One Thing, Then Another

What I wanted to write today was a review of the first season of Arcane, which I finished watching last night. Bit late but still...

That, however, requires some time and thought and I have, if I'm lucky, about an hour to get this post written, edited and published. So that's not going to happen.

I will spoil my own future review, should it ever come to be, by saying I found Arcane to be one of the most impressive animated series I have ever seen. And I've seen a few. The animation itself is quite possibly the most detailed, fluent and expressive I've ever seen outside of a cinema or for that matter inside and the script was pretty damn fine, too. Not to mention the voice acting.

Better stop before I really get into it. I just wanted to say it was magnificent and I'm an idiot for not watching it when it came out. Maybe I'll save the full review for when I've seen the second season, although that could be a while. I need a breather after the emotional beating the first one gave me before I get back on that particular horse.  

I don't want to skip a posting day just because I can't write the post I wanted to, though. I'm aiming for 300 posts for the calendar year, which means I have to come up with ten in the next nine days. The Advent Calendar has me covered for three so it's seven in nine but of those nine I'm working three and I generally don't work and post so it's really seven in six. 

Can't afford to skip a day, then. Hence this half-assed excuse for a post.

One card any games blogger can always play is the good old "What I've Been Playing" number. In my case, that'd be EverQuest II. Quite a bit of it, in fact.

Enough that my Sage is now halfway through Level 134. The cap is 135 so he's nearly there.

He would actually be there already if it wasn't for the shameless time-gating. I'm not just talking about the reputation grind, the details of which I laid out a week ago. I got that done in about four days by doing the three-hourly quest once in the morning and again in the evening each day, much the same as I used to do the Overseer missions. 

With that finished, I thought it would be back to regular questing until I got to the end of the Signature quest and hit the cap. I was half right.

There's no more time-gated content within the questline itself. The problem is that there isn't much more questing at all. It took me one more session to finish it all. 

It was fun. I enjoyed it. I have no complaints about the quality. It's the quantity I'm not so pleased with.

When my Sage reached the end of the Tradeskill Signature, he was still some distance from the cap. It took him to the very beginning of Level 133. It also gave him a Familiar, an Advanced Spell Book with some of the new recipes and granted him license to fly in the two opening zones of the new expansion. 

All of which is very nice but it's not the end. He still needs two more books and the power of flight in the third zone and for all of those he has to be Level 135. So how is he supposed to get there?

By doing time-gated, repeatable quests, of course! There's a single quest available and it has an eighteen-hour refresh. That's a lot more manageable than the three hour refreshes of the last one but also less amenable to shrinkage by super-human effort (Aka Obsessive and Unhealthy Gameplay.)

Putting a positive spin on it

On the plus side, the quests are very easy and the xp is substantial. If he'd bothered to pop a potion before handing them in, he'd be 135 already. I wasn't in that much of a hurry so I left it until today to do that. He's now one more boosted hand-in away from the Big Ding, which should come... let me see... I did the hand-in around two o'clock this afternoon so... eighteen hours... hmmm... breakfast time tomorrow.

At that point he'll be able to buy the other two recipe books from the vendor in The Unknown and fly anywhere he fancies. Then he's going to need an unconscinable amount of rares for all the Expert spells he'll have to craft for himself, Mordita the Necromancer and possibly the Inquisitor and the Wizard, too. If I have any sense, which is a debatable point, I'll take him through the Adventure Signature line first, so he's robust enough to do his own foraging in the new lands. Otherwise he'll have to use the silly magic hand and that's soooo sloooow....

The issue with the Adventuring Signature is the speed of leveling. Mordita is on the final stage now and once again I have to say it's been an entertaining story with enjoyable gameplay. I'll maybe do a proper write-up on it when I've finished. She just has one instance left, according to the wiki. It should only take her another hour or so.

And then she'll be right around where the Sage was at the same stage, I think. About two levels shy of the cap. Only I don't think Adventurers get a nice little 18-hour repeatable that gives half a level every time you hand it in. I think what they get is a whole load of side-quests, repeatables and collections that each net maybe 4% of a level. 

I could be wrong. I hope I am. I guess I'll find out when I get there. I fear it could be a while before Mordita caps out, though, and if Barnabus is going to do it too, he has at least a dozen or so hours ahead of him to get to where she is.

I said it was entertaining. I didn't say it made sense.

Which, I suppose, is the standard, intended, expected gameplay of an MMORPG. After all these years of going on about how much I like leveling and how the journey is the best part, blah blah blah, I can hardly complain if I don't get given my five new levels in the first five minutes, can I?

Except there were several expansions where that was pretty much what happened. Okay, not five minutes, but fast. The questline gave you so much xp you were capped long before you got to the end of it. 

And I liked that.  It was a great example of giving someone what they want not what they ask for. If they'd done a poll in advance, asking if I wanted to level faster, I bet I'd have said no. But they didn't ask. They just did it. And it turned out that was what I wanted, even if I didn't know it.

And then, a couple of expansions ago, the whole thing went into reverse and then some. We didn't even go back to how it was before, when the main questline in an expansion would take a good, long while but you'd come out the end of it there or thereabouts at the cap.

Instead, the current model has you still in the middle of leveling up when the story reaches its conclusion. After which you have to cobble together whatever sources of extra xp you can find to make up the difference. There's always enough, somewhere, but you have to go look for it. Or in my case read a guide.

These things change all the time, of course. If they don't, all the complaints are about how stale and repetitive the expansions are getting. If they do, it's all "Why try to fix something that wasn't broken?" There's no winning with MMO veterans. 

For all that, I think this is a pretty good expansion so far. I can quite easily imagine taking multiple characters through it over the course of the year. And we get a pass on leveling for the next one with the bi-annual rise in Level Cap, so really I have two years to bring everyone up to speed.

Always assuming, that is, that there is another EQII expansion in 2026. And 2027. If I had to bet on it, I'd bet there will be but I wouldn't bet my shirt, let alone my house. 

I should probably just be grateful we're getting expansions at all and stop nitpicking.

Rag-Tag Grab-Bag. Sold As Seen. No Refunds

For once, I have several meaty posts I want to write but I can't seem to find the time to write any of them. Certainly not today. Tomorrow I don't have much planned, though, and it's forecast to rain heavily all day so maybe then...

For now, though, I think this is going to have to be a bit of an ad hoc rummage down the back of the bookmarks. Again. 

