That Crazy Feline

Here's an existential question for a Wednesday: why spend time and energy on a character in game you know you have no intention of playing? Why do they need to look good, when absolutely no-one, real or fictional, is ever going to see them?

Don't look at me. I don't know either. But we all do it, right?

Okay, some of us do it. It's not just me. 

I'm pretty sure it's not just me...

It's not like I'm even a cat person any more. Well, I am, I'm just not only a cat person. I was a cat person pretty much exclusively for half a century or so but then, for reasons we won't go into right now, I turned into a cat-and fox person and then fox took over for a while.

Latterly, since we got Beryl, I have also become a dog person, something I never expected, although that's a different kind of "person" altogether. I like dogs a lot now but I don't identify as a dog. Ew!

Expanding a little on that, I find it very easy to imagine having a dog pet in a game but very hard to imagine dressing my character up as a dog. As a cat, though? (Or a fox.) Just try and stop me!

As I think I mentioned a couple of times, Once Human has been eating every other game's lunch around here for the best part of a month now. Before it arrived I was playing Wuthering Waves every day but I was also logging in to AdventureQuest 3D, purely to open my three, free daily chests. 

The reason I was doing that was because AQ3D added housing a while back. Because I have a Pavlovian reaction to housing in games, the  moment I learned I could have a house in Battleon, the capital city, I had to have one. Never mind I don't play AQ3D more than a few minutes a year. Never mind I will never hang out in that house or show it to anyone or probably even write another post about it. Still had to jump through all the hoops to get one.

Once I had it, of course I wanted it to look good. I imagine there are plenty of ways to work on that by playing the game but I've tried playing AQ3D and honestly, although it has a ridiculous amount of content, none of it ever grabs me. The combat is very slow and the graphics aren't really to my taste so even exploring isn't all that appealing.

You don't actually need to play the game to decorate your house, of course. You can buy housing items in the cash shop because why else have housing in a F2P game at all? 

I hope it goes without saying that I am not going to pay actual money for pixel furniture in a game I don't even play. I may be whimsical but I'm not crazy. Well, not completely, althogh apparently I am sufficiently dislocated from reality to consider it worth my while to log in every day to see if I can grab a few coins to put towards a rug or a lamp one day.

The daily log-in reward gives you three chests to open, the first of which always contains some cash shop currency. Usually it's a pitiful amount. Single figures in a game where basic items are priced in hundreds. Once in a while you can get a bit more. I had thirty or so one time. Mostly, though, it's peanuts.

Still, peanuts add up, as any mathematically-inclined elephant will tell you. After a few months of logging in religiously I had about 1600 of whatever the currency is called. 

Hang on, I'll look it up...Dragon Crystals, that's it.

I stopped logging in to AQ3D when I started playing Once Human. In fact, I stopped paying attention to any other games for a few weeks but as we near the end of the first season and I wait to find out just how that's going to work, my motivation there has dropped and my desire to play obsessively has diminished. I suspect that may turn into a problem for the game going forward but we won't have long to wait now to find out for sure.

On Monday I actually logged into EverQuest II for the first time in weeks, mostly to collect my free play-money, something you have to do once a month or you lose it, even though the stipend is part of the All Access sub. While I was there I even did some content. I've missed most of the big, summer event sequence that takes in several holiday festivals but the final one, Oceansfull, is still running and I did the main dungeon for that one. It was a lot of fun and quite profitable in terms of upgrades.

I say upgrades... I haven't gotten around to equipping them yet and I'm not sure I will. The big, mid-year Game Update is in beta right now and when that goes live I'm sure the drops and rewards will raise the item level cap yet again, making the stuff I got two days ago obsolete. Then a month or two later we'll have Pandas, meaning upgrades to everything yet again and a month after that the next expansion will come out and...

Well, you get the picture. It happens in every game but in EQII it happens at the very least four times a year, every year. It can be a bit much. I was quite into it for a while - upgrading is weirdly satisfying in its own right, regardless of how useful it is - but I think I might take a break and skip all the interim steps until the expansion arrives in December. 

At least, now I'm coming down off my Once human high, I'm starting to pay attention to what my other options are. Tomorrow there's the second major update to Wuthering Waves so I'll most likely go back for a while. 

I did consider the Guild Wars 2 expansion, dropping next week, for the sole reason that it adds housing to the game but it costs money and I'm not convinced I want what looks to be GW2's typically half-assed version of owning a home enough to pay for it. Which, given my aforementioned housing obsession, says a lot about my opinion of GW2 these days.

But enough about housing (If such a thing could ever be possible.) You may recall, although no-one could blame if you didn't, that I started off talking about cats. 

You may also remember that 8 August was International Cat Day. Or maybe you don't because it seemed to get surprisingly little attention, probably because there are thousands of Something Days every year, all piling up against each other like junk mail on a 1980s doormat.

According to Wikipedia, whch has a very short entry on the subject, "International Cat Day is a celebration which takes place on 8 August of every year. It was created in 2002 by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. It is a day to raise awareness for cats and learn about ways to help and protect them."

