Spring Fashion Supplement

It's been about a month since I last posted news of what I'm wearing in Noah's Heart. I realise it's a topic likely to be of interest to no-one but myself but I have to consider my legacy. This is just the sort of thing that's going to help convince me my life hasn't been a waste, when I look back on it on my deathbed. Also it's my blog and, to paraphrase Lesley Gore, I'll post what I want to.

It took me a litle longer than usual to max Affection with the next Phantom on my list so I could get her to hand over the pattern I needed to craft my own version of her signature look. That was because, for the first time, I chose one of the SSR-rated phantoms, all of whom require an extra level of persuasion to part with their patterns.

As XyzzySqrl explained in the comments to a post back in September last year, there's a very straightforward hierarchy in the game that goes from R (Rare) to SR (Super Rare) to SSR (Super Super Rare). Rare phantoms max affection at Level 11, Super Rare at Level 12 and Super Super Rare at Level 13. The number of points required for each level increases markedly as you make your way from vague acquaintances to BFFs. It takes 18k to go from 11 to 12, which is where I'd always stopped before but this time I needed but another 24k to go from 12 to 13.

For this reason only, I was loathe to pick an SSR phantom for my next charm offensive but in every other way it was the obvious choice. Visually, there's a very significant change in quality between the three grades. Rare phantoms wear relatively plain outfits in very muted colors, which often include a lot of dull, battleship grey. Super Rares are much more detailed and colorful, with plenty of attractive options to choose from, but Super Super Rares are incontestably the winners in any fashion parade, their costumes more subtle and intricate than their sometimes brash inferiors.

There are plenty of SSR looks I'd love to adopt but ironically the one I've picked isn't one of them. For once, I made my choice for pragmatic, gameplay reasons rather than whimsical amusement or pure aesthetics. I needed to improve some stats and this was a way of doing it.

Other than the extra tier, raising affection with SSR phantoms is no harder than with the lesser rarities, something that very definitely does not apply to raising their all-important star ratings. I currently have all my Rare phantoms at the highest star rating and fifteen out of nineteen Super Rares maxed as well. 

Of my twenty Super Super Rares, however, only one is even close. The rest have either no stars at all or just one or two. Since the SSRs are meant to be the superior choices for combat and since combat is unavoidable if you want to follow the storyline or progress through either the narrative seasons or the seasonal arenas, you'd obviously want to do all you can to stack your team with SSR phantoms at the highest star rating possible.

Which is, of course, how the developers hope to make their money. There are plenty of ways to speed that process up by spending cash, although none that completely avoid the usual reliance on the goodwill of the RNG gods. 

Since I have no intention of spending a single cent on the game, I have to make do as best I can, which means focusing on one SSR phantom at a time, and since the first such phantom I acquired was the one everyone gets at the start, Ave, that's where I've been directing my attention. 

Ave is a fun companion but she doesn't dress remotely the way I'd ever choose to dress a character of my own. I much prefer the looks of.... well, honestly, pretty much any of the other SSRs. Unfortunately, none of them was remotely ready for action so I was stuck with Ave and her frou-frou blue and white party dress.

That said, it looks better on than I expected. I'm going to wear it for a while, just for a change, but once the novelty wears off I imagine it will go back into the wardrobe, never to be seen again. 

On the plus side, all of the outfits come as separates - top, legs and shoes - and some also have hats. It is possible to mix and match the pieces to come up with a look of your own. There's also a dye system, which I haven't yet attempted to figure out. It is conceivable I might yet find a use for something Ave's wearing. I kind of doubt it but could happen...

I now have wearable versions of the outfits of three of the four phantoms that make up my regular team. You can store several different teams and you can swap individual team members at any time, out of combat, but once again, the more phantoms you try to maintain at full combat readiness, the more its going to cost you, either in cash, time or most probably both. I prefer to stick with the same crew most of the time.

