Turning Back Time And Facing The Future All At Once

Just a very short post to say my old PC finally died. And I'm posting this from my even older PC. 

I forget exactly how old the newer old one was. I found the invoice for it just a few months ago but I still can't recall the exact date, except that I remember thinking it was even longer ago than I expected. I want to say I bought in 2016, which would make it getting on for ten years old but it might be a couple of years either side of that.

It was old, anyway. It's certainly been the longest-lasting PC I've ever owned. I bought it from Overclockers, who build a finished machine from a base model according to your selections. The older machine I'm using now was also from them. They're excellent and I highly recommend them although they're now so focused on the high-end they're no longer much use to me.

At the time, I ordered two identical machines, one for me and one for Mrs Bhagpuss. Hers died last month so it's like they were one of those couples, married a lifetime and as soon as one goes, the other follows on in a moment.

They both went the same way, too. I have no idea what killed them. If I did, I might have been able to fix it. A lot of PCs we've had have "died" and then come back to life after I gave them some kind of Frankensteinian jump-start. I don't know what I'm doing but I know how to google and watch YouTube. Plus I know how to do comparative testing. Together, that'll fix a lot of things.

But not if the machine won't turn on at all. That's what happened to both of them. The first time, when Mrs. Bhagpuss's machine stopped, I did the first, most obvious thing and tried a different power lead. There was a bang and a flash and a small puff of smoke came out the back. I took that as a hint and gave up.

Given the age of the machine and the fact that Mrs Bhagpuss, having come out the far side of her twenty-five year-long gaming phase, is extremely unlikely to need a PC capable of playing anything more demanding than Candy Crush, I didn't bother pursuing it any further. 

Replacing it seemed like a much better option, especially since neither machine was capable of running Windows 11. We had both of them authorized to receive security updates to Windows 10 for another year but we'd already decided we'd need to buy replacements next year so it was just a question of bringing the date forward.

It was very easy to find something suitable for Mrs Bhagpuss. We got one of those clever, new mini-computers, small enough to stick in your pocket. Literally. The main downside is that you can't really add or upgrade anything inside but in the ten or whatever it was years she'd had her last computer, we'd never had recourse to install a single new or alternate component so it didn't seem like it would be an issue. 

She was using a very old monitor because her "new" one, itself pretty long in the tooth, died a year or two back (Anyone sensing a theme developing here?) so we got a new one of those as well, plus a couple of odds and ends and the whole lot came to less than £300. The PC straps to the back of the monitor so you can't even see it and the whole thing has worked perfectly so far. We're aware that these devices have a history of working until they don't, at which point there's not a lot you can do about it, but I figure if we get a couple of years out of this one we'll be ahead and it's under warranty for that long.

In the few days before it arrived, I had Mrs Bhagpuss set up, temporarily, on one of the old-old PCs I keep lying about. (Er... that are always to be found somewhere about the house, that is, not that I consistently misrepresent. English is hard.) That meant when mine died too, I was all ready to go with a short-term alternative.

First, though, I did try to see if I could resuscitate the better one. Since the last time I tried it sparks had shot out of the PSU, I figured rather than a new power cable I'd change out the supply itself.  I swapped in a spare one (Actually a better one. I don't know why it was in the oldest machine.) and... nothing happened. With some trepidation after the previous experience, I tried another power lead. Again, nothing.

A machine that appears to be incapable of powering up at all seems to me to be moving dangerously close to the territory of the electrician rather than the half-assed computer hobbyist. I don't mess with electrics.

Or maybe it was the power switch itself. Or one of the internal cables. Really, it's beyond my ability even to guess, let alone to fix.

And as said, I was going to have to replace it sooner rather than later anyway so my motivation to start learning new, difficult things was very low. Plus, I have a working laptop, so it's not like I was going to be offline.

Still, I prefer to sit at a desk to write these posts and I would like to keep playing the few games I still play these days. So I swapped everything that mattered out of the old machine into the even older one, which was three disk drives including the SSD with the OS on it and the graphics card. I'd have swapped the RAM and the CPU too only the Motherboard wouldn't take either.

To my surprise, everything just worked. Immediately. I've been using it for a day and a half now and for everyday use, there's no discernible difference. Well, okay, it's very slightly slower and it boots up a little oddly but other than that things are pretty much back to how they were.

For web browsing and media and blogging, that is. But what about gaming? Well, it is the same machine I used to play EverQuest II on back in the day so I was optimistic that, at least, would work, especially with the RTX 4060 to do some of the heavy lifting. 

And EQII does work. At least, I can log in and do my Overseer missions, which is about all I was doing anyway. Zoning takes a while and I haven't tried fighting anything yet but I'm fairly sure it would be fine. [Edit: After I published this, I played a little more EQII and ended up in a raid, doing the new, pre-expansion Public Quest in Enchanted Lands. No problems at all. Smooth as butter.]

I can't imagine this set-up will run Wuthering Waves or Blue Protocol or any of the new games I like, though. I mean, the CPU is an AMD Phenom II X4 from 2009 and I'm back down to 8GB Ram. I guess I could try it and see...

Well, as the screenshots in the post prove, all of which I took after I wrote that last paragraph, it is possible. But only just. With Wuthering Waves, it took forever to log in and the only viable graphic setting was Ultra Performance. Everything above was a slideshow.

With that, though, I could move around and even fight although I wouldn't say it was fun. The game does still look great even on the lowest settings, though.

But then, I haven't actually been playing WW much lately, have I? Or at all. I should have. I wanted to. But I haven't. So I'm not missing much there that I wasn't missing anyway. 

I was playing BP:SR though. So how does that run?

Okay, actually. Pretty solid, in fact. And on "High" graphics too. Eminently playable. 

And as for all those Steam demos and point and click adventures, I haven't done any testing I'm pretty sure they'd run just fine. Most of them would run on the integrated graphics of my laptop.

So I guess I don't need to make any snap decisions. I can carry on like this for a while. Which is just as well because it's beginning to occur to me that although I play a lot of games and write about a lot more, I don't really have the same needs as a typical "gamer", not when it comes to the quality of equipment I play them on. 