Let's start with a PSA.

Are You Experienced?

EverQuest II is.  275% experienced. From yesterday until 10.00AM PST on 19 November, all Live servers plus Varsoon and Zarrakon are getting a 275% server bonus to adventure and tradeskill xp. Anashti Sul, the Origins server, where players are supposed to enjoy the journey or something, I guess, are getting just 14%. 

This is in celebration of Darkpaw breaking $100k in donations to Extra Life this year. There's also a 45% increase in the chance of rare drops, double currency rewards and double loot drops in "current expansions". 

This is great news if you want to fill your bags with crap level a character up to 125. Before level l00, a 275% bonus on xp from mob kills and quests is huuuuuge. From 100 to 125 the xp from kills will be meaningless but as I understand it the bonus will still apply to quest xp, which is already huuuuuuge in some of the relevant expansions so presumably it will now be huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge! 

I haven't tested it personally, so don't take my word for it. Go try it for yourself. I also haven't confirmed what I've heard about the final five levels to the 130 cap, which is that in the expansions aimed at those levels, bonus xp does not apply to quests at all. That's by design, not because they've been specifically excluded.  

I have tested it on a Level 125 character in the expansion before the cap went to 130, though, and it seemed to work there. I was getting almost 10% of the level for a basic kill quest hand-in, which seemed like a lot. 

If I can find a gap in my schedule, I'll put in some time and see how far I can get a couple of characters who are sitting at 125. It would be nice to have them at 130 for the new expansion.And I might get one of my lower-levels out and blitz some dungeons just for fun. When it comes to xp, I like big buffs. I cannot lie.

The Whole of the Luna

As I suspected, Amazon's recent withdrawal from the games market has indeed put paid to Prime Gaming. I got one, presumably final, email from the Prime Gaming blog that handed everything off to the Luna website and since then... nothing. I guess it's up to Prime Members to remember to go check to see if anything new is available from now on.

If so, here's where to look. I'm not going to go through the slate for November one by one but just for completeness' sake, here are the games, the dates they become available and where you can claim them from:

Already available: 

New Tales from the Borderlands [Epic Games Store]
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun Series [GOG Code]
Gas Station Simulator [Epic Games Store] 
Lovecraft's Untold Stories [Epic Games Store] 

From November 13: 

Another World: 20th Anniversary Edition [GOG Code] 
Fallout 76 [PC via Microsoft Games Store] 
Fort Solis [GOG Code] 
Dark City: Kyiv Collector's Edition [Amazon Games App]

From November 20:

PlateUp! [Epic Games Store]
Dungeons & Dragons: Krynn Series [GOG Code]
Dream Tactics [GOG Code]

From November 26:

Big Adventure: Trip to Europe 6 Collector's Edition [Legacy Games Code]
Gunslugs [GOG Code]

I don't remember seeing the Microsoft Store come up before as a place to claim Prime giveaways. Not sure I like that development much. Also, I notice there's only one game you can play through the Amazon Games app itself. I imagine that's on the way out, too. It'll all be freebies from third-party platforms by 2026 or that's my bet.

Stranger Than Strange

There's a new trailer out for the final season of Stranger Things. It's the first five minutes of the first episode, which seems to be a thing now. Netflix did the same for Wednesday back in the summer.

I haven't watched it and I'm not sharing it. I watched the Wedneday one and posted it here, because it was really good. But I regretted it later. Watching it, mostly, although if I regretted watching it then logically I should also regret sharing it, unless I was trying to give people a degraded experience when they came to the show itself. (I wasn't, by the way...)

The problem with the Wednesday First Five Minutes Trailer (And this is a spoiler of a kind, if you haven't watched the show yet, although if you haven't gotten around to it by now I'm guessing you 're not really going to care...) is that it raises completely inappropriate expectations for the rest of the season. It makes it look as though in Season 2, Wednesday is going to be working as a kind of bounty hunter, tracking down and capturing dangerous criminals. 

That is very much not what the rest of the season is about . The trailer is basically Wednesday's "What I Did On My Holidays" report. When I came to watch  the full first episode I was a little irritated by what felt like a bit of a bait&switch by the marketing department. It definitely fed into my mild disappointment with the first half of the season.

I have no idea if the Stranger Things trailer plays any similar tricks but I don't intend to risk it. I'm really looking forward to the show and I'm more than happy to wait until it arrives before I see any of it.

I will happily share this with everyone, though:

That's a trailer for the upcoming Stranger Things animated spin-off series, Tales From '85. The Duffer brothers said a while back that they planned on doing more with the Stranger Things IP and this is one of those things. 

It's a cartoon that's supposed to remind everyone of the kind we all watched in the '80s, which makes sense. When Stranger Things first appeared, all the publicity about it went on and on about how it was either an homage to or a recreation of the 1980s. It was one of the things that put me off watching the show until much later.

In the latter seasons that whole eighties vibe seems largely to have vanished. The action may take place in the same decade but all the focus is either on the weirdness or the military, neither of which seems particularly grounded in any time period, not on the everday small-town lives of a bunch of young kids in the decade of Madonna and MTV. Plus the kids aren't so young any more, either.

The cartoon show, which has a completely different cast of voice actors, has the opportunity to reconnect with that original, nostalgic concept. Whether it will, or whether we'll want it to, is another question. We won't have too long to wait to find out. It's coming in 2026, although exactly when it will run is still a mystery.

And Finally

Anyone remember a song called iPod Touch that I included in a music post a while back? I thought it was great. I still think it's great. It's by Ninajirachi and it's from her album I Love My Computer, which is also great. 

At the time I thought she was some obscure hyperpopper I'd been lucky to discover. If I thougt about it at all, I'd have guessed hardly anyone was listening to her. Although actually I didn't think about it at all. 

Turns out she's a much bigger deal than I knew. She just won Australian Album of the Year at the TripleJ awards. She also won Australian Music Video of the Year for Fuck My Computer, which you can find in that post I just linked so I won't link it again here. She won Australian awards as a teen, too. She's a big deal in Oz, apparently.

This will explain.

I didn't even know she was Australian. 

Tomorrow, a proper post. Maybe. Let's hope so. 

The Winds Of Mysterious Fortune Blow Me Back To WoW

As I suggested yesterday, I'm not invested enough in any particular MMORPG just now to have a reliable, ready-to-use supply of incidents, ideas and opinions on hand to fill three or four posts a week. It's happened before and no doubt it will happen again. Luckily, I have a well-tested workaround for times like these. 

