Strolling Through The Void - Rage of Cthurath On EZ-Mode

I haven't exactly finished the latest EverQuest II expansion, Rage of Cthurath. In many ways I've barely started. But I have finished the two Signature Questlines for both Crafters and Adventurers. It's enough, I think, for me to give some kind of appraisal, even if it's not enough for a full review.

The first thing I'd say is that I like this expansion a lot. It's been fun. I'll get to why that is in a bit but I'll say up front that I'm speaking very specifically from the perspective of a fairly casual solo player. What it's been like for group-oriented players or raiders I have no idea.

It's also been pretty good value, I'd say, although it's incredibly hard to judge whether any expansion for any MMORPG offers a good return on however much you paid for it. With single-player games you can get to the end and do that "hours-per-dollar" calculation. On top of that, especially if it's one of those multiple ending deals, you might make some allowances for replayability.

With an MMORPG, the expansion provides a springboard for other content as much as it represents anything complete in itself. And then there's the question of alts. If you play a number of characters, as many people do, it's likely you'll take more than one of them through the expansion and also that other characters on your account will benefit from hand-me-downs and account-level flags and unlocks.

In my case, I've started three characters on the two Signatures already. Eventually I'll probably take as many as half a dozen through both. Does that mean I should multiply the value by the number of characters who complete one or the other or both?

Probably not but it does suggest any hours-per-dollar calculation shouldn't just work off a single run. And even if it did, I'm most likely already getting close to the traditional dollar-an-hour break-even.

So, I'm very happy with the quality and the quantity, then, am I? It certainly sounds like it, the way I'm talking. 

Yeah, no, maybe not really... I'm not sure...

The Signature quests are definitely getting shorter. I don't think there can be any doubt about that. There was a time when it took me longer to to finish one instance than it takes me now to do the entire thing. Or it felt like it, anyway. And there were those couple of expansions where absolutely everything seemed to revolve around raising multiple factions before you could even get anyone to give you the damn quests.

Is that what I want? No, it's not. What that did was put me right off the idea of taking multiple characters through the storyline. It took ages, it felt like a grind, it didn't seem to get any faster with experience and it wasn't anything I'd want to repeat. I was mostly just glad to have gotten it done at all..

That's not the case here. It's fast and entertaining, even though the storyline in Rage of Cthurath is thin, there's no denying it. And obviously, it makes no sense. That's a given. No EQII expansion's storyline has made sense for years. It's fine. It's expected. This tale, though, seems perfunctory even by recent standards. 

Here's my best attempt at a spoiler, based on what I can remember, without looking anything up. 

Lord Lucan, in his never-ending search for a means of world-domination, has gotten his hands on a McGuffin that's turned out to be more than he bargained for. Somehow, it attracted the attention of a Lovecraftian Elder God and now he's a puppet.

Meanwhile Lady Najena, who used to be a villain, has somehow gotten involved, only this time she's on our side. A whole load of spooky portals have popped up all around Norrath, spewing out Void entities we're all familiar with from previous invasions. She's trying to put a stop to it because I have no idea why. I guess she's just annoyed it's not her that's doing it.

She recruits the Player Character because of course she does or there wouldn't be much of a story, would there? She sends the PC on a mission through a portal of her own and some space-goats hijack it and divert the PC into the Void so they can get some help to escape.

This inevitably leads to a big, exciting adventure... Hahaha! I'm kidding! No, it doesn't! It leads to a bunch of trivial errands, things like pulling up weeds and making dinner for a dog (Alright, a wolf. Does that make it any better?) before Najena herself arrives in The Void and gets things back on track.

From then on it's mostly a series of dungeons instances in which the PC has to plant a whole load of runes so as to... erm... I don't know. Protect something? I think I drifted off when Najena was explaining that part.

Anyway, it's all very important (And repetitive.) and means you have to kill a lot of named mobs, all of whom drop gear better than what you got out of the Tishan's Box at the start, so there's plenty in it for you even if you're not entirely clear on why you're doing it.

Eventually you stick the final rune where it's supposed to go and that severs the connection between Lucan and the Consumer, which is the really rather ill-considered name someone chose to give the Big Bad. There's one final confrontation in which the PC gets to fight The Consumer and Najena gets to summon some big rocks for the PC to hide behind when it all gets a bit much.

The Consumer disappears back to whatever nether-hell he came from, issuing dire threats of retribution, and Lucan is a free sociopath again. Except apparently he's had some kind of existential experience while under the influence because instead of getting straight back to the world domination, he announces he can't go back in case The Consumer has another go at him, mentally weakened as he is. Like he ever cared about Norrath before. other than to be in charge of it all.

The PC wonders, not unreasonably, what that means for Freeport, which Lucan has ruled with an iron fist inside an iron glove since at least 2004, Earth time. Najena tells them not to worry their pretty little head about it because she'll sort it all out and it'll all be fine, which isn't anything like as reassuring to hear as she thinks it is.

Credits roll. End of Episode One. To be continued in next expansion, probably. Oh, except do just pop off to the Unknown and see if you can find this other McGuffin, would you? You weren't doing anything important, right now, were you?

It was just as well there was a post-credit sequence because the main questline only took Mordita to level 133. There are two more levels to go so any quests are welcome, however trivial. No other way to get the xp, these days.

The Tradeskill Signature line is basically the same only without nearly everything I just said. If the Adventure Sig is thin, the Crafting one is positively skeletal. Mostly it's gathering mats, making stuff out of them and waiting several hours until you can do it again. 

What do you want from a crafting questline, though? Narrative? I just want the recipes for the five new levels, mostly. And I have them now, so I'm happy.

And I'm happy about the Adventure timeline, too, because the fighting was actually fun for once! How many expansions are there where I would have been able to say that with a straight face? Not very many.

Why was it fun? Because it was very, very easy, that's why. And I like easy. If you like challenge, you are not going to be anything like as happy as I was. There isn't any.