I'd have thought if there was one animal that didn't need awareness about it raised it would have to be the cat. Cats infamously rule the internet and are ubiquitous in all forms of popular culture around the world. In some countries, cat-worship appears to be an almost un-ironic national stereotype.

Nevertheless, cats have their day and at least one game I nominally play has decided to honor it. If anyone knows of any others that have, I'd be interested to hear about it because I didn't spot anything else in my feeds this year. I'm surprised Gamigo didn't come up with a quiz about cats for Rift. That does seem to be how they like to pretend they're still invested in the game these days.

AQ3D went all-in on the cat theme with a whole bunch of purchaseable cat-themed items - cat pets that follow you about, sleeping cats for your home, cat-paw-and-claw weapons and the one that caught my eye - Cat Onesies. Some of these can be bought for real money in the cash shop, others require a special event currency - Cat Fur - that can only be obtained by defeating the Cat Day Boss, an Astral Tiger.

There's a Cat Day vendor by the name of Not Alma (I'd explain but life's too short.) and the regular Pet vendor, Aria, also has a lot of new, cat-related stock. In keeping with AQ3D's consistent drive to make everything immediately accessible to everyone all the time, especially if makes them money, you can just click on the event notification in-game to be taken straight to the shops.

Which I did as soon as I logged in this morning. Then I spent an hour (Yes, really. A whole hour.) browsing the cat-wear, trying it on, deciding what to buy, buying it and finding somewhere good to pose for the pictures. It's far too difficult in most games to find a nice, plain wall to pose against.

It wouldn't have taken quite so long if I hadn't had to work out how to clear my bags, which were so full from the free stuff I'd been getting from the log-in rewards the vendors wouldn't let me spend any money until I made some space for what I wanted to buy. I even took a swipe at the big tiger to see if I could snatch some fur. I knew it was suicide but what the heck. There's no death penalty to speak of. It was worth a shot.

I had almost exactly just enough Dragon Crystals to buy the three pieces for the Onesie. Kind of a dumb thing to call it, if you ask me, when you also need a hat and a tail for the full look. Might as well call it a set and have done with it.

I would have liked either the black or the ginger one but both were only available for Fur. For Dragon Crystals you get a choice of either pink or grey. I went with grey, which I think looks very stylish. Pink would have looked... pink.

I would have liked to have bought the cat pet, Skratch, to complete the look but I didn't have the crystals. Maybe next year. I may not play AQ3D but that doesn't mean I won't do all this again next time it comes arouind. Or whenever I see something I like.

Why? Probably best not to think about that too much.

If I Could Talk To The Animals...

I could post about something else today but I don't want to so here are some more of my unstructured, rambling, unnecessarily detailed thoughts about Wuthering Waves. I might be getting a bit obsessed with it. It happens.

With that in mind, perhaps it's as well that this morning I reached the point where the story takes a breather and you have to increase your "Union Level" to find out what happens next. Just don't ask me what Union it is. I don't remember joining and I'm pretty sure I haven't paid my dues.

When I got the message about it, it told me I needed to be UL14 to carry on with the story. I was only UL 8, so it seemed like it might take a while.

There was a helpful list of things I could do to earn Union XP. My feeling was the developers would prefer I do a lot of dailies or, failing that, spent some currency they would probably be able to sell me in the cash shop. That made me glum for a moment until I read on and realized I could just do some quests and go exploring instead.

Just about everything seems to give some Union XP, including wandering around the open world, exploring, beating up Tacet Discords, engaging in challenges of various kinds and generally behaving as though it was an MMORPG. That suits me just fine. For now, anyway.

At some point, no doubt, I'll have explored everything there is to explore in the local area, done all the quests, bested or failed at all the challenges, but by then, with luck, I'll have increased my standing with the union sufficiently to carry on with the story, which in turn will send me to another area, where I can start the cycle all over again. 

Or so I hope. There's the small matter of vertical progression to consider, something about which I'm currently quite ill-informed, not having taken the time or trouble to do any research on it whatsoever. In fact, I haven't bothered in the slightest with what I'm assuming will at some point become the central tenet of gameplay, namely upgrading my gear and filling out my roster of... hang on, what do they call them here? Ah yes, Resonators. 

In some gacha games I've played, ignoring the core purpose of the game, i.e. spending money on power (Or, more realistically, the slim chance of power.) does eventually mean you can't win the fights. Not being able to win the fights means you can't see the rest of the story and sometimes it means you can't even see the rest of the world either. 

Then there are the games where you can pretty much pootle around as long as you want, doing all kinds of stuff so long as it doesn't further the story. In those games, if you're willing to forget about progression, the whole gacha aspect fades into insignificance. Noah's Heart was like that, which is one reason I stayed with it for so long.

It's too early to say which way WW leans but should it turn out to be the former, I'm covered. I found a full edit of the entire story so far on YouTube, so if I get roadblocked by bosses I can't beat, I can just go watch that instead. 

Always providing I can find a spare seven hours, that is. That's how long the cut scenes last if you string them all together. Longer than the original Star Wars trilogy. And probably... no, better not go there.

