I Just Got A Magic Wand

EverQuest II has so many features and functions. It's all too easy to miss a few. Even the good ones. There's one I've done nothing with until quite recently: the option to morph your combat pets into any number of curious shapes and forms.

It's done using something called a petamorph wand. It's a physical item. It sits in your inventory. You have to click it to make it work. The effectl lasts a couple of hours and then you have to do it again. 

Over the years there have been many requests to turn the wands into spells or abilities so they can be scribed into a spellbook and free up bag space. Not happening. They remain stubbornly tied to the material plane.

I don't know how many there are. A quick google search suggests anything from a few dozen to several hundred. Let's just say it's a lot.

I have fifteeen. I should say my Necromancer has fifteen. No doubt there are a few more scattered around in various bags and bank vaults, here and there, but the only character I have who actually uses the wands is my necro. 

That's because she's the only pet class I play these days. I used to play a Conjuror and a Beastlord but they're both on another account. One I don't play much any more.

I have a channeler, too, another pet class. On the right account this time but very odd. I don't really understand how to play him and I don't plan on learning. So it's down to the necro. Isn't it always?

In EQII, fighting pets already change appearance with alarming frequency. Some classes, like necros and mages, get several different pets and each of those gets a new look every ten levels. 

Originally you were stuck with whatever the game gave you. Each time you levelled up far enough you'd get the next version of the summoning spell but until then you took what you were given. At some point quite early on that was changed to allow you to select from any appearance you'd already unlocked. 

You still have to keep to the right line. An tank pet can only look like another tank pet, a scout like another scout and so on. Pets also change appearance based on what quality the spell is. A master pet looks very different to an adept pet of the same level. If you don't have the Master scribed you can't pick that appearance. Obviously.

When I mostly played on the Test server I spent most of my time as an Iksar Necromancer. I also had a gnome magician and later, on Freeport, I levelled a human magician close to the then-cap. For all of them I picked a pet appearance I liked for each and stuck with that. It was enough for me.

As time passed I moved to other classes. Ones that didn't have pets. I spent a couple of years mostly playing a ratonga bruiser and then I settled on the ratonga berserker who's been my focus character for the last few years. I didn't think much about combat pets or what they looked like.

Even so, I knew about petamorph wands. They turn up not infrequently as quest rewards. They feature in holiday events and giveaways, where I tended not to select them if given the option. If there was no choice the wands ended up in bank vaults somewhere, unused.

When I made a new Iksar Necromancer and levelled her up, a couple of years ago, I was happy to follow past practice. Mostly I let the pets keep the looks they came with. Some I liked, some I didn't, but I never felt strongly enough to do much about it. Not until I got this one, the one in the picture, at 117. 

Not the black cloud with glowing eyes. That's Oor, the peculiar mercenary. Quite cool, if somewhat distracting.

No, the one on the right. The current max level Undead Knight. The tank pet. I think it's a grimling zombie. I know it's short, ugly and has its head on wrong. It  also stares. At you. All the time.

I took one look at it and decided it had to go. I could have replaced its appearance with one from another pet but I wasn't all that struck on most of those either. It occured to me to give one of the wands I had lying about a go. 

I had a look at the few I could find. None of them seemed particularly inspiring. I tried them out. They all looked better than the grimling but they also all had their own drawbacks. 

The drake looks pretty but iksar necros and fey drakes are not a natural team. Also, flying tanks are awkward in action. So are things that scuttle along at your feet like beetles. I seemed to have a lot of beetles.

The one I picked in the end was the lamia. Iksars are really quite nasty and necromancers are really quite evil. It seemed like a match. I can't remember now if I already had the wand or whether I had to go and buy it or quest for it. I got it, anyway, somehow.

The lamia is already one of the default appearances for a necro pet. Unfortunately it's the ranged magic-user, something I'd only use if I was grouping, which I never am. It does seem odd that the spell-related appearances aren't transferable between pet archetypes but the exact same models can be grafted on with a wand but that's EQII for you.

Since then I've been slowly acquiring petamorph wands as I happen across them and passing them on to my necro. They're pretty much all tradeable within an account (Heirloom in the jargon) although they bind to the character that equips them. Quite a few are openly tradeable. They go for a very wide range of prices on the broker.

Most of mine come from holiday events. I've been meaning to look into getting more but it's one of those things that goes to the back of the queue when I'm spending time in Norrath. I've also been meaning to post about the topic for over a year now but I'm aware that to do it justice would take more research time and effort than I care to spend on it. 

This is just a sketch of that post, really. I find myself doing that more and more, these days. It's probably just as well. Who wants to read five thousand words on petamorph wands? Who wants to write them? Don't answer that.

This morning, though, I finished the new three-part Overseer quest that came with the Chronoportal event and I thought the rewards were good enough to make it worth at least mentioning again. There's the wand, of course. There's a mummy plush for your house or tomb. And there's a very nice non-combat pet; a disembodied hand. 

Everyone likes a severed hand that skitters around like a spider. Don't they? It's a great pet for a necro or a warlock and in keeping with most EQII pets it's wonderfully characterful. It taps its fingers, scratches itself and it wears a cameo ring. Well worth making the minimal effort required to get it.

There's also a title; "Chrono Defender". Not the kind likely to stop someone in their tracks but decent enough. Would suit a guardian or a paladin rather well.

Then there's the aforementioned Petamorph Wand: Age Of Turmoil Clockwork. It's a an old school gnomish clockwork, all tarnished and rusty. It has a fiery furnace in its middle, its eyes glow and so does the lamp in its head.

The clockwork has several animations. It does that one where it flops forward, pivoting around the waist to stare at the floor. Occasionally it does a 360 degree headspin and now and then its whole head pops off, flies into the air, does a somersault and lands neatly back on its shoulders. The only problem with all of that is the loud clanking it makes. Could get annoying after a while.

It would suit a gnome magician perfectly. If I had one that's who I'd give it to. Since I don't the necro gets it. She has the one the berserker got but now she's doing the quest herself so soon there'll be spare. It gets like that with my team.

