It's The End Of New World As We Knew It

I imagine everyone reading this has already heard the news about about New World. If not, brace yourselves.

The final curtain falls on 31 January 2027. At that point the servers will be closed, never to re-open. If you own the game, you're welcome to carry on playing until then. If you never got around to buying it, well you're too late now. It went off sale yesterday.

I'm not going to do an obituary post or any kind of elegy. There's still over twelve months left to go and it's very likely I'll play some more before then. Plenty of time to for a final tour and some screenshots to remember things by.

If you want a full and accurate rundown of how things got to this sorry pass, Wilhelm has an excellent overview. I'm just going to post a few pictures for now.

I'd have liked to post some older shots. Maybe even some of the ones I took in the first closed beta and was never allowed to share. I don't imagine anyone's going to be chasing me down for breaking that NDA now. Unfortunately, everything older than a couple of months is on one of the hard drives in my old computer so that will have to wait. 

For now, here are a few pictures of Aeternum as it is and will be for the rest of this year. And the beginning of the next. And then never again.

It took three of us to kite that giant turkey. I wonder if there will even be three people left by next Thanksgiving? 

One thing I do plan on doing before the final year is out is upgrading from a wolf to a lion. Or is it a tiger? Some kind of cat, anyway...

If there's one thing I won't miss about the game it's probably the clothes. I understand the aesthetic but I never liked it. 

The environments, though, and the countryside: those I will miss.

Of course, there's always the very slim chance Amazon might relent and sell the game to someone else. Unfortunately, they don't need the small change any of the likely buyers would be able to offer. Or, for that matter, the big bucks, were anyone to come with a real proposal. 

I strongly suspect they'd prefer the game to disappear altogether, not hang around like some kind of revenant, calling into question the company's poor decision-making and inability to come up with even a single, successful game.

For the same reason, they might not be quite as amenable to an emulator as many game developers. Still, a year is a long time to leave the game running. Plenty of time for people to data-mine everything necessary to clone it after it's gone.

My guess is that we won't see a working version after the official servers go dark but I'd be very happy to see myself proved wrong. New World was and still is a pretty good MMORPG. It deserved better. 

A Few Games I'm Not Playing And A Couple I Am

Just a quick update on the games I'm playing today, I think. And I am playing games. After several weeks, or possibly months, of droning on about how I don't seem to have the time and/or inclination these days, the interest, at least, has returned in full force, as I suspected it would. The necessary time hasn't come along with it, unfortunately, or not yet, but maybe once the holiday season is out of the way...

I also seem to be running through games at a heck of a pace, just like the old days. By which I don't mean I'm finishing them or even making steady progress, sadly. No, the familiar pattern I appear to have fallen back into is starting new games, or returning to old ones, then posting here about how much fun they are and how much I'm enjoying myself, before dropping whatever it was I was so happy with just a moment ago in favor of something else.

Wuthering Waves is the prime example. I love Wuthering Waves! I think it's a great game. I haven't played it for months. It's now reached the point where I haven't played it for so long I find it difficult to imagine starting again. I'm so far behind. It took me forever to catch up the last two times and I can't see myself doing it again.

Then there's Crystal of Atlan. It's no Wuthering Waves, that's for sure, but it's a fun game all the same and I was planning on getting to the end of the storyline, at least. And then I stopped logging in for no particular reason and I haven't started again. I did move Atlan from one drive to another yesterday, to make room on the SSD for Ashes of Creation, which I wouldn't have done if I wasn't intending to get back to it some day. When that day might come is anyone's guess.

I'll come to AoC in a bit but before then there's New World to consider. After Amazon mothballed it, all the publicity about the game dying counter-intuitively made me want to play it again, so I did. And it was as good as I remembered, if not better. I was happily working my way towards the level cap and learning to ride around Aeternum on wolf-back. I had clear and definite goals I wanted to achieve.

So am I still playing New World? I am not. I mean, I will be playing again. And soon. Probably. Just not right now.

I suppose I could say the same about Once Human. I went back to that one with considerable enthusiasm just a few weeks ago. Or was it months? There were all kinds of interesting things going on. I wanted to see them and do them and post about them. 

I didn't, though. I logged in a few times, wandered about aimlessly, then drifted away again. It wasn't through lack of interest. It just happens. 

Here's the problem. All of the games I've mentioned demand a very significant time commitment. Or they do if you want to get anywhere with them. And yet, thanks to the way the online gaming market has evolved, you can still enjoy them without putting in the hours. Or indeed the effort. 

Almost all modern games "respect the player's time", by which they mostly mean you can log in for half an hour, every day or a few times a week or whenever you get a spare half-hour, and get something done. Then you log out, satisfied, and forget all about the game until the next time, whenever that happens to be.

I was doing that in all the above games for most of the Autumn and it was a little bit annoying, if I'm honest. That's why I keep low-key complaining about it. 

It's great that you no longer need to dedicate an entire weekend to getting half a level but in a way it was the knowledge that, if you didn't do it, you wouldn't get anywhere at all that kept you playing. Until you burned out, deleted all your characters, uninstalled the game and spent the next five years bad-mouthing it every chance you had...

So it's swings and roundabouts, I guess.

Anyway, where I've ended up right now is with two games on the go, the aforementioned Ashes of Creation and good old EverQuest II. Only one of those is almost certainly not going to make it into the New Year. Can you guess which?

Yep. Ashes of Creation. Not because it's a bad game. Or a bad start to a game. It's not finished yet, of course, not even close. Even so, it's very playable. Feels as finished (At low levels.) as many MMORPGS I've played. 

It also feels exactly like many MMORPGs I've played. Boy, does it ever! 

I'm well aware that it won't always bee that way. It's going to be Fantasy Eve Online Not In Space, with everything all about alliances and holding or taking territory and all that political stuff. And for all I know it may be a bit like that already, somewhere. Just not in the part of the game I'm seeing.

I'm still effectively in the tutorial although, officially, there doesn't seem to be one. NPCs keep lecturing me, at very great length, on where to go and what to do. One of them took a while teaching me how to craft a backpack yesterday (And the day before. It took a while.) which was useful. (Storage is weird in AoC because crafting mats take up a specific and variable amount of space but other items don't.)

I got sent to a farm to help out and somehow that turned into doing an endless sequence of repeatable missions. I did a lot of those as I inched my way through Level 4. That fast xp I was talking about last time sure dried up fast. 

The whole thing reminds me of Vanguard, in a weird kind of way. The landscape is similar, the NPCs are similar, the crafting stations are similar, the mission boards are similar, the pace is similar... At one point yesterday I literally found myself thinking about logging out and going over to the Vanguard emulator instead because if I was going to be playing Vanguard, I might as well actually play Vanguard.

Except in Vanguard no-one kills you and takes your stuff. Not that anyone's done that to me in AoC. Yet. But all that ponies and princesses stuff I gave out in my First Impressions post about how the PvP isn't as non-consensual as the rumors have it and how your PvP flag is off unless you turn it on? Well, it's true and it's not.