Although I am invested in finding out what's going on, what I'd most like to be doing in the game right now has nothing to do with the main storyline, compelling though it is. And it has even less to do with whacking mobs with my sword, something I'd happily do without altogether. 

What I'd really like to do is carry on working with Xuanyin, the self-styled "citizen scientist" who's developing an app that translates the language of animals into English. (Well, presumably into Mandarin then into English, since Kuro Games, the developer of Wuthering Waves, is based in Guangdong.)

The app is supposed to work on any animal but the experiment I helped out with inevitably involved a cat. You can't walk down the street in Huangdong without tripping over one.

I met Xuanyin on a bridge in the city, where she immediately put herself into my good books by not only knowing who I was but also calling me by my actual name! Yes, alright, I had to prompt her. But she knew who I was without my having to use the cursed R word. 

That's happened twice now, which makes the game's insistence on calling me "Rover" even more annoying. I know it knows who I am. It's just being deliberately awkward about it. Either that or someone on the writing team isn't talking to someone else.

There does occasionally seem to be a certain disconnect between departments in Wuthering Waves. For example, as you can clearly see in the screenshots, the cat Xuanyin and I were talking to is a short-haired calico (Or tortoiseshell as we call them where I come from.) It also looks full-grown to me. Whoever wrote the dialog thinks otherwise.

Both Xuanyin and the descriptive text describe the cat as a "hairless kitten". Xuanyin even has a short speech, which I unortunately neglected to screenshot, in which she wonders what breed it might be. Evidently the art department didn't get the full brief.

I wasn't too bothered with all of that. I was much more interested in the prospect of being able to Doolittle all the animals in the game. When Xuanyin added the app to my gourd, the local nickname for the do-it-all communication device everyone carries on their belt, I thought I'd be getting a new ability to add to my Utilities along with the Grapple, the Scanner, the Camera and the other one I can't think of right now.

Sadly not. After we'd tested the translation on the cat-kitten and found out she wanted snacks (Not sure we really needed an app for that.) Xuanyin gave me a lecture on the dangers of feeding human food to animals, then sent me off to find some Milky Fish Soup.

Luckily I remembered seeing both the cooking station and the food vendor on a high boardwalk in the upper city. I'd been wanting to try my hand at cooking and this seemed like the time - start with cat food and work my way up. 

The moment I got to the cookery station, which is in back of a resturant, Panhua, the chef and proprietor, started in on me about some girl at the counter who just wouldn't stop crying. That led to a literal sob story about the girl's grandfather and some spicy dish he used to make for her when she was a tearful tot and how she couldn't find it anywhere any more.

The restaurant-owner offered to make it for her but of course she didn't have all the ingredients and she couldn't leave the restaurant to go get them, so she asked me if I'd go instead. Or maybe I offered. My character is helpful like that. Unlike me. 

I was headed there anyway, of course, so it wasn't such a great favor. I stopped at the stove on the way, just long enough to check the soup recipe. I had nearly everything. Not surprising since I've been picking up random cooking mats since day one. I was only missing the fish.

At the food vendor I got everything I needed both for the spicy recipe and my soup. I also got a call from my pal Chixia, asking me out to dinner. We fixed to meet at the restaurant I'd just come from, apparently one of Chixia's faves anyway, so that all worked out. Meanwhile, Chixia told me how Panhua and Mahe, the food vendor, have one of those Diane and Sam relationships so beloved of sitcoms and we had a good laugh about that.

Mahe and Chixia engage in a nice-off.

I could go on. It was a strong sequence that flowed really well. I'm still not sure if it was a series of fortuitous co-incidences or a script that felt a lot more organic and unplanned than it probably was. The sheer triviality of it all added hugely to its appeal.

To cut to the chase, I made the Milky Fish Soup, went back to Xuanyin, gave the soup to the cat and then the translation app went on the fritz and Xuanyin took it back for adjustments so I don't get to talk to the animals after all. Just that one cat. I'm hoping that's not the last I'll hear about the Animal Language Translator Module but I fear it might be.

It would be exceedingly handy to be able to talk to cats. They do seem to play a surprisingly large role in the game. Not only are there cats all over the city, as I said, but I've already done two quests featuring felines, the other being to find a missing cat called Lulu, who turned out to be hiding at the top of a very tall tree. 

That one ended with Lulu's owner, who seemed more than a little unhinged, suggesting, with disturbing intensity, that Lulu and I might like to get married. I really should have taken some screenshots but I was too stunned by the turn the conversation had taken to hit the button.

A cat even plays a significant part in the main storyline. Last night, the inevitable anti-hero and his slinky sister, both dressed all in red and looking like KPop idols, arrived to try and convince me my current friends were all part of some dark conspiracy, which of course was exactly what those same friends just been telling me about the Siblings in Scarlet. 

Scar, for that is the bad boy's name, subtlety not being in any way relevant here, used a cute cat to trick Yangyang into falling into a trans-dimensional trap, just so he could monologue at me for what seemed like  - and indeed very probably was - a full half hour. His trap worked because of course no-one in this game can resist the charms of a cute li'l kitty-cat.