 

I'm toying with the idea of making a Vah Shir conjuror. I bought the extra character slot when Reign of Shadows began but I still haven't used it. I don't think a Vah Shir would look right with a clockwork pet, though. Some sort of cat would be much better there. 

Maybe I'll use that slot to make a gnome conjuror and make the Vah Shir a bard of some kind like I originally planned. Oh, I don't know. This is what always happens.  

Choice paralysis. There's so many things I could do in EQII I end up doing none of them. 

Oh well, it took me years to start using petamorph wands at all. I guess I can wait a while longer to decide who gets the next one.

Pick It Up And Pack It In

For weeks now I've been nothing but positive about Valheim. It's probably past time I mentioned something I don't like. The inventory.

I count myself something of an afficionado, if not an expert, on lugging stuff about in games. I consider inventory management to be a significant gameplay element in its own right. I'm on record as someone who spends whole Sundays sorting their banks and loves it.

The last time I remember having this much trouble with my bags was in the Allods beta. Even the stingiest free to play titles, the ones that rely on bag sales in the cash shop to keep the servers up, don't stint on space the way Valheim does.

Thirty-two slots is all you get. It's possible there are games with fewer but I'm willing to bet that in none of those games does every piece of armor you're wearing and every weapon you're weilding take up one of your valuable slots. 

Let's look at what's in my bags right now. I haven't prepared this. I just logged in, took a screenshot of what was there and logged out again. 

Top row: 

Slot 1 - Poison Resist Mead. Absolutely essential to have on a hot key if you're venturing into the swamp. You do not want to be opening your inventory and scrabbling around looking for a potion just as the last one runs out and an ooze appears out of the gloom right next to you.

Slot 2 - Bow - Arguably you might manage without hot-keying the bow since it's situational but I like to have mine handy so I can take down trolls and drakes as soon as they attack. I also like to pop every deer that doesn't see me coming, since I can never get enough meat (ironic, since I've not eaten meat in real life since the late 1980s).

Slot 3 - Mace - This is one I could swap for something more useful. I made it to fight Bonemass but then I never used it. And I've never used it since, either. 

Slot 4 - Axe - Until I made the Silver Sword, the axe was my main weapon. Even now it's almost as good and of course it also cuts down trees. I'm always going to need my axe close at hand.

Slot 5 - Hammer - It has to go there because that's where it goes. Same applies to the axe and the pick. I've played so many hours of Valheim I have strong muscle memory for the tools and weapons I use most. If I try putting them inside the pack I just keep pressing the old keys before I'm consciously aware I'm going to do it and whatever's in those slots gets used instead. Which is very annoying if it happens to be a consumable.

Slot 6 - Silver Sword - I was loathe to stop using the axe but when you move from iron to silver there's no new axe recipe, or not that I've found. When I looked at the sword and saw it did the same damage at level one as the iron axe does at level four, plus extra "spirit" damage on top, I knew I'd have to make one and learn how to use it. 

The main problem was where to put it. Until then slot six had always belonged to my hoe. I still end up waving my sword about when all I mean to do is flatten some ground. It's infuriating.

Slot 7 - Pickaxe - See Slot 5.

Slot 8 - Iron Sledge - This is a slight indulgence. I could probably get away with having the sledge deeper in the pack because once again it's situational. The thing is, it's also fun to use, extremely effective on skeletons and blobs, highly efficient on gangs of greydwarves and good for clearing brushwood and small trees. If I put it away I'd only keep getting it out again.

Second row:

Slot 1 - Obsidian arrows - If you're going to use a bow you're going to need to carry arrows. Highlighted in blue because I've selected them as the ones I want to use.

Slot 2 - More obsidian arrows - Usually I only carry one stack but I'd just made some new ones and these were left over.

Slots 3 - 7 - Free space!

Slot 8 - Medium Health Mead - Always carry some of these. If for any reason I get out of my depth or a blob jumps me in the meadows (it happens) one of these can save my life. And has. Many times.

I would, obviously, prefer to have my health potions on a hot key but when I did I kept drinking them by mistake. I used to keep them in the top row, slot three, where the mace is now, but my fat fingers would sometimes start me glugging when I was aiming to grab my axe or my bow, so I reluctantly had to put them deeper in the pack. I always keep them in the current position so I don't have to waste a moment searching for them in an emergency.

Third row:

Slot 1 - The miner's helmet thing. I forget the Norse name for it. I was using it constantly in the swamp but not so much now I'm mostly in the mountains. Still not going to go anywhere without it, obviously.

Slot 2 - Wishbone. I thought I'd only need this when I went looking for silver. Then I found out you can find sunken chests with it in the meadows and iron in the swamp. I'm at the annoying stage where if I'm not wearing it I feel like I might be walking right over something. Even though what's in the chests isn't all that interesting I'm not ready to give it up just yet.

Slot 3 - Sausages - Always need sausages. Nuff said.

Slot 4 - Cooked Meat - See Slot 3.

(At this point I should mention that both those meat products are in the wrong place. I usually keep whatever three foods I'm using in the bottom row on the right, where the raspberries are. I must have moved them for some reason. I'll put them back where they should be when I log in).

Slot 5 -6 - More free space!

Slot 7 - Cultivator. I'd really prefer to hotkey this. I use it a lot and it's very annoying to have inside the pack. I have to open inventory, select the cultivator, close inventory, then right-click to select function to use it. Then to stop using it I either have to select another tool (even if I don't need to use one) or re-open inventory and de-select the cultivator. It gets on my nerves.

Slot 8 - Hoe. See slot 7.

Bottom row:

Slots 1 - 4 - Armor. Never not going to need that.

Slot 5 - Strength belt. I always used to have this selected. Then I got the wishbone. You can only use one magical doodad at a time so it's a choice between the two of them. I tend to have the wishbone on until I hit the three hundred weight limit then swap to the belt. 

Slot 6 - Raspberries. My third food. Just happens to be raspberries because I was exploring and that's what I was able to forage along the way. 