All the reddit threads and reviews I read seem to assume I'm going to want to play the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 on the best settings at the highest resolutions or be ready for GTA6 when it comes out whereas I'm far more likely to be playing the latest mobile port on recommended settings at 1080p. Buying a proper gaming PC for what I'd use it for would be akin to buying a Ferrari to pootle along to the supermarket for the weekly shop. 

For the last three or four changes of PC, I've generally tried to come in somewhere around the low end of mid-range, which has always been plenty, but given that I've been doing very well with a machine that was that a decade ago - and now I'm getting by on one from five years before that - it's a pretty safe bet that even an entry-level gaming PC would put me at least back where I was and most likely a little bit ahead. (I did look at the possibility of building a PC from scratch and I'm sure I could do it but I just don't want the fuss.)

If I also swap in some of the bits and pieces I already have then that machine is going to be significantly above entry level and well above what I've been using for the last many years. I really can't see why I need anything pokier. I just have to make sure I get something with a motherboard that will take the GPU and extra RAM I already have and also, if possible, be good for another round of upgrades in a few years.

My plan, which may not survive contact with my patience, is to wait until Black Friday to see if any suitable bargains turn up. It would be very annoying to buy something now and then see it going for fifty or a hundred pounds less a few weeks later. For the time being, though, I shall muddle along as best I can. We'll have to see how it goes.

Also, that really wasn't "just a very short post", was it? Or a post at all, come to that. More like me talking out loud to myself. Thank you for listening!

The Essence Of Nightingale

As you can see, Nightingale has fishing. What self-respecting survival/rpg mash-up doesn't? It's not a very sophisticated implementation of the skill/sport/hobby/pastime but it's fun and useful, either of which trump sophistication in my book, when it comes to pretending to catch imaginary fish in a video game.

I don't exactly remember when, where or how I acquired the recipe to make the fishing rod Flora's holding in the shot above. My best guess is it was one of the basics included with the Simple Workbench but it could just as easily have been a reward from one of the countless Insight, r Agility or Combat challenges. 

Sometimes, when you succeed at one of those, you get a new recipe. I might have gotten my fishing rod that way. I know I had it for a long time before I bothered to make it, which I ony did because there's a quest that requires fish oil you cvan only get from specific type of fish you have to catch for yourself. 

Other than recipes, what you get from doing those challenges are Essences. Essences are the fuel that keeps Nightingale's engine ticking over. I'm not sure it's ever explained what they're the essence of but the human survivors trying to make something of their new lives in the Fae Realms have adopted them as a kind of  universal currency, so you can never really have enough. A small amount of Essence also converts into enough Essence Dust to fund all your repairs for weeks.

OK, I suppose technically you could have enough Essences, eventually. There's a finite number of things to buy with them, for a start and you can certainly have enough of the lower-level ones quite easily as you outgrow the items they can get you. 

Recipe vendors are mostly found in specific Realms. Realms come in tiers and vendors in each tier use the local variety of Essence as coin. Naturally, as you progress through the Realms, becoming ever more powerful as you go, the weaker Essences of the lower tiers and the items they buy lose their significance. Still, I imagine completionists, who must make up a large proportion of players, if not the majority, will want to grab all the sets, no matter how useless they've become.

Essences are also neded to upgrade your gear, a process that, in Nightingale, has a massive effect on your viabilty as an adventurer. I'm used to more incremental progression systems, where it's hard to tell which of two items is better without one of those inbuilt comparison functions to make it clear but there's no need for anything like that in Nightingale, where upgrading an item can almost double its primary stats.

That, of course, means Nightingale is also one of those games where you don't need new gear because you can just keep improving the gear you already have. I don't generally like that approach to progression, mostly because I find it boring. It's extremely practical, sure, but practicality has never been high on my list of criteria for enjoying a video game.

My main objection is to the aesthetics, though, not so much the gameplay. It's not that I want to go back to the turn of the millennium, where getting an upgrade to your leg slot item meant finding out which monster dropped something better for that slot, then finding and killing it, if you even could, so you could steal that monster's pants, strip them from it's cooling corpse and put them on, still warm. Or, more likely, get the alternate drop and have to kill the damn mob several more times before it dropped its pants.

In addition to upgrades, Nightingale does also have a number of different gear sets that represent some kind of progression system in themselves, so you won't be stuck wearing the exact same thing forever. Instead you will be changing your gear approximately once per tier and then upgrading it, multiple times, which is better than nothing but nowhere near as good as a fully-functioning appearance system.

Nightingale doesn't have such a system yet, which is fair enough in Early Access, I guess, although personally, if I were head of a games studio, a fully-functioning appearance system would be a top priority all the way back in alpha. What's worse is that there isn't even a mention of any such system in the recently published Not-a-Roadmap covering the next two stages of development.

The upgrade system, like the Essences it uses, also comes in tiers. So far there are only three and the naming convention used suggests there aren't going to be many, if any, more. There are four qualities: Common, Uncommon, Rare and Epic which come in four corresponding colors: Grey, Green, Blue and Pink. Stop me if you 've hear this one before.

I suppose there's Legendary and maybe Mythical still to come in the standard RPG progression hierarchy, which would allow for enough vertical progression to support at least a couple of expansions. That should see them safely through the next few years.

For now, though, we have those basic four. In theory you could upgrade your Common items to Epic, I think. You can definitely take Common up to Rare. I can't be absolutely sure what happens after that  because I don't yet have the Epic Upgrade Bench or whatever it's called.

I have the one that uses T2 Essences to upgrade Uncommon to Rare. The Epic one, it won't surprise anyone to learn, I'm sure, uses T3 Essences, which come, as you'd expect, from T3 Realms.

The catch is that the vendors who sell the recipes for the Epic crafting stations and the items they produce only take T3 Essences, which means you have to do challenges in T3 Realms to get them. And those vendors want huge quantities of Essences for most of the recipes they sell. A few recipes go for the knockdown price of 100 Essences but the going rate for most is 1300 a pop.

That would be extremely awkward if it weren't for the current state of what passes for an endgame in Nightingale, which at present allows for some appropriately epic Essence farming opportunities. 

When you complete the first chapter of the main storyline and gain access to The Watch, you get a short questline to unlock The Vaults, a trio of repeatable dungeons backed by some very iffy lore. When you zone into any one of the three Vault instances (One for each biome.) you find you're no longer playing solo. Suddenly and without any real warning, the game has turned into an MMO.

