Sometimes You Have To Make Your Own Luck

I'd love this to be a post about how I got another S-Class Banner Character on my first try and for almost no effort but sadly my luck didn't run to a third straight win. I thought briefly that it had because on my fifth roll this morning, a big S popped and up came the image above. 

Yes, it's Iroi and yes, for a second there, I thought I'd won her, but I realized almost immediately something else must have happened. When you win any character of whatever class you get a bespoke mini-movie, complete with posing and dialog. This was just a couple of static images.

I was confused enough to stop and fiddle around in the settings and options to see if I could work out what I'd won. It might surprise - or more likely shock - some players, to find out just how little I know about this game, even though I've been playing almost every day for weeks now. 

It surprises me a little, too, although not all that much. I somehow seem to be able to combine a keen sense of curiosity for what lies over the next hill with a bland indifference to how to get there. I'm like a sheep crossed with a cat. 

This is the way it generally goes: I start a new game, run through the opening tutorial then, if I like it, I carry on playing without thinking too much more about it. 

Usually what comes next is a hyper-extended quasi-tutorial that feels like the game's started but which is actually still supposed to be teaching you how to play. The problem with this approach, which I always used to recommend as probably the best way to introduce the various complexities of any game, is that I let it all wash over me and very little sticks. 

I'm sure, at some point, some tool tip or voice-over must have explained what the various buttons do on pretty much every screen but all I've done is click through them as fast as possible because I was already paying and I wanted to get on with the good bits.

It's not until I run into some problem that I stop and try to figure out for myself what all the buttons do or how the systems work. And to be fair to myself, it's not like I needed to know before, is it? Games are very easy and straightforward at the level I'm operating. It makes sense to leave it until I have a reason before digging into the details.

Absent a tutorial or a toll-tip, trial and error usually works. I tried all the buttons and one of them turned out to be a tally of every dice roll I'd made since the game began. It actually keeps the records for a rolling six months but until we get there it's everything. Looking at that, I could see I'd won an outfit.

My first! I was excited.

I needn't have been. Yes, I'd won an outfit. It was a low chance and once again I'd been very lucky to get it. Unfortunately it's an outfit for the character I was trying to win and I didn't win her. So now I have an outfit no-one can wear.

I did check. I wondered if maybe it would work for the whole team but no such luck. It's Iroi or nothing.

I carried on for a while, hoping I'd get lucky twice. I'd pre-set the number of rolls I was willing to use and I had about twenty rolls left before I hit my limit. No dice, so to speak, so I stopped. I'll almost certainly have another go before the Banner changes but for now I was done.

I was still in the mood for some gambling, though, so I thought I'd see what was on the other board, the one that uses the cheap, blue dice. I had loads of those. Last time I looked it was all characters I already had, although you always need multiples to Ascend. This time there seemed to be a couple I didn't remember getting so I thought I'd try a few rolls.

In the end I think I rolled about 25 times. There was the usual sale on where you get eight rolls for the price of ten so I did that a couple of times and then banged out a few singles on top. And I did pretty well. I got the usual couple of dupes but I also got an S-Class I didn't already have - Fadia.

I don't particularly want Fadia. If I'm honest I'm not entirely sure I can remember who she is but every character you acquire opens up some related content like Bonds and background stories so it's always good to get anyone new. 

And maybe I'll need her. After I finished rolling dice I blew a million Fons on scratch cards (I said I was in a gambling mood...) and that made me wonder where I was with my Tycoon levels. Not very far was the answer. I was on Level 19 but all the conditions had been met so I just had to press the button.

For Level 20, though, I was stuck on Exploration again. I had most of the boxes ticked but I still needed five Rabbit Holes (I'd only done one.), three characters at Level 40 (Again I only had one.) and an Anomaly Commission (I  was at 8/9 there). Rabbit Holes were easy. Or they were once I noticed you could adjust the difficulty level. Things didn't go so well before that.

Getting the character levels just meant spending some resources and I had plenty. I can't remember exactly what happened with the Anomaly Commission. I know picked a bad one. I had a look at the options available and I thought I'd try the boxing gloves. I remembered that being easy first time around.

Yes. Well. Maybe it was. The upgraded version, however, is a DPS test and I could not pass it. The gloves take a defensive stance and you have to defeat them in sixty seconds. I couldn't get them under 80%. 

At some point I fought the dog again and got the Arc but how that fits into the picture I can't quite figure out now. Maybe I needed two after all? 

I also did Dragon Gate Substitute, for which, confusingly, you fight some fish, not a dragon at all. They were easy enough, although I made it harder by falling off the roof of the building and having to start over.

The final box I needed to tick after all that was something called  Headless Rider, which is gated by an Anomaly Commission by the name of Ride Assault. I had no clue how or where to find it and it wasn't on the map so I looked it up.

Ride Assault has a complicated trigger sequence, where you have to be driving a car (A bike won't do.) down Foxwindow Avenue sometime between eight in the evening and dawn just to get it to pop. In the highly unlikely event you just happen to meet the conditions, a headless biker appears and if you chase him, he leads you into a tunnel, whereupon he summons a portal to take you to his Anomaly Realm. Then he tries to kill you.

That's not the fight you need for the Tycoon level. It's the fight you need to get that fight. But you have to start somewhere. Having read a couple of guides and fiddled with the clock to get the time of day right, I crashed about on Foxwindow until the biker appeared. I chased him, entered his realm, jumped out of my car to fight him and got slaughtered. It wasn't even remotely close.

I am now going to have to go away, read up on the strats, apply some upgrades and pick a team that has the right elemental qualities to exploit his weaknesses before I take another run at him. This means more research and finding out something about how a few systems work because I barely have a clue on most of them.

