Time To Read

Before Beryl the Dog moved in there were more than a few ways I thought adding a puppy to the household might affect day to day life. It never occured to me one of them would be that I'd start reading more.

The pandemic had an odd effect on my reading habits. You'd think that two years of enforced leisure, often with restrictions amounting to something like house arrest, would lead to an uptick in pages turned but things didn't always go that way. I did read and re-read quite a lot, in fits and starts, but mostly I spent my bonus time on much-needed redecoration and renovation around the house, on gardening and on playing and writing about video games.

It's not that I read any less at home than I normally would have done. I probably did read more. What I didn't do was read on my commute to work, even when I had work to go to. 

Before the pandemic I was working four short days a week, which meant eight short bus journeys totalling something like two hours. Breaks, in which I mostly read as well as eat, added another hour so when I stopped doing all of those it took three hours a week out of my reading program.

When things finally got back to what we're now calling normal I'd changed the four short days to two full-time and stopped taking the bus altogether. My new schedule now dovetails nicely with Mrs Bhagpuss's, so she drives me into work and back, something we started doing to avoid using public transport during the pandemic and now just both prefer.

That puts me back exactly where I was, with two hour and two half-hour breaks making up the same three hours I had before. Add in the time I read during breakfast and in the bath and once in a while in the evening and I probably spend something like seven or eight hours with a book in my hand on the average week.

In the two weeks since we got Beryl that reading time has almost doubled. Beryl has three main modes: asleep, awake and awake and crazy. In the mornings, as soon as I come down to breakfast, she's decided that the best place to sleep is on my lap. That's meant me sitting in the kitchen for two or three times longer than I would have before. 

It's another week before she gets her second round of vaccinations so we can't yet take her out for walks. When she's awake and active and the weather's good I often sit in the garden with Beryl on a long lead. She wanders about, pulling up grass, digging holes and generally indulging in all the behaviors that would drive a real gardener to canicide. I am not a real gardener. I read my book. 

When she's awake and crazy, no-one gets anything done.

I have no idea how long this is likely to last but while it does I'm very much enjoying the extra reading time. The only problem is going to be finding enough to read.

Enough, that is, that I want to read. Obviously there's no shortage of material. A lunatic number of books are written every year and these days an even more lunatic number of them are published in some form or other, a situation currently being highlighted by IndieApril as reported by Tessa at Narratess.

I did take a look at some of those but they're mostly eBooks and I don't get on all that well with the
format. Not because it isn't an excellent way to read - I find reading on my Kindle Fire every bit as natural and immersive as reading ink on paper. The problem is the barrier to entry that comes with having to switch the reader on, sign in and wait for it to finish doing all the little updates it always seems to have queued, even though I use it every single day.

That barrier is tiny but it's bigger than you'd get with an actual book. The difference between deciding to read and reading in each case is probably no more than half a minute but thirty seconds is a lifetime in whims and fancies. I have literally given up waiting for the Kindle and picked up a book instead more times than I care to admit.

The other factor mitigating against eBooks, in my case, relates to my employment. I work in a bookshop. I get a 50% discount on almost everything we sell, including all books. What's more, I recently qualified for a twenty-year long service reward and I chose a £300 gift card. With the discount, that's a lot of paperbacks.

And of course I get books for free. Not so many as I used to, it's true, what with publishers moving to Netgalley as their preferred means of promotion within the trade, but plenty of hard copy proofs still pile up, along with stacks of books my co-workers have done with and bring in to leave lying around for anyone interested to take.

One way or another, I'm never short of new books. The problem, if you want to call it that, is that I'm very fussy about what I read. Not fussy as in I only read certain things, although we all do that to a degree, more fussy as in, like most things in my life, any choice I make is likely to be based on emotion rather than logic.

I have to be in the right mood to read a book. It doesn't matter that I have forty or fifty stacked up waiting, I'll still stand there for ten minutes looking through the bookshelves to see if I can find something more suited to my mood. 

And then there are the books I just can't wait to read. Often that means the next in a series, because let's be honest, continuous narratives that stretch across multiple volumes are really one gigantic single book, annoyingly interrupted by the time it takes to the author to write the damn things.

Sometimes, though, it's a new book by a writer I absolutely love. There aren't that many of them and quite a few of those died a while ago. They aren't going to be putting out anything new ever again, more's the pity.

Right at the very top of my must-read list right now is Emily St. John Mandel, about whom I've posted before. She has a new novel coming out at the end of this month, on the 28th. It's called Sea of Tranquility and I just finished it yesterday. 

I got a proof copy. I emailed and asked for one, something I almost never do. Her publisher, Picador in the U.K., sent it to me along with a copy of her best-known book, Station 11, which I already had.

