A Progressive Attitude

I thought I might give a little progress report on where things stand for me in Dawnlands right now. I'm still playing every day, give or take. I first posted about the game on 10 August, when I'd just installed it. Just over five weeks later, Steam tells me I've played for exactly 82 hours, which averages out to a little over two hours a day; pretty close to how I've been playing.

There's no padding in those numbers, either. I've been scrupulous in not leaving the game running when I'm afk and I've hardly even tabbed out to look stuff up while logged in. If it says I was playing, I really was playing.

For all that time and effort, I've haven't even managed to complete 10% of the content. To be precise, my "Proportion Explored" stat currently stands at 8.43%. 

I don't know exactly what's included in that count but I'm guessing 100% would mean at least removing all the "fog of war" from the whole map and exposing all the marked Points of Interest. It could mean much more than that, like maybe unlocking every recipe, completing every achievment or even ticking every box the game would like you to tick. There are many.

Whatever it means, since only six of the proposed ten biomes are currently available and assuming an even distribution (It's not remotely even but let's pretend it is for now.) it's possible I've really only explored 8.43% of 60% of the content, which would be even less in absolute terms - barely over 5% of the whole thing - but more like 14% of what's actually possible at the moment.

Even if I have explored 8.43% of the entire map and/or consumed 8.43% of the total content, it's still not one hell of a lot to show for eighty fricken' hours! It's not even two per cent a week!

Someone might want to check my math there, by the way. I got Bard to do it but I'm not sure it entirely understood what I was asking. I know I didn't...

However much or little I've done, there's clearly a lot more left to go. According to the Sealing Progress charts, I'm almost done with Grasslands (93.5%). Plains (87.1%) and Forest (82.5%) are closing in fast but I've barely scratched the surfaces of Black Forest (15.2%), Swamp (13.4%) or Snow Mountain (3%).

Here, once again, I'm somewhat confused. Swamp and Black Forest are listed as separate biomes but they seem to be intermixed on the map and in the world. They either share the same Boss (Lynd) or one of them doesn't have a boss at all. They do each have their own progress ladder, though, so they definitely count as two, separate biomes.

In terms of the storyline, my next target is indeed Lynd, my first task being to find him (Her, Them, It. I mean, the thing looks like a tapeworm bursting out of an elk - the last thing I need to be thinking about is what pronoun to use. Except that's exactly what I am thinking about...) 

Black Forest by night. More like indigo, I'd say.

It really doesn't help that none of the "official" sources agrees on what to call the biome where Lynd lives. The game calls it Black Forest but the wiki uses both "Dark Forest" and, most confusingly of all, "Black Swamp". As it happens, I know where Lynd is because I stumbled across the Seal while I was looking for iron ore.

I also know what he looks and sounds like because I clicked on the Seal to see what items I'd need to collect to summon him and it turns out you don't need any! He spawned on top of me and started yelling threats so I ran the hell away.

After that little escapade I watched a few videos of supposed quick or safe ways to kill Lynd. None of them look very quick or safe to me so I'm not in any hurry to try. 

It's not like I need to move the needle yet a while, anyway. It's true that much (Although by no means all.) of the crafting in the game is tied to the Sealing process. You do need the new tier of pickaxe that becomes available after the death of each boss to mine the new ore you find in the next biome and you do need that ore to craft the next tier of armor. Despite all that, the game offers considerable flexibility in how you choose to progress.

A lot of recipes are tied not to the death of bosses but to your level. You get a drip-feed of new options as you level up. There is a hard cap on levels tied to each boss but I've never found myself short of things to do even when I hit that cap. In fact, it takes me all my time keeping up with what is available and even then I'm generally falling behind rather than surging ahead.

Swamp by day. Surprisingly pretty, isn't it?

As for handling the general difficulty that comes with a new biome, there's a big overlap that makes it perfectly reasonable to carry on in the armor you already have, provided you also take the trouble to upgrade it as far as it will go. Just this morning I finished my full, upgraded set of Refined Dark Iron Armor (Well, almost. Still need to do a couple more upgrades on the belt.) but I'm not wearing it yet.

The reason for that is item decay, one of the few things about Dawnlands I'm not completely sold on, although I think it's far less of a problem than some of the hysterical rants I've seen would like you to believe. All armor is repairable and although making repairs causes durability to decline, I've never yet had a repairable item reach the point where it couldn't be refurbished and put back into service as good as new before I'd replaced it with something better anyway. 

Nice set bonuses, too.

Repairs are instantaneous and free. You do need a workbench or anvil that's been upgraded to the appropriate level, which means going home to repair, but armor decays quite slowly. Unless you play every hour god sends and never go back to base, if you find your armor falling apart in the field you most likely have only yourself to blame. 

Added to that, the higher the armor tier you access, the further you can upgrade. My new Dark Iron set, can be upgraded from a baseline 250HP to 1000HP. The Bronze I'm wearing starts at 200HP and goes to 800HP (From memory...) At those levels I rarely need to repair at all and it's difficult to imagine that I'll ever need to replace any of the pieces now I've upgraded them. Even so, natural caution makes me reluctant to move on from an existing set before I have to and the Bronze still seems to be doing a good job so why swap?

Tools and weapons are a different matter altogether. Although you can still upgrade them in the same way, they are unrepairable. I've taken to prioritizing weapons and tools as soon as I open each crafting tier before moving on to armor. Fully upgraded, weapons last a good while but picks and axes feel like they wear down more quickly. It's probably identical but of course you do tend to hit ore nodes and trees a lot more times in a session than you hit monsters - or I do, anyway.

Given the rate of decay and the inability to repair, I tend to make spare tools and weapons so I can carry on when they break. I also swap my higher ones out for my lower ones whenever the lower ones are up to the task in hand and I try to avoid using my good axes as a weapons, although it's often just too convenient to resist. I really like axes.

The forecast said snow...

 All in all, I don't find the system too onerous. I wouldn't even remove item decay, given the choice; I'd just make tools and weapons repairable in the same way armor is. I do think that having decay and repair nudges lazier players like me into making the effort to go all the way down the upgrade path rather than, as I'm pretty sure I would otherwise, stopping at the minimum viable option.

