NTE 2 Months Later
It's been just over two months since I wrote my initial review of NTE, and considering NTE is a live service game, I think it's healthy to have follow up reviews of content as long as I keep playing. If NTE continues on it's current path, I think I'll have plenty more updates to share. There are a lot of things to talk about, and I'm excited to talk about the good and bad of all the major content that has been released over the last two months.
Limited-Time Events
As NTE is a live service game, it's really important for them to give the players new content. Aside from the main story and sidequests, one way Hotta goes about giving players reasons to play are their limited time events. Not counting login-based events, we've had 6 limited-time events so far of varying degrees of quality.
For Patch 1.1, we had the Underground Circuit and What's Baking limited-time events. Underground Circuit was a Mario Kart-esque PvP racing minigame, and What's Baking was focused on the in-universe social media app "Bagel".
Underground Circuit was really mediocre to me. Cars had very high durability against weapons, which really made the utility weapons the best options for general use. The ice gun had a high rate of fire which allowed it to destroy objects in the way or hinder other racers' vision. The spike strip shotgun was probably the best weapon when you were in first place, as it really helped to slow down other racers. There were a few problems to the event: the Le Mans style start as well as randomized cars. The Le Mans style start really rewards players who have movement skills like Jiuyuan's redirect, or Daffodil's dash cancel. It could be argued that optimizing your movement is skill expression, but if a player doesn't have Jiuyuan or Daffodil, it made getting a good car at the start much more difficult. With random car spawns in set areas around the map, using these movement skills to get to them faster was also quite important. That said, many players were AFK farming the event after the first few days (I'd guess mobile players or console, since both have notable disadvantages when compared to PC player potentials) so the fun wore off quickly. There were definitely some fun quirks like the surprise co-op races where someone would get in the passenger seat of your car.
What's Baking was focused around the in-universe social media app which is basically Facebook. Images with titles and captions could be posted, and the more interaction you got, the more event currency you received. It should be noted that Bagel is still active in-game at time of writing, as the Bagel shop is open however the limited-time rewards are gone. This event was also okay. It was really dragged down by a bug where you wouldn't be able to post. I think the event rewards were easy enough to get as long as you posted 5 screenshots on Bagel daily. However I think the core issue of Bagel is discoverability. There's an insane amount of Like For Like (L4L) and Follow for Follow (F4F) farming; people will spam comments on their own posts to boost "interaction" which causes Bagel to move the posts higher in the Recommended feed. While I think it's cool to have in-game, as the story dialogue and a loading screen tip mention it a few times, it's something that I don't really care about. I'd say this is the weakest limited-time event put out thus far.
For patch 1.1.12, we got access to the Fight Championship and Hunter's Crucible events. Fight Championship was a PvP game mode, and Hunter's Crucible was a boss challenge game mode. Of the two, I really enjoyed Hunter's Crucible.
Fight Championship was a decent event however it suffered from some text problems and a lack of explanation in some areas. The core idea was simple enough; fight barehanded in the gulag against 3 other players. However much like the Underground Circuit event, this one was heavily AFK farmed as well as far as I could tell. I think the gameplay loop was entertaining but ping differences and lag caused a lot of problems for me. I'd see players teleporting around or I'd get hit when nobody was near me on my end. I think this issue might stem from NTE's netcode, as I also see rubberbanding and sync issues when playing with my friends in MY and PH. For full transparency, I'm located in Japan and I play on SEA servers. I have a ping of around 40-60 ms. I've played Battlefield on 120 ms ping and had fewer sync issues. Now the other major issue of the Fight Championship event was tied to the PvE portion of it. You were required to unlock the Tornado fight in the prison and based on the event UI, many people, myself included, thought it would unlock the PvE challenges closer to the end of the event. But on the last couple days of the event, the PvE challenge button never unlocked. After some quick Googling, I saw that you'd have to do all the PvE challenges in prison and that the PvE button in the event UI didn't actually do anything. After doing the PvE challenges in prison, I got the rewards from the event. It was poorly laid out to the players, but this won't be the last time we encounter the issue of bad explanations and bugs.
Hunter's Crucible was a great event that really pushed the PvE content. It gave players access to a variety of bosses with a bunch of modifiers. The more detrimental the modifiers, the more points players would earn on a clear. Of course, these points were required to get everything out of the event shop. I'd say this is probably the hardest content I've seen in the game so far, since I wanted to max out my points. Damage resistance, increased enemy HP and damage, and a time limit made it much more fun because it was mildly challenging. Especially for my team since I didn't invest or use any primary DPS characters (Chaos, Nanally, or Baicang. My Lacrimosa wasn't even close to built at the time). It was a fun challenge! Arguably anyone that used a mostly built primary DPSer wouldn't have had much of a problem.