Okay, a slight caveat. I have never taken a Necromancer through the Sig Line of an expansion before. Not first up, anyway. I don't have a benchmark for how easy that would usually be.

And it's true that the main reason I wanted to swap from my Berserker was to make things easier for myself. I totally did not expect it to be this much easier, though, and I can't help but think there's more going on than better DPS.

Midnight : tiny but mighty.

There's one thing I noticed that I find very hard to explain: Mordita's combat pet never seemed to take any damage. None at all. Ever. 

A Necro has excellent healing options. I also had a healer mercenary ready to heal both Mordita and her pet. Neither I nor the NPC needed to heal the pet at all.

After a while I started to wonder what was going on so I began paying close attention to the pet's health bar. It didn't move. Not a pixel. 

It was 100% all the time. I never saw it drop even one per cent. I moused over it to see the numbers. I never saw them change. Not on huge overpulls. Not on bosses. Not if I just stood back and watched to see what would happen. The pet seemed to be effectively invulnerable throughout the entire Signature line. It was also extremely good at getting and holding aggro, allowing Mordita to chain-cast every damage spell in her artillery without a pause.

It's not like the mobs weren't putting out the damage, either. Mordita needed plenty of healing when adds got onto her before the pet grabbed them. The Mercenary even managed to get himself killed a couple of times. The pet, though? Didn't take the tiniest scratch that I ever saw.

So that can't be working as intended, surely. Maybe it's one of those good bugs. I've had invulnerable pets before. Just for a session, though, not for weeks on end. 

Even without the invulnerable pet, though, the whole thing seemed much easier than usual. For one thing, none of the bosses had any really irritating tricks. No mana drain, either, which is a huge improvement, although it's been a few expansions since that was in fashion.

Even the tricks they did have mostly involved running about, standing in certain spots or clicking on things. Nothing that wasn't immediately easy to understand and simple to do. 

Who are you and what have you done
with the real Lucan?

Bosses didn't have ludicrous health pools, either. They took damage at a very satisfying rate. I don't think any boss fight took more than a couple of minutes. I remember expansions where the trash took longer than that and the bosses took more like a quarter of an hour. As for the regular mobs, TTK was two or three seconds for most of them. 

All of that made me actively look forward to every instance, something I very rarely do. When I messed
something up in one of them (Only for a side-quest.) the thought of having to do the whole instance again didn't make me want to give up and play something else instead - it made feel like that might be fun.

All the instances are also quite compact and easy to navigate. There are lots of teleports and portals so you don't need to slog through miles of empty corridors to get anywhere. And visually the whole thing is spectacular. It doesn't come over in screenshots but in game there's a huge amount of three-dimensionality, lots of particle effects and movement. It's a pleasure to spend time there. 

There have been complaints about the pacing, particularly the way players have been left to cobble together a path to the cap involving side quests and repeatables but I'm quite happy to meander through those final two levels. It'll give me a chance to gather enough rares to upgrade Mordita's spells. 

Not that there's much sign of her needing the extra power. She went into the expansion with almost every spell at Expert level from the tier below and it seemed to give her more than enough firepower, not just to get the job done but to get it done quickly and easily. 

Rather than try to race through the last two levels with her, I think I might take a couple more characters through both the Adventure and Tradeskill Signatures first. The crafters should have a very easy time of it, what with every capped character giving a 20% xp bonus to those coming after and those also getting a reduction in waiting-time on the gatekeeping quests.

All in all, I'm very satisfied with Rage of Cthurath so far. I think it might be my favorite expansion for quite a while. But then I always say that, don't I? I'm a cheap date when it comes to expansions.

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.

Do It Again!

I've left it a bit late for a post today so let's hope this is going to be as short as I think it should be. Doesn't always follow that when I have nothing much to say, I don't take long saying it.

The post is about EverQuest Online Adventures again because apparently that's what I play now - a decades-old, discontinued game for a console three generations out of date, reanimated as a grey-market PC emulation. I mean, it's not like anyone's made any new games since 2003, so it makes sense, right?

But that's where the mouse-pointer finds its way now, whenever I feel like playing a video game. I played yesterday and I played today. Couple of hours each time. These days that's a lot for me. 

And did I get much done? 

Hah! Has anyone played this game? Wouldn't be asking that if you had, I bet.

No, I did not get much done, thank-you. Not by any reasonable estimation. And yet it felt like I did. 

Sound familiar? It will if you ever played EverQuest or one of its contemporaries, back in the days before MMORPG players began to value their time. An awful lot of doing nothing and then feeling smug about it. Or furious. One or the other, depending how many times you died.

Let me see if I can remember just what I did achieve in those two, two-hour sessions...

About as bright as it gets in Steamfont, believe it or not.

I started off by going to see if I could solo the Level 5 Gnome Magician Class Quest. The one the guy who gave it to me said I'd need a group for. 

Actually, what he said is that I'd need the help of some other apprentices because if EQOA is anything it's a role-playing game. More self-consciously so than EQ, I'd say. Everyone seems to be very much in character there. The NPCs, that is. Not the players.  

The quest asks you to go kill some Mindwhippers. To the best of my knowledge, the Norrath I'm familiar with doesn't have any of those so I had no clue what they might be, let alone where. The quest guy seemed to assume I'd know, being a local. 

He did give me some extremely vague directions but nothing I could use. I'd already done a lot of running around. I won't dignify it by calling it "exploring". I hadn't seen any mindwhippers so I thought I'd at least try and save myself a little trouble by looking the quest up online. 

From a few sources I found out that Mindwhippers are wasps. Why they're called something so dramatic I have no clue. Are they wasp enchanters? It's possible, I suppose. I also got a rough travel plan on how to get to them, which boiled down to "Go out of the West gate, turn West and keep heading West". 

So of course I went out of the East gate.

That wasted about a quarter of an hour. Once I'd figured out the problem, I went back in and then out the other gate and glory be I found the damn things! Took me another ten minutes but there they were. Most of them conned red but one was yellow so I thought I'd give it a go.