In gameplay terms, it means I spend a lot more time planning and thinking ahead instead of just rushing off into the wilderness unprepared. It also means that much of my gameplay consists of looking for nodes or other sources of materials, collecting them, bringing them back to base, refining them and finally using them to craft and upgrade my gear.

It's time-consuming but absorbing. I spent two full sessions last week, scouring the entirety of the Grasslands and a good portion of the Forest for Phantom Crystals, a resource that seems plentiful in the early days but which rapidly becomes scarce. They're needed for part of the upgrade process for higher tier armor and weapons as well as for the starting gear so they remain in demand but because most resource nodes in Dawnlands don't regenerate, what started out as a trivial activity eventually becomes somewhat challenging.

Leaving aside the opaque Exploration percentages, what I do know is that I have two bosses left to kill and at least two more armor sets to make. There's a cold weather set that I've already started on but which I think will require items from Lynd to upgrade in full and a Mithril set that certainly will. The same applies to the mithril tools and weapons. There's also one locked and as yet unknown crafting station that probably won't reveal itself until I seal Lynd away either.

Based on my current rate of progress, I'd guess that could take as much as another forty or fifty hours, always assuming I could even manage to beat Lynd at  all, let alone seal the fifth and currently final boss, Niedner. He looks very tough and without him, there's no Mithril armor.

Something for every occasion.

I'm in no hurry. I have a lot of work still to do to get my complete set of upgraded cold weather armor and I haven't even started building a castle. That's not any part of progression but since there are a whole set of recipes for castle-building, it would seem crazy not to build one. 

There are also recipes for building a mining railway complete with working mine-carts. I'm not entirely sure if there's any practical benefit to doing it but once again, if it's there...

To re-iterate something I've said before, I've read quite a few critical reviews that talk about Dawnlands as some kind of predatory gacha game. While it does now have some gacha mechanics for cosmetics, it didn't at the time these comments were made. People see want they want to see. 

The non-respawning of nodes and the need for pages to unlock crafting recipes have also been cited as evidence of unreasonable monetization. After more than eighty hours, I have seen absolutely no sign of any of that.

With the sole exception of Phantom Crystals, which as far as I can tell you can't buy for real money anyway, every other resource remains far more plentiful than I can imagine needing. There are nodes everywhere in the areas I've explored and there are vast tracts of land I haven't even visited yet.

As for recipes, I've been able to buy everything I wanted immediately and I still have more than a hundred pages saved. Unless you want to buy every recipe as soon as it appears, just for the sake of owning it, I can't see what the problem is.

Well, yes, I think I can. It's a lack of patience. I guess if you have to have everything right away you might find Dawnlands a little frustrating. Maybe then you would try to buy your way out of the problem although I'm not at all sure you'd be able to; most of the basics aren't really for sale in large quantities and even the small amounts available only change hands for in-game currency.

It seems to me that the only real requirement for steady progress is to play the game, which suits me fine. I'm doing that already and very happy to do it I am, too.

Age Restricted Product

I sat down this morning, thinking I might do a music post. I was in the mood for one but I didn't have a convenient peg to hang it on. I'd as soon just have gone with the regular grab-bag of new favorites, only I was pretty sure I hadn't stashed enough away these last couple of weeks to fill a whole post. 

I was toying with the idea of doing something about the current glut of old rockers clogging up the news, most of whom still seem convinced they have it, whatever it is and whether they do or not. That would obviously have been off the back of the frankly disturbing news that the Rolling Stones (Average age 78.) are releasing a new album. 

I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to associate myself with the unnerving tendency of former flag-wavers for youthful rebellion (cf Pete Docherty, Bobby Gillespie later in this post.) to go on and on and on and anyway there was a potential conflict of irony involving my own refusal to grow up. It would take some sensitive handling and I wasn't convinced I was up to it just then.

While I was thinking about it, I opened the folder where I keep the possibles for What I've Been Listening To Lately™. There were way more than I expected: nineteen songs by sixteen different artists, at least ten of whom I'd never featured on the blog before. 

Well, I don't think I have. Please don't test me on my own blog. You know I'll fail!

Anyway, that seemed to solve the problem so, I guess we're set. It's just going to be a good old WIBLTL after all. I'm not even going to use everything I have. It'd be too much. And I am (God forgive me.) going to open with one that's not even on the list at all, namely the first salvo from Hackney Diamonds, that Stones' album none of us thought we needed. 

I'm pretty sure we were right about that but it seems we're getting it anyway so we may as well roll over and try to enjoy it.

Angry - The Rolling Stones

Even though the first album I ever bought with my own money was by The Beatles (Abbey Road), I've been a Stones fan all my life. I still listen to Beggars Banquet, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street and especially the underrated Goats Head Soup, on occasion. The last Stones album I felt the  need to buy, though, was Some Girls, which came out in 1978. When they played the Ashton Gate stadium in Bristol four years later, all my friends went to see them but I refused to go because I thought the Stones were old and past it and it would be embarassing to go see them in 1982. If I'd known they'd still be at it more than forty years later...

I'd still think I made the right decision. It would have been embarrassing - for me.  The fact that Jagger, Richards and Wood are beyond embarassment is no reason to join them in their collective delusion. And yet... Angry is half a good song, isn't it? Not the verse, which is lacklustre, but the chorus and the extended coda, where they just slip into that groove they've been doing for more than half a century and work it... I could listen to that for a while.

Shiny Happy People  - Micky Dolenz

Okay... seems like we're doing this thing after all. Micky Dolenz is - guess what? - seventy-eight years old. He may have been in what was once thought of as the least hip band of all time (The Monkees, as I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone reading this but just did anyway.) but he could teach the Stones a thing or two about growing old gracefully, that's for sure. This is a solid cover, welded to a knowing video that suggests someone who knows who he is, where he's been and where he's going. Like the video for Angry, it harks back to youth but unlike that queasy affair, it doesn't attempt to appropriate it. 

I felt slightly uncomfortable all the way through the Stones video, which I only watched in its entirety for quality control reasons before including it here. Micky's montage, on the contrary, made me smile. Always loved his voice, too. He very definitely still has it. 