Here's how it actually works. You have a PvP flag, yes. It's off by default, yes. Does it stop people ganking you? No. All it does is give them a penalty for killing someone who wasn't flagged for PvP. You're still going to be dead afterwards. And as far as I can read it, they'll still have your stuff, or some of it.

Which still doesn't put me off playing. I've got nearly six hours in AoC now and I haven't seen any PvP whatsoever. Very much the reverse, in fact. There are people everywhere but they're all minding their own business, the exceptions being a couple of times when I was very low health in a fight with a tough bandit or a bunch of goblins and someone threw me a couple of drive-by heals. Oh, and someone accidentally trained a bear onto me but stopped to help kill it and heal me up after.

People around have been very friendly in action if not in words. No-one's actually spoken to me. I said "Thank you" for the heals but they were gone by then. Global chat, though, that's a different story. 

The good news is the gold spam seems to have vanished completely. Didn't see a single spammer yesterday, whereas the day before it was never-ending. The bad news is that without all that spam filling the chat window I can hear what the real players are saying.

It's nothing terrible but it's quite disheartening. It's what you get in every MMORPG that sets out a stall to be the Next Big Thing or, even worse, the Next Old Thing. Everyone's been there and done that and wants you to know about it.

There was one of those moments that happen in every MMORPG, quite often, when everyone in chat starts telling you how long they've been playing and how old they are. And old is the word, alright. Someone summed it up when they chipped in with "I'm 38 and you guys are making me feel young." 

Things have changed some, though. In the same five minutes, I heard one person come out with the traditional "Why don't you go back to WoW?" in response to some trivial suggestion that AoC might be a tad slow, only to be followed a few minutes later by someone else proclaiming, in an unrelated conversation about how much fun they were having, "This is the first good new MMO that's come out since WoW!" 

I don't really know how to parse that. I do know, though, that I won't be going hard on AoC for a few reasons, not least of which is the terrible trouble I have logging in to the damn game. Once I get in, it plays smoothly enough but it just hangs on a black screen for five or even ten minutes before I get there. 

Whether that has anything to do with the number of people playing or the DDOS attacks Intrepid say there have been, I don't know. If it's player numbers, there's no queue and all the servers are showing as Low, though, so I doubt it's that.

Anyway, I'll be giving Ashes a few more sessions, I expect. I like what I've seen and if I was in the market for a serious, old-school MMORPG that I could devote many, many hours of my life to, it would certainly be high on the list. But I'm not and it's silly to pretend I am.

All of which brings me to the game I almost certainly will be playing into the New Year and beyond, just like I do every year: EQII. I'm ticking along very nicely there with both the Adventure and Tradeskill questlines and having a really good time. 

I was going to write a few paragraphs about that, too, but this post is plenty long enough already so I'll save it for another time. After all, the game isn't going anywhere. And neither am I. 

Progress Notes: New World

Busy time... Christmas...Work... Obligations... blah blah blah...

All I've got is an update on how things are going in New World. 

Good. 

Yeah, really good.

Playing every day. Only an hour or two. Trying to level, mostly. Just short of 64 now. Well, maybe halfway through 63.

Moved up to at-level content yesterday after several sessions back-capping old quests and doing faction missions thirty or twenty levels below. 

Already finished MSQ from launch. Well, might have. Not actually sure. Seem to remember getting stuck on some dungeon stage but no sign of it in the Journal. Maybe the revamp fixed it. One of the revamps.

Latest MSQ flags as Brimstone Sands. Good with me. Story never made sense anyway.

Cleared a bunch of side quests. Took some more. Not great. XP poor. Stories not very interesting. 

Saw some advice to skip side quests. Seems solid. 

Pity. Usually enjoy them in MMOs. Not so much here.

On the subject, writing in New World always seems stiff. Nothing really wrong with it but it seldom comes alive. Reminds me of ESO. Too... I dunno... worthy? 

Might have to give it a good think. Writing in anime/imported games so much more relatable, satisfying, just more interesting. Even with the bad translations, sometimes. Why is that?

Faction missions much better. No plodding plots, just go kill this, loot that. Collect big XP. Double, treble story quests, at least. And takes half as long. Which would you do?

Also, fun when you get sent to kill named mobs. Lots of loot then. No idea what to do with it. All just stashed. Huge storage space and all in one place now. Just shove it all in a chest under the stairs in the Mourningdale house.

Oh, speaking of...  

There's me, stuck under the stairs to my house. Logged out lying in bed. Well, on bed. Logged in next day, rent due. Kicked me out. Got stuck under stairs. Trapped!. 

Even after I paid the rent. Couldn't even Return Home. Already there, I guess!

Had to Fast Travel to some shrine. Thought it wasn't going to work. No room to crouch. Animation didn't play. Did, though. Work, I mean. Then had to Fast Travel back to get into my own house. Rude!

New World always had a rep for bugs. First I've seen since I got back but game is laggy as hell, first thing. Log in, always have to wait two, three minutes for scenery to load. Stand there, dropping through the floor, rubber-banding back, over and over. 

Given up trying to move until it settles. Nothing to do about it. Tab out and web browse while I wait. 

After that, usually pretty good. Occasional lag spikes. Mostly smooth enough. Don't remember it being like this before and I was always on East Coast servers. Looked at switching. No dice. You can move server but not region so stuck with it.

Killed the big turkey. Not done it before. Three of us. Took twenty minutes. Fuckton of hit points. Easy otherwise although someone got killed. Rezzed him. Good I remembered how!

Turkey died. Didn't get anything much.

Got a good gathering thing off a little turkey, though. Random drop. And plenty of coin off some others. Kinda wish I'd gotten onto event before it was almost over. Not exactly hard to make money here, though.

Starting to think I should get back to crafting. Did a lot of it before. Haven't touched it this time. Everything gives XP in this game, doesn't it? Maybe craft a level for a change. Sure got the mats for it.

Dinged 63 last night and thought it was probably time to get back to the desert. Had a couple of quests to finish. Did those. Mobs a lot tougher. Fights a lot harder. Obviously. Hella fun, all the same. Always liked the fighting in this game. More than I can say for some.

After that, saw I had an MSQ close by. Started on it and got a lot further than I expected. Went into this huge pyramid. Killed a big beetle. Looted a load of chests. Took so long doing that, beetle respawned. Attacked me so I had to kill him again. Fun times!

Climbed a bunch of stairs to top of the pyramid. Killed some guards. Went through a door. Expecting a big fight with a boss. There was one but all she did was monologue for like five minutes then leave. Turned some glyph on and that was it: MSQ stage done.

Ported back, handed it in, on to the next. If only they were all like that, eh?

Guess I'll carry on this way to 65. Shouldn't take too long. Then on to Nighthaven. Really want to check that place out. Sounds cool but no point going if everything's too tough. 