Slot 7 - Coal. The one thing in this snapshot that totally should not be there. I imagine I happened to walk in range of the kiln at some point and some coal flipped itself into my bag without me noticing. Or I burned some meat and didn't spot it when I picked it up. Or maybe I killed a surtling somewhere. Whatever, it shouldn't be in my bags.

Slot 8 - Crypt Key. Essential during the iron age for getting the gates open on sunken crypts. Arguably I could keep it in a chest somewhere now I'm on silver but it's surprising how many times I end up in a swamp without meaning to. It would be very awkward to run into a crypt to escape a horde of draugr and find I couldn't get the gate open.

So there it is. Out of thirty-two possible slots I'm carrying twenty items I'd consider to be essential and a couple more I'd really rather hang onto, thanks. It means I'm operating at all time with an effective free inventory of just ten slots.

In almost any other game I've played, all my armor, my trinkets, the weapons I was using and any ammunition they needed would be stored on my character doll, not in my inventory. In many games there would be dedicated, non-general-inventory slots for crafting tools, potions and food as well.

And yet, even if we had all of that in Valheim, the game would still have the meanest space allocation I've ever seen! Thirty-two slots! Even if more than half of them weren't being taken up with things that should never be there in the first place, that's pathetic!

I might (might...) accept it if it was done as a point of principle. If there was some gameplay intent behind it, like the way Darkfall supposedly made players rummage through their inventory so as to add tension to PvP. Or if it was in the service of "realism", as in those games where objects have both weight and size and you have to fiddle around trying to get them all to fit.

But Valheim doesn't do any of that. You can walk around with enough wood to build a couple of decent-sized houses and a longboat if you want. Or enough stone to build a tower. Realism has absolutely nothing to do with it.

I think it's just bad design, pure and simple. The game needs a proper paper doll for the character and it needs more basic inventory space. 

In gameplay terms it would also benefit hugely from character inventory being included in progression. We should be able to make packs that increase our carrying capacity the way we can already make bigger chests to increase static storage.

I imagine all of this will come in time. Valheim seems so finished, so feature-complete, it's very easy to forget it's not just in Early Access but that even Early Access has only just started.

There are plenty of things about Valheim I don't look forward to seeing change as the demands of more and more players mean compromises are made but I do look forward to having more room in my bags. 

That can't come soon enough.

Somehow The VItal Connection Is Made

Even before I get started, let me have a good old grumble. I like Blogger as a platform. It suits me. I'm used to it. I could do with a little more flexibility in layout but I can live with what I'm given. There's just one thing about Blogger I really can't stand.

Somehow, someone thought it was a good idea to set a combination of keys that could instantly wipe everything you've written. As though it never existed. 

I'm not saying it was anyone at Blogger or even anyone at Google. It might have been someone at Microsoft. Let's say it was. Blaming Bill Gates is a thing these days, isn't it? It could even have been someone from Firefox. That's the browser I use when I'm blogging.

Whoever it was, it's Blogger I blame. They should know people who use their platform bumble. Anyone who knows what they're doing is on Wordpress. Everyone knows that. Someone at Blogger should have come up with a better way to stop in-progress drafts from vanishing into the ether. Never to be seen again. And I mean never.

When something goes this way it seems to be gone for good. None of the many suggested ways of recovering lost data can bring it back. I've tried them all. Well, all the free ones. That I can understand.

It doesn't happen often (thank God). In fact, I can only remember it ever happening to me twice in nearly ten years, although that both times were in the last six months suggests it might be a growing problem. As you can probably guess, it just happened to me now. Fortunately I'd only written about four or five paragraphs. Last time it happened it was pretty much a whole damn post.

There is one way to avoid it happening. Okay, two ways. Three, if you count writing the posts in a separate text editor of some kind , although that seems like a backwards step to me. 

The main one would be not to press that combination of keys in the first place. It would work, too. If I knew which combination of keys it was I'd do that. 

Yeah, no I wouldn't. It's not like I meant to press them in the first place.

The other is to remember to open a Preview as soon as you start typing. If you somehow manage to blank the draft the preview will still be there in another tab of your browser and you can laboriously screenshot it and reconstruct the post from static images. I did that once. I remember writing about it.

There. That's got that off my chest. Back to the post I was going to write. Only now it's going to be shorter. Shorter-tempered too, likely as not.

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I saw this morning the upcoming Final Cut version of Disco Elysium isn't going to get a classification from the Australian Classification Board. That's not too surprising. It doesn't take much to trigger the sensibilities of the ACB. Ironically. I sometimes wonder if anyone on that board has ever met an Australian.

They might be doing the Aussie Disco fans a favor. Although there are a few new quests and some other tweaks, the main addition is loads more voiceover, just about the last thing I thought the game was lacking when I played it.

Steam's been asking me to for permission to update the game for a while. I'm guessing that would move me onto the final version. Those who already own the PC version are entitled to the update for free, I believe. 

That's why I've been scrupulously avoiding it. I would like to play again some day and I'd prefer to do it with the minimum of over-enthusiastic people just throwing themselves into their parts.

No, if it's acting we're talking about, how about going the whole hog? I noticed from the Gamesindustry.biz post that there's a Disco Elysium TV series in the works. According to a Variety report from last year, it's being produced by the guy behind the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. Make of that what you will. 

The Variety article also told me another thing I didn't know: Disco Elysium is based on a novel, namely Robert Kurvitz’s “Sacred and Terrible Air”, published in 2013 as “Püha ja õudne lõhn”. 

I'd like to read that. Unfortunately it was published in Estonia. In Estonian. 

Reddit says there's an English translation on the way.  Steam firms that up: "It is currently in the process of being translated to English. Robert has been working hard to get Disco Elysium finished but once we have launched, he’ll be able to return to the book. Expect it in the second half of 2020."

That didn't happen but i imagine we can all guess why. So the same guy who wrote the book is also lead designer and writer on the game. Further investigation shows the whole thing is based on Kurvitz's tabletop roleplaying campaign. Because of course it is. Aren't they all?