I have no idea if there's any formal match-making algorithm operating behind the scenes. It certainly didn't feel like it the few times I went in. I just spawned in at the start with a dungeon run already in well progress. I don't even know how many other players were in there with me. More kept spawning and running past me so I fdidn't waste any time trying to figure it out - I just followed them. 

From the Gear Score next to each character name I could see I was teamed with some people much better equipped than me but also others about the same and one or two quite a bit worse. When I say "teamed", I mean it in the loosest possible sense. There's no organised group or party, just a bunch of people soloing together, much like public events in any post-Warhammer MMORPG. 

There's no shared loot system for drops, either, Anyone can hoover up anything that lands on the ground. That sounds problematic but then again, there's no credit system for completion either. As soon as any challenge completes, everyone in the dungeon can open the Essence chest and take a full share. 

There are regular loot chests, too, and I think they all have hypothecated items for everyone that opens them but there it's harder to be sure, especially since no-one ever speaks. My evidence for the supposition is If I was taking anyone else's stuff out of the chests, they never complained about it and there was always something in every chest I opened, even if other players got to it before I did.

In content, the Vaults are like a collection of the usual Realm challenges bundled together with a Boss at the end. There's some half-assed narrative justification for this in that the Fae supposedly used them for some nebulous sort of training and the Boss is actually always the same eternal etentity, inadvertently brought to the Realms by Qatermain himself, who keeps incarnating in varying forms. Killing him repeatedly is the only way to keep him from overrunning the Watch.  

I was not convinced by any of this but then neither are al lthe people who explain it so I think there's meant to be some ambiguity. Most games don't even bother putting any kind of narrative fig-leaf on this sort of thing so credit to Inflexion for at least trying.

The Vaults would be tough to solo, something you can do by crafting your own Vault card for use in a crafted portal. Soloing would be crazy right now, though. In the four or five runs I did I only saw the boss twice. Once he was dead within miliseconds aof my arrival in his arena and the other time I fought him, tanked him briefly, died, ran back and picked up my loot after someone else fiunished the job seconds later.

At the moment, as a critical mass of players reaches the endgame and tries to grind the tens of thousands of essences needed for the upgrade recipes, the public Vaults are constantly busy. You can zone in and find one in progress immediately. Since you get all the rewards just for being there, it makes no difference if you arrive just as everyone else leaves. You get the same rewards as if you'd been there from the start.

Well, so long as you can find all the glowing bubbles you need to click, anyway. A full run nets about 300 Essences but I could never find all of them - the whole damn place is a maze. 

My fastest run netted me a couple of hundred Essences for the time it took me to run through an empty instance from the entrance to the zone-out. My highest total was maybe fifty more for a whole lot of fighting along the way.  If you can face doing back-to-back runs for an hour or two, you could make several thousand Essences but even that would only buy you two or three recipes. You're going to be at it a for a while.

It's not going to be to everyone's taste, not least because it's a major change of direction from what you'll have been doing for the last 30-50 hours. If you don't like the sudden switch from solo or co-op to open grouping, there's always the option to just carry on as you were. As I mentioned, you can set up your own, private Vault but there's a whole set of open-world T3 solo Realms you can craft and farm. All you have to do is make the cards. There's even a quest to get you started.

I made one last night and had a run around to see how hard it would be. It was perfectably doable with my Rare gear but I'd be lucky to get a tenth as many Essences for ten times the effort. I'd recommend the solo/co-op Realms for exploration and for gathering mats but clearly grinding in the Vaults is the way to go if you want to farm Essences, at least until the current levelling bubble deflates and the torrent of nearly-free Essences dries up.

Other than for the fun of it and to satisfy the inevitable wish to have all the best stuff, there may not be much point in grinding for those recipes anyway. HAvign a full set of Epic gear would certainly make everything a lot easier but the main reason you'd want to be doing that content would be to get the gear in the first place. Once you have it, I'm not exactly sure what the point would be in carrying on.

For that, we'll probably need to wait until some higher-tier content is added to the game. That could take a while. It's not even in the medium-term development plan.

Reaching the Watch does feel like an ending to me. Not the end of the whole story, for sure, but the end of the first chapter, definitely. The driving urge I had to push forwards has all but dissipated now. I feel more inclined to go back to pottering around, exploring the variations on the three biomes, building up my base and generally leaning into the sandboxier elements of the game, which have very much taken a back seat for me until now.

Or maybe I'll just go fishing. 

I wonder if you can upgrade that rod...

Maybe You Just Need To Sleep On It?

Before we get started, some background. This post is emblematic of the problems I was talking about the other day, the kind that can arise when you write posts ahead of publication. I only wrote this yesterday but it's already out of date in some key respects and it would be misleading if I just posted it without an update.

I could have just put the new information in a postscript but that would allow more negativity to accumulate than now seems appropriate, so here's the coda in the preamble. It'll all make sense eventually. Probably.

I logged in to Steam about an hour ago and there was a small update to New World. Once that had processed, I was able to log into the game with no issues at all. I was also able to play completely normally, with no errors or interruptions. 

It looks like most of the problems I was having yesterday related to the big update a couple of days ago. Just my luck to try and come back right after a major content drop. I should have realised. It's not like Amazon don't have a history with this kind of thing.

Everything ran smooth as silk at "High" settings with FPS capped at 60. I didn't try it at "Very High/Unlimited" because it looked and played perfectly well as it was but I'm sure that would have been fine, too. The fans on my new card barely needed to turn. As a test, I can finally say it was extremely successful. I'm very pleased indeed.

I didn't stay long. Typically, now the hardware and the software were all co-operating, the connection to the US East server I play on was very poor. Nothing I can do about that other than move to an EU server and that's not happening. It's usually fine, anyway. This was an exception.

I did hang around long enough to visit my house in Mourningdale and pay the outstanding rent. I remember that used to seem quite onerous but now it looks to be trivial. It was about a hundred gold and I have over 33k from doing pretty much nothing. I spent a pleasant few minutes putting all the furniture I'd acquired in appropriate rooms and then I logged out to finish up this post. 