Of course, if I had any gaming skills I could probably just brute force it but I don't so it'll require some cheesing finesse. As it stand, not only can I not even begin to read any of the tells that let you know when you need to Counter or Parry. I wouldn't even know what to press if I did. I have never knowingly Countered or Parried anything since I started - nor ever felt like I needed to, either.

And it may be that I still don't. It might be that once I pick the right team and upgrade everyone, button-mashing will be good enough again. I hope so, anyway. I'm certainly not playing this game to git gud, or even for the fights, for that matter. But sometimes you have to make at least a token effort. Either that or give up, an option I always find rather attractive.

That's where I am with Neverness To Everness right now. Slowly learning how the game works so I can avoid playing as much of it as possible. 

Don't anyone try to tell me how to have fun!

How To Become A Tycoon In Neverness To Everness By Really Trying

It's been almost a week since I last posted anything about Neverness To Everness but rest assured I've been playing every day. Playing but not really getting anywhere...

I haven't been able to help noticing that everyone else, by which I mostly mean Malvaltar and Nimgimli but also literally every single person I ever see talking about the game when I google it or try to look something up, is way, way ahead of me. Everyone is Level 50. Or 60. The exact cap still seems a bit vaguely defined. 

Everyone has done a whole load of things I haven't done and quite a few of them seem to be things I haven't even heard of. I'm up to date with the main quest/story, which is a first for me in one of these games, but other than that I seem to be a long way behind.

Not that it matters. NTE isn't a competitive game. It isn't even an MMO and it makes absolutely no difference what pace anyone takes in a single-player game. There's no-one there to criticize or goad you along or wonder why you're so under-geared for your level and would you like some help?

So why was I bothered? Because my apartment is starting to feel a little cramped, what with that twelve-foot tall kewpie doll blocking the view and Mint wandering around in her nightie, sighing to herself, that's why. I already mentioned how I felt I had to buy her a bed of her own so she'd stop sleeping in mine and I wasn't exaggerating when I said there wasn't room for two beds on the upper deck. I can barely get to the stairs!

That's what started me wondering why I still only have the basic, starter apartment. Shouldn't I have the next one by now? So I began looking into it.

Access to housing, like most of the non-combat activities in the game, is controlled by your Tycoon level. That's a discrete progression system completely unconnected to you Hunter level. The two work independently and very differently.

Hunter is your basic MMO leveling path, a little bit more nuanced but still much the same process underneath. You quest, you kill stuff, you do dailies and you get xp which makes your level go up. For Tycoon, you have to meet specific criteria to complete each level. It's a literal tick-box exercise.

When I started playing NTE, I understood all that but somehow I'd mostly forgotten about it. I didn't particularly want my Hunter level to go up because all that seems to do is make the fights harder, which sends you scurrying around, trying to get the mats to upgrade your gear, just so you can get back to where you started. The traditional MMORPG gameplay loop, in other words. As for Tycoon level, that went up so naturally just through playing the game, I stopped paying any attention to it at all.

Which was why, after more than six weeks of regular play Flora was still only Tycoon Level 8. Enough get the next house, Eden Apartments, but having looked at the cost it seemed like it might be better to push through to Level 9 and buy the third,  Skyview Halls, instead. Eden costs 1m Fons but Skyview is only another 400k and Flora had more than 2.5m to burn.

(Of course it didn't occur to me until I started writing this that owning Eden Apartments might be a pre-requisite to buying Skyview. I probably should have thought of that. It's a common enough practice in games. Luckily, I just googled it and it seems skipping ahead is fine so long as you have the cash. Phew!)

Now I'd been encouraged to think about it at all, I was a bit puzzled why my Tycoon progress had stalled. It was very easy to find out. It's all laid out extremely clearly in game. I just hadn't bothered to look before.

It turned out I was being blocked by an incomplete Exploration Guide requirement. I'd barely noticed there were such things as Exploration Guides so it was hardly surprising I hadn't finished one. They're a sort of tick-list of stuff you can do in the game so I was one tick-list short of a tick-list.

The reason I hadn't already done everything necessary just by playing was mostly that a couple of the items on the list were so pointless I'd never thought they were worth wasting my time on. They were extremely easy, though, so knocking those off took not much longer than it took to find the location on the map and portal there.

As soon as that was done, I hit the big Level Up button and dinged Tycoon 9. Only the Level Up button was still glowing. I pressed it again and Ding! Tycoon Level 10!

Thanks to some very considerate game design, all the requirements for Tycoon are granted retrospectively. If you happen to have completed something on the Level 12 tick-list while you were still only level 6, you'll find it neatly crossed off the list when you get there. 

In that way I leapfrogged several levels on the way to Tycoon 16, which is where I had to stop for, as we'll see later, financial reasons. There were a few more Exploration Guide boxes to tick here and there along the way and I had to buy a motorbike to hit the "Own 3 Vehicles" qualification, a bike being by far the cheapest option just to get that box ticked. 

There were a number of requirements related to house decoration but of course I'd long since done all of those. I also had plenty of money which was fortunate because to be a Tycoon does demand a certain income.

The most interesting of all the asks was the Pink Paws Heist. Access to this is opens at Tycoon 10 and completing it at least once is a requirement for Tycoon 11.

Before I got the nod, I knew the event existed but I'd kind of decided I wasn't going to do it. Pink Paws is the bizarrely-named central bank in Hethereau and a Heist there sounded like a robbery, where you steal from the vaults. I didn't like the sound of that.

In a kind of throwback to my RPG days, I'd made up my mind Flora would not become a bank robber because it would be out of character, which is why I'd done nothing to find out more about the event after I knew it existed. Had I taken the trouble to investigate, I'd have learned the Pink Paws Heist isn't a robbery at all. It's perfectly legal. In fact it's sanctioned and run by the bank itself!

There's a whole backstory to it, albeit only sketched in outline by Chiz, who tells you all about it when you meet her in the bank lobby. It was apparently some media event run by a Streamer that went so well the Pink Paws board decided to stage regular reconstructions for publicity purposes. Or something. I wasn't taking notes.