The only regular team member I haven't maxed affection with is Hughes. He has an outfit I like but he's male and although Noah's Heart is very modern in its willingness to allow you to express both the male and female (Although not the non-binary.) aspects of your personality, it's not a game that allows cross-dressing. To dress like Hughes, I'd have to bring out my "Inner Personality" and cosplay as a boy.

Hughes is a Super Rare and I have a good number of other options in that category, some of whom have very attractive outfits. It might be easier to gear one of them up and swap Hughes out, at least for a while. Or I could just gear someone up outside the team and not bother so much about the "wasted" effort and expense.

I'm thinking on it. Noah's Heart remains a very interesting, involving, thought-provoking game, especially if you don't plan on buying your way to success. It's going to be a good while before I'm done with it, I'm happy to say. Although, of course, it might be done with me first. The game does seem to have slipped into a holding pattern of late, with very little in the way of genuine new content and a lot of re-use of existing resources.

I hope it lasts a while longer. I haven't nearly finished playing dress-up yet.

Take My Money

With Valheim on hiatus pending the Hearth and Home update, my daily gaming round these days mostly consists of Guild Wars 2, EverQuest II and Dragon Nest Origins. I've pushed further into the Dragon Nest world (not to be confused with World of Dragon Nest, which is another game entirely) than I've ever gone before. 

Dora is closing in on level 29. Progress seems comfortable. An enjoyable two-hour session might get me one level in the mid-20s. Something doesn't add up, though. According to the website, xp has been set at three times the regular rate and the estimated leveling time from creation to cap should be no more than ten to twelve hours.

I'm probably doing something wrong. I usually am. There's a lot about the game I don't understand. Most of it, in fact. Even though I've played Dragon Nest on and off for over a decade it's never been anything I've taken very seriously. Or at all seriously.

Any mmorpg played hyper-casually, in fits and starts, is going to remain opaque but Dragon Nest, being both somewhat silly and highly hyper-kinetic, is probably easier to underestimate than most. I've tended to find it quite engaging enough just running around blowing things up with my unfeasibly large gun and chortling at the badly-translated quest dialog without trying to figure out how to play properly.

Thinking back, that approach did begin to falter last time I got into the twenties. It's not so easy to mow through everything when most of your gear hasn't seen an upgrade for a dozen levels. The game gradually introduces more and more systems and options, various kinds of crafting, different difficulty levels, all kinds of special events and instances, until the time comes when you really do have to stop and take some time to work out just what the heck is going on. Or give up.

Last time this happened the decision was taken out of my hands. Before I could re-adjust my attitude the game underwent one of its periodic shifts of ownership and shook me off like a flea from a dog. I'm uncomfortably aware of the equally perilous situation I find myself in now, playing on a server of unknown provenance and unknowable security.

Still, play I do and learn I must, if I'm to progress. The first step was to think about getting some better gear and the second was to take my first look at the broker. It's a nice, straightforward post-and-sell system, very similar to EQII's. There were some good upgrades there for a few gold each so I bought a new offhand weapon and some gloves. Orange quality ("Epic" if you prefer). Never seen any before.

Buying gear will only get you so far in any mmorpg. It's no use if you don't go out and use it. The web page Guide advises "For Leveling we would recommend doing the main quest, since the Main Quest has increased Exp and Gold." Yep. Doing that. And I've taken on board the warning that "You should also pick up Side Quests, otherwise you will have to grind dungeons at some point to continue the Main Quest." 

I would love to see this game translated properly.

I haven't, however, been following the suggestion that "Taking the Board Quest close to a dungeon entrance, if the dungeons offers one, is also a good idea". I tried it but I got muddled so I stopped. Dragon Nest Origins operates a recursive structure of instances, where towns, acting as quest hubs, lead to staging points, also acting as quest hubs, which lead to instances and dungeons that themselves splinter off to others inside them. 

In all my time playing I'd never figured out how all this works in detail. I'd never needed to. I just went somewhere, killed some monsters, came back. Yesterday I finally ran into a problem with that approach.