I read Station 11 in proof back in 2014, when no-one had ever heard of it or its author. It won the Arthur C Clarke award the following year and was made into a critically-acclaimed HBOMax series a few months ago. 

Station 11 impressed me so much back then I immediately bought all three of her earlier novels, none of which had made a dent in the public consciousness but all of which turned out to be excellent. Last year I caught up with her fifth, The Glass Hotel. It came out in 2020 and I was dithering over whether to buy in hardback or in paperback on import. As usual, when I delay, I ended up not buying it at all. I finally picked up a copy last month. Just as well I did, too, for reasons that will become plain.

Station 11 was marketed mainly as a science fiction novel although it's really more in the specific SF sub-genre of post-disaster novels like The Death of Grass or Day of the Triffids. The book it most reminds me of is Earth Abides. 

It's a very significantly better-written novel than any of those. She's a wonderful prose writer, incredibly clear and precise without ever feeling brittle. I'd label Station 11 literary fiction rather than any kind of genre, if I was into labels, which I both am and am not.

The Glass Hotel is more difficult to classify. It has some science-fictional or fantastical elements but nothing that wouldn't have been called "magic realism" a while ago. I found it compelling, disturbing and strange in all the best ways. I kept thinking about long after I'd finished reading.

Sea of Tranquility is without question a Science Fiction novel. It features both time and space travel, domed cities, space colonies, robots, all the trappings. It even has a proper SF plot. 

It's also the most metatextual novel I have ever read. I was thinking about reviewing it here but it would be such a huge undertaking I decided against even trying. I realised we were in for something extraordinary when the novel's opening line  began with the name of a character unmistakeably both like and not like that of the author.

From there it's a wild ride that takes in Station 11, itself a novel about a global pandemic, the actual
global pandemic we've all just experienced and the way writing a novel about a global pandemic immediately prior to an actual global pandemic affects the way an author's work is received and perceived. 

There's a character in the novel whose written a book that did just that but it's not the author of the book I read and author of the book in the book I did read didn't write Station 11. I'm pretty sure even the name of the fictional book about a pandemic is a metatextual reference outside the text but within the cultural milieu that supports it.

Several of the main characters from The Glass Hotel appear in Sea of Tranquility. Most of the same things seem to have happened to them as happened in that book but there's one very significant difference. If some of what we learn in Sea of Tranquility is true, some of what we thought we learned in The Glass Hotel is probably not.

I wondered as I read how much someone who hadn't read The Glass Hotel would be missing when they read Sea of Tranquility and I decided it would be a lot. Then I wondered how much they'd be missing if they hadn't read Station 11 and I decided that would be a lot, too. Even having read the three early novels, about which no-one speaks, made me feel I was squeezing a little more out of the story. They are not mentioned but they are not not mentioned either.

And yet you could absolutely read Sea of Tranqulity, never having read any of these other works, not even knowing they exist, and you'd still be reading a superb novel that would feel perfectly complete in itself. It's a work of genius to have knitted all of these threads together and left no seams showing at all.

I'd love to quote a couple of passages to give some idea of excatly how good the writing is but one thing you must never do with proofs is quote from them. It's strictly forbidden and for good reason. The less important but still important reason is that there may be changes to the text before the book goes to print and no author wants their dry run to be presented as the finished item.

The more important reason is that proofs haven't necessarily passed through the fine toothed comb of the legal department. If you were to quote something from the proof that later had to be revised before publication so as to avoid some potential legal challenge, you, as the promulgator of the libel or defamation or whatever it might be, would be liable. Not likely but not worth the risk.

I'll settle for giving Sea of Tranquility my strongest recommendation although I also suggest, almost as strongly, that if you follow it up you read Glass Hotel first and maybe Station 11, too. You should read them both anyway. They're amazing.

And I think I will have to take up my seven-day free trial to Starz, the streaming platform currently showing the Station 11 series in the U.K. It's eight and a half hours long. I should be able to fit that into a week. 

Maybe I'll watch it in the garden with Beryl on my lap. That'd be a better use of my Kindle Fire than reading eBooks.

Yeah, Thomas Wolfe! What Do You Know, Anyway?

Guild Wars 2's Living World, Season One is back, kinda-sorta, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. There's no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the first season was far and away the best but there are so many contributing factors to that assessment it's very hard to be sure whether I'm basing it on the objective quality of the material or the subjective manner in which I experienced it.

For a start, Season One unfurled in something approximating real time. It was the era of GW2 when ArenaNet believed they could roll out new content, consistently, on a two week turnaround. 

It seems like hubris now but at the time it was meant to be the future of the genre. GW2 would blaze a trail of continuous development that would provide the players with all the entertainment they'd need. No biannual Expansions or quarterly Updates, just a never-ending, steady flow of quality stories, events and activities that lasted for a couple of weeks before disappearing forever, to be replaced immediately by the next episode.