I certainly can't. Nor a cute li'l puppy dog either, although I haven't seen one of those yet. I hope there are some. I hope there are plenty more quests featuring cats and dogs, too. I'll happily do 'em all.

And since that almost sounds like a punchline, I think I'll end this post there. That way it'll look like I had it all planned out when I sat down to write it. 

Which I did. 

Of course.

Feline Weird In Lost Ark

Here are some screenshots. I think they sum up just what a freakishly weird game Lost Ark is better than anything I could put into in words.

A six-foot tall, black and white cat, an unnerving, yellow sparkle in its eye, a gold bell on its crimson collar, sprawls in the middle of a cobbled city street. The cat leans back in a disturbingly human pose. Beside the cat sits a large, white rabbit. Strapped to the bunny's back are a pair of ornate leather panniers and a scroll case as though it were a beast of burden. Behind the unnatural pair an imposing, high-renaissance ceremonial arch reaches towards the blue sky. Heroic statues salute. Guards stand at attention. Children with wooden swords play at being soldiers. No-one seems to find anything about the scene remotely unusual.

Now the cat is standing up. From somewhere (Who knows where?) it has produced a pistol. It stands in a dueling pose, the gun in front of the eye that doesn't sparkle, the other arm (Hand? Paw?) concealed behind its back. The rabbit, unconcerned, seems to be playing with something on the ground.

The pistol vanishes. The cat begins to dance. The cat has moves. The cat wants you to know about them. The rabbit pays the cat no mind. Neither does anyone else.

As if concealing a weapon while naked isn't enough, the cat brings out a six-foot hoverboard. From where, again, who can say? The board, vividly illustrated, is decorated with, among other things, an embossed head. Whose head? Of what creature? That, at least, can be explained.

Although there is no photographic evidence to prove it, that is the image of a known associate of the cat, a small, teardrop-shaped entity with appendages that could as easily be leaves as ears. The cat has been seen walking the streets with the leaf-headed creature by its side. Where the creature is now is as much a mystery as where the hoverboard came from.

The cat, justifiably proud of its ability to dance while standing on a hoverboard, performs for its own amusement. No-one watches. No-one cares. The city has only recently avoided being destroyed by fire during a demonic invasion. The entire nation is locked in an existential struggle with the forces of darkness. A cat on a hoverboard doesn't merit a second glance.

As I said in a comment to Aywren, who posted pictures of her character in Lost Ark, dressed as a mouse "I was already having trouble trying to work out just what sort of game Lost Ark was trying to be but now these costumes are part of it I think I’ll just give up trying. Clearly, whoever’s behind it just doesn’t care, so why should we?"

Not Everything's Connected (It Is, Though...)

Feeling super-lazy and uninspired today so I'm just going to throw out a few scraps and not even pretend there's a theme. If you usually skip the music posts, scroll down past the videos. Things get gamey down there. Also, honestly? The first part's not really about music. More about pets dying. So you might want to skip that anyway, if it's a trigger.

Everyone left good with that? Okay. Let's start with something sad.

We all like Best Coast, right? I mean, how could you not? They're like some kind of natural high. I've listened to plenty of their sun-fuzzed, out of focus tunes, although the only one I have in my files is this:

Snacks was Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino's cat but he was much more than that, as cats can be in this modern world. "He was not just my cat. He belonged to all of you. He was the third member of this band. Our mascot. Our cover star." she says. Now he's gone. Farewell Snacks. Sleep peacefully in the eternal California sun.

It might be I'm feeling a bit more alert than usual to potential pet trauma right now. There's been no animal in this house for quite a few years (Apart from those pesky mice that keep getting in through the pipes under the sink.) but we're getting a puppy in a few weeks (Well, Mrs. Bhagpuss is getting a puppy and that means I'm getting a puppy by association.) 

We have talked about getting a kitten at the same time so they'd grow up together but I think it might be a bit too much all in one go. Also, not to be morbid about it, but as the wonderful Pony Up put it...

... is that they die. Kind of puts you off getting involved in the first place, doesn't it? Although, heaven knows, it's hardly news to me. I've had enough pets that have died over the years. I'm not sure whether having two at a time would double the odds or halve them. It might be considered hedging your bets but then again it might just be reckless.

And at our age there's the ever more pertinent question of what happens if they outlive you? Like, I wonder what happened to Black Raoul? I'd never heard of Raoul until this morning but I'd heard of his owner, Pat Fish, sometimes known as The Jazz Butcher. I own at least one album by him and I saw him play live a couple of times. Pat, that is, not Raoul.

Raoul was Pat's cat and Pat died last year. I guess someone else feeds him now. Raoul, that is, not Pat. Despite being dead, The Jazz Butcher has a new album out this month, which is how these things work. I read a review of it right after I heard about Snacks. I imagine that's why one tiny fact buried in the meat of the piece popped out at me: "apparently the “Black Raoul” who Fish chants about is known to hardcore fans as his cat." And also to the rest of us, now.

I was never a hardcore fan of The Jazz Butcher (The name of the band, really, not its leader.) but there was a time I liked either him or them well enough to name my apazine after a lyric from one of their songs. I called it "Great Big Weather Kind of Outburst" because that's the kind of thing I thought was smart back then. And still do.