The Escapist has a good article on the provenance of the game and the philosophy of its creators. Some choice quotes from Robert Kurvitz: "The two biggest favors anyone’s ever done me in my life are the political education from Estonian punk bands and what (lead designer and writer) Chris Avellone did with Planescape: Torment". and "We have an insanely ambitious list of projects we want to make in the Elysium setting. The last one I want to make, when I’m 50 or 60".

Planescape:Torment is a game that constantly turns up as both a benchmark and a touchstone for everything ambitious in crpgs. I hated it. No, that's not fair. I never got far enough in to hate it. I gave up after about an hour. Horrible, horrible game. Or so I remember it. I guess I should probably give it another try.

On the longevity of the project, well, if it happens it'll be after my time. I'll settle for the TV show. And a sequel to the game. There's going to be one, of course: Kurvitz "has plans for an expansion and full sequel for Disco Elysium".

Maybe this flag has something to do with that. PCGamer thinks so. Fun to speculate.

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As originally conceived this whole post was going to rumble confusingly between meta-musings on the nature of hyperlinking, the origins and spin-offs of Disco Elysium and Lana del Rey's new album Chemtrails Over The Country Club, which I had delivered to my door this morning along with a bottle of black mould remover and a new duvet. 

These things are unconnected. Everything is connected.

By the time my hard copy appeared in my recycling bin (it passes for a letterbox in times of pandemic), and even though I'd pre-ordered to be sure I'd get it on day of release, I'd already managed to read a full review. More jarringly, the review came complete with click-throughs to the whole album, which I steeled myself to ignore. 

I was going to link to the links so those who might still be trying to maintain a veneer of skepticism over Lana's genius could test their no doubt wavering resolve only... they're gone. That's kind of weird. 

I mean, I thought it was pretty weird the whole album was there to listen to for free on day of release to begin with but it's even weirder now it's disappeared. Maybe someone at Pitchfork has fat fingers, too. Maybe they pressed the wrong key combo. I know how that goes.

The review itself looks pretty good, by which I mean it says things I agree with. In general. In specifics I can't compare. My dedication is such that I came here to write this first. I haven't listened to the album right through yet. They score at Pitchfork, which is crass but compelling. A solid 7.5 is strong enough after Norman Fucking Rockwell's 9.4, I guess. 

I notice they don't talk much about what the songs sound like. Pitchfork reviews rarely do. That'd be like dancing about architecture, wouldn't it? A lot safer to stick to analyzing the lyrics.

The whole focus on the sheer Americanism of the del Rey project struck me as true but it's so much bigger than that. Lana may be "truly American—specifically American" but that's because she's becoming the great chronicler of the American Century, the 20th (which everyone knows didn't end in 1999). Her references, while rooted in American culture, speak to the way that culture dominated everything for all of our lifetimes. 

Until, perhaps, now. The Pitchfork piece on Chemtrails links to both the online magazine's own, excellent, review of the monumental Norman Fucking Rockwell but also to another highly insightful take on that landmark recording from The Atlantic. 

As the piece says of Lana's breathtaking "The Greatest", "It’s an epitaph" and it is. Thing is, Atlantic takes it to be an epitaph for America. I took it to be something more. 

That's the problem with masterpieces, isn't it? You either have to top them or you have to stop.  But no-one ever does stop, do they? And we wouldn't want them to.

Where do you go after the end of the world, anyway? On, of course.

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See, I would have tied it all together if it hadn't been for that pesky Blogger! Or I think I would. I guess we'll never know.

Just Some Thoughts

Some random thoughts about Valheim.

The Smell of Sulfur In The Morning.

Or afternoon. Or evening. Any time of day, really.

I'd read that as you downed each boss the attacks on your base would change to represent the next coming threat. With Bonemass down it was supposed to be drakes. I read it was drakes. Only I'm getting surtlings. Why is that?

Surtlings: the sugared-up toddlers of the underworld. When they come the sky turns orange and fills with ash. It's ominous as hell. And then two or three of the fiery sprites turn up and run about outside the walls, throw a tantrum and race around, throwing fireballs.

Sometimes they don't even manage that. I've seen them just hang around in the trees, staring. Then the sulfur fades and off they go. 

Why did they come? What did I do to annoy them? 

Heck if I know.

Difficulty Curve.

I'm beginning to wonder if it might be on upside down. 

Starting out in Valheim is tough. You die a lot. Greydwarves are scary. Trolls are terrifying. Even boars can give you a hard time. 

When you get to the swamps it feels like death is lurking in every puddle. You can't see properly, move properly, everything poisons you or shoots at you from the dark. It's horrible and it feels as though it can only get worse.

And then it gets better. Easier. Easier, still. Your skills go up, you fit yourself out in decent kit. You learn how the gears of the world turn and you stop dying. So much, anyway. 

Mostly when I die now it is completely my fault. I'm pushing on to get something done long past the point where I know it's a bad idea. I'm out of food, wet, cold, it's night, my stamina is on the floor and I just keep going because I've forgotten what it's like not to be stronger than everything else. Or at least faster.

By the time I was done with the swamp I was treating it like the meadows but getting there took a couple of weeks. In the mountains the same process took a day. Drakes make a lot of noise but they hit like day-old chicks. Wolves telegraph their attacks and go down in two hits. They spend more time stunned than they do attacking. 

Even the initially imposing stone golems quickly turn into mere nuisances. They move slowly, they're easily confused, they get stuck if you lure them into holes. Best of all, they're more interested in fighting drakes than they are in fighting you so most of the time you can just leave them to it.

It's almost all about perception. The mountains look deadly but in practice it's placid. Most of the time.

I'm wondering if the plains will live up to their reputation when I get there. I've been running scared of setting foot on the savannah but given that I was able to kill fulings when I was wearing bronze I'm not so sure I ought to be so wary. 

Is this a good thing? Wouldn't it make more sense for things to start out easy and get harder rather than the other way around? Or is that you have to pay your dues before you get to ride on your rep?

Bad Weather Is Good Weather.

Valheim has the best weather I've seen in a game, bar none. I don't play a lot of single-player games so maybe this is par for the course for survival titles but compared to what I'm used to it's astonishing. 