Or is there? Guess I could just go explore. Open up the travel points. Fill out the map. Take some pictures.

Why not?

That's a plan, then.

Of I go. Maybe a proper post about it tomorrow. 

Or about something, anyway. 

Don't count on it... 

Bless Me Padre, For I Have Killed You. A Dozen Levels Too Late But Who's Counting?

I wouldn't normally be posting on a Sunday. I'd be at work. It's coming up Christmas, though, and my work pattern has been shunted around a little, so here I am. I thought I might do a little catch-up on where I am with New World.

Still playing, for a start. Every day, almost. Longer sessions than I've been used to lately, too, although that still only means a couple of hours, most days. 

It's an incredibly comfortable game, New World. Cozy, almost. It shouldn't be, given the bleak lore, heavy focus on combat and over-saturated mob density, all things that usually make a game feel enervating after a while. And yet, somehow, it's always felt like a pleasant place to pass some time.

It has for me, anyway. Even back in pre-alpha, when Amazon Games still thought they were making a PvP sandbox, I remember trotting around the beautiful countryside, taking screenshots no-one but me would ever see, thanks to the very strict NDA, and generally enjoying the peaceful vibe.

Yes, there are zombies everywhere (Not what they like to call them but it's what they are, all the same.) but they move slowly and don't react until you're past them. Everything's a bit that way, slow on the uptake, except maybe some of the animals. Boars and big cats are particularly quick to engage and you really, really don't want to tangle with the bears.

But mostly you don't have to. There's an excellent road system. If you stick to the highways you won't run into much trouble. Not until you have to cross one of the many bridges, that is. They all seem to be positively infested with skeletons. And there are some checkpoints, gates, tollbooths and the like. They might need a detour through the shrubbery.

It's hard not to keep veering off the road, though. The pickings are so good. There's stuff just lying around everywhere for the taking. It's a kleptomaniac's paradise. There are chests and boxes and stashes of all kinds in and around every building. Not just the ruins. The intact homes, too. Go into someone's house and, provided they've been corrupted or tainted or whatever the hell it is, you can kill them and steal their stuff. It's not just socially acceptable, it's positively encouraged.

 

What with the sightseeing, the stealing, the murdering and the foraging (Did I not mention the endless supply of herbs, ores, skins and timber?) it's easy to while away hours without really doing anything much. That's mostly how I played on my first post-launch run, a couple of hundred hours, with sessions that lasted twice or three times as long as they do now.

Back then, I did somehow find the time to follow the main storyline as well. And do a bunch of side quests. But it was a rare session when I didn't lose track of the plot as I veered off course to see what I could fill my bags with. That, plus the crafting and the rep grind to buy a house and then decorating it... it all made for a slow meander to the level cap.

I must have been weeks, months, behind the bubble. In the end I did get there somehow but by then the game was out of fashion and I'd had enough for a while, so I moved on. And now I'm back, of course, the cap has gone up. 

One of the perks of maintenance mode is that returning players only have to play catch-up once, I guess. I can't count the number of times I've had to do it in some MMORPGs that had the nerve to keep on adding content every time I took a break.

This time it didn't seem to matter much. I got all wrapped up in the mount questline, which didn't appear to care what level I was. Actually, that's not entirely true. It does give you a recommended level for each stage but I don't think it's hard-locked. In any case, at Level 60, I was well over the height limit.

Well, for a while. A few days ago, though, I finished the last of the wolf-riding races and the woman who set the courses told me I ought to go to Brimstone Sands to speak to the next race organizer. Brimstone Sands is that big zone they added a while back, the one before Nighthaven and it's designed for levels 60 plus. (I think when it was added 60 was still the cap, so it's probably all doable at sixty. Not easily, though.)

So now I'm back to doing "at level" content, or I will be if I do the next set of time trials. Which would be fine if I didn't have to fight anything. The races themselves are strictly non-combat but they frequently take you right through the middle of those thick clusters of mobs at gates and on bridges. 

It didn't matter when the mobs were in the thirties and forties. If I had to, I could just hop off and slaughter them all. When the archers (And there are no shortage of archers in this game. And snipers.) took pot-shots at me as I rode through, they either missed me or did very little damage. I certainly never fell off my pony. Or my wolf.

In Brimstone Sands it's different. Arrows, bullets and musket balls hit hard enough to dismount me and you can't remount until you're out of combat. Killing the mobs takes a while. Running away on foot until they leash takes even longer. Get knocked off your mount more than once and there's no chance you'll finish the race before the timer runs out.

Time to get back on the treadmill, I guess. Gear and levels both. 

One good thing that always happens when you've been away a while in many MMORPGs is that all the stuff you couldn't afford to buy on the auction house last time you were there is suddenly on sale at a fraction of the price. No-one wants gear for ten or fifteen levels below the cap.

Except me, of course. What is the cap now, anyway? 70? Let me check... yes, it went to seventy with the Angry Earth expansion that I didn't buy, which explains why I stopped at sixty. And now they're giving that expansion away for free, I have another ten levels to do.

Or, more to the point, I have another two levels to do right away, because gear in New World has level requirements and from browsing the traders last night it looks like there's a big step-change at Level 62. I ended up buying a load of very cheap upgrades with a minimum level of 56 or 57 just to be going on with but I'll be replacing those as soon as I do another level and a half.

I did go test it to see if the new gear was sufficient to make Brimstone Sands as easy as I'd like. It wasn't. It's fine, I could do it, but I'd have to take the fights seriously and I have no desire whatever to do anything of the kind.  

Instead, I thought I'd go clear up my quest journal. I have a ton of old quests in there I can go finish up in lower zones. Mid-40s quests give decent xp and they're pleasantly unchallenging. Except for one.

Padre Nuñez. I hate Padre Nuñez! He's a Level 48 boss and I've needed him for a quest since... I don't know... it must be years now. I got the quest when I was in the mid-40s and I've tried to do it easily a dozen times. 

Sometimes I can't find the bastard at all. He wanders along the roads on his estate but half the time I go there he's nowhere to be found. Those are the lucky times.

When I do find him, he kicks my ass. He pretty much one-shot me when I was the same level as him and it's barely gotten any better since I've outleveled him. He's one of those gravedigger mobs that walks around with a coffin strapped to his back, which means you have to break the damn box before you can hurt him if he turns his back on you. 

That's bad enough but he also heals himself and drops some weird spinning scythe thing made out of light that whirls around and takes huge chunks off your health if you don't get out of its way. Which would be fine, except if you try to back off he pulls you to him somehow and if you manage to resist and get out of range he often breaks combat, goes into "Retreating" mode, runs away and heals to full health.

So he's fun...

Still, I thought at Level 60, with the best gear I could find for my level on the Trading Post, surely I'd be able to get the better of him. 