There's a long and analytical post to be written about just how well those expectations were served over the course of the first season. This is not that post, for the very good reason that it would take hours of research, checking dates, reading patch notes, going over all the posts I wrote about each episode at the time. Hours and hours of preparation, followed by more hours working it up into readable form.

I'm not even sure this portal was from the new Season One. I just know it was bugged.

I don't have hours. I have about fifty minutes before I have to stop for the night. Consequently, I'm not going to discuss how very slowly Season One began, how impatient we were, how cynical and dismissive, or how over time many of us became invested and immersed in the admittedly confusing storyline.  

I'm going to leave any conversations over whether Scarlet Briar was the best villain GW2's ever seen or an excruciatingly embarassing Mary Sue for another day. The various highs and lows of the year-long epic (Or was it longer than that?) will have to wait.

Even if I did have time enough to dwell on all the subtle implications, to unpick the threads of intent and execution, to pass judgment on the success or failure of the original project before comparing and contrasting it with the current reiteration, topped, tailed and tidied as it is, this is only Episode One. It's too early for all that.

Take this as a First Impressions piece about the echoes of something that happened a decade ago, if you will. Because that's all we're getting: echoes.

It was good to see the naive, uncynical Rox again.

As anyone who's listened to their voice bouncing off distant mountains or reverberating from a deep well can attest, however, echoes can be very affecting. Also evocative, eerie and impressive. I found playing through the first few sections of the new Season One all of those, on occasion.

There's a huge nostalgia card being played here and it's all the more effective for the lack of hype it's received. It's not been a hard sell, big deal like WoW Classic, more "here's a cool thing you might enjoy". I fell into playing it this afternoon more out of a sense of duty than excitement but I was surprised how many buttons it pressed.

For a start, I wasn't expecting to see any of the original open-world content again. I always preferred the parts of the Living World that actually took place in the living world of Tyria, the bit where everything else happened.

It was always going to be relatively simple for ANet to revive the instanced content. I imagine the problem has always been how to string the relatively small number of instances together without the much more numerous open map events.

On the evidence of what I saw today, it seems to have been easier than you'd imagine. When you think about it, the things that happened in open maps tended to fall into two simple categories: extremely questlike content that doesn't impinge in any significant way on the events already running or massive zerg battles that dominate and disrupt everything else.

Those big zergs come later. In the early stages it's all fixing signposts and finding refugees' belongings in the snow. I did both of those things today and the memories came flooding back. I found myself thinking I'd like to get a few of my other characters out and run through the simple, satisfying steps just for the fun of it. Maybe even my free account, since Anet have very generously made the content available to absolutely everyone.

The two instances, Nolan Hatchery and Cragstead, those I was somewhat less enamored by. It's not that they're bad. They aren't. At the time, though, they felt considerably more challenging and they were released some distance apart. That's probably why I didn't notice at the time how incredibly similar they are.

They're not far off being the same instance, reskinned, to be honest. It's almost painfully obvious when you play through both one after the other. In each of them you follow an NPC (Rox, Braham) along a linear path, fighting wave after wave of regular and veteran mobs so as to retake territory and protect citizens (Or warpets in training in the case of the Hatchery). 

I like the colors of these achievements.

In both you have to hold a ring against mobs that spawn from portals and in both the whole thing ends with a Champion coming through a final portal placed at the extreme end of the map. It's not so much that it's a formula, more that it's formulaic.

I'm not complaining, even if it sounds as though I am. I know what came later. I'd take a hundred simple, formulaic instances like these over any of the supposed innovations that made the later Living World seasons such a royal pain.

In that sense the whole thing did feel very nostalgic indeed. Nostalgic for a simpler, less pretentious GW2. One where a bunch of veterans piling out of a portal felt like challenging content. And it did, too, back then. I can prove it.

Here's what I said about Nolan Hatchery, first time through, back in March 2013:

"The nursery instance was exactly the right degree of hard. I completed it without dying but I was downed a few times and it looked touch and go for a while."

This time around, playing my junior Elementalist, I was never in any serious danger. She wasn't downed even once, nor came close. I did have to swap in and out of Water to lay down healing fields and I used the Earth Elemental several times to tank but the whole thing felt calm and measured, never frenetic or threatening. 

When I was on the final Champion at the end of Cragstead, Mrs Bhagpuss came in with the puppy to ask me if I wanted scrambled egg on toast. I was perfectly comfortable having a conversation with her about it, looking back over my shoulder, while I carried on fighting. That is not Challenge Mode.

I even had time to take a screenshot of the final boss. Not that you can see him.

Which suits me. I can only hope the same applies when I get to the next stage of the episode, the Molten Weapons Facility. I have a clear memory of taking a very long time to beat it first time around, including a lot of deaths and an absolutely epic PUG, which I recorded in detail here on the blog at the time.