I've been taking the quests but I can't say I've been finishing them. There are a generous forty pages in DNO's quest journal but yesterday I found I'd filled them all. Rather than renege on promises made I went back to the beginning and began to clear them all out. Only first I had to be sure I was going to the right place. 

The quest markers took me from the city to the staging area to the correct instance but after that I had to learn to check the name of the exact dungeon and find the drop-down list of quests to make sure mine were included. It's been there in front of me all these years and yet somehow I never noticed. It makes a surprising amount of difference, knowing where you're supposed to be going and then using that knowledge to make sure you do actually go there. Who'd have guessed?

Once inside, clearing out old quests went quickly. Dragon Nest is old school in its approach to power. As you level up your character gets stronger while your opponents don't. It was very pleasant for a while to go back and slaughter my way through dungeons far below my level. 

So much of it has to be genuinely funny in the original. This quest revolves around a spoiled NPC with delusions of grandeur. The noise pollution in question is her trying to play dark elf music from sheet music she had me steal from them.

Only I kept getting more quests. I'd go back and hand one in and come away with two. My journal emptied then filled. And it seems the game's not quite as old school as I thought. The new quests, often as not, even though they took me to places I imagined I'd outgrown, came in at my level or thereabouts. It seems my assumptions on that were ill-founded too, like so much else I thought I knew about the game.

And don't get me started on crafting. There's heraldry and enhancement and plates and codes and I have only the shakiest grasp of how any of that works. Then, when you get to nineteen or twenty and travel to the capital, Saint Haven, there's cooking and fishing and farming and a whole new channel with different storage and currencies...

Speaking of currencies, shall we mention the cash shop? Yes, let's. Dragon Nest, the commercial version, has one of the better cash shops I've seen. It's stuffed with very nice things to buy. There are mounts and pets and dozens and dozens of fancy costumes. You can see them all in the display window with your character modelling them and rarely have I felt so tempted to get out my credit card and treat myself.

There's practical stuff, too. Of course there is. DNO isn't terrible about storage space. You get an adequate amount for free. I always want more, though, and looking at tab after tab of locked slots is hard. I'm playing regularly. It's costing me nothing. I'd be willing to drop a few dollars for some bags and maybe a pet and something snazzy to wear around town.

At least he's not a clown

Except I can't. Or maybe I can but I don't know how. As a private server operating on donations there is, rightly, no way to pay real money for in-game currency. And even if there was I certainly wouldn't be handing out my credit card details to whoever's running this thing.

The cash shop is there, though. Tantalizing me. Taunting me. I spent a good while trying to figure out how to use it. I pressed every button on the UI. Nothing. 

Except the button for buying cash did do something. It took me to the website. I couldn't buy anything there but I learned that  "Cash stuff is obtainable ingame, by doing the circus. You can get a total of 196 Coupons alone and 256 a week, when in a Party of 4. Those Coupons can be exchanged for cash items."

Oh. The circus. That thing I've been ignoring since I first saw it many years ago. Why have I been ignoring it? Good question. I don't like circuses? Nope. Not that. Okay, I have no idea. I just never really thought about it. I'm sensing a pattern here...

I spoke to the ringmaster. I went to the circus. It turned out to be several instances with a lot of fighting. I killed three hundred Sparta goblins. That got me six coupons. I did it again. Then I found a bunch of monsters hiding in another instance and killed them, too. After about twenty minutes I had sixteen coupons. I went back to the ringmaster to see what I could buy. Nothing worth having. Nothing I wanted. Definitely no hedgehogs.

I want that hedgehog! And those bunny ears!

As far as I can tell the "Cash stuff" in that system is a) completely different from the commercial cash shop and b) linked to which zone you enter the circus from. So far I can't even get the "Cash Items" tab to come up. I would bet I need to be about level 40 and talking to the ringmaster in in the final hub village for that.