Actually, I have more than one, this not being my first rodeo as the saying goes (Although if it was really a rodeo then it most definitely would be my first, so that's a weird thing to be benchmarking against...) For today's post I'm combining two methods in a belt-and-braces stylee (And again, who even wears braces these days? Clowns and Jacob Rees-Mogg and that's about it.). 

First, there's the good old "Copy what everyone else is doing" plan, sometimes given a positive spin as "building community" but just as easily defined as pinching ideas from other blogs. In this case, though, the idea I'm pinching is so old that, if it was a folk song, it would have (Trad.) after the title. It's picking up an old game and complaining about how it's too hard/easy/annoying or just plain not as good as it used to be. That one always delivers.

"Incompatible" with what?

There's not really much point trying to build up any suspense by waiting until paragraph four to reveal the name of the game because literally everyone who ever reads this will already know from the picture at the top of the post that it's World of Warcraft. I hadn't really been thinking of going back until I read two posts in quick succession, where Shintar and Redbeard both happened to be talking about their recent experiences in Retail, playing low-levels after being away for a while. 

I won't lie. It was actually Shintar's mention of a levelling event that swung it. I am very much not one of those people who find leveling in Retail too fast. I generally don't find it fast at all, probably for exactly the reasons Shintar outlines (Try it on a character with no Heirlooms and no help from any other characters on the same account some day and see how fast you find it.) Plus I always like events where good loot drops like leaves in the fall.

Both of them play WoW regularly although Redbeard pretty much sticks to Classic these days and Shintar, by her own account, bounces between Classic and Retail. I can't actually remember when I last played either. 

Okay, that's not strictly true. I do remember when I last played Classic, or I can soon look it up. It was right when the big scandal broke and the boycott started. I know because that was what decided me not to renew my sub.

When was that, anyway? My God! It was July 2021! Four years ago! Seems like... well, two years ago, at least. And it turns out I have played Classic again since then because there was a free weekend  almost exactly a year ago and I had a go at that. I'd totally forgotten about it.

As far as I can tell, though, I really haven't logged into Retail for nearly four years. My Battlenet client was obsolete. Had to download a new one. Then I had a 56GB patch to install, which I was hoping was going to be one of those new-fangled ones where, after the digital dust settles, it turns out only a fraction of it was new data. 

Don't look at me like that. I don't know who you are!

Sadly, not this time. It was the full fifty-six gigs and now the drive I have WoW running on is in the red. Probably going to need to do something about that so thanks for that, Blizz. (Mandatory unjustified sarcastic remark quota fulfilled - minimum one per comeback post; no maximum.)

I had lunch while that was going on and it was all finished when I came back so I logged straight in, expecting confusion. I was confused for much of the time I was playing (Just over an hour.) but I also had quite a lot of fun.

WoW is very playable There's no point pretending otherwise. I do think the developers go out of their way - often several miles out of their way - to make it less playable than it could be but the basic structure is so robust it's almost impossible for them to fuck it up completely.

I will take a small portion of the blame for such confusion as there was. It was my choice to play one of my few Horde characters, which was already taking me out of my comfort zone, but even worse I picked one who was camped in Orggrimar.  

I have a love-hate relationship with the Horde capital. I love what it looks like and the general ambience but I hate trying to find anything there. Or even just trying to get from one side of the city to the other. It's not just a maze, it's a chaotic, unstructured mess. It's full of dead ends, there's no line-of-sight and the map is seven shades of totally useless. 

Warband-related perk. I think?

I was confused even before I got to Orgrimarr, though. I knew Warbands were a thing and I had the vaguest idea what they were but it turns out I know nothing about them that's of any practical use. After some trial and error I managed to get some of my characters sitting around a cheery campfire, like a bunch of sitcom characters on an ill-advised camping trip, but only about half of them made it (So maybe it was a horror movie not a sitcom...). 

I couldn't figure out why the rest were only listed on the drop-down list at the side of the screen. I never did manage to get any of those into a campsite. Whether that means they're not in the Warband or if they're in a Warband of their own or if they are all in the same Warband but just aren't showing up, I have no idea. 

I suppose I could go look it up but a) I don't have a lot of faith in the accuracy of online information about WoW, thanks to too many out-of-date or just plain wrong readings in the past and b) I don't care.

Since I'm a cheapskate, playing on the endless free trial or whatever it styles itself these days, none of my characters over a certain level were available. I think the cap for free play is still 20 but 20 is like 50 in old money now, or something? Not a problem anyway. I have plenty of lower-levels who are still allowed to log in and do stuff.

My favorite race in WoW is probably Goblin but I've done a lot of low-level goblining.  My second-favorite is Vulpera and I haven't worn them out yet so I picked on Odelie, a Level 10 Vulpera Warlock and woke her up.

When she arrived in Orggrimar (After the mandatory viewing of the visually impressive but otherwise almost wholly meaningless cinematic for The War Within, the current expansion that I can't play, not having bought it, so why even show it to me?) my first thought was  naturally to get the hell out of town. I would have, too, had Odelie not been standing right next to someone with a quest.

That quest turned out to be the start of a short breadcrumb trail to the expansion before last, Dragonflight. I didn't know Dragonflight was even available to players who hadn't bought it, although now I think about it I do vaguely recall reading something about old expansions being rolled into the current one for nothing. 

And this is one of the nicer views...

Anyway, it seems to be true because after I'd rounded up the scientists and scholars I was asked to persuade to go on the trip (And caught a bunch of stray balloons for some random kid because that's the sort of thing we heroes always have time for.) it was off to the Dragon Isles in a rather impressive zeppelin. The Horde do know how to travel, gotta give them that.

Arrival in the new lands was a lot less impressive. I swear, if I was the Executive Producer of a new MMORPG or the latest expansion for one, my very first ordinance would be "Put the best-looking zone right at the fricken' start". Why do they almost never do that? Why is it that the zone you see first is always a barren desert or a swamp or, as in this case, a filthy grey pile of rocks whose bleak ugliness is only made more depressing by dull, barely-glowing pools of lava?

Horrible place, made worse by horrible lighting. And it's not because the game is old or the engine isn't up to anything better. I have plenty of screenshots of delightful Azerothian scenery, all filled with color and vibrancy and interest. Didn't take any like that today.

