjoy only in memory.

There would certainly be plenty of stories to be told in a place like that. We can only hope we get to hear some of them.