Partly it's the way everything's turned up to eleven. Storms are torrential. Blizzards are whiteouts. Waves lash, winds howl, trees bend. 

It's not just excess, though. There's much subtlety. In the meadow you can tell when the wind changes. Breezes ruffle the grass before a storm brews. Or so it seems. Whether you can read the weather that's coming from the signs I'm not sure but it feels like you can.

There are some oddnesses. When I take a portal from my mountain lair and step out onto the sundrenched deck of my log cabin I sometimes bring the winter with me. Thick flakes fall for a few seconds as if the chill mountain air has followed me through. And maybe it has. It's magic, after all.

Needs Some Work.

How, exactly, does building decay happen? Anyone figure it out yet? That decking outside my cabin that I mentioned? Needs constant repair. I come back home and it's turned green again. Out comes the hammer.

The stairs in the Stilt House, they're the same. In the castle it's the railings around the patio at the top of the tower. If it was the whole building I'd understand but it's not. It's just certain parts.

I have a couple of theories. Maybe some of the building materials are invisibly flagged for interior or exterior use. I haven't seen any sign of core wood decaying, nor pallisades, nor roofing. It seems to be beams and flooring that weather. Perhaps they're meant to stay indoors?

To get weathering you need weather. That's my other theory. The parts that deteriorate are storm-damaged. Lashed by rain, shaken by gales, they bend and fracture and rot. It's an hypothesis supported by my observation that adjacent boards seem to suffer different rates of damage that could possibly be related to the amount of cover they enjoy. 

Those two theories fit together, of course. The boards that stay dry and don't decay, though they're outide, might be considerd to be "inside" if they're in a location that triggers the "sheltered" buff. Then again, sometimes that triggers when I walk between two trees in the swamp so maybe not...

Plain Sailing.

When I played Vanguard I used to sail my boat for the sheer fun of it. I'm starting to do the same in Valheim. It took me ages to get the feel for how the longboat handles. I was always getting it becalmed or stuck on sandbars and if the wind was in the wrong direction I just had to sit and wait until it changed.

There are no in-game instructions on how to rig the sails or pull the tiller, or not that I've seen. I worked it out by trial and error. Now I can make the ship go in any direction no matter which way the wind blows. Slowly, if it's against me, sure, but at least it goes.

Being able to steer the longship at speed through a narrow gap between the mainland and a string of low-lying islands is exhillarating. Time was when I'd have had to go the long way round. Now I just cut through. It's a thrill.

Breaking Up Isn't Hard To Do.

A sailor's best friend is their axe. After a long voyage it's ridiculously quicker to demolish your boat and pack it for a trip by portal than it is to sail back home. All my sea trips are one-way, now. Sail out, plant a portal, break down the boat, gate back.  

The risk comes in the nails, which sink. I'm a little nervous of that part. I'm still trying to figure out the best place to stand to be sure the bits of boat all pop straight into my bags. And always remember to check there's space for at least four items. If you don't, you can bet the one that won't fit will be the one that doesn't float.

Sometimes You Just Need A Hint, Sometimes You Need The Whole Damn Manual.

If you don't look stuff up two things happen: you don't know what you're missing and you do. I can't say much about the first but I have plenty to say about the second.

I've known since about the first week that you can tame animals in Valheim. There's even an in-game tip that tells you boars like root vegetables. I've seen screenshots of people with tame wolves.

I'm still waiting for something to happen that lets me know how. How do you  give a boar a turnip? Do you lure one into a cage you built and then grow turnips inside with him until he gets the idea? 

And what about wolves? I know I said they weren't much of a threat but I wouldn't like to stand there letting one bite while I tried to nudge it into a pen. 

Is there some tool you can make? A harness or a lead? A trap? If so, how come I've never seen the recipe? 

But then, I only discovered the recipe for the Drake Helmet today. It must have taken close on fifty kills before the first drake trophy dropped. Is it meant to go that way or is it just my bad rng luck?

That's all I have for now. Well, it's all that comes to mind. I know full well as soon as I log in something else will come back to me. It's that kind of game. Always something to make you wonder.

Like where the hell Moder might live. 

Time I climbed another mountain.

When You Hear The Call

I've kind of fallen of the EverQuest II wagon these last few thanks to Valheim shouldering everything else to one side. It's niggling away at the back of my mind because I had a very loose plan of action for the winter and spring involving filling out the gaps in my Berserker's gear with drops from PQs and getting all the adornment slots filled and upgraded through crafting.

That's what I did last year and it was steady, satisfying gameplay. Nothing spectaular but gently enjoyable, a background hum of pleasure in the gaming day. 

It helped a lot that at the time I was regularly getting very nice upgrades from the Overseer system. Over the lifetime of the two EverQuest games there have been too many innovations and additions to remember, but only a handful of systemic changes that I'd consider to be fundamentally game-changing - AAs, mercenaries, flying mounts...

The Overseer mechanic is one of those. It made me in-game rich (by any previous standards I'd known, anyway) and better-equipped than I'd ever been before, in both games. I was really hoping the same would happen this year with a post-expansion new season but as yet we haven't had one. 

The good news is that one is definitely planned. Until it arrives there's not much incentive for me to keep up my previous routine, bashing out Overseer quests as though they were dailies. Which, I guess, they are.

Oh, I remember this one!

By dipping out to go play viking I've also missed the bus for this year's PQs. They'll still happen, of course, and people will still do them, but the feeding frenzy that was so compulsive back in January will have abated to a desultory trickle by now as most people who care will have found the drops they wanted.

I really love public quests in mmorpgs. I think they embody the spirit of what the genre was probably always meant to be better than just about anything. Certainly much more so than instanced dungeons or raids. 

To my way of thinking, the true meaning of "massively multiple" is scores of people, hundreds if the infrastructure can stand it, all engaged in the same activity at the same time in the same shared space. And it needs to be an open space into which anyone can wander by accident, not some by-appointment, only if your name is on the list instance.