Never mind. I'm sure it gets better. I just don't get why anyone would want it to be the first impression players get.

By this point I'd been playing maybe half an hour and I'd made next to no experience at all. I thought I probably ought to make at least some effort to progress so I grabbed what quests I could find and ran around doing them. Or trying to do them. It's quite hard to kill proto-dragons when you don't have any spells on your hotbar.

I'm not sure when or why but it seems while I was away something so significant must have changed that they had to wipe everyone's hotbars. All six of mine were completely empty, except for a single icon that had something to do with Warbands. Yes, them again.

Luckily for Odelie there was a guard nearby and he dealt with the proto-dragon while she sorted out her spellbook. Otherwise that would have been her second death of the session. I know everyone says Retail is so easy now you couldn't get yourself killed if you tried but I assure you that's an exaggeration. Just try running across those canvas roofs in Orggrimar and see what happens.

Once I'd got that sorted out, the rest went quite smoothly. The starting area in the Dragon Isles feels like it might have been designed by the same people who worked on the town planning for Orggrimar but other than that I enjoyed it. 

The gameplay, that is. The story, not so much. I will say, yet again, I find questing in WoW very dull compared to just about any other game I can think of. The quest text is dull both to look at and to read, which makes it hard to get invested in the narrative, such as it may be. 

Functionally, though, it's fine. The kill numbers are low, the drops come fast, the mobs die even faster... what's not to like?

As for the xp it was decent. I played for just over an hour and Odelie went from the start of Level 10 to just into Level 12. Two levels in an hour sounds quite fast (Although, honestly, not that fast by modern standards.) but bear in mind I had full rested xp and there's supposed to be an xp event on. I wonder how fast it would have gone if neither of those was true?

I finished up in the big clearing in front of the Embassy building. There were loads of players there. There were quite a few in Orggrimar, too. For mid-afternoon on a weekday, I thought it seemed pretty busy, especially since it wasn't even current content.

And as I said, I had fun. The xp was nice but the real treat was the loot. I got a couple of the Mysterious Chest drops from the event and while the gear in them wasn't game-changing (Still an upgrade, of course, though.) the 30-slot bag I found in one certainly was. Add to that the 20-slotter I got from a quest and I more than doubled my slots. When I logged in all I had was the default inventory and one ten-slot bag!

The event only has another week to go - I started late - so I'll need to get a move on if I'm going to make the most of it. Whether I have the motivation to keep logging in is a good question but if anything's likely to spur me on it's free bags.

Like A Finger Pointing At The Sky

Playable Worlds surprised us this week with a post-Christmas weekend testing schedule for the Stars Reach pre-alpha that packed a potential sixteen hours of uptime into a couple of days. It came in the form of four, four-hour playtests, two on Saturday and two on Sunday. 

That's a much better set of options for me, equating to afternoon and late evening-early morning in the U.K. If it becomes a regular event, I ought to be able to get some serious hours in. 

Unfortunately, for this particular weekend, I already had commitments for most of the slots. I was working on Sunday, so that knocked out one whole afternoon and also meant I couldn't stay up late for the Saturday evening either, plus I had things already planned for Saturday before I found out the tests were happening.

Even so, I managed to get about three and a half hours in altogether. Once again things turned out to be fairly productive. Well, in the second session, anyway.

The first session, late on Saturday evening, was a bit of a bust although I can't say I didn't enjoy myself. I logged in with the intention of working on my Civic Engineering so I could start building myself a home but I couldn't remember what I needed to do. It had been a while since last time and I'd comppletely forgotten everything I'd learned.

Next time: less mining, more building!

I spent a while reading the in-game guides but they weren't as helpful as I thought they would be. There's a lot of information there but it seems a little vague at times. mostly, I wanted to know what buttons to press and the guide didn't always want to tell me. Or possibly the information was there but I was too tired to take it in. It was past my bedtime, after all.

Either way, I couldn't find what I needed to know so I decided to go do some prospecting instead. It seemed like a good choice since I knew I was going to need a lot of mats, even if I wasn't sure which ones. Metal and stone seemed like a likely bet so I set off to look for some. I didn't get far.

Wherever it was that I'd logged out at the end of the previous test (I rarely remember.) it seemed to be positively infested with vicious killer wildlife. As soon as I'd dug a few holes, a pack of Owldeer galloped up and started jostling me. I believe Owldeer may have been made less aggressive than they used to be but they're still ready for a fight when they can find one so I had to go on the defensive.

I swapped to the electric arc gun, the Omniblaster, and started blasting away, all the while backpedalling, which seems to be the preferred method. I wasn't doing too well until a couple of the deer fell into one of the holes I'd dug and couldn't get out.

Can't Climb. Can't Jump. Can run a little.

This amused the hell out of me, I can tell you. It also opened up hilarious possibilities for future gameplay, something I fully intend to explore when I have the leisure. I happily electrocuted the trapped deer and looted the corpses. Then I picked off the rest of the herd from the safety of the far side of some more rough terrain, leading the creatures into holes whenever I could get them to go the right way.

That was fun. Since combat was going so well and I was feeling bloodthirsty, I abandoned my mining plans and set about murdering as much of the wildlife as I could. I wanted to try using the FPS-mode central reticule to see if it made things any easier, anyway, so I thought it seemed like a good time. 

It took me a while to figure out how to swap between the reticule and the cursor. It's Tab. Everything is Tab, as I know now. That was a bit of a game-changer for me. It only took me, what, half a dozen sessions and over six hours to figure it out, too! I'm fairly sure most people worked it out in a matter of minutes. I wish I had. It does make quite a difference.

Not to combat, though, or not for me, anyway. Once I'd swapped to the reticule, I didn't find it much of an improvement. I found it hard to tell the difference, in fact, so I swapped back to using the cursor, which at least had the benefit of familiarity.

After about half an hour of steady slaughter, I'd accrued enough Combat xp to buy everything that was left on the Combat tree. I already had most of it from all the fighting I'd been forced to do in earlier tests. Again, most of it hasn't improved things any so far.

That largely because most of what you get for your points are crafting recipes. A few options, like the triple-attack, take immediate effect but mostly they just give you recipes for things you have to make. And there it's the same old story: I never have quite the right mats.

Nighttime. Better get to bed. Sun'll be up in five minutes.