Nope. I found him (Eventually.) and launched a full-on frontal assault. Shock and awe tactics. It was a lot closer than usual but when it came down to the wire and we had about 5% health each, he outlasted me and I died. 

I was not happy. When it's that close, you know it's just a matter of either luck or slightly better tactics so I tried again. And this time, for the first time ever in all the times I've visited his estate, I discovered  he has a fixed spawn at some kind of outdoor shrine or altar. 

Well, he is a priest...

How I never saw it before I can't explain. I also don't recall ever seeing it mentioned in any walk-through I read. There he was, though, with two guards. He had his back to me. I think he was praying.

Having learned nothing from all the other times, I launched myself at him from behind. I killed his two guards and backed off as he dropped his stupid blue lights. And this time, for whatever reason, he followed me without reeling me in or breaking combat. His health was dropping fast! And he didn't self-heal! Or turn around so his coffin would protect him!

He just fought like a regular person, face to face, no tricks and I kicked the crap out of him. It was super easy. Barely an inconvenience!

Maybe that's how you're meant to do it. Fight him at his altar. Maybe he buffs himself there and I caught him before he had time to finish. Maybe the leashing is more generous in that area. Maybe I just got lucky.

Don't know. Don't care. Never have to see him again. Well, unless I ever level up another character but I don't think there's much chance of that...

What with that quest and a few others much less stressful, I made it about two-thirds of the way through Level 60. I can't say it feels quick but it's certainly enjoyable. My plan now is to trundle steadily through a bunch of mid-40s/low-50s quests until I ding 62, then buy a whole new set of gear and get back to the races.

Looks like I'm playing New World again. For a while, anyway.

Ride Your Pony, New World Style

I'll resist the temptation to moan on yet again about how I don't have time to do anything these days. Except I just did exactly that so I guess I failed the resistance check.

Anyway, I really don't have much time left for blogging today so I'll keep this short. It's just going to be one of those "What I've Been Playing" posts and since all I have been playing is New World and EverQuest II, that's not going to take long.

When I say I've been playing EQII, that's not strictly true. I did manage to get in one good session while the huge Extra Life xp buff was running. I decided not to bother grinding through the last five levels on anyone, on the very valid grounds that it wouldn't be much of a laugh. Instead I logged in Mitsi, my Level 67 Swashbuckler on a different server, and spent a very happy couple of hours taking her to 80 in Kylong Plains.

She drank a two-hour 100% xp potion and with the server bonus she was getting +375%. If they hadn't somehow borked the bonus for having multiple max level characters that would have been 425% but it was plenty anyway. By the time I finished, most things in the first part of the zone had gone green. (They were orange when she got there.)

I did plan to move her to a more suitable area and carry on but the opportunity never arose and now the bonus is gone so that's the end of that. Fun while it lasted, though.

The other very satisfying thing I did was copy all of my character files across from the old PC. I looked up what was needed but in the end I just copied every .txt and .ini file and let the game sort it all out, which it did perfectly. When I logged in, all my hotbars were back and correctly populated and all the weird tweaks to the UI I've made over the years were in force again. Everything just as it should be!

The new PC is also running EQII like a dream. Loading times are much shorter and everything moves like butter. Does butter move? Oh, you know what I mean.  

As for Overseer, which is mostly all I do at the moment, I'm a level and a half from dinging into the current tier, which I believe must be Tier 7. I might just about get there by the time the expansion arrives, at which point I'll need to do another ten levels to get to the new current tier. It never fricken ends!

Assuming there is another tier, that is. I don't see Overseer mentioned in the promotional material for Rage of Churath. Maybe it's going to become a legacy feature. I'm not sure if I'd be sad or happy about that...

Other than that, most of my gaming time - no, all of my gaming time -  has been spent playing New World. Or New World : Aeternum if you prefer. Not sure anyone does.

And again, I'm not sure "playing" really describes what I've been doing there. I've been doing time trials. Pretty much just those. 

I mentioned before that I'd finished the basic mount quest and acquired a horse. And that I'd done the first five races. They call them "races" but in my book a race requires someone to race against. Racing against the clock is a time trial so that's what I'm calling them.

The NPC who gives the first set claims they're difficult but they really aren't. I'm playing on the U.S. East Coast server, which is suffering some very bad lag, so I've been stopping dead and even rubber-banding backwards a fair bit and yet I've only failed one trial so far and that was in the second lot, which are supposedly even harder. The timers seem to be pretty generous.

When you complete all five of the first batch, the horse guy says there's no more he can teach you and sends you on to another guy, like they always do in these games. He warns you the next guy is weird and sketchy and that he likes to set really tough races but so far the second guy seems exactly as weird and sketchy as the first guy and the "races" seem no harder.

I've done three of those now and honestly I could keep doing these time trials for ages. I always enjoy races in MMORPGs although usually I'm racing against someone, which I always thought was kind of the point. I like time trials too, though, so this suits me just as well. 

One thing I've noticed is that I seem to have a huge number of talent points or whatever the game calls them left to spend. Like almost 250. And another 60 or so of some other kind of points. I'm guessing there must have been a reset at some stage while I was away.

None of it seems relevant to the content I'm doing, i.e. riding along roads on a horse and avoiding anything that looks like it might give me a fight, so I haven't done anything about it yet. I suppose I'll have to at some point but I can't say I'm looking forward to it.

New World is certainly holding my attention for now, anyway. It also runs extremely smoothly on the new machine, the only issues being the terrible ping to the servers. I initially blamed that on our ISP, Virgin Media, always a likely source of any problems of that kind, but apparently it's due to some wider issues at the server end. I certainly never used to have such a poor connection to the East Coast last time I played so I hope they fix it soon.

It doesn't make the game unplayable, though, or even particularly annoying. I've played through far, far worse. 

I plan on re-installing Once Human on the new PC soon and I already have Blue Protocol on an external drive but until I have time for one or both of them I'll just carry on with the riding lessons.

And when those come to an end, I think I'll go take a look at Nighthaven. I'll be way under level for it but when has that ever stopped me before? 

New World Aeternum? More Like New World Temporalis

Twenty-four hours ago, I wouldn't have bet a red cent on my next post here being about New World.

It's true I had been thinking about playing again. The latest update, Nighthaven, looks very appealing and  the previous expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, which I never bought, just went free to play, so there's a great deal of content I've never seen. The game was reportedly undergoing a bit of a renaissance thanks to all of that and it's always interesting to see an MMORPG in the throes of a surge.

Still, it didn't feel like quite the right time to go back, not for me anyway. I'd uninstalled New World a few months ago because I was running short of storage and space hasn't gotten any bigger since then. I was loathe to give up another 60GB for a game I might not even play. 

And then my PC broke and I moved back to this much older one I'm using now, on which New World probably wouldn't run very well, if it even ran at all. So I pushed the idea to the back of the list, thinking maybe I'd take a look when I got a new machine. 