This is from an upcoming EP of REM covers. I look forward to hearing the rest. I never really liked REM but I wouldn't deny they had some good tunes. It'll be nice to hear them done well by someone I enjoy listening to.

Ghosted At Home - Lol Tolhurst, Budgie and Jacknife Lee (feat. Bobby Gillespie)

OMG! Where to begin? We've jumped half a generation for a start. This bunch are in their mid-sixties. Well, Lol, Budgie and Billy are. I don't know about Jacknife Lee. I'd guess a bit younger. Also, for a while there, back in the 'nineties, Bobby made out like a bandit by sounding more like the Stones than the Stones did.

On this he sounds like a louche, looser Jagger. There are even a few Sympathy-style ooh-oohs in the background. It's shameless, which is to be expected. It also sounds much more dangerous and unhinged than anything the Stones have managed since at least Undercover of the Night, particularly when the (uncredited) bass kicks in two-thirds of the way through.

And yet... much though I enjoy it, I can't entirely dismiss the underlying sentiment behind this comment on YouTube: "I love each and every one of these guys and their respective bands, enormously — but this is dated shit. The truth is, this sound is thirty years out-of-date and each of the musicians were too old THEN to have put out this tripe." 

I wouldn't go that far but... 

These Hands aka Danny The Knife - Pregoblin (feat. Pete Doherty)

At forty-four, Pete Doherty is a babe in arms compared to everyone we've seen so far but don't kid yourself; forty-four is still old. I have no idea how old Alex Sebley and Jessica Winter, the two people who make up all of Pregoblin are, although I'd guess significantly younger. 

I listened to a couple of other Pregoblin tunes but they didn't quite have the effortless swagger of this, which sits squarely in a tradition of boho ragamuffin balladry that runs unbroken back at least to the 1960s and quite possibly the 1560s.

How much of it is down to Pete Doherty? I wouldn't like to say. There are some Fat White Family associations in there somewhere, too, and they're out of the same mould. Pete's so steeped in that sound, though, it's likely to seep into anything he touches. And stain it. 

I don't complain. It's a good stain, plum-colored and rich, like spilled red wine on threadbare velvet.

Nikki Sudden was the vagabond king of this sort of thing but Pete makes a fair crown prince. Luckily, it also happens to be a sound and a look that ages well. He should still be able to swing it when he's in his sixties, always assuming he gets there, which is a big "if". I hope he does and I hope I'm still around to hear him. I think he's getting better as he grows older.

Motorbike - Poppy

Okay, I know this looks like a sudden swerve but bear with me. What's that chorus? "Girl on a Motorbike". I think the video makes it clear Poppy's channelling Mick Jagger's one-time paramour, Marianne Faithful, in the sixties' cult classic movie of the same name aka Naked Under Leather, which is also, not at all co-incidentally, the title of one of the best songs I ever wrote. It was about the Stones. I said I was a fan.

get him back! - Olivia Rodrigo

I was going to go with Brian Eno by Work Wife next just because Eno is another old "rocker" (Yeah, I bet he'd just love that...) but it's super-slow and dreamy and it fucks up the flow so let's ditch the geezers and carry on rocking with our girl Olivia. Gods, but she's good. 

In the interests of having something to tell people when they ask me want I want for my birthday, I have not yet heard, much less bought, Olivia Rodrigo's sophomore album, GUTS. This is the kind of selfless self-restraint I hope to be karmically rewarded for in the next life.

K2 - Melenas

I saw this lot described as the Spanish Stereolab. It's not a responsibility I'd want to carry but they seem to be up to it. Melenas hail from Pamplona, by the way. It's a lovely city. Kind of wish I was there right now. 

Spain is one of the hothouses of indie these days. So much of the good stuff I hear comes from there. Like this...

Se Me Ha Muerto Una Flor - Lisasinson

The ever-reliable Lisasinson. That opening bass riff is so familiar. Is it The Damned?

There are a couple more I definitely want to fit in today so I think we'd better have them now and screw the flow. Can't expect anyone to keep patience with more than a dozen new songs in a single post. In the words of every tedious, self-satisfied late night radio DJ, then, let's slow things down...

Engine - Slaughter Beach, Dog

Remember what I was saying about liking my songs short? This is seven seconds short of nine minutes and it couldn't be any less if it tried. I'd been meaning to listen to Slaughter Beach, Dog for a while, just for the name, but nothing had triggered me to click through until this came up in Stereogum's ever-reliable 5 Best Songs of the Week. 

It gets a couple of great paragraphs by "Chris", who I presume is Chris deVille, but the part that got me to listen was "The track is not particularly catchy or bombastic, either. But it casts its spell instantly and carries you along in its current to the end." Music journalism tends towards the bombastic. Understatement is rare. It gets your attention. So does the song, which drifts like mist over firm ground, ethereal and solid all at once.

I used the studio version because the dynamics are perfect and I think the song paints its own pictures in the mind but if you want to see moving images while you listen, there's a luxuriant live take here.

Wedding Singer - Modern Baseball

Jake Ewald, who is Slaughter Beach, Dog, used to be the lead singer for Modern Baseball. They're another act whose name I keep skipping past, thinking I'll get to them one day but not today. Well, I got to them and they're great. Were great. They split up a while back.

The more midwestern emo I hear, the more I want to hear. Of course, what qualifies as midwestern emo is another matter. Not Modern Baseball, apparently. Don't you love genre wars?

No Caffeine - Marika Hackman

I can always use a new Jane Weaver. Or a new Snowpony, even better. Not nearly enough people plowing this furrow. This video gets an "Explicit" warning on YouTube for reasons that escape me. Is there something about nosebleeds I'm missing? 

Sugar - Cherry Glazerr

Wow, they've changed! This fits right next to Maria Hackman and all the fuzzed up fucked up drone tone nineties psyche I like. If this wasn't called "Sugar", would I be hearing Sneaker Pimps? Yep, I think I would.

So, this is going long. Again. Oh hell, oh well...

Swallow - Girlpuppy

Another Jarret Wolfson tip. I purged my YouTube subscriptions last week. Dropped a couple of really big music channels because I finally realised I never listened to them because they never link to video or live performance. I mean, who just wants to listen to the song? That's so twentieth century.