Realising that, I decided I'd had enough for that session. As I said, I was too tired to concentrate and I knew I had to be up early for work the next morning, so even though Mrs Bhagpuss and Beryl were asleep and the test had a couple more hours to run, I gave up and logged out.

The next night, Sunday, I was ready the moment the servers came up at 10pm my time. I logged in and the game crashed. I've had more crashes these past two tests than in the ones before Christmas but it was still only a handful and I was always able to get back in immediately, so not really much of a problem.

I wanted to go back to my original plan of getting to grips with the new Homesteading systems, which once again meant first reading the manual to try and remember what I was supposed to be doing. This time I had better luck, possibly because I was awake. 

I worked out, after some trial and error, that I needed specific, hard, rocky materials like Gneiss or Marble to make the blocks the Instaformer requires. Using the Instaformer is what gives you Civic Engineering xp but it's taken me all this time to figure out how to use it. 

I didn't have enough of any of the right rocks to make even a single block so it was off to the mines again. At least this time I knew what I was looking for. Sadly, I didn't know where to look for it.

My first thought was to go look in space because that's where I found all the good stuff before. Space, however, does not seem to be the go-to place for rock. I came away with a lot of metal and a few gems but none of the rocks I needed. On the positive side, I didn't run into a single space monster so it was quite peaceful while I was looking.

I don't know what it is but I don't like the look of it.

Back planetside, I decided just to wander around and keep my eyes open for anything that looked promising, like a cliff face or a big boulder. That has to be where the rocks are, doesn't it? Before I got started on that, though, I remembered that in a previous test I'd bought the option to survey the environment for minerals. That sounded like just what I needed. Might as well give it a try.

It turned out to be avery good decision, if not at all in the way I'd imagined. Trying to figure out how to use mt surveying and assessing skills led to a series of discoveries that, frankly, I should have made back in the second or third test. Things that are pretty much essential for playing the game buit which I've been doing without this whole time.

For example, anyone who's been reading Wilhelm's Stars Reach write-ups will have noticed he regularly talks about people freezing stuff or setting it on fire. I have been wondering how to do that ever since I started. Well, now I know.

I'm not going to tell you though because if you're in the test program you already know (I have to be the last person there to work it out, surely...) and if you're not it would just be a bunch of meaningless, technical detail. The important part is that I can now freeze lakes and set forests on fire along with the rest of them and boy, is it fun! No wonder people keep on doing it.

I can also turn back time, allegedly, although I think a couple of pages in the manual might have been stuck together when I read it. When I point the Suitcase Bomb (Not the actual name.) at a patch of land, the ground turns into lava and bubbles, then mostly cools down into the same thing it was before. 

Wouldn't want to be the guy who lives at the bottom of the hill.

I thought it was supposed to turn into something else. I expect I'm doing it wrong. Once again, though, it's such fun to do, I don't really care. This game is made for vandals and nihilists as much as it is for creators and collectivists, as far as I can tell. There are going to be some sparks flying between the two camps when it gets into the hands of players more interested in making either mischief or their mark than the current crop of testers, I'm fairly sure of that.

If this report sounds random and chaotic, it's because that's what the whole of my near-two-hour session was like. I kept discovering new things the tools could do, trying them out, finding out it was spectacularly destructive and carrying on just for the hell of it. 

I did so much Prospecting (Aka destroying the environment.) I earned more than enough points to fill out the entire Mineralogy Tree. I hugely increased the size of my Hopper (Don't. Please. We're all adults here.) as well as the yeild and the efficiency with which rocks melt. Then I used my newfound skills to  turn everything around me into a barren, pitted, smouldering wasteland.

So that was fun. And also surprisingly productive. I found the ability to Assess things to see what mats they contain, along with the skill that supposedly allows you to survey the area to find what you're looking for, both very little help but just blasting everything in sight with a firehose of purple energy bolts was fantastically effective. 

I stood well back and played the stream across any and every surface indiscriminately until I spotted something boiling out of the plasma that looked like it might be useful. That's how I discovered Coal and Marble and a few other materials I'd never found before.

Nothing worth having down here. Leave it for some other sucker to fill in.

Once I hit something I wanted, like Marble, I went after it like a rabid pit-bull. I ripped up the landscape and spewed the debris back onto the ground like it was Eastern Europe in the 1930s. It was glorious. Also wholly unforgiveable. Stars Reach is going to set the worst possible environmental example if it doesn't rein some of this in before launch. It's a good thing playing video games doesn't affect anyone's behavior or attitude in the real world...

After half an hour of that I had enough Marble to make a couple of blocks with the Lathe. It was also about then that I was thinking of giving up. If it took that long just to make two blocks...

Luckily, one block from the Lathe equates to twenty blocks from the Instaformer. Once I realised that, I was able to lay down enough marble to give me about forty points of xp in Civic Engineering. It seems you earn roughly a point per block extruded.

That was the good news. The bad news is that it takes a hundred points to buy anything on the CE Tree and two hundred to buy anything good. Back to the mines for more Marble!

In the end, I managed to dig out enough to get me 120 xp. Eighty more and I can buy the recipe for the Fabricator, the tool I need to start building an actual house. I think. I hope...

Meanwhile, without really meaning to, I seem to have stored up enough xp in most of the other skills to come close to maxing out their respective Trees. Again, that frequently just means acquiring recipes that need to be crafted but I'm slowly beginning to come to terms with how that works.

Ever hear the expression "One banana short of a plaster"?

For example, I now know that I was right when I said, last time, that I thought I remembered seeing some kind of cooking station in a camp. There is indeed something called a Stove that apppears in your camp, whenever you set it up. How I couldn't find one in my camp, when I looked for it then, I have no idea. I found it this time with no trouble at all.

Still couldn't make anything on it, of course. Didn't have the mats. It takes a suprising amount of bananas to make a banana plaster. Or maybe, like blocks, they come in packs of twenty. When I get a few more I'll hit the Stove and find out.

Meanwhile, other people are clearly making far more progress than I am. That dinky little hamlet people were calling a city last time (So cute!) is now genuinely quite impressive. It's still more of a small town or a large village than a city but it's starting to look quite sophisticated.

A hell of a lot more sophisticated than my pathetic attempt at a Homestead, that's for sure. All I have is a lot of holes and a weird marble abstract that looks like some pre-schoolers tried to make a Henry Moore out of half-chewed Mentos. In a toxic waste dump.