I'd probably forget about it only in Saint Haven, where everyone hangs out, I can see people parading around, dressed as if they're about to enter the costume parade at Comicon, riding exotic mounts, with even more exotic pets at their heels. There's a way to get these things. I just don't know what it is.

I don't know yet. I will find out. If I have to join the sodding Discord and ask, I will find out! I shall have my giant, pink hedgehog or I'll know the reason why! Or, I guess, I won't.  Know the reason why, that is. That's kind of the problem.

On the upside, I did find out how to take screenshots with the UI off. Dragon Nest is a beautiful game and as I level up I'm getting to see new and ever more spectacular locations. Trying to position the camera just so to get shots I could crop for the blog was getting old so I googled "Dragon Nest Hide UI". That got me some helpful information that turned out to be completely wrong.

Everybody jump!

It was helpful because it started me looking at the Gestures, those little icons you can slot to your hot bar and press to make your character perform various emotes. I'm not much of an emote person. I don't use them a lot in any game. I had noticed the gestures existed but I'd never bothered to play around with them.

Supposedly there was a "Selfie" gesture that would hide the UI and take a screenshot. No there isn't. In some version of Dragon Nest, maybe. Not in the one I'm playing. There is a Gesture with the same icon but it does nothing at all. There's also one called Jump Photo. That one makes you leap into the air but it doesn't take a screenshot of you doing it. 

While I was researching all this, however, I happened to notice someone on a thread explaining that the way you got your UI back after you'd taken a selfie was by pressing Ctr-I-PrtScr all at once. If that was a toggle...

It is a toggle! It's also a blindingly awkward combo but who cares? It works! Now I can take all the fullscreen shots I want. And I looked at all the Gestures and there are some great ones. I'll be able to take some amazing shots of Dora in all kinds of hilarious poses in front of gorgeous backdrops with no visual clutter.

I just have to work out how to get her something more impressive to pose in than shorts and a waistcoat. Plus she needs a pony. And a hedgehog.

Everyone needs a pony and a hedgehog. If that's not the law it damn well ought to be. I guess I'd better find a way to make it happen.

Ready For My Close-Up : Gear, Fashion and Accessories In Black Desert

Writing about the ever-growing influx of Korean MMOs into the Western games market, particularly recent hits like Blade and Soul, Black Desert and Tree of Savior, Ironweakness of Waiting for Rez observed that "many of the systems like gear advancement are unlike anything else I’ve played". He also pointed out that, while a lot of this may seem new and innovative to players unfamiliar with the Eastern gaming scene, "in reality many of the concepts and systems these games are based on have been repeated for years in the Asian market".

It's difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from dabbling in the handful of Korean MMOs that make it to this hemisphere. The next one coming down the pipe is Asta: The War of Tears and Winds, currently in open beta. By all accounts, that one is a straight WoW clone, as have been many other Korean MMOs I've briefly played and enjoyed over the years, like Loong, Argo or Aika.

The Korean gaming market is reportedly so extensive, with gaming so much more deeply embedded in broader popular culture than in the West, that you might imagine there would be space for almost any kind of innovation or novelty to find an audience. Whether the drive behind such change is aesthetic, creative or primarily an attempt to carve out a commercially viable niche in an extremely competitive market I wouldn't care to guess. Neither do I know how open the average Korean gamer might be to novel, idiosyncratic or unfamiliar ways of doing things in game.

Looking at both Black Desert and Blade and Soul from a western gamer's perspective, though, some of the design decisions do seem peculiar. When I collected my Cherry Blossom earrings from Hunt the Seed Merchant in Heidel yesterday and slipped them in it really got me to thinking about how strange and alien to a traditional, western MMO gamer  the whole gear and appearance systems in BDO might feel at first blush.

Black Desert has a famously hyper-complex character creation engine. It allows you control not just over the basics like hair, eye color, build and height, but over everything down to individual muscle groups. Daum was so certain this would appeal to the western gamer that they released the whole thing as a standalone to promote the game.