It's fun, or it would be if there weren't sirens going off constantly. They're deafening! It's on a timer that gives you about nine minutes before something happens but what that might be I can't tell you because, since all I needed to do was complete the run to tick the box, I jumped into the ReRo Phone Box and teleported out at the earliest opportunity. 

I will be back, though. It's quite lucrative and I need the money. I finally hit the buffers at Tycoon Level 16 because the next level asks for more money than I've got. Or, I should say, than I've ever had. 

In another fine piece of game design, to level up as a Tycoon, you don't have to pay anyone any money, you just have to be able to prove you have it. Or have had it, at some point. The tick-box is for lifetime earnings and to reach the next level I need to have made another 450k or so. 

Looking ahead, it's pretty much all "Earn More Money" right the way to Tycoon 20. There are a few more Exploration ticks to get for Level 20 itself but otherwise Flora's already done everything that's going to be asked of her. 

The Tycoon ladder carries on past 20 but from there on it's locked for some reason. You can't even look at what you need to do until you ding 20 yourself. 

As for rewards or unlocks, there's Chiz herself at Level 18 and not a lot else. All five houses are unlocked already, although I can't afford the last two. 

Also unlocked is the Pawbes Rich List, a competitive table of who has the most money in the game. Uniquely in my experience, this includes both players and NPCs. I don't think it gets you anything other than bragging rights, a title and a fancy border round your name, which would seem to be of limited appeal in a single-player game.

I want Chiz, so that will motivate me to work on the next couple of levels. After that I guess I ought to make it to 20 to see what comes after. Yes, I could just look it up on the Wiki but I'm in no rush. 

What I really need to do is start thinking about which house I'm going to buy next and who I'm going to ask to come live in it with me. I'm thinking Lacrimosa would make a good flatmate. Or maybe Chiz, when she joins the team. 

I hear she's good at making money. That could come in handy. A tycoon always needs more money. 

Making Sense Of Neverness To Everness - or - The Genshin Impact

I've been having an interesting conversation with Mailvaltar in the comments to his recent post on Neverness To Everness. I had too much I wanted to say to fit into a comment thread so I told him I'd probably spin it up into a post of my own. And then he pointed out he'd already posted something very much along the same lines five years ago, back when Genshin Impact first came out.

I had a look through my back pages and it turned out so had I. It's quite hard to remember what an... er... impact that game had when it arrived. How strange and unfamiliar it seemed. In my own First Impressions piece, I said "just about everything in the game I've seen so far, is confusing". I'd never played a game quite like it although apparently millions of players, who'd made their way through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, saw things a little differently. 

Breath of the Wild wasn't an MMO, of course, but then again, neither is Genshin Impact. Probably. There seem to be varying opinions on that. It was one of the things I was confused about. I'm not sure it's much clearer now. 

All of these games seem to live in a nebulous, undefined hinterland, somewhere in the liminal spaces of a Venn Diagram overlapping MMOs, RPGs, Visual Novels, Life Sims, Co-Op, Single Player, Open World and a bunch of other genres and playstyles. I'd say it's indisputably a genre but if it has a name anyone's agreed on, I don't know what it is.

Oh, wait... yes I do! We call them Gacha Games. That's the catch-all, isn't it? 

Except all that's gacha about them is their main source of revenue. As a descriptor, it's about as helpful as Subscription or Free To Play. It tells you how the company stays in business but it doesn't give you much of a clue about the type of game you're going to be playing.

Except it sort of does. As Mailvaltar observes, gacha games are "extremely alike mechanically...even if the actual gameplay hails from completely different genres." 

And that's especially true of the way they handle character progression. His almost six year-old post linked above, my own from a month before and the post by Tobold that provoked it, all deal with the way Genshin Impact requires a huge amount of grinding to sustain the progress needed to keep the combat as easy as it was when you were starting out. Without that, combat can eventually get too tough for casuals like me and Tobold.

As a general rule, this seems to be approximately how all the games that followed Genshin's huge commercial success roll. They also follow what's looking like a genre convention of odd, quirky, enigmatic names - Zenless Zone Zero, Honkai Star Rail, Noah's Heart, Wuthering Waves, Neverness To Everness.

The shorthand in use for all of those is "Gacha Games", so I suppose, by default, that is what the genre's called now. It might have made more sense to follow the gaming naming convention that gave us Roguelikes and Metroidvanias. We could have called them Genshinlikes. But we didn't. So gacha games it will have to be.

And as Mailvaltar explained in very helpful detail in yesterday's post, there's a very specific way to play a gacha game if you want your characters to be capable and your progress smooth as you work your way through the storyline. You'll have to get to grips with a number of quite complex systems and then, when you've figured out what you need and how to get it, you'll have to grind your finger-tips off, killing the right mobs and doing the right quests to get the gear you want. Just as though it was EverQuest in 1999.

That was enough to do for Tobold back in 2020. As he said " I'll be farming elite monsters for weeks. And I don't want to." And who can blame him? I don't think he's played a Gacha Game since. 

I also noped out of Genshin Impact the moment it got hard but unlike Tobold it didn't put me off trying again. And it's as well I did because subsequent entries in the genre have been far less demanding. There have been a few barriers to progress in some of them that I've had to make some effort to clamber over but nothing like the harsh, early roadblocks of Genshin Impact. 

I was stuck for a while in both Noah's Heart and Wuthering Waves before I did some work to improve both my teams and my tactics but in both cases, though, it happened much later than in Genshin. It was easier to fix, too. And as Mailvaltar suggests in his most recent post, that easing continues. Neverness To Everness may be the least-demanding gacha game yet.