• First pull, it killed the pet. I ran away and lived. 
• Second pull, I tried to root the wasp, it came after me, I ran away and lived. The pet didn't.
• Third pull, I got killed by a roaming red con wasp before I even finished casting. 
• Fourth pull, I sent the pet in and nuked. I got the wasp quite low before I got aggro. The wasp came at me, but I thought I still might be able to take it so I stood my ground and kept nuking. I was wrong.

At that point I decided the guy had been right all along and I'd need some help. Or else some levels. 

Anyone know if he was always called Q`Anon?

I was also fed up to the back teeth of it being dark all the frigging time so I thought I'd go exploring and see if it got any lighter anywhere else. I was Level 5 and I didn't seem to lose any xp on death or gain any xp debt and there's no corpse recovery in EQOA so it seemed like a good time for a roam.

Using Right Button as a kind of radar I headed South, threading my way through the increasing number of aggressive red mobs - Large Spiders, Fire Ants, some sort of bear, a few wolves, a Decaying Skeleton and eventually something very unexpected - a Dragoon. 

Dragoon in Norrath is a rank peculiar to Dark Elves. These Dragoons turned out to be guards outside the DE home city of Neriak. 

At that point I hadn't begun to come to terms with the extremely different topography of this new Norrath. Since then I've studied the map in the Prima Guide and I have a slightly better understanding of the layout but at the time I came across the Dragoons I was very confused.

I stopped and took alook at the map (Out of game, of course. There is no in-game map.) and saw that Klick`Anon is in the far North-East, directly above Neriak, which is directly above Freeport. That last pairing is the same as in the Norrath I'm used to but in that one the gnomish city is on a different continent altogether.

That gave me the idea of finding my way into Freeport, where I thought I could at least register with the Coachman so I could get a ride next time. That's something EQ never had but which EverQuest II, which came out a year after EQOA, did - point-to-point, safe travel by NPC mount. I even thought I might bind in Freeport, since they have a Magicians' Guild there, along with something approximating an actual day-night cycle.

Unfortunately, I overshot the entrance to Freeport by what must have been several relative miles, ending up deep in the Desert of Ro. I only figured that out when it was too late, after something killed me and I woke up back in Klick.

Somewhere in the desert,
where if it isn't exactly blazing sunlight,
you can at least see where you're going.

That was the end of my first session.  No material gains maybe but plenty of valuable new knowledge acquired. That's why it felt so satisfying.

Today, I thought I'd finish that trip to Freeport. To spoil a good story, I never got there. I didn't even get as close as the last time. Somehow, whereas the previous day I'd been able to avoid all the dangerous mobs, today I kept getting jumped on in the dark by ants, spiders and things I never saw coming.

After a couple of deaths, I did a bit of googling to see if  there was an easier route. There wasn't, but there was another coach station near a village on the way to the Elf starting city, Fayspire. It looked like it might be an easier trip, so I changed my travel plans and went there instead.

Tried to go there, I should say. All the advice is to "follow the road" but I never saw any road. My screen is so dark I can barely see the trees in the forest let alone whether I'm running on a paved surface or just dirt and pine needles. Another hour of wandering around in the dark, hammering RB and getting killed a couple more times and I'd had enough. 

If you're frustrated by things you can't change, concentrate on something you can. I couldn't get the screen any brighter (I tried...) and I couldn't kill the mobs that were killing me but I could kill weaker ones and level up and with enough of that, maybe I'd be able to survive a few more hits and run away more effectively.

I spent the next half-hour or so grinding light and dark-blue cons back in the starting area until I dinged Level 6. That was astonsihingly enjoyable. I didn't realise how much I'd missed it. 

My new clothes.
(Image auto-leveled so you can see them.)

Once I'd dinged, most of the mobs went green or light blue so I moved outside the walls and went looking for slightly tougher prey. I found enough dark-blues to be going on with but once again I ran foul of some aggressive red con ants and got myself a free port back to bind. 

Which was fine. I was loaded down with insect body parts and bits and pieces of rat and snake. I needed to get shot of it all anyway. I sold it all to one vendor and checked another for new spells. 

Nothing more until Level 8 it seems, so I spent my money on a full set of vendor armor instead. It added a lot to my armor class although I very much doubt that will mean much to an angry red-con. Still, if it helps me run an extra few yards before I fall over, it might be the difference between life and death.

I re-summoned and re-buffed my Water Elementaling for what seemed like the twentieth time and went out to carry on grinding xp, which was when I discovered Level 6 is the point at which xp debt kicks in. Took me half a dozen kills to clear my debt before I started making real xp again. It also made me a lot more cautious, which slowed things down a bit more.

A bubble into Level 6, Mrs Bhagpuss announced it was tea-time so I stopped and after tea I started writing this but once I've finished, there's a very strong possibility I'll log back in and grind some more. If I can get to Level 8 and buy the next pet, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to take those Mindwhippers without outside assistance and probably survive the trip either to Freeport or Fayspire, too.

Someone by the name of Judy Thompson left a comment on today's post at TAGN in regard of World of Warcraft, saying "you can’t go back and do it over". I read that right after I'd been thinking just the opposite. 

EQOA thus far really does feel going back in time. It's not exactly like doing it over but it's the closest I've come since the first time I played on a retro server, many years ago. Maybe closer. 

The trick is that it's the same but also different. A lot of the skills and knowledge are transferable but not so many that it feels straightforward or obvious. There's a lot of learning to be done and also some unlearning. 

I guess what I'm saying is that it's familiar but not over-familiar. How long that feeling will last remains to be seen but it's a good one to have, while it lasts. 

Levels And Legacies

Redbeard has a post up today about leveling in World of Warcraft Retail and how fast it is these days, so fast he wonders whether there's really any point in having it at all. I have some thoughts on that but I'll leave them over there, in the comment thread. I thought about writing a whole post but I don't play WoW regularly and I don't know enough about it. I've never even reached the level cap there so anything I say is going to be suspect.