It's not like there was any hurry, after all. New World wasn't going anywhere. It was on the up, wasn't it? If Amazon hadn't canned it when it was barely scraping by, they'd hardly bail on it when it was picking up traction, would they?

So it was a bit of a surprise, to say the least, when this popped up in Feedly yesterday. Shortly followed by this. 

For anyone that can't be bothered to click through, the first of those links says that Amazon is getting out of the first-party gaming business in general, specifically withdrawing from MMOs. The second confirms that Nighthaven will be the final content release for New World, which will henceforth immediately enter maintenance mode.

It hasn't been officially confirmed yet but you can almost certainly also say goodbye to the in-development MMO based on the Lord of the Rings IP that Amazon was making. Not the first game that was being made in China. That got cancelled a while ago. The second iteration, the one they were supposedly developing in the USA. Since the studios that were working on it don't exist any longer, it's a safe bet that game is gone, too.

Just for clarity, Amazon hasn't (Yet.) pulled out of the games market completely. It's still committed to running Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty in the West, although if I had to guess I'd say that might only last as long as it takes for whatever contractual obligations they might be under to expire. I suspect the company no longer wants anything to do with making and running games at all.

I'm surprised only because I wan't expecting it right now but I can't say I'm surprised it's happening at all.  Amazon was never convincing as a games developer.

The company, like a lot of others that have subsequently pulled away, got into the games market a time when everyone wanted to be in that space. There was a huge boom in gaming during the pandemic and it looked like gaming was potentially going to be the biggest entertainment medium of the next decade if not the rest of the century.

Then several things happened. Interest in gaming generally slipped as people got out of the house and back to the lives they used to have before they got locked down. It also became apparent that what the mainstream audience really wanted were easier, simpler, less challenging games. Meanwhile, Amazon completed development on several games and they were all either disasters or disappointments, New World included. Then finally AI came along and stole everyone's lunch money.

Looked at from a non-gaming perspective, the  question isn't so much "Why would they quit now, when things seem to be looking up?" as "What the hell did they think they were doing messing around with games in the first place and why didn't they get out years ago? It was always obvious they weren't getting anywhere."

It's hard to imagine that all of Amazon's gaming portfolio put together, including not just their first and third party MMOs but also Prime Gaming and Luna, contribute anything very significant to the vast megacorps' bottom line. I asked Gemini to figure out "what percentage of Amazon's overall turnover comes from their gaming operations, including Luna?" and this is what it told me:

"Based on Amazon's 2024 financial reports and available industry data, the revenue from its gaming operations—including Luna, Prime Gaming, and Amazon Games—is significantly less than 1% of the company's overall turnover

. Amazon's gaming sector is relatively small and unprofitable compared to its other business segments, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its North American e-commerce operations. 

Amazon's total turnover and gaming revenue (2024)

• Total Revenue: For fiscal year 2024, Amazon reported a total revenue of $638 billion.
• Gaming Revenue: In contrast, the company's video game division generated an estimated annual revenue of $549.9 million in 2024. Luna is included within this revenue stream but does not report its figures separately. 

Calculation

Using the figures from 2024, Amazon's gaming revenue accounts for approximately 0.09% of its total turnover."

I'm not vouching for Gemini's accuracy but that's very much in line with what I would have expected so I'll take it.

Of course, none of this has anything at all to do with whether the games are any good. The only conceivable way that would factor in to any decision would be if they were prestige projects that added luster to the company, either with the public or within the corporate ecosphere.

 Like Hollywood movies that no-one goes to see but which win big at the Oscars, every media and entertainment business can afford to carry a few critical darlings for the buzz they offer and for the self-aggrandizement that comes from being associated with them. New World does not add to Amazon's luster. It did, briefly, when it broke sales records on launch but very quickly all the stories in the media were about the gaffes AGS was making and the cascading numbers, which showed players leaving by the hundreds of thousands. 

New World very quickly developed a reputation as a buggy mess of a game, played by almost no-one and operated by barely competent developers, amateurs who seemed to create two new bugs for every old one they fixed. Far from being a feather in Amazon's cap it turned the gaming division into something not far off being a laughing stock.

And yet Amazon stuck with it, trying to shore it up and eventually reshape it into a new game, New World Aeternum, just so it could have a second chance at making a first impression, this time on console. The move was seen by some, even at the time, as a Hail Mary pass for the game but it looked to have landed. After a fashion. 

Player numbers stabilized to an extent. Some of the newer content was relatively warmly received. The whole thing began to look a little less like a clown show. With the recent release of Nighthaven it seemed as if the game might genuinely have a future.

It did not. It does not. It's apparent now that the reason AGS were so surprisingly generous, not only giving away the expansion-sized Nighthaven update for free but throwing in the actual paid expansion Rise of the Angry Earth as a bonus, was that they were done with the whole thing. 

Presumably it all happened quite quickly. I don't imagine anyone said "Hey, we're shutting the studio in a few months and putting the game on life support. How about we go out with a bang?" I imagine until pretty recently the devs working on Nighthaven assumed the intention was to make money on it and if that worked, there'd be further expansions down the line. 

That won't be happening. The game is officially entering maintenance mode. In fact, it already has. There will be no further development and no new content. 

Amazon have undertaken to keep the servers on "through 2026" although I would point out that the exact form of words used in the statement is less definitive than that makes it sound. What they've actually said is that it's their "intention" to do so and we all know what good intentions are worth.

They've also said they'll give "a minimum of six months’ notice" before shutting down the servers so the best we can say for certain right now is that we'll be able to play New World until next April. 

I imagine it'll run on a little longer than that. They probably will let it have another year, provided it doesn't give anyone any trouble. On the same logic that it wasn't making them any meaningful amount of money or giving them any useful publicity, maintenance mode is going to represent an insignificant cost, while closing the servers sooner than they suggested they would could lead to some negative press. Easier just to leave the servers switched on and forget about them until everyone else has, too.

I thought when I started this post that I'd talk about my history with the game, which goes back to the earliest alphas, but this has already run on long enough. I'll leave what I think about the game as a game for then, should I ever get around to writing it. 

For now, I'll just say I've always liked New World. It's been on my permanent list of "games I might go back to some day" for years now.  As I said at the top, I'd been thinking about doing just that recently. The news that it may not be around for much longer and that what's there now is all that there's ever going to be does nothing to change my mind.

Or, actually, no, it makes it quite a lot more likely I will go back and sooner rather than later. I'm going to wait until I replace this PC but once I do, I'll almost certainly re-install New World, including all the content I've never seen, and give it another go. 

Given that I've always played the game as if it was a solo RPG, it makes no difference to me how many other people are playing, too. If maintenance mode leads to ghost servers, it won't much matter for anything I'm likely to be doing. 

As for there being no new content, that's not going to be a problem until I've finished what's already there, which I probably was never likely to do anyway. It's not like I finished everything in the original game, even when I was playing daily for months.