Everything after the next picture is what I wrote yesterday. Once you've finished it, what you just read will make a lot more sense!

I thought I might as well write a post to kill time while I wait for Steam to verify my New World installation for the second time this afternoon. I should say my New World re-installation. Verifying the first installation really didn't help and I don't imagine verifying this one will, either.

Back up. Why am I trying to play New World? Good question. It's not because of the upcoming Rise of the Angry Earth expansion, interesting though it sounds. I don't actually have any particular desire to go back to Aeternum at the moment. I'm more than busy enough in Dawnlands.

No, I just wanted to use New World to test my new graphics card. As I promised (Myself.) I have indeed bought an upgrade to my extremely reliable but even more extremely outdated Zotac GeForce GTX960, the card that came with this PC, when I bought it about six years ago.

Given that it was barely a mid-range card even then, it's astonishing how well it's lasted. Until recently, it ran every game I threw at it and mostly it ran them well, even when the minimum spec said I shouldn't even bother trying. It's still soldiering on. If I was just going to carry on playing the same games I'm playing now, I wouldn't need to change it.

Of late, though, it's becoming obvious that soon newer games won't be an option, even at low settings. I don't tend to play the most graphically intense kinds of games but it's getting to the point where even new MMORPGs and survival games are starting to look like they might be to much for my old card to handle. 

I was aware it might be a waste of time upgrading the card if it just shifted the problem to my equally aging processor, but I ran a few tests and apparently I got lucky there. My CPU over-performs for what's expected of it. If it does need to be replaced at some point, my motherboard can take something quite a bit better but for now it looks as though I can stick with what I have and still get full benefit from a new GPU.

I've been through this upgrade cycle before - swapping out key components mid-cycle before replacing the whole lot with a new machine - but last time I did it, the whole life of that PC, including upgrades, was shorter than this one's already lasted unchanged. If nothing actually fails then, with the overhead for improvement still open to me, I might get a full decade out of it, which would be amazing.

Because it's been so long since I bought it, just about any new card would have been an upgrade. I could have saved myself some money and picked up something from a couple of generations back . Given the above history, though, I thought I'd take the plunge and buy something up-to-date.

Obviously, I'm talking no more than mid-range, at best. Let's not get carried away. I was going to get a GeForce RTX 3060, which would have been a huge upgrade, but I prevaricated for so long, by the time I finally got my wallet out that card had been superceded by the 4060.

I read a bunch of reviews and it seemed that while the 3060 had had a pretty good reputation, the 4060 wasn't seen as a huge step up. It seemed it was a very decent card, just not sufficiently advanced in any way to justify being marketed as the next generation the four-zero prefix implied.

Hah! Who cares? It's the fourth generation of that line after the one I'd be upgrading from! It might only be 15-17% better than 3060 and that might not be enough for someone to consider trading them out but for me it would be like swapping a mule for a moon-rocket! Okay, maybe not quite, but it would be a hell of an upgrade all the same.

The 4060s I was checking out weren't a lot more expensive than the 3060 I'd had my eye on so it made no sense to go for the older one. I also found out that the 4060 was significantly less demanding on power than the 3060, meaning I wouldn't even need to look at upgrading my PSU, and it was smaller, which would mean I wouldn't have to do any fiddling to get it in the case. The 4060 is also optimized for 1080p gaming, which is a real positive in my view. The 3060 is supposedly better for 4k, but I don't have a 4k monitor and I have no intention of getting one. 

I was even enough on the ball to read some specific reviews for the exact makes and models, which led me to buy an "MSI GeForce RTX 4060 VENTUS 2X BLACK 8G OC", for which I paid more than I've ever paid for any computer component in my life. I got it from Amazon because it was easy and convenient and they could deliver it by 1pm the next day but in fact I checked a lot of places and it was pretty much the same price everywhere, give or take a few quid.

It came this morning, complete with a rigmarole where I had to give the delivery guy a six digit code that had been sent to me by email. Since he arrived about five minutes after I'd gotten up, I hadn't even switched my PC on yet, let alone checked my email but he was very patient and waited for me to get myself together.

A new graphics card is just about the easiest component to swap out but I still managed to have to do it twice because I tried to put the fixing screw in backwards. That wasn't a mistake. I thought it would work better that way. It didn't. 

Since my previous card was also a GeForce, the drivers I already had were fine. They were even up to date. The card worked perfectly out of the box. I ran some benchmarks and was very happy to see that my new card was considered more than capable of running pretty much anything currently available. All that remained was to try it out.

And that's where my problems began. For one thing, as I said, my old card had been doing a very good job of playing all the games I wanted to play right now. I was mostly upgrading so I could play new games - games I don't yet have. I logged into a couple of things but naturally I couldn't tell any difference. 

I could have started jacking up the quality to see what happened. I do tend to play a lot of games below the maximum graphical settings. But instead I thought of New World.

My GTX960 could run New World but it really hated doing it. After a while the whole box would heat up and start to make some alarming noises. I had to keep the graphics on a low setting and even then I didn't like to play for much more than an hour at a time. 

That was why I started playing New World on GeForce Now, a solution that allowed me to play at higher settings without my PC bursting into flames, but which involved jumping through an annoying extra set of hoops every time I wanted to play, including sometimes having to wait in a queue for a not insignificant amount of time. It also meant, somewhat ironically, that I could still only play for an hour at a stretch because that's what non-subscribers get and I wasn't about to pay a subscription just to play a free game.

Of course, playing on GeForce Now meant I hadn't needed to update New World on Steam for about a year and a half. When I came to do it today there were more than 36GB of files to download. That took a while.

Once the game was patched I went to log in and... not much happened. It took what seemed like forever but was actually about fifteen minutes before I could even see my character. Since I last played there'd been some server merges but I didn't much care about that. My houses were safe, apparently, apart from any I might have had in First Light, which was now under occupation by the Angry Earth.

As far as I could remember I didn't have a house in First Light so that was okay. I logged my character in and found myself in what was the new area this time last year, Brimstone Sands. I haven't played since November. I turned the graphics up as high as they go and started to move around but unfortunately my PC was having other ideas.

The new card was absolutely fine as far as I could tell. It was bloody Steam messing about, as per usual. I have a lot of issues with Steam acting like a needy child and wanting attention. I've disabled just about every automatic process I can find but it always manages to be up to something I'd rather it wasn't.