Re-reading that post confirms my memory of the exhausting, attritional afternoon I spent trying to finish the fight. What I had completely forgotten was that I'd not only already beaten it, but done so on the first attempt in another PUG on the very night it launched, when "no-one knew what to expect and we had no strats to follow". What's more, "Mrs Bhagpuss did the run on both of her accounts in PUGs during the first couple of days and had no more trouble than I did."

As I so often say, this is why I have a blog. So I can correct myself every time I remember things wrong. I have thought of that instance for years as nightmarishly difficult whereas in fact it seems I just had one nightmarishly difficult experience there. 

I'm very curious to see how it turns out this time. If it's unchanged from nine years ago it's going to be an absolute cakewalk. If it's been brought up to current group instance standards it will be a lot tougher than I'm used to any more. Been a long time since I did a serious PUG.

Something to look forward to!

Dragons! Why Did It Have To Be Dragons?

It's more than a little unfortunate for ArenaNet that another mmo gaming company chose to release a cinematic on the same day they chose to plug the first episode of the revamped, replayable Living World Season One. Especially when you consider that gaming company happens to be Blizzard and the cinematic in question is the official announcement of the details of the next World of Warcraft expansion.

I mean, come on! Even I was watching the Blizzard stream, which started very conveniently for me at five in the evening, and I don't even play the blasted game.

The question is, having watched it, would I want to start? For the moment, let's just focus on the content of the expansion itself, putting all the other baggage to one side. No moral choices here, just aesthetic and entertainment ones.

On first impressions, based on what I saw and heard in the Livestream and read in the press release and media coverage afterwards, yes I probably would. I'm not saying I'd make a long-term home in WoW just off the back of what I just watched but I can easily see me buying the expansion and playing for a month or two.

It has a couple of things that appeal to me: a new race/class and a new starting area. The race itself isn't all that exciting. It's yet another dragon/human hybrid. I'm sure that's not the official description but a Drakkin by any other name is just as clichéd. At least it looks halfway decent. I never liked the look of the Drakkin and EverQuest II's Aerykin aren't much better.

Granted, it's a "Hero Class" so it starts at Level 58, but that's still better than going straight into the new at-cap content. With the new cap moving to 70, that's a dozen levels of new content if you roll a new Dracthyr character rather than just ten, although what that means, given the level squish that preceded the last expansion, is a lot harder to say. 

It seems unlikely there'd be a whole starter zone for a mere two levels but what do levels even mean in WoW now anyway? Maybe that's how it was for Death Knights back in Wrath. I played one but I can't remember. 

I could remind myself soon enough if I wanted to find out, though. Wrath of the Lich King Classic is coming. Not quite sure when but it's definitely on the way.. 

That doesn't even qualify as news, more like confirmation and I wouldn't begin to suggest any connection with the Norrathian drogon kin, even if  Holly Longdale is working for WoW these days but it felt very strange to see her fronting such a big announcement in her capacity as Lead Producer for the retro Classic faction.

What was even odder was the way her reminiscences about WoW sounded more heartfelt and convincing than anything the two WoW lifers sitting next to her could contribute. She has the ardency of a convert.

More of a surprise were her comments on the absence of the Group Finder from the servers at launch (Assuming I heard that right. It seemed a little muddled.). Of course, it wasn't added until late WotLK, so I'm guessing it will turn up eventually. Or maybe, if Wrath Classic really does signal the end of the line for the WoW Classic Experience, it won't.

Going back to the expansion, which I haven't mentioned is called Dragonflight, I was amused to see what looked suspiciously like both the Guild Wars 2 UI and GW2's Griffon mount make appearances as exciting new innovations. It wouldn't be WoW if it didn't add features other games perfected years ago. I'm pretty sure I've seen the crafting commission system in at least three mmorpgs I've played before, too.

The cinematic was quite nice. A little subdued, I thought. Almost thoughtful. As for the discussion that followed, it was a litany of saying the right things but with some surprisingly convincing self-deprecatory banter between the principals. 

And it's certainly better to have figureheads spouting things we want to hear than the opposite, even if they do sometimes seem to be doing it through gritted teeth. I'm not sure Kaylriene will have heard everything he was hoping for (I'm sure he'll let us know.) but at least it's a gesture in that direction.

The new zones look very pretty. More importantly, they don't look weird or spacey or unearthly or doomy or other-dimensiony or any of the other things I'm sure most WoW players have had about enough of by now. A return to Azeroth and landscapes that look suitably fantasy-real has to be a relief for everyone, not least the artists.

The last big ticket item in the expansion pack I won't comment on, other than to say I have no opinions on Talent trees in WoW and precious few thoughts on them in any game. A necessary inconvenience is about as emotional as I ever get about the mechanic. I'm sure it'll be a big deal to someone, just not to me.