Maintenance mode can be a comfortable, welcoming place, too. The only people around are there because it's a game they really like. There aren't any irritating changes to mechanics or systems to assimilate. You can be assured the experience you expected, and for which you logged in, will be the experience you'll get. For some players, it's a better deal than Live Service.

The problem always is whether it will last. 

It can. Look at Guild Wars. Look at FFXI.  Two games that have been in Maintenance Mode for many years. Both still have players. Both have a good reputation. If Amazon could replicate those experiences for New World players, Maintenance Mode wouldn't be too bad at all.

They won't, of course. They'll run  the game on for just so long as they think they can get away with without a sunset damaging the company, either commercially or reputationally, and then they'll switch the servers off. Amazon isn't Square Enix. It's not even ArenaNet. 

In fact, let's be clear about it: Amazon is not a gaming company at all. It never was. 

Same Same But Different

I was going to take (another) day off from posting because I was out for much of the day and I didn't have anything I particularly wanted to talk about but then I was idly scrolling through all the Amazon Prime Gaming and Steam games I haven't played (or installed) yet and I happened to notice two or three occurrences that looked like they might tie together into a quick post. So here we are.

It's something of a follow-on, thematically at least, from the post I wrote on Monday about playing the gaming field and not staying loyal to a single game, a topic and a concept I'm still mulling. With Solasta out of the way, I've been in search of a game to fill that pause-friendly, tactics-heavy, somewhat cerebral slot and I was browsing the possibilities to see if I already had something that would fit the bill or whether I'd need to find something to buy.

To forestall the inevitable suggestion, obviously the best choice would be Baldur's Gate 3 but I'm definitely not spending that much money. I may see if I can get someone to give it me for my birthday or Christmas although if there's one major downside to  digital distribution it's that it renders video games entirely unsuitable as gift recommendations for aging relatives. Until then it'll have to be something on a budget or preferably free.

While I was dithering, I took a side-turn and started playing Crowns and Pawns, a classic point & click adventure I bought on sale earlier this year. It ticks the pause and brain boxes but as I discovered, after an hour of mostly enjoyable puzzle-solving, it does absolutely nothing to scratch that tactical itch. I'll definitely keep on with it because it seems like a really good game - just not the game I'm looking for right now.

I also tried Shadowrun: Dragonfall, a tactical rpg I picked up at 90% off recently, which ought to have been exactly what I was after but very much wasn't. While it absolutely nailed the tactical elements as well as being fully pausable, it failed to engage my interest in either the characters or the plot. The minute size of the characters and the lack of anything much in the way of visual effects had the unfortunate effect of making the combat seem perfunctory, even though it probably has at least as much going on as the games I'm comparing it with unfavorably. I might give it another go but I suspect I won't.

With nothing meeting my exacting standards, I found myself idly scanning the news along the top of the Steam screen, which was where I was reminded of a couple of items I'd read earlier, along with some new news I hadn't seen before. Two games I'm kinda-sorta still playing are on the cusp of turning themselves inside out in the hope of attracting interest and players and it occurred to me that, if I wanted to see how that went, I'd probably have to start both of them over from the beginning.

Starting over seems to be a recurring theme just now. I wrote recently that I'm on hiatus from Once Human because I haven't quite decided if I want to start afresh on a Seasonal server, either right now or as soon as a different scenario becomes available. Now it seems I can add both Nightingale and New World to that decision tree.

I hadn't really considered the quasi-relaunch of New World, under the New World: Aeternum brand to be something that would necessitate a clean start. I suppose it doesn't, per se, but having read Tyler Edwards' piece on his experience of the press version of the upcoming beta it seems fairly clear that there's at least an opportunity to begin again anew.

The Nightingale marketing department, meanwhile, is urgently attempting to explain to worried punters that that the upcoming Realms Rebuilt update, a rewrite so extensive I have seen it described as a relaunch, will allow players to clone their current online characters to the offline version of the game. 

This, apparently, will take place in something called Legacy Mode, the explanation for engaging with which requires a very complicated FAQ, which I have skimmed but don't yet fully understand. It appears that as of tomorrow, when I next log into Nightingale, all my character slots will be empty but somehow I will be able to recover my "old" characters and play them offline, even if I haven't done anything to prepare for the wipe.

I have to say all of this came as a complete surprise to me. I didn't even realise the update constituted a full character wipe. If I was currently playing Nightingale I might have been a tad miffed. Since I'm not, though, I'm choosing to see it as an opportunity to start the game again from the beginning.

But is it an opportunity I want to take? I enjoyed both New World (Almost 250 hours played.) and Nightingale (Over 100.) but do I want to do it all over again, slightly differently? 

I certainly didn't get much value out of My Time At Sandrock, which I bought at a very early stage, while it was still in early development, then ended up hardly playing at all. I jumped on it because I'd really enjoyed My Time At Portia but it transpired that playing what turned out to be a very similar game (At least at that early stage of development.) didn't light the same fires.

Now I see that the My Time crew are trailing a Kickstarter for a third game in the series, My Time At Evershine and for no good reason whatsoever I find myself quite excited by the prospect all over again. I have at least learned my lesson. I won't be pledging or buying in to Early Access. Even so, when the game finally arrives in a full-featured, launch version, I wouldn't bet against me buying it anyway

A few years ago - okay quite a few years ago - starting over in games and playing through the same content only slightly differently was pretty much standard operating procedure for me. As my EQ25 series is more than amply demonstrating, I used to make a lot of characters in the same MMORPGs, especially when there were different starting areas.

Yeebo posted today about the attraction of all those very different class stories in Star Wars: the Old Republic. I commented to say that the sheer number of stories had actually put me off the game and it did to an extent but I'm sure it would have the opposite effect had the game been around back in my EverQuest days. I'd have taken it as an opportunity to play lots of characters without having to go through the exact same content every time.

The question I'm asking myself, as I look at the revamps of New World and Nightingale and the possibility of a third My Time game, is whether I still find the prospect of rolling a new character in the same game as appealing as it once was. It's a question that applies, not equally but to a significant degree, to my search for a suitable replacement for the turn-based, tactical combat titles I'm craving.

To some extent, every return to a familiar genre or style of game could be said to be tantamount to playing the same content with a different skin. It's just a matter of degree. There's a considerable appeal to the familiar and the more I think about starting over, the more I remember how much I used to enjoy it.

Maybe I'll take the opportunity to see if any of that enjoyment is still there to be had. I could even give SW:tOR another run. 

Okay, let's not get carried away...

Spring Cleaning In Reverse

There's just one more day left for New World's Springtide festival, after which any event currency left unspent will melt away like the morning mist. So I thought I'd better get on and use mine, while I still had the chance. No sense leaving right to the last minute then forgetting about it.

Of course, there was the slight problem of what to buy with the fifty or so tokens I'd collected. I'd been logging in to grab them most days while the event was going on but I didn't really stop to ask myself why. Free stuff, y'know?