The good thing about it (The only good thing, really.) is that I ought to be able to find it again next time. I even put up a flagpole so I can see it from far away. Don't have a flag yet but the pole is big enough to be seen from space. (Not literally from space. From space you literally can't even see the planet.)

Want to know what's keeping it up? A vitriolic hatred of all that's decent and good!

 It's my third Homestead, by which I don't mean the third I've made but the third of the three I currently own. The other two are... well, if you find them, I'd be very grateful if you could give me a hint as to where they are. I put them down, went off to do something, then couldn't find them again.

You can put down map markers to tell you where points of interest, like your house, might be but the flaw with that is that you have to remember to do it while you still know where they are. By the time I remember, it's always too late. I do think we at least ought to get a permanent "You Live Here" sign in the UI. And some way of abandoning homesteads remotely.

Fortunately for me, by the time I realized I was never going to be able to find my way home, I still had one deed left so I was able to start over, yet again. At least this time I've left a permanent marker in the world to show me where I live. 

If there isn't a wipe, when the next test comes, I'll carry on from where I left off. This time I'll see if I can't at least get some walls up. Maybe even a roof but let's not get too fancy.

Going Further Back To Go Forwards Faster

I would have posted yesterday but I was too busy playing. I even had something mapped out in my mind, but I didn't want to stop to write it up.

I suppose that's a good thing. It suggests I was enjoying what I was doing enough to want to carry on, rather than just doing it long enough to gather enough material for a blog post, something I freely admit is often the case when I play games these days.

At this point it's tempting to go into a peroration about blogging and gaming and synergies and which drives what, but blogging about blogging, while very enjoyable for the blogger, can sometimes remind me uncomfortably of all those novels about being a novelist or, worse, those depressingly popular books about someone who reads books. 

Instead, how about I just get on with it and talk about what I was doing? There's an idea.

So, there I was, trying to get my Berserker in EverQuest II to Level 130 so I could start on the new expansion. I already explained the problem and outlined my plan to deal with it and how long I thought that might take. Then, when I was playing on Sunday evening, I had a bit of luck.

I logged in expecting to pick up where I left off, cleaning up all the non-story quests from the previous expansion, Ballads of Zimara, most of which come from starter items that drop off mobs. I opened my quest journal to see exactly where I was up to and because I was in Freeport at the time, instead of sorting it by the zone I was in, as I usually do, I sorted it by Quest Level instead.

That brought up far more yellow quests than I was expecting, yellow meaning just comfortably above the character's level, usually the sweet spot for the best xp. That made me curious so I took a closer look. I found something surprising.

Many of the yellow quests weren't from the last expansion ore ven the one before that. They were from Visions of Vetrovia, which came out in 2021. The level cap back then had been 125 so it seemed strange that the quests were flagged Level 130. But they were.

Since the quests in BoZ were already very easy it seemed logical the ones from the expansion before that would be easier still. Whether they'd be faster wasn't so certain. In my experience with most MMORPGs there are three things that take time when you quest:

1. Killing mobs.
2. Traveling to and/or finding the place you have to go to to kill the mobs.
3. Listening to NPCs telling you why you should go kill the mobs in the first place.

There are other factors, especially in those games where the devs seem to be involved in some kind of in-house competition to find the most obscure, awkward or annoying ways to increment a quest counter. I long ago lost track of the number of ways it's possible to interact with an object in EQII but I can tell you it's too many.

Mostly, though, it's a combination of TTK, TTT and TTR. Time to Kill, Time to Travel and Time to Read. Dropping back three expansions was always going to help with TTK. Having flying enabled in all zones, instant map travel as an All Access member and the exact locations of every update step in the Wiki was going to cut down hugely on TTT. Two out of three. Not bad. 

I wasn't sure there was much I could do about the last one, though. Many players, possibly most of them, shave a good deal off the running time of every quest by skipping the quest text but I always (Well, almost always...) read every word. I could have made an exception for the sake of expediency but it would go against the grain so I knew I would probably skim-read everything, at least.

The big question was would the xp from two expansions ago be worth bothering with? The way Darkpaw has futzed around with xp and leveling over the past few years makes it hard to be sure until you try. Since I had the quests my book already, I thought it was worth a look. 

I was hoping these older quests would move the dial enough to justify the effort because, although I
could see a path to Level 130 by way of the BoZ scraps I had left, nothing was giving me much more than 2% of the level and I still had about 60% to go. I didn't much fancy having to find all the dropped quests and then finish up on the dregs of the few repeatables. If I could find some narrative quests, at least the time might pass faster and the whole thing wouldn't feel quite so formulaic.

Naturally, I started with the quests in my journal for Forlorn Gist, the highest-level zone in VoV, on the assumption those ought to give the best xp. There's no way to travel there directly (Oh yes there is but I'd forgotten!) so I had go the long way, map-hopping to the starting zone, flying to the griffin station, riding public transport to the next zone, Karuupa Jungle, flying across that to the next station and finally arriving in Mahngavi Wastes, from where you can walk to Forlorn Gist. So much for saving on travel time.

I was about to head to the zone line when I happened to notice I also had some quests in the Wastes and what's more two of them were complete and ready to hand in. That seemed like a gimme so I took it. I flew to the questgivers, a couple of centaurs hanging around next to a graveyard, big, red books over their heads to tell me they'd been waiting three years for me to show up. I spoke to the pair of them, accepted their thanks and collected the reward.

Those quests gave easily as much xp as I'd been getting from the ones in BoZ. Maybe a little more. Great! Op success! And both centaurs had more work for me so rather than head off to Forlorn Gist I thought I might as well carry on where I was.

I worked through the two related quest sequences, all of which were either Kill or Fetch quests or a combination of the two. The mobs and objects were all in the same zone. Everything was an insta-kill. Travel distances were short. I barely even needed to refer to the wiki because I had EQMaps up with all the POIs highlighted. It was glorious!

Once again, I'm going to make the point that I prefer questing when there is absolutely no challenge to it. I love one-shotting all the mobs - better yet if I can round up a bunch and one-shot the lot with an AE - and best of all if it's all those inevitable, irelevant, infuriating adds that insist on piling on. 

I can't see how having to spend five to ten seconds killing each mob that gets in your way as you roam around looking for the ones you actually need for the quest adds to the entertainment value in any way whatsoever. If you have to interact with them at all, surely it has to be more fun fun to mow them all down like so many stalks of wheat.