When it comes to EverQuest II, though, I have plenty of experience, albeit mostly from the perspective of a solo player these days, so I feel quite safe giving my thoughts. And what that experience tells me is that getting your levels is the absolute least of it. Even if you have no intention of engaging in end-game content, hitting max level is just the beginning.

Of course, the significance of the number next to your character's name in an MMORPG has always been mutable. Even back at the dawn of the genre, levels were only ever a means to an end.

Back in those olden-if-not-so-golden times, when leveling in MMORPGs was such a chore people sometimes bought their characters on EBay or paid someone else to level up for them, it was widely believed it took sixty levels or whatever the cap was to just to learn how to play your class. 

If you hadn't put in the hours, no-one wanted you in a group. Even if you did have the player-skills, your character most likely didn't. Or they didn't have the equipment. They probably didn't have the flags or the languages or the faction needed because all of that takes time - a lot more time than it takes to get the levels.

In many MMORPGs and especially in EQII, not as much has changed as you'd think. It's true that, over the twenty years the game has been around, almost every aspect of the game has been streamlined, pared down and made more user-friendly but the process only goes so far.

Streamlining something may make it faster but the irony of comparatives is that making something faster still doesn't make it fast. It isn't until you settle down to compare the accrued advantages of a character that's been played for thousands of hours with one that's been played for only a few hundred that you begin to appreciate the vast gulf that lies between them, even if their level counts make an exact match.

And it isn't until you go to do something about equaling them up that you realize just what a huge task it's likely to be. I'll just give one example.

What I've mostly being doing these past few weeks in EQII has been getting my Necromancer's harvesting speed down to 1.5 seconds. I wanted to do it because harvesting is virtually impossible to avoid in the game, even if you never craft or go out looking for crafting mats. Countless quests require it so it's not a skill easily or wisely ignored.

You might just about get away with leaving it alone as a pure Adventurer but I want my Necromancer (Her name's Mordita.) to be an all-rounder. I want her to adventure, craft and harvest. My Berserker (Conkers) does, so if she's going to replace him, she needs to as well. And crafters have to harvest a lot.

If she's going to do at-cap tradeskill content, she'll need to max all the harvesting skills (Mining, Trapping, Foresting, Fishing and Gathering itself.) The cap is currently 700 (Probably. Hard information is so hard to come by for the game these days. It's a worrying sign of the end times, I think.) 

I could raise these skills just by going out and hitting nodes but I've been working my way through the lengthy gathering questline instead. Most of it still involves going out and hitting nodes but it comes with some useful rewards so why not?  

It's taken me quite a few hours and most of Mordita's skills are still less than half-way to the cap so there's plenty more to go, which was why after I got to the end of the second quest chain, I decided I needed to do something about her harvesting speed. 

The base speed to complete one harvesting action is five seconds. Each node has a potential three pulls although not all pulls are successful. With a skill well below the recommended level for the type of node, which is where she's been and will be for a good while yet, you can easily end up standing next to the same rock, picking away at it for a dozen turns or more.

With the help of crafted items you can bring that down some but it still felt glacially slow compared to what I'd been used to with Conkers for as long as I can remember. As with everything in EQII, the exact mechanics and details are obscure but in general, base gathering speed bottoms out at one and a half seconds, which is then affected by your Casting speed. Conkers casting speed is 103% so his effective gathering speed is about 0.75 seconds, which feels pretty zippy.

To get there, he needed the Gathering Goblin AA, which requires you to be at least a Level 90 crafter and some other AAs but that just for the actual goblin, who follows you around harvesting. To turn him into a buff that reduces your base harvesting time to 1.5 you have to do a quest.

It's been a few years since I last did it but I vaguely remembered it involved speaking to another goblin in Obulus Frontier, a zone that arrived with the Kunark Ascending expansion back in 2016. Imagining it would take a few minutes, maybe half an hour at most, I trotted over to the zone to pick up the quest and of course the goblin wouldn't talk to me.

That sent me back to the Wiki to see what the problem was and it turned out to be quite a big one. I'll try to sum it up as succinctly as I can.

To get Growf the goblin to give you the first in the series of quests that concludes with you setting the gathering goblin free and receiving the harvesting speed buff, you need to have finished the whole of the Kunark Ascending crafting signature questline. Growf's bit is just a kind of coda at the end but it's dependent on the full thing.

I wasn't best pleased but it didn't sound too bad. Three or four hours, maybe, assuming I didn't read any of the quest dialog, all of which I'd seen more than once already. So I set about it, only to find you can't just start in on the KA questline out of nowhere. There's a pre-req: the entire tradeskill signature questline from the previous expansion, Terrors of Thalumbra.

This was starting to look like a much bigger project than I'd anticipated. Two complete expansion signature questlines. That was going to take a while, even if they were only crafting ones, which go a lot faster than their adventure counterparts. We're talking several full sessions for sure.

Got to be done, though. Off I went to get started on the ToA sequence, only to find I couldn't get that one either. For most expansions you get a letter inviting you to speak to someone and off you go but it seems that around this time the plan was to make sure everyone saw every part of the content  so before you can get the Thalumbra questline, you have to complete yet another pre-req, The Captain's Lament from the 2013 expansion, Tears of Veeshan. I think it was part of the pre-expansion build-up but it was a long time ago...

To release my Gathering Goblin from indentured servitude and receive, in recompense for my magnanimity, a reduction in my base harvesting speed to 1.5 seconds, I was going to have to complete the full tradeskill signatures from two expansions, plus the warm-up from the one before. 

All told, that comes to more than fifty separate quests. Fifty quests, just to upgrade one small aspect of Mordita's capabilities to bring them in line with Conkers'. And it's not even anything crucial to gameplay, just a minor quality of life improvement.