The thing about Gacha games that I really wanted to  dig into a little, though, is the apparent disconnect between content and delivery. It's a dissonance that echoes what Jack Emmert was saying about the importance of knowing your audience and the dangers of feature creep. The Gacha game studios, hearing Jack talk, must be muttering "Hold our beer..."

One of the strongest drivers to engagement gacha games have is story. Right from the beginning, with Genshin Impact, the bar for storytelling was pushed through the roof. Back in 2020 I said "Genshin Impact is one of the best-written video games I've played.", something  I put down to "the tone, the very thing so few video games get right." 

I said at the time I might put a whole post together about why the writing was so good but then I stopped playing because getting to see any more of it got so hard and that post never got written. The story was great but the way it was delivered sucked. Who the hell wants to grind and grind and practice and practice just sot hey can see the next episode of their favorite show?

Since Genshin, that's never been quite the same problem but the underlying issue persists. The content gets ever better, which makes the hoops you need to jump through to get to it feel more and more inappropriate. 

And it is getting better and better. The writing in Wuthering Waves is better than I remember it being in Genshin and so is the voice acting. The animated sequences are more frequent, longer and approach cinematic quality. It's like watching high-quality anime with some awkward interruptions.

My impression of Neverness To Everness so far suggests the evolution of Gacha game story content into some kind of mass media entertainment format isn't over yet. In the four chapters of the main story the game shipped with, there's barely any combat at all. What little is there presents little challenge and doesn't appear to increase in difficulty as the story moves on. Instead, there are a variety of interesting non-combat mechanics that enhance the storytelling instead of getting in its way.

The "cut scenes" are longer and more sophisticated, too. It feels like playing a complex visual novel, complete with that same sense of watching a movie play out around you that sometimes leads people who like a bit more action to dismiss those games as "walking simulators". Not to say they don't have a point. I've seen more than a few comments on reddit and YouTube from NTE fans who'd like Hotta to go the whole way and make an actual anime based on the game and I have to say that it does often seem like that might be a better use of the material. 

In the case of Neverness To Everness it's not only the quality of the writing, acting and storyline that's competing for attention with the Gacha revenue stream. There's also that whole Life Sim thing they have going on. It's something that hasn't been nearly as well-developed in other gacha titles I've played.

Genshin had none of it that I can recall from back when I played but that was five years ago so maybe it does now. Noah's Heart had housing and affection bonds with your team but the whole game was a bit clunky and under-cooked so none of it had much impact outside of a dedicated few loyalists, of whom I was one. I don't know how common these features are in other gacha games because I haven't stuck with any long enough to find out but I can't say I remember any from the ones I've tried.

In NTE you have plenty of non-combat, non-story options. You can run a business, either behind the scenes as management or out front with the customers if you want. You can be a street racer in your car, go fishing or play mah-jong. You can deliver parcels around the city or moonlight as a taxi driver. You can date, go to the movies, hold hands and hang out with your imaginary friends. You can own multiple properties, decorate them and, if you can build up sufficient bonds of affection, have your friends move in and live with you.

None of this requires any fighting so the entire material grind that so upset Tobold back in the pandemic would seem to have no purchase here. It exists but you don't need to worry about it. You're not going to be punching anyone or anything. 

Or are you? I'm not so sure. All those characters I was talking about the other day plus all the others that will inevitably come into the game as time goes on, how will you meet and get to know them if you aren't pushing through the story? You can roll on the banners and you might be lucky but I'm a bit vague just now about how that works when it comes to interacting with the same characters in the world. I seem to have some I can team with but I can't get them to work in the cafe or come to my house. I think I might need to meet them in context before that can happen.

Or maybe I've just missed something. Gacha games are ferociously complicated. 

In his recent post, Mailvaltar does an excellent job of explaining some of the systems I've been struggling to understand. Not that I've really been trying. I have no real interest in learning how they work. I just want to figure out the bare minimum to get by and then never think about them again. But even if I was fascinated by the complexity of it all, I think I'd struggle to keep all the details straight. There's a lot to remember.

In the end, the best approach for anyone who doesn't enjoy the process is probably just to play the game and only worry about it when you get stuck. After all, if it isn't a problem, it isn't a problem, right? And a problem only becomes a problem when you can't fix it. 

Gacha games want you to be able to fix it. If you can't or if it looks like it'll be too much trouble, then like Tobold you might walk away and that's the one thing they really don't want you to do. Yesterday, when I uninstalled NTE, only so I could re-install it, Hotta responded with a heartfelt exit poll asking what they'd done to upset me and how they could make it better so I'd consider coming back.

They already have, I suspect. They've made everything easier. In retrospect, Genshin was quite an unforgiving game, expecting high levels of both performance and compliance from an early stage. In comparison,  Neverness to Everness positively welcomes slackers.

So far... 

Settling In or Just Another Day In Hethereau

Here's a first-world blogging problem if there ever was one: new games give you far too much to blog about. Such a terrible situation to find yourself in! Enough ideas for a dozen posts but how are you meant to choose? 

Maybe pick the most immediate, the one that's right there in front of you, shimmering with vitality and immediacy? Or should you let it rest a while to settle and prove? But if you do, will it join all those other, unwritten posts? Drift away into the void, never to be seen?

Should you stand back, take the broader view? Focus on the details?

What are you trying to achieve, anyway? Do you want to tell stories? Offer advice? Share information? Analyze and explain? Are you looking to give a show and tell with pictures? A critical essay on one specific aspect of the game? Half a dozen bullet-pointed paragraphs on several?

Or perhaps you find yourself so stunned by choice all you can do is write about how hard it is to choose at all.

Yeah, that really would be a waste of time, wouldn't it? So let's not do that. 

Lens Flare

When this blog was young, I'd have done a whole post about it. Just the sort of sidewise lean I loved back then. Mind you, that whole post would only have been the length of one section of this one. I valued concision more then, too.