It's more fun for me, anyway. I can one-shot for a long time before I get bored. I'm not sure I've ever gotten bored doing it, in fact. Usually I stop for other reasons long before the warm feeling it gives me begins to cool. Conversely, I get very tired of hacking through hordes mobs that take time and effort to kill. Even thinking about can sometimes be enough to make give up and go play something else instead. Something easier. And more fun.

All of which meant that I was having a high old time, picking up quests and knocking them out as fast as I could. After a while, though, the quests ran out so I had to stop and think again. And I found myself puzzled.

Although all these quests were new to my Berserker, they were far from new to me. I remembered all of them. It took me a while to work out why but the answer, when I found it, was simple: I'd done them on a different character. 

For Visions of Vetrovia three years ago, I ran an experiment. I swapped my regular questing character, the Berserker, for my Bruiser, who I'd heard through some research I'd done should have a better TTK. Also, Bruisers can feign death, which is always handy.

The experiment was inconclusive. I couldn't tell much difference between the two of them. They're both melee classes. They both use a lot of AEs. Plate is thicker than leather but avoidance makes up for it. Feigning death gets you out of a lot of things but so does having three death saves. Solo there doesn't seem to be a lot to choose between them. 

I went back to the Berserker for Ballads of Zimara and I'd forgotten he'd ever skipped an expansion. Thinking about it, I recalled how he'd done the crafting questline and while traveling arond the VoV zones for that, had picked up just enough loose adventure quests as and when he came across them to get his five levels, from 120 to 125. As I discovered yesterday, though, he'd never even started the Adventure Signature questline.

That turned out to be a godsend. I dropped the idea of going to Forlorn Gist and instead I went right back to the start to begin working my way through the MQ. 

Visions of Vetrovia, four expansions ago now, is part of the era when every stage of the main quest rewarded massive chunks of xp, often enough to move the bar half a level or more. Even at 129, with the required xp per level measured in the trillions, allowing for full vitality, I found almost every step of the Signature line was giving around 5% of the level.

That's more than double what I was getting for the BoZ pick-ups and repeatables and I was also getting a lot more than double the entertainment value into the bargain. I was enjoying myself so much that when I dinged 130 yesterday evening I was almost sorry there weren't any more levels left to get.

Event then, the whole process still wasn't exactly what you'd call fast. I didn't time it but I think it probably took me around four hours to do the final two-thirds of Level 129. The important thing was that it didn't feel like a grind or a chore. It felt like having fun.

There were several things that did make it all go by a bit faster. As soon as I realised I'd done the entire storyline before, I felt under no obligation to read any of the dialog. It was quite liberating to click through it all as fast it appeared. 

I also gave up looting most of the mobs after a while, after I thought about the value of what they were dropping. EQII suffers from hyper-inflation, meaning nothing any mob drops is of any value unless you can either use it yourself or sell it to another player. Cash drops that sell to vendors might as well be pocket lint.

Lastly, I was helped considerably in my progress through the MQ by the fortuitous circumstances of my Berserker's happy-go-lucky approach to questing four years ago. The quests he'd been able to get while not following the main storyline mostly turned out to be the same ones you have to do for various NPCs before they'll give you their MQ quests. Every time he got to a point where the wiki said he'd need to go do all of someone's quests to get the next MQ stage, he found he'd already done them and the NPC was happy to speak to him right away.

All things considered, it was both a very enjoyable way to get that last level and a very useful learning experience. I see now that there's a good reason to hold back on doing current content on some characters. 

While it was super-easy to level, I got into the habit of taking half a dozen of my crew to the cap every time it went up. Now it's likely to be more better - or at least a lot less trouble - to let them leap-frog each other a year or two apart and let time and power creep turn what might have been a painful slog into an enjoyable romp.

That, though, is for the future. As soon as the Berserker dinged 130 he got a letter inviting him to come to the new zones to help with the latest crisis, whatever that might be. It means going back to taking things seriously, playing properly, reading all the quest text and doing things the way they're supposed to be done. 

I can't say I'm thrilled but I suppose I'll have to. I mean, that is why I was leveling him in the first place...

Throne And Liberty - A Waypoint-And-Click Adventure

Here's the thing about Throne and Liberty. One of the things. The graphics are gorgeous but the world itself really isn't. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Solisium was a beautiful place, once. Not any more. At least that's what the disembodied voice that sounds like a slightly bored student reading to the class from a set text strongly implies. 

The voice starts up each time you open a new waypoint. The camera spins up and around, a swooping spiral to give you an aerial view of the stretch of the map you just revealed. Meanwhile, the unnamed tour guide recites two sentences - it's always exactly two - telling you what you're gawping at and why it looks so bad.

Usually it's because there's been some kind of war. One group of wizards scrapping with another, most likely. Or an attempt at colonization that met heavy resistance from the indigenous occupants. Werewolves, orcs, goblins. Anyone dumb enough to get in the way of progress. Sometimes there's no proximate cause. The land just seems to have been exploited for its natural resources then abandoned.

Actually one of the more attractive views, believe it or not.

I find it hard to think of another MMORPG, survival game or open world RPG I've played that looks so unremittingly bleak. By the time I'd completed my project of opening every accessible waypoint (There was just one I couldn't get to and that only because it's on an island to which access is only given at a point in the storyline I haven't yet reached.) I'd seen nothing but deforestation and desertification on the imperial scale. 

It might have been depressing if I hadn't been feeling so pleased with myself for finding a way to the last waypoint I needed. it was situated high on a butte, right in the middle of a camp filled with very aggressive orcs, something I discovered the hard way. 

I tried the direct approach first. It did not go well. I gave it some thought and decided something more subtle was required. The camp was bordered on the seaward side by some high cliffs. There was a village at the foot of the mountain range. I'd already opened a waypoint there so I ported in and started to clamber up the rocks.

I know you can't see any orcs but I assure you - they are there!

Throne and Liberty lies at some point mid-way between games like Genshin Impact or Wuthering Waves, where you're encouraged to use your parkour skills to climb anything you can see and much more movement-restrictive games like Guild Wars or the first version of Final Fantasy XIV, where you couldn't reliably step over a low kerb. 

I wouldn't go so far as to say that in Solisium, if you can see it, you can get to it. There are a fair number of invisble barriers as well as the very obvious visible ones I mentioned in a previous post. By and large, though, I've found that if something looks like you should be able to climb it, you probably can. With some effort. And a lot of bunny-hopping.