At least I think it was from one of their songs. Damned if I can remember which one and the internet's no help. Doesn't really matter, anyway. We were talking about Black Raoul and he gets his namecheck in the one I already linked.

Enough about dead pop stars and their cats. Or pop stars and their dead cats. Except to note that a) there are a lot of them b) there are more of them all the time and c) I could totally get another post out of this...

Change of subject.

Lost Ark is out this week. I know, because people have been writing about it and now they're playing it. Enough of them to bring Steam to its knees, apparently. And that's just in Early Access. Wait until the official launch tomorrow.

I have absolutely no interest in Lost Ark whatsoever. It's pretty much the poster child for "Games That Don't Interest Bhagpuss". (That was fun! Talking about yourself in the third person is tight! And so is stealing other peoples' catchphrases!) Even so, I've been bracing myself for an explosion of posts about the game across the blogosphere...

Hasn't really happened yet. Only a handful of people have mentioned it so far. I hadn't realised until I read Kaylriene's first impressions that Lost Ark was free to play. I'd assumed there'd be an up-front cost of some kind. And it's on Steam. I suppose that makes it marginally more likely I might end up trying it at some point but there's no room in my schedule right now even if I wanted to give it a go.

The final piece of news I propose to stuff screaming into this grab-bag of unrelated trivia is this. By the way, isn't it annoying, the way I'm hyperlinking all this stuff without context so the only way to find out what I'm talking about is to click through? I wonder if that's considered good practice or bad? I could see it going either way.

For those with mouse fatigue, here's the headline in question "Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit Movie Rights Up For Sale This Week" And here's the tag that follows "Amazon is considered a favorite to buy them." 

It's all a tad confusing. There seem to be a lot of rights involved in the sale. The package "includes many movie, merchandising, gaming, and live event rights" and some of them don't seem to be exclusive. Depending which report you read, it seems the existing owners and operators of related properties and spin-offs shouldn't be affected. Maybe.

Where that leaves Standing Stone and Lord of the Rings Online, I guess we'll find out. If Amazon do end up winning the bidding war, I wonder if they might even bring that mmorpg they killed back to life? Or maybe TenCent will buy the rights and start it up again.

Something new for LotRO players to worry about, anyway. There's always something, isn't there?

Lost Cat

Remember the big cats? They're back.

In fact, if you believe the patch notes, they're multiplying:

New cats, visible while under the effect of the Chatoyant Elixir or similar effects, have been added to each major city.

The patch happened on Tuesday but I didn't get around to reading the notes for a couple of days. By the time I dropped into the forums to see what might have changed there was an additional note:

We have temporarily disabled the additional visual effects of the Chatoyant Lens while we address an issue.

 Lens? What lens? 

Ah, that lens!

I went to Hooligan's Row to get one. All the holiday event vendors are hidden away down there. I'd completely forgotten about them. Why they're tucked away in such an obscure spot beats me. You'd think ANet didn't want people to find them.

The vendor is a cat, naturally. All the cat sells are chatoyant elixirs and the lens. The lens costs ten elixirs. The elixirs cost five tiger's eye pebbles and a beryl orb each. At current prices, as this reddit thread points out, it's much cheaper to buy the ten elixirs on the Trading Post than it is to buy them from the cat.

I didn't need to do either because I had fifteen chatoyant elixirs in my bag from last year. See? I said they'd come in useful.

The lens is a rare quality accessory with appropriately feline stats. The rubric tells you it "causes you to see extra cats while equipped".

I slotted it and went looking.

I couldn't see any new cats. I couldn't see any old cats. I went to a few of the places I remembered the giant cats from last time and there was nothing.

Maybe it was the temporary disablement. Perhaps it disabled all the cats even though that's clearly not what the note said.

I left it for the while and went to do something else. Then this morning when I logged in I thought I'd try again.

Bingo! Big cat sighted in Gendarran Fields!

Only one of the old ones, though. I wanted to see a new one but not so much that I wanted to run around all the big cities searching for them. The patch was a few days old. Someone would have updated the wiki. Someone would have posted a list. With screenshots, most likely.

Yeah, you'd think. But nope. Nothing. Nada. Not a sausage.

No-one cares for cats any more, it seems. I tried all the obvious places - the forums, the wiki, reddit. I asked google. I searched "giant cats" and "big cats" and "new cats" and "gigantic cats". No-one's saying anything about any of them.

Even that reddit post on the lens only went up this morning. The patch was Tuesday. It wouldn't be like this if Dulfy was still around, that's all I'm saying...

So I went and looked for myself. I tried Lion's Arch first. The cat in the water was there. No-one was looking at him. I was the only one there. Last year there was a crowd but I guess giant cats are old news.

I did a lap of L.A. looking up at the sky. I got a crick in my neck but I never saw another giant cat.

Then I tried Divinity's Reach. Found the one in Melandru's Plaza right away. Did another circuit of the city: no joy. Opened a few new waypoints, that was all.

Finally I tried Hoelbrak. It's probably the most compact of the main cities. Last year's cat was there. Couldn't see another.