Without a doubt that's the primary reason I've stuck with Guild Wars 2 all these years, even though at times it frustrates and annoys me as much as it entertains. The original vision, overhyped and oversold as it was, still comes closest to my idea of an ideal mmorpg. 

ArenaNet never managed to close the deal on the promises they made but luckily for all of us mmorpgs are so ferociously complex in their construction, so iceberg-weighted with unseen engines and ballast, that even when those who seek to control them want to make changes there's only so much they can do. You can put a hat on the cat but its still a cat for all that.

Not so sure about this, though...

 

For all the time and effort the developers invested in fractals and raids, GW2 remains at heart a sprawling, open-world game, where things happen and everyone joins in. Yes, your character has to be level 80 for a lot of them and yes you have to have bought the Path of Fire expansion, but even allowing for that there's a never-ending firework display of "events" in the parts of the game anyone can visit for free.

EQ2 doesn't have the advantage of being built that way but it has a good track record of inclusivity all the same. The mentoring system and the agnostic dungeons are both intentional attempts to get everyone playing together regardless of awkward barriers like levels. They're shaky in implementation but the ideas behind them are sound.

The team has stuck doggedly with Public Quests for many years now, even though they cause all kinds of problems. It's tempting to say the game was never built for that number of people to come together and fight giant monsters except apparently it was because I have screenshots of my characters doing it a decade and a half ago. We had dragon attacks when we put the wizard portals back up after the cataclysm and I'm pretty sure that was in the first year after the game came out.

I just bet you would.

No-one called them "Public Quests" back then. I think we called them "World Events". They didn't have the semi-formal structure that came later. You just heard something was happening and you turned up to see what it was. Now you get quests and achievements and guaranteed, personalized drops but it's really the same thing.

Over the years, EQ2 has bundled dozens, maybe hundreds of these things together to make a living world. Some, like the raising of the portals, happen only once. Others come around time after time, like old friends.

Norrath's calendar of holiday events, as I've often said, is second to none in the genre. This month sees one of the year's biggest flurries of activity on that front. Brew Day is winding down but even before it goes we'll have another event to enjoy. The Chronoportals open today.

As well as some very nice-looking new house items, including some excellent paintings, the drops from the Ancient Cyclops instance (the one that's a PQ in all but name) have been updated to make them useful for max levels. Another chance to upgrade some of those slots for a casual like me. There's also a new Overseer quest, something I'm very happy to see.

The chronoevent is a short one by Norrathian standards. It's only here for just over a week. It's just as well because two more are coming along right behind. The Beast'r Eggstravaganza and Bristlebane Day are both active on the Test Server right now.

I read the patch notes for both and they look great. Beast'r has five more egg pets to find and a title for finding them. And there's another new Overseer quest for Bristlebane. 

The trickster's feast also brings a new patchwork fight (yet another kind of unofficial PQ) to the dark side of Luclin. I haven't seen the loot table for that but historically the patchworks have been very generous when done at level so I'm hopeful my Berserker might get something he needs when he goes to try his luck. 

Everyone loves an egg pun.

There are also the inevitable new crafting books that I'll buy and never use and of course all the old quests and features from every other year are up again. 

I've spoken before about the misleading naming convention in Norrath that has events known as Brew or Bristlebane Day lasting for weeks but there is actually a proper Bristlebane Day. It is, of course, April the first and that's the one and only chance you'll have (this year) to match wits with a new riddle-setter. 

We already have the Sphinx but rumor is (if you can call something a rumor when its already happening on Test) they'll be joined this year by another question-setting entity for just that one day. That's definitely appointment gaming.

As well as the returning holidays, there's a major game update brewing. I'd say more about it but I don't know much. Or indeed anything. 

Well, I know what's in this thread. It's called Whispers of Tyranny and most of it probably isn't going to be for me, being raids and heroics. There's some solo content, though, and some quests but no mention of a new Overseer Season. 

There's a beta starting today but I won't be joining in with that. My days of beta-testing content for live games where I'm going to be playing that content just weeks later are over.

All of the above is also motivation for me to get myself organized and get back to logging in to EverQuest II at least often enough to see all that new stuff. Maybe to stick around and farm the drops I need if there really are some good ones I could use. 

And I need the push. It's getting to be all Valheim all the time around here and I'ma  little uncomfortable about it. Much though I've enjoyed being a viking these last few weeks it's good to be reminded other pantheons are available.

Different Voices

This morning I played through the first two parts of Guild Wars 2's latest addition to the Icebrood Saga. Let's not get into the naming conventions of that again. 

I wanted to see the story segment with Braham. I was hoping it might be a separate option but the chapter begins with a (really quite interesting) conversation between Aurene and Jormag before segueing into the first of this update's suite of Dragon Response Missions.

I've been playing GW2 for a long, long time now. I've followed all of the main storylines. Sometimes I've been heavily invested, sometimes I could barely drag myself on. I was one of the minority who thoroughly enjoyed Scarlet's wars but I struggled through the mediocre fan service of the whole, interminable Palawa Joko farrago, including most of the core storyline of the Path of Fire expansion.

The thing is, after this much time with the cast, it all turns into the equivalent of a long-running soap opera or a sitcom that's heading into a tenth season. Hardly any of the characters make any sense if you think about the things they've done. None of the stories hold up to scrutiny. And none of that matters because you know them all so well. It's familiarity that carries you through the nonsense.

Which is why it's so famously difficult and risky to recast. 

It happens. Sometimes there's no choice. If an actor dies (or goes to jail or gets a better offer or leaves to raise a family...) it's either recast or write the character out and if it's a core character that might mean the end of the show.

It made for a sombre opening to a new season but it's one of the best episodes in the whole show.

 

Luke Perry, who played Fred Andrews, Archie's dad, in Riverdale, died suddenly between the end of the third season and the start of the fourth. The opening episode of the first season they shot without him is a long and very poignant eulogy. Fred was a significant character but also one the show could manage without. I don't imagine anyone thought even for a second of replacing him.

Online games with ongoing characters have some different choices to make. Obviously none of the images we see are going to change unless it's by intent. Their voices, though? Well that's a different matter altogether.