And finally... oh no, wait... I said I was going to get to Brian Eno by Work Wife, didn't I? 

Brian Eno - Work Wife

And there it is. Starts soft but really builds. Apparently American Football are an influence. They're midwestern emo... I think. This certainly isn't. Well, they're from Brooklyn, for a start...

And so we come to the end. Nearly got everyone in. Didn't think I'd do it. Going to have to drop a couple - Sorry, Prince Daddy & The Hyena (That's one band.). Sorry Lifeguard. See, if we hadn't had all those old geezers at the start, there'd have been room for the young 'uns. Then again, that's a Jam cover I just linked...

Just room for one more so let's make it a good one.

Sulky Baby - yeule

Do you ever feel like the nineties never ended? Nat Cmiel aka yeule there, tunneling the same temporal wormhole as the last four. I swear I didn't plan it that way. It's a talent.

I was actually going to give you Sofstscars, the title track from yeule's new album, but it doesn't have a video and you heard what I said before. Don't fret. We'll be hearing from her again. And again, I'm pretty sure.

Not now, though. I'm done for today. Have a great weekend!

A Shattering Experience In EQII

I've been neglecting EverQuest II of late. That's how I came to miss the opening of the new update, Shattered Overture. It arrived a couple of days ago, together with this year's pre-expansion event, Fractured Skies.  

Last summer we got the Myths and Monoliths update in August and the Secrets of the Sands expansion prequel in September. This year it's a two-for-one package.  Does it mean anything? 

Maybe. Ask me again when I've finished the whole thing. What with spending every available gaming minute in Dawnlands (Eighty hours played and still counting.) it was only this morning that I got around to taking a look at the update, trying to read the runes for the expansion. 

Before I logged in I scanned the sketchily-edited press release (Poor verb tense consistency in paragraph one; mismatched singular/plural in paragraph two. The whole thing reads like a first draft and a rushed one at that.) and watched the extremely short trailer. Twenty seconds. Now that's concise.

I only had it in mind to check out the pre-expansion event. I was going to get some screenshots and gather enough background for a post. In the end, I spent a couple of hours doing not just the whole of the Fractured Skies questline (It's short, as the pre-expansion stories always are.) but also the first of the two Shattered Overture solo dungeons, Shattered Unrest. 

I also took a ridiculous number of screenshots (Almost seventy!) documenting most of the quest dialog and all of the rewards and boss drops. I do this almost every time I play any new content in EQII in the mistaken belief that I'll use the pictures in whatever post I write. It's crazy behavior. Can you imagine this post with seventy screenshots, almost all of them showing nothing but item stats and NPC speech bubbles?

 

See what I mean? No-one wants that. Forget all that finnicky detail. Is any of it fun and/or worth doing? Also, does the prequel reveal anything about the setting or theme of the expansion?

Yes, yes and kinda. 

Fractured Skies is a classic EQII expansion prequel event but for my money it's a pretty decent one. They almost always follow the same pattern: your character gets a letter asking them to go see someone, somewhere about something. Sometimes a reference is made to your high standing in Norrath and your past history of saving the world from existential threat. Other times, as now, you're just some adventurer who might be at a loose end.

When you get to wherever it is, whatever crisis precipitated the call has already ended but there's a lot of mopping up to do. Either a Big Name In Norrath (Firiona Vie, The Duality...) or cabal of self-appointed busybodies (The Far Seas Trading Company, The Concordium...) wants you to investigate how the crisis arose and what ought to be done about it.

You spend anything from a few minutes to a couple of hours, wandering around the general area looking at stuff and talking to people about what happened. While you're doing it, creatures related to the mysterious event (Golems, Elementals, Undead...) attack you for no apparent reason. 

You report your findings to whomever and get sent somewhere else to do much the same again, probably several times. All of your research uncovers very little of substance but you get some kind of hint about where the crisis originated. Usually a very vague hint.

When you're done, whoever thinks they're in charge asks you to keep on looking at the same stuff you already looked at, collect the same things you already collected and kill the same things that keep on attacking you. These are your repeatable quests that hang around for as long as there is left to go before the expansion arrives.

If you're only an adventurer you do those until either you have enough faction to buy all the stuff in the prequel faction shop that interests you or you go mad from boredom, whichever comes first. If you're a crafter, you also get to make a bunch of stuff for the busybodies, who always seem to have run out of something because they failed to secure any kind of working supply chain before setting up their camp.

This year's event follows that pattern precisely but I found it considerably more interesting than the cut & paste format might suggest, partly because it's very well done of its kind but also because there are some evocative call-backs to the very start of the game.

In the prequel, chunks of debris come crashing down from space, bringing back memories of The Shattering, when the moon Luclin exploded.  We never got to see that event, which occured immediately prior to the launch of EQII but now we don't just get to hear the locals speak of it again, we also share some of their terrible experiences as the rocks literally crash down around us as we go about our investigations. 

As well as the scares, I also had to laugh when one the residents of Thundering Steppes couldn't remember the ridiculously pompous name this year's know-it-alls have chosen to go by. They're calling themselves the Sky Watcher Sodality. Is it any wonder people find it hard to remember?

The crisis this time causes considerably less damage than the Shattering, but there's still a tidal wave from the impacts in the Shattered Seas (Always lot of shattering and fracturing going on in Norrath...)  and a significant number of casualties. The rocks that hit the shoreline along Thundering Steppes leave a weird turquoise stain and stir up some powerful undead as collateral damage but they also seem to have brought some previously unknown "metallic creatures" with them. Could it be a clue?

During the investigation someone has a vision of bird-people doing something or other. They look like owls, which immediately puts everyone in mind of the Hooluk, a race of owl-like bird-folk who live on several of the sky islands from EQII's second expansion Kingdom of Sky. The suspicion, naturally, is that it's pieces of those islands that have crashed to earth. Muggins here gets sent to check it out.

Once again, I found it quite amusing that none of the Hooluks I spoke to had any idea what I was talking about because as far as they were concerned nothing had happened. I particularly enjoyed the fobbing-off I got from one of the owls, who was quite obviously ready to promise me anything just to make me go away and leave him in peace.