It wasn't that the Lens wasn't working. Not if you trust the patch notes:

Thank you for your patience while we addressed this issue. The content has been re-enabled.

It might be me, of course. It occured to me the patch note says "new cats". It doesn't say "new giant cats". Last year's event included a load of normal-sized cats that appeared around you now and then. You could touch them and get a temporary buff. Maybe it meant there were new ones of those?

That would be... unexciting. And come to think of it I haven't seen any of those cats either. Not even the old ones.

I'm calling off the search for now. Maybe there are new big cats and maybe there aren't. Maybe that's the April Fools part of it all. I wouldn't put it past ANet. They've done worse.

If someone does post a list before the event ends in a couple of weeks I'll add it here. Then I'll go round and take some pictures. Otherwise, I think I'll let sleeping cats lie.

Kitty, Kitty, Please Come Here

Following on from yesterday's post, here are some more pictures of cats. This is the Internet, right? It's not like there's a quota.

As I added in an edit late in the afternoon, I was wrong about the big cat only appearing in Lion's Arch. There was one in every starting city. It took me a while but I found them all.

First I went to Hoelbrak, simply because that was where the cat was in a screenshot someone posted on the forums. The moment I waypointed in I could see the creature looming over the mountain tops from half a city away.

Finding the exact location in most of the cities turned out to be a case of looking for players hanging in the air on their flapdoodle mounts like a bunch of rubbernecking tourists on hang-gliders. It made for a number of amusing screenshots, where the giant cats looked like they were about to swat the pesky players out of the sky. Sadly, they never did.

Someone on the forums had posted a list of directions on how to find each cat. The format was just like what ArenaNet uses for "quests":

LA = Seek for the Lighthouse.
Hoelbrak = A good view from the mountains.
Rata Sum = Do I see a shiny box?
Divinity Reach = Attack of the Titans Cats.
The Grove = I can see the whole tree here!
Black citadel = The witch cat is present where the blood prince appeared.

The poster later clarified that they'd made them up themselves, which is going above and beyond, I'd say.

Most of them were very obvious and easy to find. The one in Rata Sum was right next to the Super Adventure Box zone-in. It was also the only cat that was on all fours and moving. It seemed to be doing some kind of slow dog-paddle (cat-paddle is not a thing, more's the pity) in mid-air. It was also a total pig to get a decent screnshot of due to the annoying tree on the right.

I had some trouble finding the cat in Sylvari starting area The Grove but that was mostly because the place is a pain to navigate at the best of times, with lifts and spiral stairways and a peculiar looped layout. It turned out to be right next to the zone to Caledon Forest so I could have saved myself a lot of running about if I'd come in that way.

By far the toughest to spot was the cat in Charr stronghold, the Black Citadel. Of course, that was the city I went to first of all yesterday, which is why I originally thought the rumors of cats in the starting city were false.

The Black Citadel cat is way back in the Nolani Ruins, a place no-one goes outside of their Charr personal story or Halloween, when there's an instanced event there. You can't see it from any other part of the city, either, except for one of the viewing gantries.

It was worth the effort. It's a witch's cat in a witch's hat. The same one that rides the broomstick most of my characters use as a glider.

And that was that for cats. Or so I thought, until I logged into EverQuest to set my Overseer quests and saw...

That's the wallpaper from the (in)famous Cat Room as applied to the Character Select screen in honor of Bristlebane's high holy day, April the first. The Cat Room was a place GMs used to use to summon recalcitrant players for a dressing down. According to this thread the cat in the picture belonged to one of the devs and was called Mitty. You could also break into the room from various locations as evidenced in this video:

I did that once but not in Befallen. Somewhere in Kunark, I think it was. And now I'm rambling. Enough with the cats.

Aren't you glad this only happens once a year?

All Hail The King Of The Cats: GW2

Guild Wars 2 has something of a checkered history when it comes to April Fools Day. There was the mega-popular Super Adventure Box in 2013 but then, two years later, there was the fixed wing fiasco that led many people to stop playing for the duration.

Since then, SAB has become an annual holiday in its own right and ArenaNet have become much more circumspect about pissing people off for the sake of a gag. This year they've come up with something that's likely to amuse most, delight some and irritate only a few - ailurophobes.

I was setting my Overseer missions in EverQuest II this morning when Mrs Bhagpuss came in to tell me there was something happening in Tyria. I finished up what I was doing and logged in to find I had mail.

Opening the envelope revealed a communication - of sorts - from His Royal Majesty, First Claw of the Realms and Conqueror of the Sunbeam Throne, the King of All Cats. That's some title for a cat that can't even speak English.

The directions sent me to Lion's Arch, appropriately, where a lot of people were running around in a frenzy, talking across each other in map chat and generally behaving like something big was happening.

Which it really wasn't. Mrs Bhagpuss popped up a party invite and I went to join her. She was treading water at the edge of the L.A. harbor, staring up at the biggest cat ever seen in Tyria.

We looked at it for a while. I took some screenshots. Various people wondered in map chat what the cat might want or what we might do to get its attention. I swam down to find that the King of of All Cats wears a collar and name tag, which suggests he might have an owner even more extraordinarly oversized than himself. And that he might not be quite as all-powerful as his title implies.