I'll also pass on any comments on the lore or the story. None of it meant anything to me at all. I barely recognized any of the names. It's not as if I haven't played the game, either. I probably have a few thousand hours in WoW. That stuff just washes over me.

What was conspicuously missing from both the livestream and the press release was any detailed timescale. I think we did get a definite nod to "this year" but that was about all. We shouldn't have to wait too long to find out whether Dragonflight is going to be enough to rekindle the light in the eyes of the faithful. 

I suspect, at best, it'll be a holding excercise. WoW's glory days are most likely behind it now. It would be kind of appropriate if an expansion based around dragons turned out to be the beginning of a long tail for the game.

Be Vewy, Vewy Quiet...

This was going to be a post about hunting rabbits. It kind of still is. Only not really.

When Wilhelm posted yesterday about having drifted away from Lost Ark, even though he didn't think it was a bad game, just not really the right game for him at the moment, it made me think "Oh, yeah! Lost Ark! That's a game that exists!"

Then it reminded me of another game I was playing a while ago, namely New World, and I remembered I'd been enjoying it quite a lot, so I logged in and played that for a while.  I might get back to Lost Ark some time. I did say I was going to get that boat and I still expect to, too. Not right this minute, though.

When I logged into New World I was confronted with the screen above. I'd completely forgotten the rabbit event. The rewards are hardly must-haves - well, the storage chest would be if it wasn't ultra-rare - but I fancied having a bash at some bunnies anyway. Get a post out of it, maybe.

And I might have, too, if I could have found any. Granted I got distracted immediately by the fact that the Main Quest I had in my journal had vanished, which I thought (Hoped!) might mean it had been given a solo option like some other Expedition steps on the MQ. I went all the way to the questgiver to see if there was a choice now but he just tried to give me the same old one that had gone from my journal.

I declined it, so as of now I have no Main Quest at all. I'm only just shy of one level from the cap, so I don't imagine it matters.It's not like I need the xp and any rewards are going to be way below my level. I suppose I ought to get the upgraded Azoth staff but then it's not like I ever use the one I have...

I ran around doing a bunch more quests to level up and if the puppy hadn't decided to go completely nuts I might well have hit fifty-nine last night. As it is I still have about a level and a quarter to go before my leveling journey ends.

Towards the end of the evening I remembered the rabbits I was supposed to be hunting and went looking for some. I hadn't happened on any by chance and things didn't go any better when I was trying. Usually they're all over the place so either they're hiding or they're being killed as soon as they appear.

That's not impossible because the other thing I discovered when I logged in was that my server has finally been merged. We've been the host server for several previous merges and it never seemed to make any noticeable difference but now we've been amalgamated with another server as the junior partner and it's like launch week all over again.

Seriously, I haven't seen crowds like this for months. There were people everywhere, chat was buzzing and at one point I even ran across a bunch of people using the game's inbuilt, open voice chat, something I have never seen, or I should say heard, before.

I didn't even realise New World had open voice, let alone that it was on by default. I don't know who thought that was a good idea. Mine stayed on precisely as long as it took for me to find out where the off switch was.

I'm in two minds about the larger population. It certainly helps the economy but I was rather enjoying New World as a sparsely populated wilderness. It seemed somehow more in keeping with the milieu than the current party atmosphere. It was late evening on a holiday, though. I imagine it'll be quiet enough mid-morning on a weekday.

While I had Steam open I thought I'd check the comparative popularity of Amazon's two mmorpgs. New World isn't doing badly by normal standards. It's #35 as I write this, putting it in amongst popular titles like No Man's Sky, Terraria, 7 Days to Die and Valheim. Using the old rule of three, a game with a concurrency of 30-35k  probably has about a hundred thousand players, which is very decent for an average mmorpg.

Lost Ark, however, is #3 on Steam's charts, with a concurrency, as I write, of 458k. Of course, Lost Ark is free to play, so you can't really nail down a number for who "could" be playing. I'm not sure the old rule of three really applies. Even so, it's fair to assume if nearly half a million people are playing Lost Ark all at once, a lot of different people will be playing it earlier or later the same day.

I still like New World a lot more than Lost Ark, even if it's not the popular kid in the Amazon playground any more. It's just really good fun to run around in and the combat is massively more appealing to me, especially when I'm fighting things much lower level than I am and they're still giving me very good xp. Not like the miserly 2xp per kill Lost Ark doles out. That makes me begrudge every mob I have to kill beyond the bare minimum to get a quest done, whereas in New World I run around picking fights all over the place for the sheer hell of it.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble now and I've already padded this out way more than I ever thought I'd be able to get away with. Just wait until I actually find some rabbits to kill! The posting then will be epic!