I had a good time doing the short series of quests, partly because they are short and to the point but mostly because I found them quite nostalgic. They're full of call-backs to Norrathian history, something that works well on me, since I've been there for almost all of it. 

I suspect players with little grounding in the lore and legend of the game might find the whole thing a bit dull but at this point there's little chance of anyone like that having to force their way through to the end. There surely can't be anyone left playing the game who isn't deeply invested in it.

I wouldn't call any of this fan service so much as the developers both knowing their audience and also having been at this as long as most of the players. EQII is a job for life, whichever side of the screen you're on.

As for what the prequel might tell us about the expansion... not a lot in my judgment. Something has blown up and crashed down but the obvious candidate seems to have been ruled out. The metal blobs don't remind me of anything I've seen before and I can't remember if I've encounterd Hooluks anywhere other than Kingdom of Sky. We're going to have to wait until someone with a better memory than me figures it out. 

So much for the prequel. What about the update? Well, curiously that seems to tie in with the same theme with similar metallic creatures appearing in both. That's something I really wasn't expecting. I guess it explains why the two launched together.

There's very little backstory for this one, so far anyway. Dr. Arcana has managed to bugger up one of his tomb-raiding expeditions and somehow managed to deconstruct the Estate of Unrest in doing it. I should confess at this point that I have absolutely no fricken' clue who Dr. Arcana is. He turns up at every Public Quest, handing out extremely powerful items for "artefacts" retrieved but why he wants them or what he does with them I have no idea.

Once more, there's a raised eyebrow and a subtle wink in the quest dialog as Arcana admits he hasn't been entirely forthcoming about his motives in the past. He isn't this time, either, but at least he's willing to have a proper conversation for once.

He sends us into the shattered (Oh yes, I said shattered!) estate, now scattered in fragments across some kind of peach-colored void. He wants us to retrieve his lost artifacts along with some strange crystals he spotted there, when he was busy wrecking the joint. Getting them involves riding flying discs from exploded room to exploded room and fighting five (I  think it was five...) boss mobs.

I was expecting this to be a slog; it was anything but. My Berserker is decently geared for solo instances at this stage of the expansion cycle but by no means as well set up as he could be. Usually new content like this is tuned slightly above his comfort level. This time the regular mobs turned out to be very easy to dispatch and the bosses, with one exception, fun to fight and fast to kill.

The trash mobs dropped so quickly I thought I'd risk the first boss without even looking to see if anyone had written a walkthrough yet. Usually I like a bit of a hint about the tricks bosses employ before I take them on but I was feeling lucky. 

It all went swimmingly. I tanked and spanked Ferroc, who appeared to be a bull made of iron. I think he sumoned some help at one point but I just kept AEing like a good berserker should and barely even noticed. After that I worked my way through Crogyn (Giant beetle.), The Gooey Gobdrop (Exactly as it sounds.), Gildilisk (A drake, I think...) and finally The Bonecleaver (Looked like a robot to me.)

Every one of them I tanked and spanked. There were messages about each of them doing something but I just ignored it and kept on thumping. Nothing untoward happened until The Bonecleaver and even then I didn't change tactics. It just took ten times as long.

Old boney has a buff called Level The Playing Field that he gives himself at about 80% health. It almost completely protects him from all kinds of status effects, which are the source of the majority of damage players dish out. You can still hurt him but all your attacks do is their basic damage. I think he also does some kind of minor power drain too, just to be a pain.

The buff is dispellable so the idea is clearly that you take it off him every time he casts it. Unfortunately, Bereserkers don't get any form of Dispel Magic and I didn't have any items on me that could cast it either. I thought maybe my merc would handle it but either he doesn't have the spell or he was too dim to use it.

The upshot was that I had to grind the bastard down one lousy per cent at a time. It took me about twenty minutes. The upside was that I was never really in any danger. At one point I just left my Berserker and merc auto-attacking while I tabbed out to look the fight up in case there was something I was missing. No-one had written it up so I had to carry on as I was.

It was worth it. All the bosses in the instance drop Fabled gear that's a significant upgrade to anything I'm wearing. Everything is at least 425 Resolve with the best piece I got hiting 435. The portmanteau quest for doing the whole thing netted me a Fabled Prestige item rated 440.

Gear like that will give me a definite leg up but of course, it won't last long. We're on the ever-moving EQII gear train, where no item ever lasts more than a few months and anything you get at this time of year, at least as a solo player, is going to be replaced twice before Christmas. If that's not your bag then you're playing the wrong game.

Before I explore the second instance, the dramatically-named Imprinted Memory: Origin of the Fellfeather, I'll have to take all the Augments out of the pieces I'm replacing and put them in my new armor instead. I'm also going to have make up my mind whether to use the hatchet and dagger that dropped, switching from my two-hander to dual wield, or whether to go sword-and-board with the hachet and my new shield. Decisions, decisions.

And I'll have to remember to keep playing EQII. Every time I do, I have a good time so I'm  not sure why I keep forgetting to go back. At least when Panda Panda Panda starts up again I'll get a reminder once a week.

Oh, and while I remember, there's also a freebie floating around. As I logged in I got a pop-up offering me an EverQuest II 2023 Welcome Windstrider Crate. It was packed!

Inside I found a full set of Runed Windstrider appearance armor complete with staff, a Stormfury Trawler illusion that makes you look like a cyclops and a Trusted Guardian vanity pet that turns out to be another dog. That's my second EQII dog of the summer.

I wondered what had prompted such generosity so I looked it up. Apparently there was an event for Labor Day that I'd missed completely. Until September 25, every account, F2P included, is entitled to the crate I got (One per character) so don't miss out. 

Members are also supposed to get a one-per-account crate with a bunch more stuff including a Jumpa-Lope Windstrider mount that "flies with its ears". I'm a member and I didn't get one. I'm going to have to look into that.

Chimeraland: Still There, Still Weird

I saw a "Whatever Happened To...? post about Chimeraland on MassivelyOP yesterday and it made me wonder... whatever did happen to Chimeraland? 