I did take a quick look at the holiday vendor right at the start and I could see there were a lot of armor skins, plenty of house items and some consumables but I didn't bother to look much further than that. I figured, when the time came, there'd be something I could buy. I mean, clothes and furniture are always welcome, right?

Well, the clothing was all pretty horrible. New World has some very odd aesthetics when it comes to appearance gear. I used to think it was because the good stuff was in the cash shop but now I think there just isn't much good stuff at all. 

The heavy armor looks like armor, which is just not how it's done in MMORPGs, while the medium and light look like someone had a lot of old curtains and sofa covers lying around and thought they might as well make something out of them.

Too-bright light, slightly scary plant.

The Spring Collection includes a Beekeeper's outfit, which appears to be historically accurate, more's the pity, plus a Springtide set that might do service for a touring company production of Julius Caesar.  There's an in-game Preview feature that lets you see what you'd look like wearing this stuff and I'd include some screenshots, only it uses a peculiar mechanic I couldn't get to grips with.

Instead of showing a separate image in a window, like almost every other game, New World shows you wherever you happened to be when you used it, only now you're wearing the item you selected. Since I had to be at the vendor to see the gear, that's where the Preview put me. The problem was, every time I tried, someone came and stood right on top of me, obviously also using the vendor.

What with that, the terrible lighting and no way I could find to move from the spot I was on, I pretty soon gave up trying to get a good shot. I couldn't even see the gear well enough to decide if I liked it or not. I had to tab out and look it up online to find out I didn't want it.

As well as the skins, you can buy patterns with which to make your own gear, the real thing, with stats. For ten tokens a pop you can get a pattern to make 700GS items, which would be great if I could wear them. Since I'd have to buy the expansion to be able to equip anything that high, I didn't bother.

Aerial Pinwheel. How does it stay up? Magic!

I did grab a few of last year's patterns, which make 600GS gear. Those were very much cheaper and most of my gear is well below 600, so it would be a decent upgrade. Of course, I'd need to be playing the game properly for that to matter but still. It could happen.

The consumables I didn't really look at. I'd been getting a ton of them from the daily gifts anyway and once again they weren't going to be much use if I wasn't out there fighting Corrupted and Lost and the rest of the crew. There were also a few one-off items but I didn't know what they were for and I couldn't imagine I'd ever find out so I struck them off the list, too.

And that just left housing items. Fortunately I love decorating so that was just fine with me. The only problem was going to be where to put them all.

I bought a big, four-poster bed and a chaise-longue, which were clearly going to take up a lot of space. There was a surprisingly wide range of lighting, wall and ceiling lights, table and standard lamps, more than one kind of each. I bought all of them. 

Naturally there were baskets of flowers. There were also a couple of oddities, like some large bags of "pigments" and a hovering device called a Pinwheel. I loaded up on those too.

I can't help thinking these would look better in a palace. Or a cat-house.

I think the only house items I didn't buy were one of the flower baskets and a banner. I thought the banner would be a wall hanging but my next-door neighbor in Mourningdale has something on their porch that I think might be one and it's actually a big pole with banner at the top and some flowers growing up it. It looks good. I wished I'd bought one once I saw it. might do one more round of the camps before the event ends tomorrow so I can get one for myself.

By the time I'd finished placing everything I could barely get up and down the stairs. My bedroom looks particularly cramped, even after I took out one of the beds that was already there.

I know I complained last time about the size of the rooms but it's not so much that - it's more that I seem to have acquired a hell of a lot of furniture for someone who hasn't actively played the game since a few months after launch. It's partly because Amazon keep giving house items away with the Prime Gaming deals but mostly because the one thing I keep coming back for are holiday events and New World seems to have those pretty regularly.

In an irritable report on a recent Q&A with the devs, MMO Bomb revealed that "Going forward, the focus will be less on Seasonal narrative content". At first I misunderstood that to mean less holiday content and I actually felt mildly relieved. It doesn't mean that, of course. It's not that kind of seasonal content they're talking about.

Flowers in barrel from this event. Other flowers... not sure.

Troy Blackburn at MMO Bomb also transmitted the apparent annoyance of the NW player-base with Amazon Games' constant harping on about the much-hyped "June Announcement". Even as a casual observer - and even more casual player - I have to agree that whatever it is they're keeping secret, it's going to have to be something truly spectacular now, just to justify the fuss they've been making over it.

Most of the speculation I've seen revolves around either a Console port or conversion to some sort of Free To Play business model, neither of which seems worth waiting months to announce. I guess either would potentially bring in a surge of new players, which seems to be one of the main expectations everyone has for the change, whatever it turns out to be, but plenty of other MMORPGs have either added a console client or gone F2P but none I remember ever chose to make a big secret of it like this.

If it's not that, though, I don't know what it might be, unless they're going to announce that Amazon's next big in-house video project is going to be a New World TV show. That would be a big deal and it would make a great setting for one, too. 

I doubt it's that, though. What I do think is that when we find out, pretty much everyone is going to be disappointed. I'll be happy to be proved wrong but I think it's a safe bet I won't be.

Failing some amazing development that none of us has even thought of, then, I expect my next visit to New World will be for whatever the holiday after Springtide might be. When it comes, I just hope there's something to get other than furniture. My character lives alone and she already has four beds...

Jumpstyle Is Not A Crime

Since I ran up against the buffers in Nightingale I've been game-hopping like crazy. Typically, when I was spending all my time in one game, I complained about feeling trapped. Now I'm back to jumping between half a dozen games it's giving me the jitters. There's no pleasing some people.

The games I'm "playing" just now (Although that's a very fancy word for what I'm actually doing when I log into some of them.) are:

• New World
• AdventureQuest 3D
• Once Human Closed Beta 3
• EverQuest II
• Nightingale
• The Dungeon of Nahalbeuk: Amulet of Chaos

I don't have one of those fancy apps that tallies exactly how much time I spend in each of them but I can say with a fair degree of confidence that it isn't a lot. I doubt it's more than a couple of hours altogether most days.

As well as those six, I have a mental list of about twice as many games I feel I ought to be playing - or could be playing - or was in the middle of playing before I stopped for no good reason. Those include:

• Valheim
• Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit
• Tales Noir Preludes
• Imposter Factory
• Lake
• My Time At Sandrock

There are more - potentially a lot more - but that's a round dozen so I'll call it there, just so I have time to give a little gloss on each of them, starting with the ones I'm at least managing to log into once in a while:

New World - I came back for the Spring event and kind of hung around. I've been logging in most days to do the rounds of the settlements and festival camps so I can pick up my freebies, especially the tokens. I've bought some of the furniture I wanted and I have a couple more days to get the rest. I need to remember to spend everything I've earned because the event currency vanishes along with the event itself a tthe end of April.