Easter Greetings

We never do Easter cards on the blogs, do we? Well, now we do.

Everything in the picture I got from the EverQuest II Beast'r vendor, along with a whole lot more. All of it together cost me less than I'd get from the cash money dropped by any random mid-level mob. A few gold in a game with an economy based on platinum. Say what you like about Daybreak's real money pricing strategy but they have always been astonishingly generous with in-game costs.

Naturally, because I had absolutely no plan to do this at all, I ended up with everything on my Bruiser, who only has a basic two-room Qeynos inn room. Two-room inn room? There must be a better way of saying that. Suite? Two room Qeynos inn suite? Two room suite in a Qeynos inn? Qeynos inn two-room? Two rooms in a Qeynos inn?

Sod it, you know what I mean. Whatever you call it, it's not ideal for a big Easter display. Don't get me wrong - it's a delightful home, very cosy, and he's done quite a bit of work getting it just how he likes it, but for great baskets of chocolate eggs and rabbits (Chocolate rabbits, that is.) you need more of a picnic setting.

As it so happens, my Inquisitor lives in the Baubleshire luxury home. She is not a halfling, let me make that quite clear from the outset. She's a gnome. As anyone who played EQII back at the begining will remember, a dozen races could start in either of the two Alignment cities, but Freeport and Qeynos both only had six "Neighborhoods". Everyone had to share and gnomes got to share with halflings.

Fortunately, there are no such enforced billetting arangements when it comes to private homes. My version of Baubleshire may look like a halfling hangout but it's strictly gnomesville. Still, that's an Easter feast that would dampen the hairy palms of any wannabe hobbit. (Yes, I know the hair's meant to be on the back of their hands. Really, though, who wants to get that close to check?)

I can't pass out Easter Eggs through the screen but I can offer you something even better then chocolate - Peanuts!

Of course, Easter's about more than just chocolate, bunnies and beagles. Take it away, Tori.

 And that's it for another year. Happy Easter Everyone!

Back In Leather

It was all but inevitable that I'd return to Valheim some day. I've kept the client updated and dithered over checking out some of the updates but it was Wilhelm's recent series of posts that finally tipped me over the edge.

Partly it was the thought of starting over in a clean, new world. All the time I've played the game I've had but the one character and the one map. I haven't explored the whole thing, not even close, but most of the mysteries lie a long sea voyage away now. 

Even if I was willing to make the journey, my main character, if we can call her that, would only be able to test out the higher-level changes. Like Wilhelm, I was curious to see how the game plays these days, from the beginning.

Which is not to say I'm planning on playing through the whole game all over again. That's very unlikely to happen. To get to where my main character is now took three hundred and eighty hours. At a hardcore six hours a day that's about two solid months, which is pretty much what it was, now I come to think of it.

Oh, god! Here we go again...

I would guess that could be halved. Maybe thirded. Remove the inordinate amount of time I spent building bases almost literally everywhere I traveled, setting up complicated, tangled teleport networks, sailing around aimlessly, getting hopelessly lost... pretty much coming as close as I ever have to living in a virtual world the way we all used to say we wished we could...

Even so, at a bare minimum it had to be something like a hundred hours just to do the core leveling and gearing up. I don't think I even want to commit to something like that. Not that it would be as long as that. It's supposed to be easier now, right?

Only one way to find out. This evening I made a new character and seeded a new world. I named it Grandma and used LetsEat for the seed. My original world is called LanaDelRey and that's also the seed. At least I'm consistent.

Not quite how I imagined a Valkyrie to look.

I'd completely forgotten the introduction, in which a Valkyrie, looking altogether too much like a cosplayer in a hang glider, carries you down to the land you're going to settle. There's a storm raging, rain lashing down. lightning, the whole Viking trip. 

This is the point at which I say that thing bloggers often say, which is how useful it is to have a blog so you can go back and check stuff you did a while ago and see what you thought about it. If I wasn't able to do that, right now I'd be making a number of wholly inaccurate statements and drawing some even more inaccurate conclusions from them.

For example, I might have said that last year, my first day, I arrived in the middle of the night in the pouring rain, couldn't see five feet in front of me, spent the first session stumbling about in the darkness getting killed by skeletons. I might have contrasted that with today's arrival, when the sun shone brightly and everything felt calm and peaceful.

I might have gone on to make some observations about how, this time, berries and mushrooms grew thick on the ground right next to where the Valkyrie dropped me, meaning I was able to begin with food inside me, providing buffs to my stamina and hit points. Then I'd make a cogent point or two about how different that was from last year, when it was much later that I worked out how to find food and make myself fit to fight or flee.

I'm all but sure I would have had something to say about the way my knowledge of the game meant I didn't waste time scrubbing up the wood to make my own first hovel. This time around I knew to find and refurbish a shack left half-standing by whoever came before me.