It's almost certainly easier to swap out an actor we only recognize by the sound of their voice than it is one we know by sight but "easier" isn't the same as "easy". I've lost track of how many of GW2's ever-expanding ensemble cast have changed voice actors over the last eight years. I do remember Rox's voice changing completely but other than that I'd have to look it up. 

I do know that my male Asura, with whom I do all the Living Story stuff and whose voice I hear more than anyone's, still sounds the same as he always did. It would be very weird if that changed but if the game lasts another eight years I imagine it might.

Not up to your usual standard, Canach.

I'm pretty certain I would have noticed that Canach's voice had changed even if I hadn't already heard about it. He's far and away one of the game's most distinctive presences, one of those characters that make a scene worth struggling through an annoying boss fight for. 

Of course, it might have been hard to be sure at first, given the increasingly irritating way that Living Story dialog plays out theese days, in the middle of a firefight. I get that it's meant to be the equivalent of action heroes swapping witty badinage between bullets but I find it all but impossible to listen to the quips and hit the targets at the same time. If it wasn't for the chatbox recording everything that's said so I can read it back afterwards I'd scarcely know who said what to whom most of the time.

Even so, I could tell Canach wasn't quite his usual, acerbic self. He seemed a little flat. Subdued. 

Turns out he's been replaced. His originator and long-standing voice actor, John DiMaggio, whose take on the character was accurately described by an ANet rep as "urbane and hilarious" has been replaced by Matthew Mercer. This change brings with it a number of problems.

I had no idea who Matt Mercer might be. Never heard of him. I found out by reading the forum thread on the topic that he's well-known from the Critical Role web series, something I've heard of many times but never watched. Not only that but he also voices the male norn player-character in Guild Wars 2.

Braham's the only male Norn I really pay any attention to.

 

I don't have any male norn characters so that's unlikely to be a problem for me but I can imagine it might be for someone who finds themselves listening to Matt Mercer having a conversation with Matt Mercer. I'm sure he varies the voice enough to make them distinct but from my years of listening to audio books I'd have to say you can always tell it's the same actor doing all the voices, no matter how well they're doing it.

Based on the forum reaction, the change hasn't gone down particularly well but that's only to be expected. Criticism of ArenaNet is muted because the reason given is "clash of scheduling", a polite way of saying they couldn't get John DiMaggio to do it any more. 

That puts them in the position of either having to recast or to let the character lie fallow. Or kill them off, of course, which is always a popular option in genre fiction. 

Canach isn't really a key figure in the plot so dropping him would be unproblematic from a practical point of view but he is very much a fan favorite so it would also be a poor commercial choice. The question is, would players rather have a bland Canach or no Canach at all? 

It's not a moot point. We already had the same thing happen to one fan favorite: Zojja. She was gravely injured at the end of the first expansion, Heart of Thorns, but so were half the cast. Everyone else got better. Even Eir made a brief comeback appearance and she was dead!

Zojja has never been seen again. I'm not a hundred per cent sure the reason has ever been confirmed but once again it's widely believed to be scheduling issues. Zojja was voiced by the very much in-demand Felicia Day, who almost certainly had more lucrative offers to take up. Plus she's just become a mother. That'll cut into your work schedule.

I can't remember what the original Rox sounded like but who could forget those eyes?

The continued absence of such a popular character with no in-game explanation is something of a running sore in GW2. Every time any rested character returns there's a flurry of "and what about Zojja?" threads on the forums. She's gone but very much not forgotten.

Recasting a significant character like Canach does indeed demand the question "and what about Zojja?". If an interpretation as definitive and accepted as DiMaggio's can be replaced, what's so unique about Day's short-tempered Asuran? The third comment on the thread titled "New Canach VA?" is the equally succinct "Zojja next?"

It would be nice to be able to say that's the only voice acting controversy in the new update but it very definitely is not. There's also the tricky question of how a Tengu should talk. 

I never liked the tengu. They're big, annoying birds with thick quasi-Russian accents and a bad attitude. I always found them both abrasive and borderline offensive. Imagine, then, how strange it was to be greeted in the first of the new Dragon Missions by a tengu voiced like an excitable American tween.

Or, as one commenter on the forum thread brusquely titled "Tengu Voice - Dislike"  put it "sounds like a skritt in disguise". That's all too accurate. When the character began speaking she was well out of my line of sight and I really did think it was a skritt I was hearing.

Other commenters compare her voice to various Asuran and Quaggan characters already in the game and the one thing all of those have in common is exceptional (some might say excessive) cuteness. This new tengu, Kilidris Sparrowhawk, is undeniably cute, something I don't believe any tengu has ever been.

Just die, already!

She also gets some very interesting dialog. When the insanely tedious sub-boss fight on the bridge is finally finished you get the option to ask her several questions and I would advise anyone interested in the politics and culture of Tyria to take that option. 

We already know that the tengu are going to feature in the third expansion and this would very much appear to be the beginning of some re-structuring and re-positioning to make that a more palatable option to those of us who can't stand the blasted birds.

How that's going to go down with their legion of fans is another matter. It does at least make me feel a little more optimistic about one aspect of the End of Dragons experience. Whenever the hell it arrives.Seriously, isn't it about time we got some indications of a timescale on that?

As for the rest of the storyline in the current update... it wasn't at all bad. Plenty to chew on. Maybe I'll get into it when I've finished the rest. 

That Braham, eh? He doesn't get any smarter, does he?

At The Grammys

Despite having been a huge music fan almost all my life I've never paid even the smallest passing attention to the Grammys. It's not for any moral objections to the concept of competition in the arts. I'm down with awards in principle. It's more that until really quite recently the Grammys never got much traction where I live. Not with my peer group, the general public or even the media.

In my teens and twenties I bought all the music papers and magazines there were. They all held annual write-in polls and I filled them out and sent them off. Weeks later, when the results were printed, I pored over the winners and losers, fulminated about the injustice of my favorites being ignored and crowed when the people I'd voted for came out on top.  