And it worked. There was a ton of media coverage as everyone jumped in to make the ugliest characters imaginable, clone celebrities or just squee about the possibilities. I didn't take the trouble to try it for myself but even then, like a few other skeptics, I couldn't really see what the fuss was about. Most of the screen shots that proud creators were posting looked somewhat bland and rather samey.

When I got to use it for real, though, I was quite satisfied with the look I was able to achieve for my Tamer. The real let-down didn't hit until later.

Whatever the strengths or shortcomings of the character creator itself, the thing that never occurred to me, nor, I suspect, to many people enjoying playing around with it, was that it makes precious little difference how much control you're given over the face and the muscles when you have next to no say in what clothes your character is going to be wearing.

For a while after launch there was an undercurrent of discontent rumbling across the forums and the first impressions pieces. After all those hours spent tweaking characters to get them just so it seemed that out there in the world those subtleties were had to spot. Everyone looked disturbingly alike and there was a slight sense of disbelief as people began to realize that no matter how many upgrades they got their armor would go on looking much the same.

What's more, since BDO has absolutely no concept either of "Bind on Equip" or level restrictions for gear, most players will want to latch on to the very best armor and weapons at the earliest opportunity and wear them forever. The faster you get your character geared, the fewer differences in appearance you'll see.

And it's not like there are so many differences to begin with. There are just four traditional slots. The "Armor" slot seems to cover the whole body. The other three are Shoes, Gloves and Helmet. The Helmet does not display at all. The Shoes I have right now do display, but not as shoes. They are, in fact, 1980s Fame-style leg warmers that run from thigh to ankle and leave my original, default shoes in place.

There are a lot more slots than that, though. There are seven slots for jewellery and accessories with stats plus, of course, the weapon. I don't believe any of those display except, obviously, the weapon and, less obviously, the Trinket, which, for a Tamer at least, adds a neat fluffy dangler to the hilt of your sword, a bit like the old tiger tail a boy racer would have fixed to the whip antenna of a Ford Cortina circa 1975.

Inside the outer ring of traditional gear is a an inner ring of Costume slots: Helmet, Top, Shoes, Gloves, Main and Secondary. All of these display. Oh, and there's an Underwear slot, too. That displays but only, thankfully, when you're in your own house. I don't think we want to pursue the implications of that particular aesthetic decision too rigorously.

All of those can be toggled on or off to mix and match. Finally (I think) there's a row of three more toggleable slots along the bottom for Head/Ear, Eye and Nose/Mouth/Chin.

That is where my Cherry Blossom Earrings go. And they look great. I'm really pleased with them. I feel the hours spent grubbing around in the shrubberies for seeds and sitting on a rock waiting to pull weeds were well worth it. Just like the hours spent in character creation were. Provided I want to spend my gaming sessions zoomed in on my character's face I can consider the whole enterprise a complete success.

If I want to see my character change and grow in appearance in long shot, however, it appears I'll need to pay a visit to Daum's notoriously overpriced cash shop, although there is a limited in-game crafting option available if you buy a house and convert it into a Costume Mill. There's one in Calpheon, although I doubt I'd ever have found it without the help of Google and this invaluable spreadsheet.

In time I may edge carefully down that rabbit hole. It would certainly be a goal and I'm finding myself a touch short of those in this game. For now, though, I think I'll make do with whatever generic look my gear gives me, accessorized occasionally by such freebies as might become available through holiday events or log in bonuses.

Luckily I quite like how my character looks right now. It's certainly a lot better than some of the horrific fashion and dye disasters hurting the eye and the soul from Calpheon to Altinova as players with more money than taste begin to cut loose their creative drives.

Like everything in Black Desert and Blade and Soul before it, getting dressed is a learning experience. I feel I'm still some way short of being able to tie my own shoelaces but at least I can put my jumper on the right way round. The next step is going to be playing with dyes.

I hope they come out.