I played it quite happily, even a little obsessively, for a while a couple of years ago, when it was only avialable on servers in South East Asia. I stopped for a bit and then after a while the game launched "globally" through Steam.

I ummed an aahed over whether to start afresh before deciding that yes, I would, because Steam is so convenient. I played my new character for a while but doing everything over again wasn't quite as compelling as doing it for the first time and I soon drifted away.

I dropped back in once or twice but mostly I forgot about the game. If I thought about it all, it was with a vague idea I might go back to the SEA server, where my character was a lot higher in level and I had a pretty nice house. Really, though, I had no particular plans to play again.

When I read the MOP piece, which all but says the game is in maintenance mode, I got a whiff of nostalgia that made me think I probably ought to stop by the old place one more time before it was too late. I didn't want to get the urge some day and find out I'd missed my chance. Been there, done that, got the emotional scar tissue to prove it.

This morning I jumped through the usual hoops (Resetting my password, patching the game, finding it still didn't work, uninstalling and re-installing, resetting my password a second time...) before I could log into the SEA servers. When I got there I was greeted with a very long message about a new version of the game, complete with extensive patch notes.

I wasn't entirely sure at first whether it was new information or legacy "news" from last year, when I knew there had been a major update that added a whole new continent. If the game was really in maintenance mode it wouldn't be surprising if no-one had bothered to change the login messages for twelve months.

As I scanned the details it became clear that no, this wasn't outdated information. There is a huge update coming and it arrives tomorrow! Here for your delight and approval are the full patch notes because I'm blowed if I can find them anywhere other than the in-game launcher.  The official website hasn't had an update since January and the Steam page hasn't been updated for nearly a year!

And that's where the notes end... right in the middle of a sentence. I'm guessing they were too massive for the buffer to handle. 

We'll get the rest of them tomorrow, when the update lands, no doubt. There's a downtime of just a couple of hous, after which you'll need to install the update to log in because "the old version will be discontinued".

The instructions only mention the iOS and Android versions but since the game is fully cross-play enabled and I just cut and pasted the notes from the Steam installation (That was fun, let me tell you...) I'm as confident as I can be that it will apply to the PC version as well.

I think it's safe to say that developer PixelSoft have not abandoned Chimeraland and that the game is not about to enter maintenance mode. As for whether anyone is still playing... as always with cross-platform games it's extremely hard to tell. 

There certainly aren't many people playing on Steam. Population has been in steady decline ever since the game arrived on the platform, with August seeing an average monthly population of around ninety. That sounds very small but the all-time high was only 2252. 

With a 30-day peak of 143, the game has lost about 93% of its audience, which honestly makes it much the same as New World, except that no-one's playing New World anywhere other than Steam, whereas you can play Chimerland on any number of devices.

With a big update coming, it would be a good time to return to Chimeraland. I might have done it myself if my characters had still been there. Unfortunately they're not.

I'm so used to MMORPGs never deleting characters that I never even thought to check what Chimeraland's policy on dormant accounts might be. You get three months' grace. If you don't log in after that, your characters are wiped. I hadn't logged into either Steam or my LevelInfinite account on the SEA cluster for a lot longer than three months so my characters on both platforms are long gone.

Surprisingly, I really don't mind. I had no plans to start playing again and I wasn't particularly attached to either of the characters I had. If I want to relive my adventures with them I can just read the many blog posts I wrote at the time. That will bring back fond memories far better than logging in to a game I no longer remember how to play.

What I might do is make a new character just to have a look at the two continents I've never seen. I'm more motivated by the thought of starting afresh than I would be to run an existing character around. 

Probably, though, I won't bother. Time moves on and I feel Chimeraland has had its turn. I have plenty of new games to tinker with. I'd rather go forwards than back.

Still, it's very good to see that the game hasn't been abandoned after all. It's a strange game. I've not played anything quite like it. It would be a shame to see it disappear. 

And even if I'm not playing any more I hope someone's enjoying it. I mean, where else can you play an adolescent jellyfish with legs, grafted onto the back end of a giraffe?

End Of Season - Discontinued

I'm going to do the usual here and cram three shows into one post when really I ought to give each of  them a post of their own. At least I'm not going to attempt to blend them all together in one half-baked critical pie, so there's that...

Disenchantment Season Five

Last night I watched the fiftieth and final episode of Matt Groening's Disenchantment, which for some reason I always want to call "Disenchanted". The fifth season was mostly satisfying with a soupcon of disappointing to taste. Episode L as a closer, though, (They count off in Roman numerals for some reason.) really did the job.

The best thing about the series coming to an end after five ten-episode seasons is that at least the writers knew this was going be the last. I don't believe the whole thing was plotted as a five season arc because if it had been it surely would have made a lot more sense but these days you have to learn to be happy with the endings you get and this was about as tidy a wrap as I've seen for a while. Where Titans and The Owl House both left a number of options intentionally open for possible future storylines, Disenchantment seemed determined to not just to close every door but firmly lock them all and throw away the keys.

The finale was written by Groening himself, his only episode in the entire series and the only one in the entire run credited to him alone. In fact, his only other writing credit on the whole series was the Season One opener, which he co-wrote with Josh Weinstein. Weinstein also wrote the penultimate and pre-penultimate episodes, giving the climax something of the feel of parents coming back to tidy up the old family home before moving out for good.

The show debuted on Netflix in 2018 but I didn't start watching until I subbed to the streaming service a couple of years later. In 2021 I mentioned it here for the first time with great enthusiasm: "The writing is subtle, the characters convincing, the stories compelling and the animation supple...I like it so much, for my birthday I asked for three different t-shirts featuring various characters". I'm wearing one of them as I type this.

By 2022, though, I'd cooled off a little: "We're on Season Four now and I'm not quite convinced it's as strong as the previous three". At the time I wrote that I'd only seen the first three episodes and I was prepared to reserve judgment but by the time I'd seen them all I found I didn't need to revise my opinion all that much. I still enjoyed the show a lot but it definitely didn't seem to have either the focus or the bite it once had.

Season Five does little to reverse that trend. I still loved it but I loved it as a fan. As a critic, I'd say it felt a little baggy in places. There were a lot of fight scenes. Visually it remains a treat, filled with fleeting gags that demand heavy use of pause and rewind. The voice acting was on point as always although I felt the dialog wasn't always quite as sharp as I remember from the early years.