All of those observations and assessments would have been entirely inaccurate. My memory failing to give me an accurate read and my imagination stepping up to the challenge, as usual.

Coming back to Valheim, the first hour felt much easier. I was all ready to go with the narrative that changes have been made to make sure the New Player Experience is softer, smoother, gentler than it was. And maybe they have. I'm surfe there weren't that many berry bushes right at the spawn-in. And  as Wilhelm says, isn't Eikthyr's altar handier than it was? It looks that way. Then again, I didn't mention it last time, so how can I be sure? 

Well, I could log my main character in and go look, I guess. Shall I do that? I guess I should...

Hmm. It's almost identical. The symbol on the map is in a different direction from the stone circle where you arrive but almost exactly the same distance from it. The only possible difference could be that I might have had to go find the runestone to mark it on the map last time, whereas this time it comes pre-marked, but honestly I have no idea if that's true.

What I do know is what actually happened last year according to the First Impressions post I wrote the same day:

It was daylight when I arrived, not night. There's a picture of me at the top of the post that I took immediately after I landed. It also wasn't raining. My character is wet, yes, but only from that thunderstorm the Valkyrie flew through. I think... 

I did stumble about in the darkness and get killed by a skeleton, although at the time I had no idea what had killed me. In the post I describe it as happening "in the opening few minutes", so it was presumably late afternoon when I made landfall. This time it was morning. 

It's probably random. I suppose I could make a few characters and test it but I don't really want to know that badly.

My recollection of food being scarce at the start turns out to be nonsense. I have a whole section in the First Impressions post, where I rant on about how I can't see the point of having survival mechanics at all if ignoring them doesn't stop you surviving: "You can't starve to death, either. You can get hungry but the game makes sure to remind you to eat something and since you can apparently survive quite happily on a diet of raspberries and mushrooms, both of which grow abundantly throughout the forest, there's no real risk of getting the hunger debuff." (My new emphasis.)

First dawn.

Again, maybe the food didn't have such powerful buffs or you couldn't eat more than one kind at a time. In last year's post I am focusing on the debuff negative not the buff positive. Perhaps that's what changed.

Finally, building my own home. Yeah, I didn't do that. Not until quite a bit later. "By the second night I had a shelter, a ruin I'd found and partially repaired." Just like I did today. I had in my mind the first house I built but I'd forgotten all about the various fix-ups I squatted before.

So, maybe Iron Crown have made starting in Valheim easier and maybe they haven't. I'm still not really sure. What I am sure about is that having played the game for three hundred and eighty hours certainly made it easier for me to get started this time around.

There were a few fiddly little things I couldn't remember at first, like how to get the Repair hammer working, but whereas last year I was complaining it had taken three nights of tedium before I'd managed to make myself a working bed, this time I had my head down on the first evening. I was running around with nearly double my starting hit points almost from the get-go.

Knowledge, however, can be a dangerous tool when used thoughtlessly.

Second dawn and I've already traded up.

Last year I died three times in four hours, all of them accidents. This time I died four times in an hour, all of them reckless foolishness. I managed to lose fights with three skeletons outside a tomb, with five boars, including a one-star, right next to the stone that tells you all about boars, and with a Greydwarf in the Black Forest. None of those were fights I should have been having. I started all of them.

And it was fun! There's no real penalty for dying at such low levels other than the time it takes to get back and grab your stuff, assuming you can. Even if you can't, it doesn't matter. You have nothing you can't easily replace. It's actually a great time to be reckless.

At least that's going to be my excuse for all the deaths I imagine I'm going to have as I try to map the outline of my starter island. I don't think I'm going to be back for long but I'm going to be sticking around long enough to do that much, at least. 

After that, we'll see.

Just One More Thing...

At the top of the post you can see a picture of my Berserker, not getting the new quest that came with this week's EverQuest II update, Coffers and Coffins You can tell he's in the right place. All those other people are standing on top of the questgiver. I have to assume they are getting it. 

The inconsiderate pile-up isn't the reason for my Berserker's failure to acquire the quest. Even if they all got the hell off the NPC it wouldn't help. As far as my characters are concerned, there is no NPC there.

The update, which I trailed a while ago, when we didn't know all that much about what was in it even though that was what the press release was supposedly to be telling us, looks very substantial. It has not one but two new raid instances and a new quest line culminating in a dungeon that can be handled solo or as either flavor of group. 

If, that is, you've completed the Signature Adventure Questline from Visions of Vetrovia. I have not done that. Yet.

I was hoping I might at least be able to talk to the questgiver and maybe get one of those "Come back when you know what the heck you're doing" messages. Then I would have been able to take a picture of her and use it as a framing device for this blog. Devs never think about bloggers and their needs when they come up with this stuff, do they?