Eventually it started to settle down and I was able to begin moving about again. I collected all the presents that had piled up in my Claim window and then I opened them all. Mostly they seemed to contain materials, few of which I had any memory of what to do with, but there was some furniture in there as well. That was a bit more interesting.

I took a couple of screenshots and started to head out of town, whereupon the game popped up a message telling me I was missing a file and that was the end of that. I closed the client and had Steam do a full file check, which found three files absent or corrupted. It assured me these had now been found and installed so I logged in again.

This time I almost made it to the corner of the street before the game told me it suspected I was doing something suspicious and kicked me out again. Apparently this is a common New World error although I've never seen it before.

Checking, it seems the error is usually related to missing files. Since I'd just done a file check and been told all was in order, I decided to do a full re-install. That turned out to be about 66GB and looked like it was going to take quite a while so I went downstairs and prepped a salad and put the topping on the pizza for later.

When I came back, Steam had closed and my whole PC was unuseable. Something had obviously gone wrong. It looked as though the PC was doing some work on itself so I waited for it to finish. And waited. And waited. 

After about a quarter of an hour I lost patience and shut it down. It started up okay so I opened Steam and carried on downloading from where it had crashed, which was about half-way. That took a while, during which I caught up with all the "End of Blaugust" posts I'd missed. Once the re-install had finished I logged in yet again.

It went much faster and more smoothly this time, until I tried to log my character into the world, at which point I was told another file was missing. FFS! I ran the file checker again. This time there were six files missing. Re-installing the whole game had managed to make things twice as bad!

Supposedly the file check had automatically located and installed the missing files but it said that last time. Just to be sure, I ran it again. This time it came up 100% complete.

So I crossed my fingers and went again and guess what? I'm still waiting. This time I got as far as  character log-in but the game has just hung there for fifteen minutes with the HDD whirring away. I'm wondering if it might an issue with the drive. Next plan would be to reinstall New World on a different HDD and see if that makes a difference. 

Or I could just quit while I'm behind and play something that actually works. I've wasted over five hours on this now and all I wanted to do was try out my new card. I'm sure there must be some other game I could use to do that. 

I just got an email telling me Horizon: Zero Dawn is 67% off right now. That was one I thought my PC would balk at. Maybe now's the time to give it a try...

Expansions, Pandas, Events... It's All Happening In EQII

So, we know the name of the next EverQuest II expansion at last. It's Renewal of Ro. Jenn Chan slipped it in at the end of her latest Producer's Letter.  

Darkpaw seems to be developing some kind of slow release, drip feed for expansion news, a technique I find rather effective. There's just enough new information each time to keep the appetite piqued and it takes several bites out of the news cycle. Like most things Daybreak is doing these days, it feels like a solid, competent effort from a significantly more focused marketing department than we've been used to seeing in the past.

There's still very little detail on the exact setting or storyline for EQII's nineteenth expansion, other than the hint hidden in the very last sentence - if you can call something hidden that's been both bolded and italicized. "Get ready to Tack on your best gear and establish yourself as one of the greatest of spelunkers in hiztory". Jenn does love her puns.

You could engrave everything I know about Takish Hiz on the head of a pin - if you were a gnome with one of those sets of magnifying goggles they all seem to wear. I have a passable grounding in Norrathian lore, myth and history but the first I ever remember hearing of the legendary home of the elves was in 2003's Lost Dungeons of Norrath, the sixth (And in my opinion one of the best.) expansions to the original EverQuest.

Takish Hiz was one of the LDoN dungeons, where I spent a great deal of time in the six months before the next bi-annual expansion suddenly made getting groups to go there all but impossible. I remember it clearly as a complex of marble halls and corridors entombed beneath the desert sands. Of the sylvan forests so dear to the elves who once ruled Norrath during the eponymous Takish Age, there was no sign at all.

How long Takish Hiz has lain beneath the sands I'm not sure but by the time Renewal of Ro drops it has to have been a millennium at least. EQII is set five hundred years after EverQuest. EverQuest Online Adventures, the iteration of Norrath created for Playstation 2, was set five hundred years before. Much to my regret, I never played EQOA but from the wiki I can see that Takish Hiz was a zone in that game and the pictures and descriptions clearly show it long abandoned, the desert already in the process of reclaiming a land left empty by the vanished forests of the elves.

I have to say I am very interested by the choice of location for this year's expansion. While I do like to see and explore brand new places, I feel one of EQII's strongest cards is its connection with EQ . Every time we're offered the chance to re-visit old haunts there's a powerful emotional charge freighted in that frisson of familiarity, combined with curiosity. 

It's subtly different from pure nostalgia, more like the odd, disconcerting sensation that comes from seeing how things have changed when you go back to a place you once knew well, after a long time away. I find that feeling compelling in the real world and it's no less energizing in virtuality.

Added to that, the EQII expansion which the new one references, Prophecy of Ro, was very good indeed. It had a truly huge amount of content, much of which I've completed more than once, and it had a strong, consistent theme that held everything together. I had many good times there and still do, whenever I go back.

The last expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, was lots of fun. It ticked all the expected boxes for an EQII expansion and I got several months of quality entertainment from it but perhaps the only thing I felt a little unsatisfied by was the supposed connection with the troubled EQ expansions Gates of Discord and Omens of War. I was looking forward to revisiting some of those locations - Wall of Slaughter maybe, Natimbi certainly, but in the end there was barely a namecheck for any of the places I knew.

Takish Hiz is much more of an unknown quantity. It was already lost in the mists of history the first time around. The Desert of Ro, on the other hand, has already had its day in the sun in PoR. I'm very curious to know just what the balance between new, old and new-old will be this time around.

Before the expansion arrives I probably need to do some work on whichever characters I intend to take through it first. I haven't been neglecting the game entirely but these last few months my activity there has tailed off a lot. I'm substantially further behind than I have been for a couple of years.

One way I've been able to benchmark is by the new gear available from 2022's Panda, Panda, Panda! event, which was patched into the game earlier this week. The event itself was always on the schedule, but it hadn't been entirely clear whether there would be a new set of quests this time.