Oh, but how I love lens flare! It hits me like a drug. When I say I like a game there's a non-trivial chance what I really mean is it gives good lens flare. Quite a lot of the imports I've been keen on the last few years answer to that.

On any given day you care to name, there's a strong possibility I'll have been staring into the sun, mesmerized by the glare, fascinated by the halo, seeing the eternal in the ephemeral. Again. 

And taking screenshots. 

Do you know how hard it is to not take screenshots of lens flare? Especially at sunset or sunrise. Games have golden hours just like Hollywood needs. I have to talk myself down, convince myself they aren't magical moments never to be repeated. Just coded performances, another show same time tomorrow. 

By The Clock

It should get easier now, I found the clock. I found it yesterday. 

Actually, I didn't. The game told me about it. Oh, wait, I didn't mention the name of the game yet, did I? Neverness To Everness. I guess you guessed that, though.

I was doing a quest. Not that they call them quests. Games with contemporary or futuristic settings tend to avoid giving that mystical gloss. Come to think of it, I'm not sure what they are called in NTE. Missions, maybe? Doesn't matter anyway, except that names always matter. But let's not go there just now.

It was one of those deals you get in games sometimes, where the NPC tells you to come back in a while. A few minutes, a few hours, tonight, tomorrow, after dark, when you've had time to think about it. Any time but not right now, ok?

They're annoying, aren't they? Does anyone actually enjoy being fobbed off by an NPC with a "Give me a day and I'll have finished making your boots."? Why do developers even bother? Is it just to piss people off?

Rhetorical question. Of course it is. Here's a tougher one. What might be going through a developer's mind when they add a quest like that, one with a hiatus, then pop in a hint telling you if you can't be bothered waiting you could just spin the hands on the clock and make it happen right away?

That's what NTE does. I met this woman who was selling her car for real cheap except you could tell she didn't really want to. She asked me to come watch her race so I could check out what a great bargain it was but the race didn't start until six in the evening and it was midday then. 

The car was a real steal and I wanted it plus there was obviously a backstory and I wanted that too. I thought I'd do something else for the afternoon and come back later. 

Only I didn't need to bother. It seems you can set the time to anything you want. The weather, too. Those sunrises and sunsets? Any goddam time you please! 

All of which is top quality of life and so very welcome. Only, if you're allowing that, why even suggest waiting?

I think it's for "realism".  It's not clear if the street races are even legal but they all happen after dark. Maybe the roads are just quieter then but I kinda doubt it. All the bad things happen at night, don't they?

I guess it would make even less sense if you could talk to an NPC any time of day and a race would magically begin right there and then, though. Oh, the compromises we make for authenticity.

Friends Would Be A Reality Show Here

You know that thing everyone mocks about Friends? Ok, ok! I'll be more specific. You know that one thing? How everyone always points out how unrealistic it is, to put it mildly, that a bunch of twentysomethings with crap jobs, if they even have any job  at all this week, could afford live in those apartments in New York? Or any apartment?

Yeah, well you ain't seen my pad in Hethereau! I got it yesterday and it is saaweeet! So sweet!

I was wondering when housing was going to appear, so I had a poke around and found you have to get to Tycoon Level 5 first. Tycoon Levels probably needs a post of their own but the tl:dr is that it's how you get all the casual/leisure options, like fishing and housing and runing a business, assuming you call that last a leisure activity, which I fricken' do not.

I was momentarily concerned it might be a grind to get to Level 5 to open the feature that most interested me but it wasn't. I'm sure there will be grinds in the game but I haven't hit any yet. 

It took me a couple of sessions to get to where I needed to be and by sessions I mean fragments. I did some Tycooning in-between exploring and questing and taking screenshots of atmospheric weather conditions. I suppose it might have taken me an hour, all added up.

So, getting on the housing ladder was quick and easy. It was also cheap. And like most things in the game it was quasi-realistic. I had to go to a real estate agency, where the realtor showed me what she had on her books. That part was convincing enough.

The illusion of reality started to break down when I saw that only one property was available at my level, the rest needing to be unlocked. Then it shattered completely when I found out how much it cost: 200,000 Fons. That's almost chump change!

What? It sounds like a lot? I suppose... I mean, 200,000 is a biggish number. But then, of course, if you don't play the game you have no idea what a "Fon" is so it might be a fortune or just a whole lot of nothing. 

I can't say I have a clear mental image of a Fon either. Bloody stupid name for a currency if you ask me. Every time I see it pluralized, it makes me think of Henry Winkler. Maybe they should have called it the Winkle. 

The important part is that, even though I've only just started playing, and even though I've spent most of my time goofing around, I still had enough cash on me to buy the apartment outright. And that was after I'd leased a cafe and bought a car!

I imagine there'll be a whole post on housing at some point, not to mention the truly bizarre entrepreneurial economy, but for now I'll just say that just the starter home is a fifth floor duplex with huge picture windows and stunning views. If this is what a part-time gig at a down-at-heel, back-street enterprise in a poor part of town, run by a drunk and staffed largely by children gets you, god knows what I'll be able to afford when I get a real job! 

I bet you wish you lived in Hethereau. I know I do.

Otterness To Notterness

Nimgimli posted yesterday, listing a few things that were harshing his mellow in NTE and one of them was Taygedo. 

Taygedo is an otter with a television for a head because what else would he be? He works for the Eibon Antique Shop, the struggling business the PC gets drafted into right at the start of the game for reasons that are still not as clear to me as they probably should be. 

Taygedo communicates almost entirely by the use of the word "Taygedo" or slight variations, a bit like Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy. He occasionally throws in a few grunts and squeals but conversations involving him mostly run along the lines of the old subtitled movie gag, where several sentences of dialog are rendered in the titles by just that single word. Only in reverse.