I went to check the forums to see if anyone had any information about what to do next. No-one did. For about the thousandth time I wished Dulfy was still in the game guide business.

Back in L.A. the general feeling seemed to be that the event was purely for the fun of seeing a very big cat. Which is plenty of fun for a lot of people, myself included.

Also, when you drink the tonic that comes with the mail, something I should have mentioned you need to do before you can see the King of the Cats at all, you also find intangible cats of regular size appearing all around you, wherever you go.

The tonics last an hour and you get nine of them, which is likely to be eight more than most people are going to need, although there are those for whom infinity tonics wouldn't be enough. According to the description they only work on April Fools Day so if you want to get your kitty fix on there's no time to waste.

Word was the King of the Cats could be seen from Gendarran Fields so I went to take a look. It took a little longer than expected because the character I was playing, my foremost Elementalist and primary World vs World character, has apparently never set foot in that map before today.

Once I'd worked out how to zone into Gendarran Fields from Lion's Arch, under somewhat unecessary instruction from Mrs Bhagpuss, there he was, a giant cat looming over the city wall. Most... impressive. Not to say disturbing.

I took a trip to a couple of other starter cities on a rumor that the big cat was visible in all of them but if he was, I couldn't find him. I settled for a few more selfies and that was pretty much that. [Edit - the rumor is true, as confirmed in this forum thread].

As April Fool events go it's quite low key but also well-judged. It's funny, surprising and doesn't ruin your day, which is more than I can say for 99% of practical jokes.

If it turns out there's anything more to it I'll come back with an update but for now, all hail our new overlord, the King of the Cats!

If You Like This Sort Of Thing, This Is The Sort Of Thing You'll Like: GW2

What is there to say about the fourth installment of GW2's third Living Story season? I've been pondering that question for a few days and I'm not sure I have much in the way of an answer but the phrase "More of the Same" keeps pushing itself to the front of my thoughts.

I share a considerable frustration and discontent with Jeromai, who's posted several times on the update already, over the general direction and approach the game is taking. There was a brief period following the sudden departure of Colin Johanson, when it seemed GW2 might be returning to the inclusive, casual-friendly, supposedly mold-breaking tenets of the now-infamous Manifesto, but those days proved to be short-lived.

GW2 in 2017 is primarily a game of instances. The original concept of a sprawling open-world game in which "you can just naturally play with all the people around you" is long dead. Or, rather, part of it is entirely dead, fenced off in Raid instances accessed only by the typical self-appointed "elite" that clusters in  the velvet-roped curated spaces of every theme-park MMO, while much of the rest is on life-support, sustained by the artificial stimulus of map-specific currencies and daily rewards.

Jennah's first dome: created without explanation and later expanded without explanation to cover the entire city. I want to play that Mesmer.

Indeed, each of the new supposedly "open-world" maps added with the four chapters of the current Living Story might as well be instances. An ANet developer was reported recently as saying that open-world maps in GW2 represent historical periods rather than the current timeline, something that is self-evident yet rarely acknowledged. With these maps, tied as they are to a fixed narrative, all of which plays out in personal instances, that has never been more obvious.

The thrilling promo video for "Head of the Snake" led many to hope, some to fear and a few to assume that Divinity's Reach might be due for the treatment previously meted out to Lion's Arch. A re-run of Scarlet's assault on the pirate city seemed altogether too much to hope for and indeed so it proved.

At risk of spoilers, although it's apparent from the screenshot at the top of the post, which is the view of the Human capital as seen from Lake Doric, the walls of Divinity's Reach do not fall. In fact, contrary to the evidence of that video and the in-game cut scenes, they don't appear to suffer any significant damage whatsoever.

Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose

When Scarlet was rampaging across Tyria, pulling godlike ex-machina plot devices from her seemingly bottomless bag of tricks, she was roundly condemned as a Mary Sue of the worst possible stripe. That assessment was, I always felt, tempered somewhat by the later discovery that she was the catspaw of an actual, quasi-godlike entity, the elder dragon Mordremoth.

Who, then, perhaps we should be asking ourselves, stands behind Queen Jennah's newly-acquired, miraculous powers? How is it that this former poster-girl for hapless, helpless love interest, the Penelope Pitstop of Kryta whose plaintive calls for help caused Logan Thackeray to abandon Snaff to his death, collapse all hope of defeating the crystal dragon Kralkatorrik and bring to a chaotic and acrimonious end the dragon-slaying guild Destiny's Edge, can suddenly cause instant death with a flick of her wrist and raise and maintain an impenetrable dome across an entire city at a moment's notice?

It may be that, as with Scarlet, there is at least a semi-coherent explanation but if so it remains, like the influence of Mordremoth, at best dimly sensed and obscure. Or it could just be bloody awful plotting. Either way, we are not getting a two or three month long version of The Battle for Lion's Arch. We're getting a permanent map that forever records the short few hours of Minister Caudecus's futile revolution.

Let me talk to him, Your Majesty. I'm fluent in the universal language of quest-markers.