Other than that, I've done a few quests and I feel like I might carry on and do a few more, just for the fun of it. Questing in New World is generally entertaining and I see new quest markers everywhere I go. Unfortunately, I'd need to buy the expansion to level any further and I think it's a bit steep at £25.  I'm somewhat discouraged to do too much questing while the xp goes nowhere so I'll probably shelve this one soon in anticipation of whatever the Big Announcement in June might be. Maybe that will make it feel like it's worth buying the DLC.

AdventureQuest 3D - I log in every day just to collect my three daily chests. There are two reasons I keep doing it: 1) The first chest always gives some cash shop currency and I want some for housing items and 2) AQ3D has by far the fastest login process I've ever seen. 

Seriously, it's like lightning. I wish every MMORPG was even half as fast. I just timed it and it took 28 seconds from Pressing "Play" in Steam to looking at my character in game. I can log in, get my chests and be back in Steam in under a minute although I don't usually go quite that fast. Of course, I'm not actually playing the game but there's certainly nothing being put in my way if I wanted to, which is more than I can say about a lot of games - *cough* Lord of the Rings *cough*

Once Human CB3 - I logged into this one for the first time in a couple of weeks last night and my house was gone! That was a shock. It turned out to be more of a feature than a glitch, though. It seems that if you don't log in for a while (I don't know what the time-limit is.) your house automatically gets copied and stored using the system designed for moving home. 

All you have to do to restore it is find a new spot and put down the blueprint and it magically reappears, just as it was, with all the furniture in the right place. It seems like a very ingenious solution to the endless problem all games with open-world housing have, namely absentee homeowners. This way, no-one has to look at hundreds of abandoned homes and all the best building spots can be taken by people who are going to use them.

Once Human has a lot of clever design features like that. Yesterday I ran across the game's ingenious solution to that other annoying trope of so many F2P MMORPGs, player-owned strip malls. You must have seen them; dozens, scores, hundreds of stalls put up by players to sell their goods, all crammed together in a particularly ugly form of urban blight.

In OH, players sell from pick-up trucks on which they place vending machines. These fit so well into the post-apocalyptic environment, already littered as it is with broken-down vehicles and machinery, it took me a good while to realize what they were. They also have the benefit of all being different. I haven't found out how you get one yet but it looks as though once you have one, you can furnish and decorate it like a room in your house. I wonder if you can also drive about in it? There are vehicles in the game, so I don't see why not.

I want to do at least one more full post about Once Human soonish, so I'll leave it at that for now. I don't plan on playing much more of CB3 but that's only because I want to save my enthusiasm for when the game goes live. I did do some exploring yesterday, though, which is where all the pictures in this post came from. It's fun just driving around on my motorcycle, looking at the scenery. I might do some more of that before the beta ends.

EverQuest II - I'm in and out of this one as usual. This morning I finished the Signature Questline from the current expansion, Ballads of Zimarra, which would normally be a big moment. Instead it turned out to be something of an anti-climax. 

For one thing, it's the first expansion for a long time where finishing the Sig hasn't also put me at the level cap. My Berserker is still only half way through Level 128. For another, there isn't a big, explosive ending to the storyline - just a regular fight with a named mob I wouldn't even call a Boss, followed by a hand-in, at which point you get a pop-up telling you the Sig line is finished.

It transpires there's a reason for that. The Signature Quest might have stopped but the quest faucet is still jammed full on. Other NPCs nearby immediately sprout feathers over their heads and everything carries on as before. I looked ahead on the wiki and there are tons more quests of all sorts in the expansion, many in direct line of sequence from the Sig. 

I'm not sure why they've done it this way although no doubt there are reasons. It's fine with me, anyway. Now I can just carry on chipping away until I eventually hit 130. I'd like to get it done before the Anashti Sul server arrives in June. That shouldn't be too hard...

Nightingale - As I said the other day, the changes they've made aren't significant enough to get me back playing regularly again. I would like to re-visit all the vendors so I can buy stuff directly from the UI in future, though. That would be a project in itself.

The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: Amulet of Chaos - The wild card on this list, being both the only game that's both solo and offline. It's also the one I've been playing the most. I've had a session most evenings, usually lasting a couple of hours, which is sometimes as long as it takes to finish a single battle.

I really like the gameplay. It's one of those XCom-style, turn-based, tactical group combat games, only with a high-fantasy skin. Lots of setting people on fire, knocking them down and hiding behind things until someone blows them up. All of that.

It's also - loosely - a parody and I was wary of what that might mean in the way of "humor" but it's largely okay. The voice acting is just the right side of amateurish and the jokes rise just above embarrassingly cliched. I wouldn't call it witty or original but it raises the odd smile and the characters... have character.

The game also seems to go on forever. I feel like I've been playing it for months. I know I'm doing all the side quests but I feel if I wasn't my party wouldn't be tough enough to handle the main quest so it doesn't feel like that's much of an option. Anyway, I'm enjoying it and I hope one day I might even finish it.

And now the ones I'm thinking - but not doing much - about...

Valheim  - Wilhelm writing about this one again reminds  me I ought to go back and at least take a look at the Mistlands. I had a terrible start with that biome, although from what Wilhelm says that was likely the developers' intention. 

I'm not even going to bother trying to play the game properly any more but luckily I don't need to because I've switched all the mobs to Passive, meaning I can go explore without fear of being jumpd on by a spider the size of an elephant, moving as fast as a cheetah. I mean, does that sound like fun to anyone?

I was tempted to go back and have a wander around yesterday but then I thought about the final biome, Ashlands, which is in testing now and should be going live in a matter of weeks. It probably makes more sense to wait for that and then explore both biomes together. If I do, I won't be switching mob aggro on for that either, I'll tell you that for nothing!

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit - I bought this in January. Haven't even logged in yet. Every time I see it in my Steam Library I feel uncomfortable. Maybe I'll start on it as soon as I finish Naheulbeuk.

Tales Noir Preludes  - I bought this around the same time and played it right away. I was really enjoying it but then I stopped, for no reason I can recall. I keep meaning to carry on from where I left off but somehow I never do. Must try harder.

Imposter Factory - Much the same story for this one, although I got further before I stopped.

Lake - And this one! I have no idea why this keeps happening. I have a post in mind to write about Lake, too. Something very odd happens in it. Twice, in fact. 

I thought I might already have posted about that but search suggests I haven't. I guess I could tell you what the Odd Thing is now but there's still the outside possibility it might happen more than twice, so I really ought to finish the game first, just in case.

My Time At Sandrock - Will I ever play this damn game? I very much doubt it. 

I almost wish I hadn't bought it, now. I feel like its whole schtick has been done by so many other games, I can't really see the point. Then again, the My Time At... games probably do it better than most of them, so why play any of those, when I already have this one installed? 

And there we have it. Not so much a post, more of a to-do list. Maybe putting it all down on paper will even inspire me to get some of it done.

I kinda doubt it but you have to try something, don't you?