I wasn't counting but I played most evenings the last couple of weeks, generally for an hour or two each session. Even with the huge boost of instant map travel via All Access Membership, the huge advantage of being a max-level Adventurer, thereby making every mob in every required zone non-aggro, a full walk-through on hand, complete with locs to cut and paste into the game and the lack of any inclination on my part to read for the third time even a single line of quest dialog, it still took me that long to get it all done. 

And I was lucky Mordita already knew how to speak Gobblish, the Goblin language, because Growf doesn't speak anything else. If she hadn't, I'd have had to go do the quest for that as well.

Luckily for me, I enjoyed the whole thing. It had just the right level of simplicity for me not to feel the grind while I had to pay just enough attention to the instructions to make it seem like I was doing something. My sweet spot, really.

Even so, it's a hell of a long time to spend on such a small thing, while preparing one character to take over from another. If it was the only time I needed to do something like it, that would be one thing but it's just an example of a seemingly endless number of minor adjustments and calibrations that have to be made before Mordita is going to feel expansion-ready. 

Getting the levels, which used to be the barrier, is now literally the least of it. You can buy those, quite legitimately. I just had to click a button. But if anyone thinks a Max Level Boost is going to do all the work for them - or even most of it - they can think again. At least in EQII, they can. I don't know about other games. I bet it's much the same everywhere, though.

And let's not forget that all of this was mainly done as a way of speeding up another set of quests. Now that Mordita has the fast harvesting speed, it's back to the harvesting questline itself so she can use it, and that's going to take quite a few more hours to finish. 

After that, I'm going to have to take a close look at her stats and see what else she's missing. She could do with learning a whole bunch of languages, for a start.

Six months to the next expansion. I hope it's going to be enough...

Going Further Back To Go Forwards Faster

I would have posted yesterday but I was too busy playing. I even had something mapped out in my mind, but I didn't want to stop to write it up.

I suppose that's a good thing. It suggests I was enjoying what I was doing enough to want to carry on, rather than just doing it long enough to gather enough material for a blog post, something I freely admit is often the case when I play games these days.

At this point it's tempting to go into a peroration about blogging and gaming and synergies and which drives what, but blogging about blogging, while very enjoyable for the blogger, can sometimes remind me uncomfortably of all those novels about being a novelist or, worse, those depressingly popular books about someone who reads books. 

Instead, how about I just get on with it and talk about what I was doing? There's an idea.

So, there I was, trying to get my Berserker in EverQuest II to Level 130 so I could start on the new expansion. I already explained the problem and outlined my plan to deal with it and how long I thought that might take. Then, when I was playing on Sunday evening, I had a bit of luck.

I logged in expecting to pick up where I left off, cleaning up all the non-story quests from the previous expansion, Ballads of Zimara, most of which come from starter items that drop off mobs. I opened my quest journal to see exactly where I was up to and because I was in Freeport at the time, instead of sorting it by the zone I was in, as I usually do, I sorted it by Quest Level instead.

That brought up far more yellow quests than I was expecting, yellow meaning just comfortably above the character's level, usually the sweet spot for the best xp. That made me curious so I took a closer look. I found something surprising.

Many of the yellow quests weren't from the last expansion ore ven the one before that. They were from Visions of Vetrovia, which came out in 2021. The level cap back then had been 125 so it seemed strange that the quests were flagged Level 130. But they were.

Since the quests in BoZ were already very easy it seemed logical the ones from the expansion before that would be easier still. Whether they'd be faster wasn't so certain. In my experience with most MMORPGs there are three things that take time when you quest:

1. Killing mobs.
2. Traveling to and/or finding the place you have to go to to kill the mobs.
3. Listening to NPCs telling you why you should go kill the mobs in the first place.

There are other factors, especially in those games where the devs seem to be involved in some kind of in-house competition to find the most obscure, awkward or annoying ways to increment a quest counter. I long ago lost track of the number of ways it's possible to interact with an object in EQII but I can tell you it's too many.

Mostly, though, it's a combination of TTK, TTT and TTR. Time to Kill, Time to Travel and Time to Read. Dropping back three expansions was always going to help with TTK. Having flying enabled in all zones, instant map travel as an All Access member and the exact locations of every update step in the Wiki was going to cut down hugely on TTT. Two out of three. Not bad. 

I wasn't sure there was much I could do about the last one, though. Many players, possibly most of them, shave a good deal off the running time of every quest by skipping the quest text but I always (Well, almost always...) read every word. I could have made an exception for the sake of expediency but it would go against the grain so I knew I would probably skim-read everything, at least.

The big question was would the xp from two expansions ago be worth bothering with? The way Darkpaw has futzed around with xp and leveling over the past few years makes it hard to be sure until you try. Since I had the quests my book already, I thought it was worth a look. 

I was hoping these older quests would move the dial enough to justify the effort because, although I
could see a path to Level 130 by way of the BoZ scraps I had left, nothing was giving me much more than 2% of the level and I still had about 60% to go. I didn't much fancy having to find all the dropped quests and then finish up on the dregs of the few repeatables. If I could find some narrative quests, at least the time might pass faster and the whole thing wouldn't feel quite so formulaic.

Naturally, I started with the quests in my journal for Forlorn Gist, the highest-level zone in VoV, on the assumption those ought to give the best xp. There's no way to travel there directly (Oh yes there is but I'd forgotten!) so I had go the long way, map-hopping to the starting zone, flying to the griffin station, riding public transport to the next zone, Karuupa Jungle, flying across that to the next station and finally arriving in Mahngavi Wastes, from where you can walk to Forlorn Gist. So much for saving on travel time.

I was about to head to the zone line when I happened to notice I also had some quests in the Wastes and what's more two of them were complete and ready to hand in. That seemed like a gimme so I took it. I flew to the questgivers, a couple of centaurs hanging around next to a graveyard, big, red books over their heads to tell me they'd been waiting three years for me to show up. I spoke to the pair of them, accepted their thanks and collected the reward.