I feel relatively neutral about the gimmick but it's self-evidently as likely to infuriate as delight. It certainly annoyed Nimgimli. However endearing or otherwise you find him, though, I do think making Taygedo the central figure in a lengthy storyline close to the start of the game is a high risk strategy.  At best.

Add to that, the plotline doesn't just give you an otter with a televison set for a head repeating one word over and over ad infinitum. It also asks you to stop whatever you're doing so you can help him set up a date with another otter (No TV head for this one.). You have to take him shopping, buy him clothes and gifts and then to pretend he's your boss so he can impress his date, who he's given the impression he's much more important than he really is. 

Basic 1960s sitcom plot in other words. I was going to say "minus the mechanical animism" but then I remembered My Mother The Car.... I can see why Nimgimli was losing patience if that's waht he'd been doing.

I'm quite enjoying it myself. I've bought Taygedo the gear. I haven't yet been on the date yet. So that's something to look forward to... 

Setting Boundaries  

Finally, for this post that is, there's the issue of where to go next. Or rather where the game's going to let me go. 

I've been doing a lot of exploring and some of it has taken the form of seeing how far out of town I can get. It varies and it's not nearly as obvious as you'd imagine.

Hethereau is bounded on one side by the ocean and on the other by some lush green hills. I was fairly sure neither would be available to explore and I was mostly right but not entirely. 

The sea is just sea for the most part. The distant hills are out of reach but there is a substantial out-of-town wilderness area with campgrounds and a somewhat manicured stretch of woodland you can wander around in if you want. Not much to see there except trees but it's nice to get out of the city for a while.

Across the river and stretching along the coast is what looks like another part of town although it could be a separate conurbation entirely. I wanted to see what it was like. 

It would be an exaggeration to say I felt confident I could go there. That would imply some element of doubt. I had none. I didn't think about it at all.

I happened to be strolling along the beach opposite when I got the urge to go take a look so I took a right-turn to the ocean and ran straight into the red No Access barrier that materializes when you try to go somewhere you shouldn't. Because I can't take a hint, I tried a few other ways- gliding, crossing the bridges, swimming - no joy.

You can see the area is fully developed. There are even cars moving through the streets. You just can't go there. Ooh, I was cross! Why even put the thing there if it's just a tease?

I was crosser still, when I tried to go to PukaLand. PukaLand is an amusement park on an island just off the coast. Or maybe its on a peninsula. You can see it from anywhere on that side of the city, its fairground identity established by a huge ferris wheel and a Disneyesque castle. 

You can see it but you can't see it. You can go up to the gate but you can't go in. That damned red screen again.

I can't say whether these and other inaccessible locations are places not yet "in the game" or whether they open up at certain points in the storyline but either way it's frustrating. I guess the positive take is that it means there's more content ready and waiting to go, one way or the other but damn! I wanted to go there now!

And that's it for today. Just some random thoughts among many. Plenty more where those came from but I'll try to narrow it down to just the one next time. 

Maybe.

No promises. 

You Take The Train, I'll Take The Bus This Time: Transport Options In Neverness To Everness

Hethereau is without doubt the biggest video-game city I've ever visited. I've seen it compared to Grand Theft Auto's Los Santos but since I've never played GTA5, I can't say if there's any validity in the comparison or, if there is, which might be the larger.

It certainly feels a lot bigger than Genshin Impact's Mondstadt  or Liyue or Wuthering Waves' Jinzhou, anyway. And it also feels a lot more like a real city, by which I guess I mean a city you might find in the world in which we all live, something that makes it feel almost disturbingly convincing at times. 

I keep getting the feeling it's somewhere I might have been, once. Even though much of the architecture has a South-East Asian look to it, there are streets and plazas that remind me quite strongly of some Spanish cities I've visited.

With a city this big, there needs to be some way to get around. I haven't been playing remotely long enough to produce any kind of Travel Guide To Hethereau but I can offer a few anecdotal experiences. 

Walking, Running and Sprinting: 

The obvious way to start exploring any city is on foot. In the real world, that almost always means walking but in game-cities the default pace is usually a steady lope or a gentle jog. No-one walks when they can run.

In Neverness To Everness, you run unless the game decides you ought to walk. I was surprised, several times, to find my pace dropping to a stately stroll when I entered certain buildings, vehicles or specific outdoor areas. If there's an option to walk voluntarily, I haven't found it yet but I imagine there must be, assuming they have role-players in Hethereau.

Sprinting definitely does come under the direct control of the player. Just hold down Shift. As you'd imagine, it requires stamina, the amount of which you have left is shown in a tiny, unobtrusive, diminishing arc next to your character. So far I haven't run out of stamina before I chose to stop sprinting so it's a generous allocation compared to too many games, where you run out of puff before you reach the end of your front path.

Climbing: 

You can climb just about anything. Buildings, fences, vehicles, you name it. If it goes up, you can climb it like Spider-Man. This also use stamina but once again it seems unlikely you'll run out before you reach the top or at least some intermediary flat space, where you can rest a moment and refill your stamina bar.

Swimming:  

Also an option although the only time I've had to use it was when I fell off a parapet trying to snatch an Oracle Stone from a raven. (It's a thing. Don't ask. We'll get to it here, some day, I'm sure.) Swimming uses stamina too and again it gets you a lot further than it would in many other games I've played.

In other water-related travel news, there are boats in the harbor but whether or not sailing is going to be an option I couldn't say. We can but hope!

Gliding: 

Gliding is available almost from the start. There's a very brief moment where a tip pops up to tell you all you need to do is hold RMB but it passes so quickly you might miss it altogether. In fact, I might have imagined it. 

I think I discovered I could glide when I jumped off a roof and tried to turn in mid-air and found I was hanging from an anomaly that appeared to be keeping us both in the air by flapping its ears. I also think I'm meant to know who or what the anomaly is. I'm pretty sure we were introduced at one point. You can get different glider skins but the default is this little fellow and he's fine. 