Kind of a living tableau rather than a Living World. Disappointing. Unambitious. Tame. Also practical and apparently very popular if both the current buzz in map chat and the outpourings of praise on the forums are any guide.

The sad and inevitable conclusion seems to be that not enough people wanted the vision of that manifesto. As we have discussed many times, the distance between what people claim they want and what they actually want is like interstellar space.

I have a worrying feeling that had ANet chosen to make their sequel to GW2 something that followed rather than broke with the existing MMO conventions of it's time then it might have become the closest thing to the fabled "WoW-killer" the genre has seen. It could have been FFXIV: A Realm Revisited a year earlier in other words.

Backwards into the future? Here's hoping.

They did not choose that path and they have paid the penalty. They made a game that wasn't quite what their market segment wanted and when they shifted to accommodate those expectations the market itself changed away from them. If someone in ANet towers is drafting a design doc for GW3 right now I imagine the words "survival" and "sandbox" are somewhere prominent.

We are, as they say, where we are. Not only is there no hint of a GW3 (and since the official position is that GW2 will run as the company's primary product indefinitely that's not a hint we're likely to be given for a long time yet) there's still no official news or even announcement of the second expansion.

What we have are these increasingly formulaic assertions of "content" that arrive under the flag of the Living Story. It's not nothing. It is, arguably, an improvement on Living Story 2, although I struggle to recall, without going to look it up, what actually happened in that season.

If only all of Kryta looked like this.

The new map is a fair size and quite interesting. The events are, perhaps, less rigidly organized than Bitterfrost or Ember Bay. There is, to some slight extent, a more organic, unpredictable pace.

The art department, ANet's one indisputable star asset, has done its usual, expected best but this is Kryta they've been given to work with and there's only so much you can do with scrub grass and dirt. Not to mention there's a war going on.

The promised challenging, group-oriented "leather farm" (oh, the mental pictures that conjures...) turns out to be a big hill with hundreds of fast-spawning centaurs. As Jeromai reports it benefits from a full zerg rather than a mere "group" but since what's farmed turns out to be almost entirely the wrong kind of leather, whether zergs will be easy to come by seems less than certain.

Anybody fancy the Leather Farm? Guys? Please don't report me!

As for the story, the usual fear of spoilers prevents me from going into too much detail. Suffice it to say that if Queen Jennah is not being mind-controlled and if Countess Anise is not revealed to be a major villain at some point then we as players are effectively being asked not just to condone but to endorse fascism. It's a queasy scenario. I hope the writers know what they are doing.

The story arc of the chapter, something most players take to be intended as solo content, ends with one of ANet's trademark annoying, pointless, attritional boss fights. These are always inappropriate to the context but we are all by now inured to them. This one, however, was so execrably tuned that forum outrage erupted (again) and a very swift and quite severe nerf to difficulty followed.

I completed it on the first attempt under the original difficulty. This is not any indication of my skill as a player. I happened to be doing it on my heal-specced Druid and I simply bored the Boss to death. Even so I died about half a dozen times. Mrs Bhagpuss, on hearing about it, declined even to attempt it and now hasn't logged in to the game for three days.

This made me laugh.

There were plenty of things I enjoyed. Some of the dialog and cut scenes were above par. Countess Anise infuriates me so much that I literally shout at the screen when she's on. That has to count as successful writing or voice acting or both. Canach has become one of my favorite NPCs. I laughed out loud several times at his snide, drawling sarcasms.

There were also plot developments that surprised and intrigued. I do think that trying to tell a coherent narrative in this extenuated, disparate fashion would challenge even the best of writers and video games do not generally attract the best of writers or, probably, the second or third best. Still, they are making a fist of it and I remain involved.

But then I'm a sucker for meta-textuality.

Mechanically there was one worthwhile innovation. At various points there are interactive objects or even creatures that respond only to one class. I spotted a turret only engineers could use and my druid was able to tame an attacking mob mid-fight and turn it on its trainer. That was oddly satisfying.

Also of note is the addition of vendor-purchasable paintings and furniture that can be placed in Guild Halls. Our tiny guild has no guild hall (although the large WvW guild I'm also in does) so the reason for the excitement this awoke in me when I happened upon it isn't perhaps obvious.

You really want that thing in your personal instance?

I'm calling it here: this is laying the foundation for some kind of personal housing in the expansion. As is the otherwise incomprehensible obsession with cats. There are a couple of new ones in the update - a ghostly one in Lake Doric and a very odd, bloodstone-tainted example in Caudecus's Manor. If these aren't future housing systems undergoing live testing then Anet are even more inscrutable than I imagine.

In summary, then, "Head of the Snake" is not by any means a bad update. It's adequate; satisfactory, even. Had it been the first chapter of this season I imagine I would be almost fulsome in my praise. The problem is one of diminishing returns. Having found a format that the playerbase appears to deem more acceptable than either the open-world sprawl and bi-monthly cadence of LS1 or the shut-down, buttoned-up isolation of LS2, ANet unsurprisingly seem keen to play it for all it's worth.

I'm just not sure how much that is or how long the goodwill can be sustained before the inevitable ennui takes over once again.