Those quests gave easily as much xp as I'd been getting from the ones in BoZ. Maybe a little more. Great! Op success! And both centaurs had more work for me so rather than head off to Forlorn Gist I thought I might as well carry on where I was.

I worked through the two related quest sequences, all of which were either Kill or Fetch quests or a combination of the two. The mobs and objects were all in the same zone. Everything was an insta-kill. Travel distances were short. I barely even needed to refer to the wiki because I had EQMaps up with all the POIs highlighted. It was glorious!

Once again, I'm going to make the point that I prefer questing when there is absolutely no challenge to it. I love one-shotting all the mobs - better yet if I can round up a bunch and one-shot the lot with an AE - and best of all if it's all those inevitable, irelevant, infuriating adds that insist on piling on. 

I can't see how having to spend five to ten seconds killing each mob that gets in your way as you roam around looking for the ones you actually need for the quest adds to the entertainment value in any way whatsoever. If you have to interact with them at all, surely it has to be more fun fun to mow them all down like so many stalks of wheat.

It's more fun for me, anyway. I can one-shot for a long time before I get bored. I'm not sure I've ever gotten bored doing it, in fact. Usually I stop for other reasons long before the warm feeling it gives me begins to cool. Conversely, I get very tired of hacking through hordes mobs that take time and effort to kill. Even thinking about can sometimes be enough to make give up and go play something else instead. Something easier. And more fun.

All of which meant that I was having a high old time, picking up quests and knocking them out as fast as I could. After a while, though, the quests ran out so I had to stop and think again. And I found myself puzzled.

Although all these quests were new to my Berserker, they were far from new to me. I remembered all of them. It took me a while to work out why but the answer, when I found it, was simple: I'd done them on a different character. 

For Visions of Vetrovia three years ago, I ran an experiment. I swapped my regular questing character, the Berserker, for my Bruiser, who I'd heard through some research I'd done should have a better TTK. Also, Bruisers can feign death, which is always handy.

The experiment was inconclusive. I couldn't tell much difference between the two of them. They're both melee classes. They both use a lot of AEs. Plate is thicker than leather but avoidance makes up for it. Feigning death gets you out of a lot of things but so does having three death saves. Solo there doesn't seem to be a lot to choose between them. 

I went back to the Berserker for Ballads of Zimara and I'd forgotten he'd ever skipped an expansion. Thinking about it, I recalled how he'd done the crafting questline and while traveling arond the VoV zones for that, had picked up just enough loose adventure quests as and when he came across them to get his five levels, from 120 to 125. As I discovered yesterday, though, he'd never even started the Adventure Signature questline.

That turned out to be a godsend. I dropped the idea of going to Forlorn Gist and instead I went right back to the start to begin working my way through the MQ. 

Visions of Vetrovia, four expansions ago now, is part of the era when every stage of the main quest rewarded massive chunks of xp, often enough to move the bar half a level or more. Even at 129, with the required xp per level measured in the trillions, allowing for full vitality, I found almost every step of the Signature line was giving around 5% of the level.

That's more than double what I was getting for the BoZ pick-ups and repeatables and I was also getting a lot more than double the entertainment value into the bargain. I was enjoying myself so much that when I dinged 130 yesterday evening I was almost sorry there weren't any more levels left to get.

Event then, the whole process still wasn't exactly what you'd call fast. I didn't time it but I think it probably took me around four hours to do the final two-thirds of Level 129. The important thing was that it didn't feel like a grind or a chore. It felt like having fun.

There were several things that did make it all go by a bit faster. As soon as I realised I'd done the entire storyline before, I felt under no obligation to read any of the dialog. It was quite liberating to click through it all as fast it appeared. 

I also gave up looting most of the mobs after a while, after I thought about the value of what they were dropping. EQII suffers from hyper-inflation, meaning nothing any mob drops is of any value unless you can either use it yourself or sell it to another player. Cash drops that sell to vendors might as well be pocket lint.

Lastly, I was helped considerably in my progress through the MQ by the fortuitous circumstances of my Berserker's happy-go-lucky approach to questing four years ago. The quests he'd been able to get while not following the main storyline mostly turned out to be the same ones you have to do for various NPCs before they'll give you their MQ quests. Every time he got to a point where the wiki said he'd need to go do all of someone's quests to get the next MQ stage, he found he'd already done them and the NPC was happy to speak to him right away.

All things considered, it was both a very enjoyable way to get that last level and a very useful learning experience. I see now that there's a good reason to hold back on doing current content on some characters. 

While it was super-easy to level, I got into the habit of taking half a dozen of my crew to the cap every time it went up. Now it's likely to be more better - or at least a lot less trouble - to let them leap-frog each other a year or two apart and let time and power creep turn what might have been a painful slog into an enjoyable romp.

That, though, is for the future. As soon as the Berserker dinged 130 he got a letter inviting him to come to the new zones to help with the latest crisis, whatever that might be. It means going back to taking things seriously, playing properly, reading all the quest text and doing things the way they're supposed to be done. 

I can't say I'm thrilled but I suppose I'll have to. I mean, that is why I was leveling him in the first place...

Palworld Progress Report : Thirty-Five Hours And Counting

Wow! It's been a whole two weeks since I last posted about Palworld! Can you believe it? I mean, I've mentioned it plenty of times since then in the context of other games but the last time I posted something specifically about Palworld was the end of last month.

Given a gap like that, you might quite reasonably assume I'd lost interest or maybe even stopped playing altogether. That would be incorrect. 

In the post I just linked I mentioned Steam saying I'd played for sixteen hours. At time of writing, Steam has my time logged as thirty-five hours.

More precisely, it tells me I've put in 18.8 hours in the last two weeks. Since it happens to be the fourteenth today, that's how much I've played this calendar month, giving me an average February playtime for Palworld of just over an hour a day.