Unlike sprinting, climbing and swimming, gliding doesn't use stamina so you can stay aloft as long as you can find more air below you. There's also no falling damage so it's 100% safe as far as I can tell. Don't sue me if it's not!

Driving:  

This is supposedly a big part of the game but after about three or four hours play the only motorized transport I've got is a scooter. It's a really smart, red one, though. Looks like a classic 1960s Lambretta to me. 

I'd love to tell you how I got it but I have absolutely no idea. I was just jogging through the city last night when I noticed an option of some sort had popped up. I didn't read it very carefully and I can't remember what it said but I do know that after I clicked it, I had a scooter and I still do.

Maybe it pops up the first time you go near enough to one. There are plenty parked on street corners around the city. Or maybe it comes after you've done some quest or entered some area or spoken to some NPC. It'd be lovely to explain how it happened but I can't. I guess I could look it up... ah, yes, it's part of the Prologue questline, apparently. 

The scooter is pretty easy to ride although cornering is... interesting. I found out about the prison system in NTE by crashing my bike into something when I missed a turn. The bike was fine but I picked up some Warrant points for damaging public property. Get enough of those and it's a spell in the pokey for you. Or, more importantly, for me!

Traveling By Train: 

In common with quite a few games I've enjoyed, Neverness To Everness lets you get around by train. Unlike almost every one I can think of, though, that doesn't mean clicking on something that looks like a train or a train station and being teleported to the next stop. 

It doesn't even mean entering a train, sitting down and being treated to a cut-scene of your journey. In NTE it really does mean getting on a train and sitting down (Or standing up, if you prefer.) while the train rattles along the tracks in real time.

I have played other games where that happens but the difference here is that the train is an actual, physical object in terms of the gameworld. You can climb up on top of the carriage and ride outside for the whole journey. I've done it. You can jump off anywhere along the way, too. And that!

The train comes complete with other passengers, opening and closing doors, realistically lengthy stops at every station and not at all helpful announcements. Just like the real thing except you don't have to pay and no-one asks to see your ticket. Well, if you don't have to pay, I guess you wouldn't need a ticket... 

Taking The Bus: 

This is the one that floored me. As you jog around the city, you'll see lots of bus stops, often with people waiting for a bus. Sometimes you'll hear an NPC complaining the bus is late or they've missed it. I thought this was flavor and it is but that doesn't mean there isn't a real bus service.

I only found out because I decided to sit down at a bus stop and take a screenshot. I thought it would look cool. As I was framing the shot, a bus pulled up at the stop. I looked at it, expecting it to pause and then move on. Maybe an NPC might even get off. But no, the doors opened and the bus stayed there.

So I got on. I mean, why wouldn't I? The bus, unlike the train carriage, is a bit of a tight fit. The camera didn't like me swinging it about so it was hard to get a decent angle but I was able to sit down inside and get a shot of me through the window, riding the bus. 

I think this is a first. I can't remember any game I've ever played, on or offline, single or multiplayer, that let me ride in a bus. Not that it's been my great ambition but still...

The bus isn't quite as realistic as the train. You can't get up and walk out the door when it stops or I couldn't, anyway, although that might have been the camera. Maybe it is possible and I just couldn't manage it. What I had to do instead was press "F", which deposits you on the sidewalk, just like it does when you want to get off your bike. 

I don't know if you can jump on top of the bus like you can the train and street-surf through town. I haven't tried it. Yet. I can't see why not, though.

Boothing It: 

And finally there's the Booth network, NTE's form of instant travel. Dotted all over the city are structures that look almost identical to the classic red K6 telephone box, as found all over Britain until mobile telephony rendered public telephones irrelevant. You have to visit these and activate them, after which you can 'port from one to another. 

Or so the game tells you. I've activated a few but I haven't used any yet. I'm having far too much fun exploring on foot, by bike, on the train and by bus. Why would I want to miss out on all of that, just to save a few minutes?

At the moment, in fact, I'm not even particularly interested in following the plot or developing my character. I just want to explore this fascinating city for myself, without any agenda or purpose other than the fun of seeing something new. Plenty of time to get on with the plot when it all starts to feel a bit too familiar.

That might take a while... 

EverQuest II - Guides, Links And Not-So-Helpful Advice

Last week Cliff, who's returned to EverQuest II again, apparently inspired so to do, at least in part, by reading some of my recent posts here, left a comment asking, among other things, if I had any sites to recommend that might help with things like understanding the stats in the game or figuring out which AAs are important. Just regular stuff like that, which you might think the game itself would explain.

It doesn't, of course, or not in any particularly helpful way. There's only so much you can do with a tool-tip and EQII doesn't have one of those nifty in-game encyclopedias that tell you everything you need to know. Not that those are ever much help, judging by the ones I've seen in other games.

It's not that SOE or Daybreak or Darkpaw, or whoever was nominally in charge when any and all of the myriad systems and mechanics in the game were added, didn't bother to explain them. It's more that any explanations were couched in long-forgotten press releases, AMAs and forum posts or latterly in Discord discussions, which are even harder to find. The entire game is a palimpsest of ideas, good and bad, some of which have flourished, some of which have atrophied, but all of which have been very poorly cataloged and annotated.

As with most MMORPGs, the best resources for the kind of detailed information that really tells you what you want to know has always come from other people who play the game. Once upon a time, EQII was rich in such resources but not any more. Many have gone dark and the few that remain tend to stop at a certain point, when whoever was updating them lost interest or gave up playing.

After I gave a few less than helpful answers to Cliff's general and specific questions, I had a bit of a think about it and decided I might see if I could find out if any sites that might be useful were still around. I started googling but it was slow going. The returns were meager. Still, there were a few useful results. I thought I might be able to put something together.