The characters remain as loveable as ever, many of them even more so, with the show's unusual but extremely welcome habit of remaining ever-open to genuine emotional growth and personal redemption. The show has a vast cast of recurring characters, some of whom, like Mop Girl, graduate from background artiste to starring role. Others shift from villain to hero or at least become the kind of people who try to do the right thing once in a while.

The central characters, Bean herself, Luci, Elfo and King Zog especially, show so much personal growth across the five seasons they're scarcely recognizeable as the venal, vicious, stupid, selfish people we were introduced to back in Season One. Without spoiling any of the details, I will at least reveal that all of them, along with quite a few more, get very happy endings indeed; endings which, I have to say, seem entirely merited.

The overwhelming sense I got from the final episode was one of closure, which is what you want from something like this, I guess. I almost never let the credits play all the way through but for once I waited until the very end. I had the feeling there would be a final word of some kind and there was: the drawbridge to the castle winches up and the entire castle vanishes, just as if it had never existed at all. 

You can't really make it plainer than that. I guess we won't be getting any more Disenchantment. In a way I'm disappointed because I've spent a lot of time with these characters and I'd happily spend a lot more. In another way, though, the show began to amble a while ago. If you're the sort of viewer who needs these things to be going somewhere in a fairly obvious and definable way, you'd probably say it went on a little too long.

On balance, I'm happy to let it rest where it landed. Whenever I think of Disenchanted now, the images that come to mind will mostly be of people I liked being happy. Maybe not for ever after but at least for a while. It's a pretty good way to end a show.

Carole & Tuesday Season One

A couple of nights before I came to the end of my run with Disenchantment, I wrapped up the first Season of what's quite possibly my favorite show of the year so far, Carole & Tuesday. 

Not that it came out in 2023. It originally debuted in Japan in 2019 and appeared on Netflix almost immediately afterwards. For some reason, Netflix didn't choose to flag it up as something I might want to watch until a few weeks ago. That was the first I heard of it.

The extremely brief description looked interesting: "Part-timer Carole meets rich girl Tuesday, and each realizes they've found the musical partner they need. Together they just might make it." I like shows about bands trying to make it. There aren't nearly enough of them for my liking. I'm always up for another. I added it to my watch list and as chance had it a space opened up almost right away.

When I started watching I got a bit of a surprise. The thing that thumbnail neglects to mention is that the whole thing takes place in the future. And not just any future - the future on Mars! Oh, and it's directed by Shinichirō Watanabe, the director of Cowboy Bebop (The anime version, not the live-action remake.) which makes it more of a big deal than I realised.

These are the sort of things you think someone might think to mention when attempting to lure viewers in but I'm glad Netflix marketing department were slacking for once. The science-fiction setting, which is marvelously eliptical and utterly lacking in any form of exposition, as all the best SciFi ought to be, set all my expectations spinning as I settled down to watch what I thought was going to be a relatively mainstream, contemporary show. 

As for the presence of the director of one of my favorite animated series, I didn't even discover he was involved until I started researching the show for this post. It made me feel all kinds of pleased with myself when I found out. I'd been debating in my mind whether to mention all the ways the show reminded me of Cowboy Bebop, something I was a little concerned might reveal more about my very limited exposure to anime than demonstrate any perceptive critical analysis on my part. Apparently all those years studying practical criticism in college weren't wasted after all.

I have a lot of things to say about Carole & Tuesday but I think I'm going to save most of them for another post, after I've seen the next Season. There are only two. I haven't started the second because I enjoyed the first so much I want to come to Part Two as a true sequel, not barrel right into it as if I was watching a soap opera.

I would like to mention the structure of Season One, which I thought was exemplary. Despite the fantastical setting and the melodramatic narrative, there's an inarguable authenticity to the whole thing. The show steers remarkably clear of those "Well, that would never happen" moments. Instead, the destinies of the two young singer-songwriters from opposite sides of the wealth divide intertwine in a wholly believable, even logical fashion.

Everything that happens could happen. Most of it probably wouldn't but that's why we're hearing these girls' stories and not someone else's. Mere credibility wouldn't run an engine as powerful as the one that drives this show, though; for that kind of traction you need a more formal structure, the kind with its own internal consistency, along wit the sort of architectonics that make everything hang just so.

What's a better platform for a tale of musical rags to riches than a talent competition? And what's more hackneyed and cliched? To turn that coat inside out and make it look like new without even showing the seams is some trick yet they pull it off with seeming ease.

The keys to the trope's success as it plays out in Carole  & Tuesday are first the way it creeps up, unflagged and unexpected and then the way it entirely takes over. It's almost like a show within a show... until suddenly it's not.

Shows about talent competitions are generally just that; shows about talent competitions. They can be fine but we know what we're going to get, going in. Carole & Tuesday upends all of that. The show uses the formality of the competition as a scaffold, not a framework; it's not there to prop the narrative up; it's there to let us get closer to the story.

It's also about the third or fourth way the duo search for some kind of way in to a music industry even more closed to outsiders than our own. In their world, AIs write the songs; humans merely perform them. Social media creates buzz but buzz doesn't necessarily translate to interest from anyone that matters. Except sometimes the people that matter aren't always those you think.

The overwhelming impression I got, watching Carole & Tuesday, was that it was just that; overwhelming. That's mostly why I found myself thinking of Cowboy Bebop early on. There's so much subtext you can scarcely see the story for it sometimes. Nothing ever seems unfreighted with meaning, from a street scene to a sunset to a freeze-frame. It's a rich mix.

I watched the show with the English-language dub. I'm a subtitles guy when it comes to live action but for animation I'm happy to use my ears. The voice acting is mesmeric and odd. Carole is normality itself; Tuesday sounds like one of the companion characters in a video game. There's a wide mix of accents and timbres, all of which work towards making Mars seem not like Earth, which is as well because it looks like Earth, most of the time.

The script itself I find absolutely fascinating. It has that hyper-real quality so familiar from the best translated games. Everything is impeccably correct, grammatically, and yet much of it sounds heightened, somehow. There's an indefinable formality about the way people speak that I find quite delicious. 