(Since we're on the subject of the fourteenth day of February, Happy Valentines to those who celebrate it. I got a great present from Mrs Bhagpuss - a Mikey Fox Fingerling. It's quite rare and hard to get although that may be because hardly anyone wants one. Mine may have been the last ever to be sold. I've renamed him Valentine Fox because Mikey is a really dumb name for a fox. Valentine Fox sounds like a movie star. ) 

Back on topic, yes, I am still playing Palworld. For now. 

If I've been playing, though, the next question has to be what have I been doing?

Levelling

I've been making inroads. I'm Level 25. I want to say halfway to the cap but I'm not exactly sure how many levels there are.

Levelling is an odd duck in Palworld, anyway. I'm playing on a single-player world with a near-standard ruleset. The only changes I've made to the defaults have been to remove the death penalty (So I don't have to go back and get my stuff every time I make a dumb mistake.) and to switch of base raids, (Which I found very annoying.)

I haven't touched anything else but I'm aware that I could make a whole lot of things much easier for myself if I wanted, including increasing the rate at which my character gains experience. You can speed it up by as much as twenty times, which seems a tad excessive. One day I'll make a world with everything tuned to the fastest, easiest possible settings and see just how much fun that is. Or otherwise.

He's gotta be worth at least a thousand xp!

Much though I like an easy life, I've encountered this sort of thing in other games and it can be problematic. While I'm theoretically all in favor of allowing players as much control over the levers of progress as possible, it is still true that even just knowing you could accelerate the speed at which you're levelling can feel uncomfortable, even if you decline to take advantage of the offer.

In other worlds, when you're aware your levelling speed is variable, the process of levelling doesn't seem to have the heft it normally would. At worst, the whole game can turn into a kind of internal battle with yourself over how much willpower you have or how much of your own fun you're willing to gamble. It's occasionally been an issue for me in the past but I'm pleased to say that in the case of Palworld I've mostly been able to forget about the metaphysics and just play as though the version of the game in front of me is the only one available.

Building

There are more progression markers than just levels. One of them is how far you've advanced your base-building skills. I upgraded my first base far enough to earn the right to a second one and the first thing I did was move to another island and make myself a real home. 

Building options in Palworld aren't the best I've seen but they're not at all bad and I was sure I could do a lot better for myself than the log cabin where I'd been living. I'd already opened access to building in stone and I'd considered tearing my first base down and starting over but I knew the option to have multiple bases was coming soon, so I decided to keep the sprawling eyesore, which I'd mostly been using as a combination storage dump, sweatshop and flophouse. 

Since you can teleport almost instantly from one base to another, there's really no reason to have assembly lines and slave pens spoiling the ambience of your seafront mansion. Better to keep all the unsightly practicalities in one place and go live somewhere else entirely.

Nice chair. Now if I could just work out how to sit down...

I picked a beachfront location with a great view, woods on each side and an open field behind. I spent a couple of sessions constructing a three-story mansion with balconies facing the sea, a long verandah facing the meadow and ivy growing up the walls. I put in a neat, tidy working area with the minimal number of essential machines so I make a few basics and do my repairs and left it that.

It took me a ridiculous amount of time to get a proper, pitched roof to fit. I had to watch YouTube videos to figure it out and even they didn't help much. In the end I got everything just about how I wanted it. I'm pleased with the result, even if it is still a little boxy.

I've begun furnishing the place. I have brick fireplaces, which light up a room with a charming orange glow. I have some carpets down and some tables and chairs. There's a lot more I could do but who wants to sit in crafting furniture when they could be out...

Exploring

There's so much to see! Getting a flying mount was a real game-changer, for a couple of reasons. Obviously, there's the access it gives to the many, many towers, buttes, cliffs and other extremely high places. I was expecting that and looking forward to it. Palworld has a great deal of verticality. In theory you could climb to a lot of these spots but in practice you'd run out of stamina and fall to your death long before you got to the top of most of them. I know. I tried.

What I didn't realise was that in acquiring a flying mount I'd also effectively get a boat along with it. Not an actual boat. That really would be weir and anyway I'm not sure if boats are in the game or not. Let me explain.

Flying mounts use stamina when they're aloft but not when they're "on the ground".  At ground level,  although they still look like they're flying as they cruise along just a few feet in the air, they operate just like a ground mount, using no stamina at all. 

That doesn't look natural...

So far, so ho hum. Not having to change from a ground mount to a flying mount is a nice perk in itself but no big deal. What is a Very Big Deal Indeed is the way flying mounts treat water exactly as if it were solid ground. 

Where as a player character or a ground mount will enter water, be it sea, river or lake, and begin to swim, something which uses stamina and can result in drowning, a flying mount just carries on cruising six feet above the surface, just as if it was still on land. It doesn't look like a boat but it sure behaves like one.

The combination of flying and "sailing" means there's nowhere I can't go, so of course I've been going everywhere. For an explorer archetype, it's been a joy but also very time-consuming. My Nitewing is great but you couldn't call him a fast flier. When I tried to see what was out in the deep ocean to the south-east (Spoiler - nothing.) it took me nearly half an hour to get to the edge of the map and back.

Mostly, though, it's been a never-ending series of short trips to interesting places. I've seen deserted cities, active volcanos, hidden refuges and mysterious statues. I found the perfect spot for my third base, when I get the go-ahead to build one. I've opened up a lot of the map but there's plenty left and I mean to see it all.

Hunting

While I've been out exploring, I have naturally run into many news species of Pal. Whenever I spot one I haven't collected, always assuming it's in my level-range, I stop to try and catch a representative sample for my Paldeck. 

Collecting is the driver but just catching Pals is fun. Throwing the sphere is quite a skill and so is softening up the target. There are lots of ways to do it. The sneakiest is to wait until they're asleep then creep up behind them and club them with a baseball bat. I've caught quite a few that way.

Catching tougher Pals requires a lot of softening up and/or better quality Pal Spheres. There's some thoughtful and challenging gameplay involved in whittling them down to a vulnerable state without either killing them or letting them kill you and it gets a lot more challenging when your own Pal is trying to "help". 