And then I ran across this thread on Reddit, the contents of which I am now going to cut and paste into this post just in case the thread gets unstickied or disappears. Full credit for the following goes to Mandalore93, who did all the actual work.

 Official EQ2 Links

• EverQuest 2 Official Site

  • EverQuest 2 Server Status

  • EverQuest 2 Support

• EverQuest 2 Forums

  • News and Announcements (Archive)

    News and Announcements (New) 

  • EQ2 Patch Notes (Archive)

    EQ2 Patch Notes (New) 

    EQ2 Staff Post Tracker (Archive) 

  • EQ2 Staff Post Tracker (New)

• EverQuest 2 Official Discord

EQ2 Guilds

• EQ2 Guild Recruitment Forum

Resource & Info Sites 

• EverQuest 2 Wiki

  • Megaton's Varsoon TLE Guide 

• EQ2U  

• EQ2 Trader's Corner 

• EQ2 Furniture

EQ2 Add Ons

• EQ2 Interface

• EQ2 Maps

• Advanced Combat Tracker

Guides & Strategy

• EQ2 AA Calculator

• Comprehensive Tradeskill Equipment List

• Tradeskill Timeline

• Harvesting Timeline

• Food and Drink Comparison

• EQ2 Travel Baubles - (Sigrdrifa's post, specifically.)

• EQ2 TLE Youtube content by Bear Necessities

I have checked all the links They all work, although at time of writing the EQII API is non-functional so the EQ2U site is of limited functionality. Darkpaw are supposedly working on fixing the API so it should be restored to it's usual self at some point. Cross your fingers! Also, when I tested it, EQ2 Trader's Corner had exceeded its permitted bandwidth and wasn't responding. Presumably that, too, is a temporary condition.

I also removed two links from the guild section because they threw up a malware warning when I clicked on them. You can find them in the Reddit thread if you want to take your chances.

And I added in links to the current forums where appropriate. Mandalore93's links go to the old forums but I've left those in because there's a ton of useful archive information there, at least for as long as Darkpaw keep the old pages up.

As you'll see if you click through all these links, many of them go either to the official Daybreak EQII website or to the excellent EQ2i wiki. In all honesty, these are probably the two most reliable sources these days. There used to be a lot more but time has withered most of them away.

For anyone coming back or just starting, I would strongly recommend Megaton's Varsoon TLE Guide, regardless of whether you plan on playing on the Varsoon server or not. Apart from the restored starting areas, which don't exist on the Live servers, I think most of the rest will be there or thereabouts correct for content on Live, up to wherever Varsoon has gotten to right now. I believe it should be going into the Chains of Eternity expansion next month, which will give it a level cap of 95, right before everything changes at 100, so the guide will stand as the definitive source for how to play what now feels like almost a separate game.

Cliff also asked a couple of very pertinent, specific questions that I ought to be able to answer. Unfortunately, I can't. Not with any confidence, anyway.

One was about stats and what they mean. If only I knew! It would make things so much easier. 

Stats have changed many times. I understood them once but that was a long time ago. The Megaton guide has an very illuminating overview on how they've altered over the years and, more importantly, on what's most important now. It's in the "Adventuring" section. My rule of thumb is that it's generally your Primary stat, Stamina, Potency, Crit Chance and Ability Mod you want to concentrate on but don't quote me on that. It does keep changing...

The one crucial stat Megaton's guide doesn't mention is Resolve. Varsoon hasn't gotten to the expansion that introduced it yet. Resolve, for players on Live servers, is probably the most important stat of all.

Resolve is explained in enormous detail here on the wiki. It doesn't become relevant until Level 100, after which it becomes absolutely central to Heroic and Raid players but less so for soloists. It does still gatekeep solo content but since every expansions gives you a full set of gear with the required Resolve for solo instances, you don't really need know much more than to be sure to pick that up and equip it before you start any new expansion. It'll usually be in a container with the name "Tishan" attached, next to an NPC in the very first area you arrive in.

What Resolve does do is make for a very handy way to decide if a new item is an upgrade or not. If anything you find has higher resolve than what you have, you'll want to swap it in, unless there's some triggered or passive effect you particularly want to keep on the old piece.

On the topic of free gear, solo players working their way up the levels probably also want to make sure they do the Panda quests. There's a ton of free stuff in there, much of it worth having although the Tishan's items tend to overwrite it. 

Cliff's other question was about AAs, which for anyone that doesn't know stands for Alternative Advancement. I wish I could give a good answer to this one. I can confirm that having the right AA build can make a huge difference. 

For example, a few years back, I read a comment on the forums that explained why my Berserker wasn't feeling nearly as robust as he should have. I applied the advice given there and he immediately became much more powerful. 

For what it's worth, I wrote about that in this post and the forum comment that helped me is here. The key AA in that case is Enhanced Vigor in the Prestige line. Max it to double your hit points.

The good thing about AAs in EQII is that you can have multiple builds saved and swap between them, although it is a bit of a faff to do. The best I can suggest if you're not sure what to take is to make a few builds and swap between them. 

And that, I think, is about as helpful as I can be. There are a myriad of quests that give all kinds of highly useful and desirable items and abilities but trying to list them would take forever. I'd suggest keeping Overseer up to date as you go along, if possible, although it can be a diabolical grind. The various time-reducers it gives for Mount, Mercenary, Familiar and Spell progress are invaluable. 

Always remember to keep your upgrades for all of those going and, if you have the time, do the Familiars Wild quest daily every day. At higher levels (Post-100, really.) a huge proportion of your effectiveness comes not from your own stats but from those of your Mount, Merc and Familiar.

But I'm not going to get into that in detail. I barely understand the how the synergies work myself and certainly not well enough to explain them. As I keep saying, systems and mechanics in the game are ferociously complicated now and as population and interest continue to drift down, accurate, up-to-date resources are increasingly hard to come by. 

I hope that helps a bit, anyway.