It's a very specific register that no-one I ever heard naturally uses and I love it. I particularly love the codas that append themselves seemingly uninvited to the end of simple, declarative sentences, as if saying just exactly what you mean isn't quite always enough, somehow, but always needs qualification, preferably with a conjuctive adverb.

In a show for which music plays such a central part, none of this might be enough if the songs didn't come across so it's a blessing that they do. It's also a mystery that they work so very, very well in context, when most of them sound somewhat less impressive, heard alone. I had the soundtrack playing while I wrote some of this post and although it's all good stuff and nice to listent to in the background, there's littlesense of the kind of emotional impact it packs in the show itself.

And that, of course, is exactly as it should be. Carole & Tuesday isn't a concert movie. It's not the animated video of some actual band's greatest hits. It's a story in which music plays an important part but it's important the music doesn't take over entirely. Like Carole and Tuesday themselves, the songs and the images need to work in harmony to become more together than they could be apart and that's just what they do.

I've said more than I was going to say. I'll leave it at that for now. Obviously, I recommend this one highly but I imagine most people reading this, those who'd be interested, anyway, will already have seen it, long before I did. You won't need me to point the way.

Cannon Busters Season One (And Only.)

And finally in this trilogy, a show I finished watching months ago but never got around to reviewing. Cannon Busters is yet another anime that premiered on Netflix back in 2019 but which I didn't discover until this year. Although it was produced in Japan it's an adaptation not of a manga but of an American comic-book from the early aughts. 

The comic, however, was written and drawn by LeSean Thomas, an animator who for at least the last fecade and a half has mainly worked in Korea and Japan. I gave up worrying about authenticity years ago so I'm just going to go ahead and consider it in the same bracket as all the other shows it reminds me of, which would be Cowboy Bebop (Again.) Edgerunners and Edens Zero.

I liked Cannon Busters a lot but I wouldn't claim it was a great show let alone one that makes a whole lot of sense. It's more of a picaresque romp in which a crew of very disparate characters careen off each other like lightning bugs in a mason jar. 

The animation, as I'm coming to understand seems to be the norm with these things, is both kinetic and engaging. A big part of the pleasure in animation, whatever the style, comes from just watching, something I always knew but had forgotten. When your eyes are having fun your brain doesn't always need to be getting in the way.

Much the same can be said for the ears. Cannon Busters opens and closes with a couple of really great themes. The music througout is top class. 

As for the acting, once again, the English dub is entrancing. SAM, played by Kamali Minter, is incessantly upbeat in the way only a robot could be. Stephanie Sheh, playing Casey, inevitably my favorite character, makes SAM sound downbeat. Philly the Kid (Kenny Blank) is almost permanently outraged or manic, frequently both at once, something which ought to make listening to him exhausting. It does, only in a good way. 

I found all of them and the rest of the cast a joy to spend time with. The plot, such as it is, rambles like a drunken Eagle Scout through a series of settings that throws the Old West and the Old East into some kind of retro-futuristic steampunk blender to make a fizzing cocktail of tropes that ought never to fit together except when, like this, they do.

The whole farrago is shot through which such an exuberant sense of innocent self-indulgence you just can't help but love it. Well, I did, anyway. 

Unlike the first two shows in this post, however, Cannon Busters does not come all tied up with a neat bow around the final episode. It stops resolutely in mid-climax in the clear expectation of a second season which, so far, has not appeared. Since it's been four years now, it seems unlikely it ever will.

If you can stomach a show that ends in the middle and you don't hate enjoying yourself more than you know you should, I'd recommend Cannon Busters wholeheartedly. If a lack of resolution makes you itch or you believe plots always ought to make sense, well this is probably not going to be your kind of thing...

Is There Anybody There?

I thought I might just pop up a few screenshots of this little oddity in case I don't get around to doing a full First Impressions post for a while. In case anyone missed it on MassivelyOP, which was the only place I saw it reported, Burgee Media, developer of Erenshor, the "single player MMORPG"  has very bravely made a free pre-alpha demo available through Steam.

I downloaded it yesterday and played for about half an hour. It was a very weird experience.

Not because of the gameplay, which will be extremely familiar to anyone who's ever made a character in EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot or any MMOPRG from around the turn of the millenium. Nor for the very basic graphics, which ressemble those of many a pre-alpha.

No, the disconcerting thing about Erenshor is that even though you know you're the only one there, chat is filled with people trying to sell stuff, asking questions, having arguments and giving their ill-informed opinions on the game. Just like in every MMORPG ever.

It's freakishly convincing. In the half hour I played I didn't notice much, if any repetition, other than the sales pitches, which of course you'd expect to hear over and over again. 

It reminded me of the Heroes Festival instance in EverQuest II that lets you recreate the classic EverQuest rite of passage that was camping the Ancient Cyclops. That had simulated player chat but only as a set routine. In Erenshore it seems to go on and on. 

As if the disembodied voices weren't strange enough, the whole thing reaches another level when you spot the characters who are yelling in /shout, running around town. I hailed one of them and she answered me, which was surreal.

Even harder to process was the time I got killed trying to solo a young wolf. I resurrected and ran back, only to find two of the "players" about to pull the same mob. I joined in and the three of us finished it off, after which I was able to loot it. Well, I would have been if it had had any loot.

The idea for the game is that eventually you'll be able to party up, join guilds and even raid, all with your not-so-imaginary friends. You can apparently already form groups and trade even in the demo although I haven't tried it yet.

As proof of concept for a "single player MMORPG" it works but the thing that interests me most is that if you were looking for a test case for the valid use of generative AI in gaming, this would absolutely fit the bill. Imagine the endless chatter in general, guild, group...

I might elaborate on that thought another time but for now I'll just leave it there to settle a while. As far as I can tell, the demo is going to stay up until there's a newer, improved version of the game available, so if you want to try it out it'll be waiting. Whether Erenshor it turns out to be no more than a novelty or a harbinger of things to come, I guess we won't know for a year or two.

I kind of hope it's the second but then I also kind of believe my toys come alive at night so probably best not to listen to me...