There will. Nine weeks of quests, just like usual. This year they take the format of Creature Catalogs, a very smart way of reducing the workload for the team, while still giving players a similar experience to previous years.

This morning I did the first, a series of identifications around Kylong Plains in Kunark. With instant travel, flight and a surprisingly accurate memory for the exact locations of all the creatures needed, the whole thing took me about five minutes. If you did it old school and weren't familiar with the area I'd guess it might take fifteen or twenty.

Either way, it's a very good return on time invested. The first tier of rewards includes weapons which, at 315 resolve, will be upgrades for all but one of my characters. Browsing through the very large selection of gear, augments and sundry items available from the full sequence of nine quests, I can see that I'll need to pick up most of what's on offer, even for my best-equipped character.

Last year, for the first time, most of the Panda gear wasn't really an upgrade for the character I was planning on taking into Visions of Vetorvia so it shows how much I've let things slip. Of course, these days, the panda gear itself tends to be made obsolete by the hand-outs from the box on the floor next to the first questgiver in a new expansion, so it's a moot point whether I really need to take this short-term, interim upgrade. Since I'm going to be doing the quests for the fun of it anyway, it would be crazy not to pick up the rewards.

There's also a huge number of housing items to be had, all of which you'll be able to see at EQ2Traders as the event progresses. Niami Denmother also always has the best walkthroughs for the panda quests, should you need any handholding.

As well as the pandas there's also the other "get you ready for the expansion" event that always runs alongside it: Gear Up, Level Up. It comes in three phases and this time its available on all servers (Emphasized as "yes, all servers".

The schedule, should you need it, is as follows:

• September 27 – October 10 = Double Loot
• October 11 – October 17 = Mount Training Drops
• October 18 – October 24 = Spell Research Drops

I don't usually bother with Gear Up, Level Up but I might this year. Spell research boosts are always the most souhgt-after but to take full advantage I really need to get on and make all those Expert spells I've been avoiding.

Mount training boosts I already have in abundance, thanks to Overseer, but unusually, there's still content I haven't finished in the last expansion. Those double drops from instance bosses might have some things I want, even if I don't techically need them at this stage.

Either way, it's great to have options. Now all I have to do is find some time to excercise them.

Visions Of Vetrovia: A Lot More Fun Than Gates Of Discord And You Can Quote Me On That.

I'd like to preface this post by making it clear I consider myself to be very much at the easily-satisfied end of the mmorpg-player spectrum. A long reading of this blog should support the proposition that I've rarely met an mmorpg I didn't like and that I can find something good to say about almost anything the genre throws my way.

With that caveat, my tentative early assessment of EverQuest II's Visions of Vetrovia is that it might be the game's best expansion for years. Of course, I have to immediately add another layer of qualification: I'm talking purely from the perspective of a solo player. What the heroic group or raid experience is like I have no idea and most likely never will. 

Down in the weeds with the rest of the scrubs, everything's looking peachy. The screenshots don't really do the graphics justice. There's an astonishing sense of space and air about the first two open zones, Svarni Expanse and Karuupa Jungle that can only really be appreciated and experienced by wheeling through them on a flying lizard or a winged horse.

The third zone, Mahngavi Wastes, is bleaker and emptier, as befits its name, but it, too, feels wide, wild and free in a way few, if any, of the zones in the last several expansions have. Although the whole storyline revolves around the undead, only the last zone, Forlorn Gist, has the perpetually darkened, foreboding, closed-in feeling you'd expect when werewolves and vampires are doing the decorating.

All of the zones feel substantially larger than we've come to expect, although I'm not sure a surveyor's report would bear that out. I suspect it has something to do with the way they're designed, They all make great use of dimension and even better use of contrast. 

In the past, designers have employed some well-worn tricks, convoluted twists and turns, various means of blocking line of sight, to make small spaces feel complex and confusing, thereby creating an impression of something larger than its visible bounds. Here, there are broad horizons and vast, vaulted forests. If there's one thing the EQII graphics engine excels at it's foliage and in Vetrovia it gets its best run-out since 2012's Chains of Eternity. I can't remember ever seeing so many leaves.

Gorgeous graphics make a great foundation but a strong expansion needs much more than pretty pictures. In the case of EQII, what that usually means is a strong central narrative and a seemingly never-ending gear ladder. 

Most mmorpgs rely heavily for incentive on hierarchical content that requires players to replace their gear at regular intervals but EQII has always taken that process to extremes. The expansion has only been out for a couple of weeks and so far I'm only on stage six of the thirteen part Signature quest sequence and yet I've already upgraded some slots no fewer than four times. 

What's more, I know from experience that by the time I get to the end of the questline, most of the items I'm so pleased with will have turned into usless kipple fit only to be transmuted into mats. And that's a good thing.

If upgrading gear was a struggle, such relentless progression would be stressful and frustrating but here it's the opposite. The joy of this expansion is that the first set of gear, the starter equipment in Tishan's lockbox, is more than good enough to get you started and every quest reward and drop after that just adds power to an already-powerful baseline.

The result is a highly satisfying sense of empowerment. Only a couple of weeks ago I was tentatively pulling singles as I edged my way across the platforms and rope bridges. Today I'm barrelling into piles of pygmies, sweeping them up into an angry mob, then unleashing an explosion of AEs that fell the lot of them outright. 

It's immensely enjoyable. What's the point of gearing up if it doesn't make you stronger? Of course, if it made everything utterly trivial I imagine that might get boring eventually, even for me (Although, if I'm honest, I'm not sure about that. It rarely has before.) but that's not what's happening at all.

As the regular open-world mobs cease to offer any kind of threat, more of the storyline moves into instances. I've completed two so far, Heart of Conflict and Dedraka's Descent. They each took me something like an hour and involved some deaths, a modicum of swearing and much reading and re-reading of walkthroughs.

Compared to many previous such instances I've done, I felt these were pitched just about right. Setting out, they appeared daunting. There were moments where I found myself wondering if I'd have the enregy to get through to the end but the difficulty was such that each time I anticipated failure, success came instead, albeit sometimes on the second attempt.

I was most impressed with the items that dropped from the bosses. In the past, two of the more annoying things about instance bosses have been the uselessness of the things they leave behind them when they die and the irritating mechanics involved in getting your hands on them.