Nevertheless, as you can see I've managed to come up with half a dozen paragraphs anyway. I am, after all, a professional. Or I would be if anyone paid me.

Adding "Finish Adv. Sig. Line" to my To-Do list and moving on, there's quite a lot more in the update. It really is meaty. The part I was most looking forward to was the start of Overseer Season Four. I can crack on with that right away, can't I?

Yes. Technically, I can. I have. I mean, I've started. I'd forgotten how Overseer Seasons work, though. It's a long, slow wind-up before the pitch, basically.

Here's how it went for me a couple of hours ago. I had my Berserker check the Overseer window. He's the one with the most agents although all my characters have pretty full rosters. There was a raft of Completed missions waiting to be cashed in from last time I was on so I clicked on all of those first.

Each completed Season Three mission gave me a large chunk of Overseer Level 30, which is where XP stopped last time around. It didn't take many hand-ins to fill the whole bar, at which point there was a nice Ding! and a pop-up to inform me I'd unlocked the Achievement "Season 4 Overseer".

So far, so easy. I carried on with the remaining completed Season Three missions. Immediately I noticed a change. Instead of great chunks of xp, I was now getting tiny slivers. Also, all the remaining Season Three missions had vanished.

On the plus side, the Achievement came with two Season Four missions. I scribed them both. They were, naturally, the shortest, lowest-quality possible: blue missions lasting one hour with a one hour cooldown.

This is completely normal. It's how Overseer has always worked. It's just that, what with there being a year between Seasons, I never remember it works that way. It always comes as a surprise. Not one of the good kind, either.

It's fine, though. I know the routine. I just have to do those two missions as often as possible until I get some more Season Four missions as drops and then keep doing those as well until eventually I have enough to do my maximum ten a day.

If I keep at it, soon I'll have ten good missions, the Purple and Green ones, and if I keep doing those every day I'll get lots of good stuff. It's a fair system but it requires patience. The early days (Or weeks, if the rng gods are unkind.) can be disheartening, which is why I imagine quite a lot of people still think Overseer isn't worth the trouble. They never stuck with it long enough to see it blossom.

While I was looking up where the NPC I couldn't see was, so I could go and take a picture not of her, I noticed there's yet another holiday event running. It's Norrath. Of course it's a holiday. I wonder any work gets done there at all.

The holiday in question is Beast'r. If you can guess which real-world holiday it mirrors, give yourself an Easter cookie. Damn! Gave it away!

I already have a whole clutch of Beast'r eggs that I never use as vanity or house pets so I wasn't hyped to go egg-hunting again. I would have, though, for completion's sake. I'm not much of a completist but I will fill in gaps if it's quick and easy and Beast'r is certainly that.

When I checked the press release, though, I found there are no new eggs this year. There are some new house pets on the vendors but that's it. 

What I did notice was that Beast'r comes with three Overseer missions of its own. I thought that might
get me a little extra Overseer xp for Season Four (It doesn't, by the way.) so I took a quick look at the wiki and mapped over to Everfrost, where the first of the missions begins.

Except I'd skim-read it wrong. It actually starts in Darklight Woods. I didn't find that out after I'd been to Everfrost, which turned out to be serendipitous. I was scanning the map for likely questgivers and I spotted one in a position I didn't remember so I flew over to see if that was the Beast'r guy.

It wasn't. It was the questgiver for one of the new tradeskill quests that arrived with Coffers and Coffins. A long time ago, most likely when Domino was in charge, questlines were added for several crafting ranks, rewarding all the Advanced recipe books for that decile. It started with the introduction of Frostfang Sea and New Halas as a starting zone, I think, and became a semi-regular thing with most expansions thereafter.

For some reason, presumably available dev time, a few sets of levels never got the memo. I never imagined anyone would find the time or the inclination to fill in those gaps but then I wasn't expecting Niami Denmother to get the Crafting Lead gig. 

The current update adds questlines for the forties and fifties. All the details, as you'd expect, are at EQ2 Traders Corner. I was planning to do both of them, for fun mostly. I hadn't even thought about who I'd get to do them. It's not like I actually need the recipes for those levels any more. 

Decision made! My Berserker, who is also a Weaponsmith, can do the Level 40 quest because that's what he just got. It does also come with a three-headed dog called Eustace, so he's keen. Just got to pick someone for the Level fifty one now.

As well as all of that, the update also includes several new collections and an excellent change to a useful but somewhat annoying questline from several expansions ago, described by Niami Denmother as "very off-putting for many". I was one who'd been put off. I've done it twice and that was enough. Now all I have to do is take my remaining max-level crafters, both of them, straight to Obulos Frontier and cut to the chase...

... providing they can a) speak Goblish and b) prove they've completed the Visions of Vetrovia Signature Tradeskill Questline. 

I think this is where we came in.