It took me a while to work my way right to the top of the crag overlooking the orc encampment but I managed it eventually. And it was fun. Climbing in open world games generally is.

What was more surprising was how nice it all was up there. A liminal space, where nothing happened and no player was expected to be. In contrast to the bleak, blasted wasteland below it was all lush, green alpine valleys, flush with trees, grass as fresh and flat as a well-tended lawn. All it needed was a few birds singing, the sound of distant goat bells and and a log cabin or two to make it the perfect holiday destination.

In retrospect, I realize I should have taken some pictures but at the time I was laser-focused on not falling off or getting stuck. It's quite easy to get stuck in Throne and Liberty, which is presumably why there's a button in the UI to move you to a safe spot when it happens. I've had to use it already and I imagine I'll be using it again soon enough.

Glide down, grab the WP, port out. Easy Peasy.

Once I'd morphed into a hawk and glided down to the final waypoint I was a bit stuck on what to do next. That's the problem with goals. Once you achieve them you have to come up with more.

Since I didn't have any bright ideas, I did what anyone would do in a dull moment and went back to following the plot. Or what passes for one in this game.

Chris Neal at MassivelyOP described the storylines in T&L as "barely connected little adventures", which seems entirely fair, based on what I've seen so far. It's an unusual approach. I believe there is some kind of over-arching narrative concerning some devious organization called the Arkeum and its nefarious plans but as yet those plans, whatever they may be, have remained firmly in the background.

In the foreground of the chapter I completed last night was some kind of Goblin insurrection. I had a quest that asked me to kill a Goblin Shaman so I got started on that and it turned into a whole series of quite interesting escapades involving the little green nuisances. 

There was one part where the whole lot of them attacked a tower and I had to run ahead up the steps setting magic traps to blow the little buggers to bits. That was fun but not so much as when I met a bespectacled researcher who looked not unlike Velma Dinkley from Scooby Doo and who had some similarly cartoonish ideas on how to infiltrate the goblin councils.

Okay, she doesn't really look like Velma. It's just those glasses.

She morphed me into a goblin because that's a thing people can do and I scuttled over to listen to them whooping themselves up for a riot with a lot of speechmaking and dancing. I had to dance, too. I got four new buttons on my hot-bar and everything.

I never figured out how that worked. It was the usual match-the-moves deal but I couldn't figure out the tells. It didn't matter in the end because there was no fail state. I just kept pressing all the buttons and eventually I somehow convinced the gobbos I was one of them. Then they all ran off, leaving their secret plans on the floor for me to grab because now we really were in an episode of Mystery Incorporated.

So, I enjoyed that. I also liked the side-quest, where a blind girl asked me to look at her painting and tell her what I saw. She was concerned because it had been freaking everyone else out. I'm not surprised. It turned out to be a portal to some infernal realm so they were right to be concerned.

The realm was also an instance of some sort but I didn't investigate further. I don't think I'm up to anything much more than basic overland questing right now, for the simple reason that I've intentionally made no effort whatsoever to upgrade any of my skills or gear since I started. I've been running a little experiment to see how far I can go without engaging with any of the progression systems other than simple leveling but I'm afraid it's going to have to stop.

She's not spooky at all, is she?

Level 20 seems to be the cut-off point. Experience comes very quickly in Throne and Liberty. When I returned to questing last night I was Level 12 and when I logged out not much more than ninety minutes later I'd just dinged twenty. 

Allocation of xp seemed unpredictable. For the most part it dripped in steadily and predictably but there were two occesions when I gained a full level for not doing anything much at all, presumably when I completed some quest stage or other. 

At one point I finished a long sequence to find myself a few percent shy of a level and I was delighted to find it was acceptable to go kill a couple of random goblins to make up the difference. How deliciously traditional - and satisfying - that felt. More games should allow players who enjoy it to grind xp grind from killing mobs instead of questing.

I did a bit of both and once again, I found myself having fun. There's nothing very original or special about Throne and Liberty but it does seem to have that old-fashioned MMORPG feel to it, the sense that you can just go out there and do stuff that doesn't particularly matter and it will keep you entertained for a while. 

You can quest, sure, but you don't have to if you're not really feeling it. There are other options. That's a wheel that maybe needed some re-inventing.

One original feature of the game is the perpetual NPC commentary. I kinda like it.

It also helps that no-one's claiming the fate of the world rests on your shoulders or telling you you're the Chosen One. At most you might be one of a whole load of chosen ones but not a particularly special example of the breed. A lot of people have star stuff in them. You're just one of many. You should probably do something with your talent but it doesn't have to be right now, just when you get around to it. That feels liberating, appropriately.

In the end I only stopped because the main questline had just taken me into a solo instance and I was getting my backside handed to me repeatedly by the mobs in the first room. It was apparent that starting gear and skills weren't going to cut it thee so I called it a night.

I still don't think I'll be staying with Throne and Liberty for long. I imagine that soon enough, or more likely all too soon, it'll turn into the regular upgrade grind they all do. That's mostly what I was hoping to avoid by not upgrading anything at all.

Still, the upgrade process in most of these games starts out as enjoyable and achievable. It's only later, when the improvements cease to be significant and the mechanics become both time consuming and costly, that the whole enterprise turns into a chore. I'm hoping it'll be a good while before that happens and until it does I'm quite looking forward to the ride.

Scrub grass, weeds, bare rock, dead trees... this place has it all!

I can definitely say that, when I sit down at my desk and contemplate what game I'd like to play, Throne and Liberty is the one that comes first to mind just now. It's not the best. It's not even my favorite. It's just new and it has that indefinable whatever that calls to me when I see the Play button there on Steam.

I am going to have to do something about gearing up but I find, somewhat to my own surprise, that I'm actually looking forward to it. It'll mean reading a lot of tool-tips but I can do that. And then I'm going back in that cave to teach those wizards a lesson. 

Plus, hopefully, make some money. Waypoints stop being free to use at Level 30 and the rate xp comes in in this game, I could easily knock off another ten levels by the end of the day.

After that, who can say. I don't even know what the level cap is. Maybe I'll get there, maybe I won't. I would like to get far enough into the storyline to gain access to that forbidden island, at least. 

It'd be a shame not to open that last waypoint, now I've gotten this far.