Screw sportsmanship! Just get him before he wakes up!

One thing all the Pals on my Go Team seem to have in common is that they don't know their own strength. Against Pals their own level or a little above they often seem overpowered; against most things lower than them they're just murder on paws. I've lost so many potential targets to an over-zealous assist from my Nitewing or Tombat and even my humble Cativa seems incapable of keeping her claws sheathed.

I could probably benefit for a more thoughtful choice of companions but I'm both lazy and loyal (A terrible combination for most video games, I've found.) so my line-up doesn't change much. I've had the aforementioned three and Foxsparks with me for a long time now. The only recent change came when I captured a Dumud, a kind of land-shark. The animations were so goofy I couldn't resist taking one along for comedy value. Of course, he is a shark, so he's just as deadly as the others, for all that he looks like a parade balloon come loose.

Teamwork

I feel at this point I should point out I actually treat all my Pals very well. The game, which has numerous moral failings deserving of a long, critical essay I may even one day get around to writing, allows for some really quite disturbing mistreatment of the hapless creatures you capture. I'm fairly sure that to get the most out of your Pals in terms of productivity and efficiency, you have to behave like a cross between Bernard Matthews and Patrick Bateman. That's not really me.

Other than capturing them in the first place, I leave the Pals who live at my base pretty much alone to get on with their lives. I feed them well, I make sure they all have somewhere to sleep and I tend to them if they get sick or injure themselves.

Now imagine him bouncing along like a spacehopper.

Other than that, I let them wander about, doing what they want, which mostly seems to be hanging around the food bins 24/7. If I really want something done urgently I might pick one of them up and show them the relevant crafting station but I rarely want anything done in a hurry so that doesn't happen often.

I definitely think of them more as pets than workers. Quite annoying pets. Who keep getting in the way. Which is why, for much of the last couple of weeks, especially since I built my big, stone house, as much as possible I've been playing...

Palworld Without Pals

Okay, not completely. I have my five, special Pal friends with me at all times. What I don't have are any Pals at all living at my new house. 

I thought about it. Obviously it would make a lot of things easier. The whole idea is that Pals operate machinery or perform tasks using their various, specialist skills and that more pals or higher-level pals make everything happen faster. 

It's true and the necessary corollary is that, without Pals, everything takes longer. Sometimes a lot longer. It takes an astonishingly long time to make some of the more complex or complicated items without the help of a Pal or two or at least it seems like an astonishingly long time if you're the one doing it. 

Thanks for the help, Sparky! Take as many red berries as you want.

If you want to go it alone, you can't just walk away and leave the timer to tick down, either. You have to sit there, holding down "F", for as long as it takes. For minutes at a time. A few minutes doesn't sound like that long? Try holding down one key for five minutes straight. See how you like it!

And that's what I've been doing. It's fine. As I said before, I'm rarely in a hurry. I sit and watch the little circle slowly edge round. I look out to sea. I enjoy the view. 

There are some things you simply can't do without the help of a Pal, of course. Anything that requires kindling, for example, like the Forge. You need a fiery Pal to breathe into it or it just won't work. For those, I just summon one of the five Pals on my travelling team and have them do it. Then, when they're done, I recall them and I'm all alone again.

Future Plans

At level 25, it's become very clear to me that Palworld is a true sandbox. I'd been so wrapped up in my own little projects it took me a while to realise just how long it had been since I last received any kind of hint or suggestion on what to do next. Nothing's even sent me to another tower to fight another boss. 

There's no shortage of progression but none of it feels directive. Most of it barely even feels obligatory.

Heat Resistant Metal Armor modeled by Flora

Motivation and direction evolve much more organically than by following a narrative or even working your way up a ladder or down a path. One time, I went exploring and I found a ruined city. I wanted to explore it but when I got there it was too hot to stay long. As soon as I levelled up far enough to be able to make some armor better able to resist the heat, I went hunting for the materials to make a set. Once I had it, I went back and explored the city and after that, a volcano. 

From the volcano I saw a tower to so I flew up to it and from the tower I saw an island and glided down. The island turned out to be a sanctuary with rare Pals but they were too high to capture so I marked my map for later and carried on.

Everything seems to happen that way. I go exploring, find something interesting, realise I need some new gear or item or levels to get any further with it and that gives me another goal. There are no tasks or missions or quests but it never feels like there's no structure let alone nothing to do. 

And After That?

How long all this can go on is less than certain. The world is curated not procedurally generated. Given time, I'll have cleared all the fog from the map, captured all the Pals, learned all the recipes... or I will if I stick around long enough. That's unlikely. I'll be surprised if Nightingale doesn't nudge Palworld into the background and after Nightingale there's going to be another game and another...

I read an interesting opinion piece at Gamesindustry.biz, making the case for the "Live Service" model being all but played-out. It appeared, presumably not at all co-incidentally, just after a news report on the same website revealing that 95% of games studios are currently said to be working on a Live Service game. 

It almost seems a shame to build here. Almost.

Palworld, Nightingale or Valheim may not be Live Service games in the sense of having "seasons" or "battle passes" but I feel much the same law of diminishing returns applies to open-ended, exploration-driven survival sandboxes. They're fantastic for a time - and it can be quite a long time - but after a while there's a definite feeling of being done with them. Not forever but at least for a while and once you move on, will you return? And if you do, for how long?

My future plans for Palworld and all games like it are much the same: play them while they're fun but if something more interesting comes along, play that instead. Interest and involvement can run extremely high for a while; comittment, not so much.

I've been used to MMORPGs, which tend to set their hooks much deeper. My time with a favorite MMORPG is often measured in years. Even a dalliance can claim months of my life. Survival games, in comparison, might only expect to hold my favor for a few weeks. 

For now, though, I'm playing Palworld and liking it a lot. This won't be my last post on the game, I'm sure of it. I barely got through half the topics I wanted to cover today and even then the post ran long.

Then again, I could say that about pretty much every post here...