Those polls, parochial as they were, seemed like a big deal at the time. Later, in the eighties and nineties, when television picked up on the theme with big events like the Brits and the Mercury Music Prize, I'd watch those on TV and talk about them afterwards, ironically in the case of the former, more seriously for the latter.

The Grammys, though? Nah, they never figured. The music papers in the seventies and eighties didn't seem interested. They'd report the winners in a small news story but I don't remember ever seeing a feature article on either the results or the ceremony, not even once. 

Partly I think it was because the nominees and winners seemed so incredibly old-fashioned. The lists of names that got printed looked like a snapshot of your parents record collection, or possibly your weird cousin's, the one who didn't quite move to the same beat as everyone else. And those were the names I recognized. Most of them were people I'd never even heard of and at the time I prided myself on the breadth and depth of my popular music knowledge. 

Sometime much later, probably during the decade or so when I wasn't paying much attention to anything other than mmorpgs, it seems the Grammys changed a little. Not an awful lot, just enough to make them look about as in touch as the Brits used to be. That's a low bar but at least it's there.

I still never paid much attention. It was easy not to. The Grammys still don't get much traction in the British media, something that, now I come to think about it, is slightly strange, considering how the Oscars have always received major TV and press coverage. 

A few years back, though, I started following Pitchfork and they do take the the awards seriously. By which I mean they report every single winner in every single category and post video of all the performances. I'm not sure whether the writers at Pitchfork actually care much for the results per se; they report the whole thing with enviable clarity and precision but no critical evaluation whatsoever. It's pure, factual news. 

I still can't pretend I care. I can see that the nominees these days are intended to be some kind of snapshot of current trends, which I'm certain sure wasn't the case back when I was getting my music news from the inkies, but like the Brits it always looks as if something has to have penetrated the popular consciousness pretty deeply already even to make it onto the Best New Artist shortlist (I mean, Phoebe Bridgers? Doja Cat? Megan Thee Stallion? How new is new?).

Without intentionally trying to come off as any more hipsterish than usual and bearing in mind that I am over sixty years of age, even I find most of the nominations a tad mainstream. Which made it somewhat disturbing for me yesterday when I realised that possibly for the first time ever I actually own two of the big winners of the night. What's more, I'd bought them as soon as they were released.  

At the time, if I'd thought anything about it at all, I might have flattered myself my choices reflected some kind of eternal youth. Now I'm wondering if it was an indication of the exact opposite.

The two albums in question are the winners of Best Album of the Year (Taylor Swift's Folklore) and Best Alternative Music Album (Fiona Apple's Fetch The Bolt Cutters). What's more, I actually had Folklore playing while I wrote yesterday's blog post. I was literally listening to the Grammy Album of the Year on the day it won.

That feels very weird.

It's significant and possibly even more concerning that both of the awards in question were for "Albums". Just typing the word makes me feel old. It surprises me a little that albums as a concept still exist, given the extraordinary changes to the way music is distributed and consumed in the 21st century but there they still are. 

Wreckless Eric, whose blog I've been following since his Covid19 scare last year, popped up with alarming synchronicity this weekend to make that very point: 

"I keep recording stuff but it’s not easy to find the motivation to assemble it into a coherent record, an album. And I’m not a fan of putting tracks up on Bandcamp or whatever as and when. I admire other people for doing it but it’s not my thing. I love albums - LPs - collections of material designed to sit together and be listened to in a particular order Something to be considered, not cherrypicked and discarded. I know it’s an old fashioned view but it’s where I come from"

The figures show that's not how most people experience music these days and yet the album persists. I suspect that even now it's a format that makes emotional and creative sense to artists and musicians, even those who were born in this century, more than it does, or maybe ever did, to the people who end up listening to it.

 Either that or it remains an effective marketing tool. One or the other.

This week is actually a really big one in my personal music calendar and that's all because of an album. Friday sees the release of Lana del Rey's Chemtrails over the Country Club. I have it on pre-order. I should get it on the day of release. 

Of course, I could just stream it and have it at the nanosecond of release but apparently I still have to have the physical evidence of its existence or it doesn't count. Meanwhile there are already people out there doing breathtakingly good re-interpretations. Art moves fast these days.

It's either her sixth or her seventh official album, depending whether or not you count the almost-eponymous Lana del Ray, which came out in January 2010 and then got pulled from all outlets, physical and digital, for reasons that remain unclear. 

I have a download of it and gallingly I actually had it in my Amazon basket back in 2010, when I'd just discovered Lana and was wondering whether to buy it. I dithered, it vanished. There's a lesson there.

There's also the album Sirens she recorded four years earlier under the name May Jailer but never released, which I also have safely downloaded, courtesy of YouTube, and the spoken-word album Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass, which I own in both digital and physical format as well as in the form of a book of poetry.  

Her last official musical release, Norman Fucking Rockwell, one of the best collections of songs I've heard in fifty years of listening to music and one of my top ten (maybe top five) favorite albums of all-time, was nominated for best album at the 2020 Grammys, when it lost to Billie Eilish's When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? I'm not quite sure why I don't own that one, too. I love Billie Eilish.

So maybe my owning two of this year's winners isn't quite so surprising after all. Had things gone slightly differently, I might have been able to write a post very much like this a year ago. 

Even so, I really shouldn't care even a little bit about the Grammys, I realize that. It may have toned up its cultural attitude to try and look somewhat less dusty and befuddled but only because to do otherwise would have risked slipping into utter irrelevance. The Oscars have been attempting a similar makeover with equally limited success but I guess we have to give them both credit for at least trying (although I'm not sure one of this year's big winners, Fiona Apple, would wholly agree).

I do remember being quite miffed last year that NFR didn't win, although given what did my irritation was necessarily muted. This year I was annoyed to see that Jack Antonoff hadn't walked away with Best Producer (Non-Classical). I mean, what does a guy have to do?

It's all good fun, though. The whole point of awards is to take them seriously enough to fight over the results but not to take them so seriously the fights matter. I guess the Grammys are worth a quick glance for that, at least.

It's a step up for them in my book. I'm sure they care.