There had been some kind of quasi-exploit some years back that necessitated the implementation of a convoluted system to make sure only the person who killed the mob in a solo instance got the reward. I forget the details, if indeed I ever knew them. 

Whatever it was, it seems to have passed, because this time the bosses just drop good, old-fashioned steel chests that you click on to loot like we did fifteen years ago. It's a much more organic method of looting a mob than having some UI frame open. You wouldn't think it would matter that much but it does.

What's in the boxes is what really matters, though. I was surprised and delighted to find that every last boss I killed (More than a dozen so far.) dropped at least two pieces of armor or weaponry. Some dropped three. 

The items weren't always things the character who got them could use, something players of "Mains" might not like, but my characters were forming a disorderly line behind the Bruiser, who unaccountably has ended up being the one I'm taking through the story first. Yes, I know I said it was going to be my Necromancer. I have no more idea why it's not than you do.

The final boss in one instance even droppped a familiar. I don't think I've seen a familiar drop from any boss in the last five years. I know they can. In my experience they just never do.

Whether that was just some fantastic luck or whether the loot table is much more generous this time around I guess I'll find out as I carry on through the rest of the story and its associated instances. I hope it does turn out to be a more common thing than it used to be - that familiar was a massive upgrade.

The tuning of the instances seemed fine enough that I found it worth my while pausing when any item my Bruiser could equip happened to drop, so he could swap it out for whatever he was wearing. I can't recall ever doing that before, possibly because hardly anything that useful has ever dropped during a run, let alone several times in the same instance.

I may very well be over-selling this. My memory of the last few years of expansions isn't that clear to begin with and I'm playing a different character this time. Even so, it feels different. The whole expansion does. Visions of Vetrovia feels as though it's had a better pass for playabilty than usual. It trucks along.

That said, I have a couple of warnings for anyone following along behind me. Warnings and advice.

Firstly, if you're playing an adventuring character who's also skilled enough in a tradeskill to do the Signature crafting questline - do the tradeskill Sig Line first. It's way, way shorter than the adventure line. It'll only take you two or three hours at most and at the end of it your character will be able to fly in the first three zones.

I'm quite a fan of the modern practice of withholding flight until a character's explored the whole of a new zone on foot. I would recommend doing that for fun anyway. The zones, as I said, are wonderful to be in, with all kinds of sights to see and EQII is blessed with relatively forgiving mob density in most areas.

For all the fun of exploring on foot, I have to say the Adventure questline goes better by air. There are a lot of long runs and long runs back and even with the mobs well spaced there can be a lot of extra-curricular killing before you get to the places you need to be. Being able to swoop through the skies and see the land laid out like a map beneath you makes the whole thing fly by, literally and figuratively.

Secondly, do read the timeline carefully before you proceed. I know, spoilers. And not everyone likes a walkthrough the first time. I don't. I try to do it on my own until I get stuck.

The thing is, there's at least one part where you can't really know you have to do a set of side quests before you do a section of the Signature line. Strictly speaking, you don't have to do it first. You'll just wish you had when you realize you didn't.

It's no biggie if you just bumble through like I did. All it means is you have to go back and do the subquest before you can carry on.. only then the subquest takes you into the same instance you just finished. Now you're going to have to do it again. 

If you'd known that in advance you could have prepared. Then, when you killed the fourth of five bosses as you went through the instance for the Sig line, you'd also have gotten a quest drop for the subquest. 

It does tell you that in the wiki. I saw it. I even did some of the subquest. I just didn't finish it. Now I have to do the whole instance again. Which is fine. Did it once, can do it twice. And more loot is always good. Still, would have been neater the other way.

Here's where things stand for me right now. I've taken three crafters all the way through the tradeskill questline. All three of them are doing the crafting dailies, which take about ten or fifteen minutes each. 

Those can reward Advanced crafting books, which would allow me to make upgrades for all my adventuring classes except the Swashbuckler (I still don't have a high-level jeweller.) Those books are rare, though. I've had one so far, an Armorsmith book. I put it on the broker for nine million platinum. If it sells I can buy one I need, when someone offers one. So far there are hardly any for sale but it's early days. There will be, once all the guild crafters have their recipes.

The Bruiser is doing very well in the instances so I'm carrying on with him for now. He's feeding all the gear he can't use back to the team so if he starts to falter, the next in line will already be somewhat geared to see if they can do better. I still think the Necro would be the most powerful but I'd rather have some of her spells upgraded before she tries to prove me right.

Everything is spinning along so nicely I feel confident I'll be playing mostly EQII through Christmas and into the New Year. The sense of progression is very satisfying and there are several clear paths to follow to keep that going. 

There's also more than enough variety to keep things feeling fresh and I have more ideas of things I want to be doing than time to do them all. It's always something like this at this stage of an expansion cycle but this time it feels even more like it than usual.

Naturally, I reserve the right to come back here in a day or a week or a month to rant about where it all fell apart and what a diabolical bait and switch the whole thing turned out to be. I am, after all, not even halfway through the questline yet. Plenty of time for things to go horribly wrong.

I can only report as I find, though, and so far I'm having a fine old time. Here's hoping it continues.

The Ant And The Panda And Me

This week sees the conclusion of EverQuest II's "Panda Panda Panda" event. Every week I've meant to get back to it but somehow I never have. Today, I finally managed to drag myself away from New World for long enough to catch up. I still had two-thirds of the quests to do (six out of nine) but that didn't take too long. I knew where most of the locations were without having to look them up.

It's always a fun, no-pressure event.There's no particular urgency to do each week's quest as it drops because once they're in, all the Summer/Panda quests stick around forever. You can go back at any time and do them at your leisure. You also only need to do them once per account. All your characters get immediate access to the rewards as soon as you finish each stage.

Looked at from another perspective, though, the clock is ticking. Part of the reason these questlines were added to the game and why there's a new one every year is to allow slackers to catch up before the annual expansion, which should be with us in a matter of a very few weeks. If you're a casual and/or solo player and you plan on getting Visions of Vetrovia on release you probably want to makes sure whoever you plan on taking into the opening zone has the advantage of all the free panda gear.

I've always suspected as much.

Or do you? I'm not at all sure. Another modern EQII tradition is the "Tishan's Box" that sits on the ground somewhere close to the first questgiver in each new expansion. It's full of armor, weapons and adornments for every archetype and it usually upgrades whatever you just got a few weeks earlier from the pandas.

If I had the determination I'd run some kind of comparison on the two this year to see just how much better the Tishan's gear is and whether it upgrades everything or whether you need to mix and match for best effect. I've thought of doing it before but what always happens is that I'm too excited to get on with exploring the new content and by the time I've calmed down I'm already wearing a mish-mash of panda, Tishan and early quest rewards.

Another reason is that upgrading gear in EQII is ferociusly complicated. One of the reasons I've been putting off finishing the panda quests this year is that I've been dreading the moment when I have to go through every item and compare it with what I have on. 

That's a lot of slots.

It would be bad enough if it just meant checking my armor and my weapons but there are the adornments to look at, too. An EQII character doll has more than 20 equipable slots and each takes up to six adornments. 

Adornments are where most of your power and survivablity comes from so you can't just slam in anything and hope. They come in sets, too, with set bonuses that can be extremely powerful and they have numerous status effects and buffs, not all of which can be applied at the same time on the same character.

When I read, as happens most years, of returning EQII players being slaughtered by the low-level wildlife in the introductory zone of the new expansion, I know it's always due to lack of preparation, if not lack of understanding. 

For years, the game has been very soft indeed for solo players and casuals, even in brand-new content, provided those players understand the expectations that lie behind the design. They give you all the gear you need, for free. They do expect you to at least put it on.

As an illustration, when I did my due dilligence this afternoon and compared every piece of new Hua armor and jewellery with what my Berserker was wearing, I only ended up equipping a couple of rings, a necklace and a pair of boots. Even as a very casual solo player the great majority of the gear he had on was better than anything the panda had to offer.

That's quite significant. I haven't really done what a solo player is intended to do to make sure their gear is up to scratch. That would be to run solo instances until my eyes bleed in the hope of getting the rarer drops, to do all the Public Quests I can find for as long as the wider community is running them and to do all my dailies and weeklies until there's nothing left that would be an upgrade. Not to mention the summer ethereals, the collection questline and the mid-year Fabled dungeon update, all of which have solo content that gives upgrades.

If you do all of that you'll end up very nicely dressed. I didn't. I did a few bits and pieces now and then when the mood took me but other than that I just did Overseer quests for the first four or five months of the last expansion cycle and that got me to 235-240 resolve in some slots and 225 in the rest. I was lucky to get a 270 resolve two-hander and a 260 cloak as well. 

The Hua gear from this year's panda quests is 225 resolve, which means you can take that as the minimum baseline for solo and casual players. The devs are telling you that you should be at least this tall to ride by now. If you've been playing much at all, you probably already will be but if not then Panda Panda Panda!

It would have been easy to slap on those few obvious upgrades and call it a day but that would have been a serious error. Gear is important but adornments are crucial and even though my Berserker is a maxed adorner with a very good set of recipes, there are a whole bunch of non-craftable adorns that only appear each year with the questline.

I spent a good long while meticulously going through every one of the dozens of adornments the Berserker had studded into his armor, comparing them with what was available on the panda vendor and swapping out all the ones that looked like improvements. It wasn't just the quest-specific ones I needed, either. 

Even though I could have made a load of white adornments this year I hadn't. I was too stingy to use the mats I had and too mean to buy the ones I needed. I spotted a whole bunch of free upgrades on the vendor and bought them by the stack.

And then I had to fit them. Including everything, the whole process took me about two hours of which only thirty minutes was flying around the world doing the six quests I hadn't done. Most of it was spent taking adornments out of things and putting others in. 

The reason it took so long is that adornments are slot-specific in various ways that can't just be seen at a glance from their color but needs to be studied in detail. Some things will go in many slots, some in few, some in only one. If you don't concentrate you can end up putting something that could go in half a dozen places into a slot that you should have saved for another gem that only goes in one or two.

It's not a major issue if you mess up. There's a handy gadget you can get from your class trainer that allows you to take adorns out of items without losing them or damaging the armor but it takes time to do and it's annoying when you find yourself removing the adornment you only added five minutes ago because you didn't plan ahead.

All of this sounds very off-putting and it is - to returning ex-players or potential new starters. To the core EQII players, the people who pay the subscriptions and buy the expansions, I strongly suspect it's the exact opposite. EQII players love complexity. They love fiddly systems and mechanics that take up hours of their time. They like to think their game is more intellectually demanding than other mmorpgs, whether it's true or not.

Over the long years I'm sure I've seen far more complaints when the developers have tried to reduce the number of choices to make things simpler and easier than I've seen about any new system that takes a lot of figuring out. The more abstruse and arcane things become, the more people seem to appreciate it. It's that kind of game.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't like it this way, too. It's absorbing while I'm doing it and satisfying when I'm finished. There's nothing like going from 520k hit points to 650k just by standing in your house fiddling around in your bags. 

I learned a few things, too, like I really need a new mount. The one I'm using is a decent one and it's maxed but it's from the expansion before last. I hadn't realized I never got a new mount in the whole of Reign of Shadows. I also haven't been keeping up with the gear upgrades for my mercenaries. I have quite a lot of stuff they could be using but it's not doing much good in my bags and bank vaults. And don't talk to me about Familiars... 

There's a lot of work still to do and I confess I'm not sure if there's much point at this stage. Unless Visions of Vetrovia veers wildly off the path set by most previous expansions, anything that looks like an upgrade now is going to look like cast-offs in a month or two. So long as I'm sufficiently well-equipped to handle the signature questline I'm probably better off just turning up as I am and swapping stuff out as I go.

For anyone who isn't interested in setting themselves up for the expansion, I'd still recommend finishing up the panda quests anyway. There are quite a few nice non-combat treats in the slightly misleadingly named "Decoration Packs". 

I particularly like Antony, the ant mount. Like most EQII mounts he's nicely animated, presumably by the invaluable Ttobey, who Darkpaw are very lucky to have. He's very characterful and not nearly as creepy as he could be. Antony, that is, not Ttobey. 

It's a shame Antony can't fly but then flying ants don't have much of a record of airworthiness, so it's probably just as well.