At time of writing, we're on Patch 1.2 and we've had 3 events with more to come if the livestream is accurate and nothing goes wrong. We have 999 Nights, Shadow-n-Seek, and Mews Flash. One of these events is okay and the other is actually awful. Mews Flash is scratch cards, and 999 Nights is a whole new game mode. I don't really need to go too much into Mews Flash since they're just scratch cards that are likely to put a big dent in your wallet. But 999 Nights is pretty big, and Shadow-n-Seek is prop hunt.
999 Nights takes you, Mint, Shinku, and Iroi into a high fantasy boardgame world. Shinku is the latest new gacha character at time of writing, with Iroi to follow once Shinku's banner is over. The combat is more or less the same as the base game, however it introduces a Diablo-esque loot treadmill. You are locked to the 4 characters presented and you start with nothing. No money, no gear... nothing. This is completely cut off from the base game. There are unique quests, unique gear, and now gear sets. Gear in 999 Nights can give bonuses much the same as your cartridge and modules in the base game. You can get crit rate, crit damage, HP, and so on. It is a bit simplified in terms of raw stats, but is changed significantly by sets, uniques, and passives. These sets will dictate how you approach the challenge and nightmare modes, which are unlocked after beating the previous difficulty level. As of time of writing, after you buy out the shop, this event is basically skippable unless you really enjoy the gameplay. However aside from the meta currency used for the event shop, I don't know if there's any point in playing aside from trying to farm the meta currency for when the second part of the shop opens. There is an item in the shop that refreshes daily but I haven't used any of the Heterogenous Units yet so I don't see much of a point in farming too heavily. I'm not a huge fan of high fantasy and I started playing NTE specifically because it isn't fantasy. Aesthetically, I couldn't wait to be done with the event however the gameplay is arguably better than the base game due to all the extra items you have access to, which can allow you to make some really broken builds. The most difficult bosses can be cleared in well under 30 seconds if you invest the time. The game mode does have a few bugs and there are times where the text in the achievements doesn't match other parts of the game. In addition, the lack of checklists make certain aspects harder to figure out such as which minigames you need to do to complete certain achievements.
Shadow-n-Seek is a pretty simple prop hunt. There are 5 hiders and 1 seeker. The hiders get to rotate between 3 different props that seem to work in sets. Some are hard to work with, while others are pretty ridiculously overpowered. Of course, the props available change depending on the map. Seekers get a radar ability that tells them if any hider is within the AoE of the radar. Hiders are allowed to spawn a few decoys that will trigger the radar and taunt. Hiders can also move during the round however their movespeed is greatly increased during the prep time. Overall, I think it's simplistic but really fun. I haven't seen any issues with people trying to AFK, though this may be due partially to the fact that this style of prop hunt allows hiders to go AFK.
Quality of Life (QoL) Limited-Time Events
While not proper events in their own right, we've had a few QoL limited-time events. These are events that allow you to finish your weekly city stamina more quickly for increased rewards, increase the fons you get per Pink Paws Bank Heist, or give increased drops in certain character pixel dungeons. While not worth writing home about, they are definitely worth a shout out because when they're on, it's nice to be able to do stuff more efficiently.
Monetization
There have been two mystery boxes and my god I really hope they don't make these a regular thing because if they do, I may quit and I really don't wanna quit.
The first mystery box was the Everdriving Mystery Box, which as far as I can tell is an official Porsche collab. While most of rewards in the mystery box were good, the costs were far too high if you wanted to get everything. It's very unfriendly for F2P or light spenders. There were a lot of great items like the Porsche 918 Spyder which is objectively the best car in the game at the moment. While customization of the 918 is prohibitively expensive and the oversteer does leave a bit to be desired, the acceleration and top speed are second to none. If you were able to buy it out, you could get some very useful items! Again, I think the prohibitive costs were what held this box back from being good.
The second mystery box is the Neon Rift Mystery Box and is still good but has problems of bloat to nickel and dime the players. On the one hand, I think the Draco motorcycle is the best way to travel around the city. Like other motorcycles, it can be summoned almost anywhere however it can make incredibly sharp turns, has instant acceleration, and can jump. It also has infinite durability at the moment. The big issue with this mystery box is the inclusion of reskins of the main character skin. The reskins take up 2 out of 15 boxes and are objectively the worst items in the box since they do literally nothing without the character skin. Everything else is usable regardless of whatever you get from the box. The total cost however is notably lower than the Everdriving mystery box.
Overall, while none of the items in any of the boxes are truly necessary, the Draco is a big QoL and the Porsche 918 is the fastest car in the game. I would advise checking the pull charts on websites like Game8 to figure out how much you're willing to spend, because you are unlikely to get the best items in the mystery boxes until the last pulls.
Story
Circling back to the overall story and plot of the game, we've had one main story episode since 1.0 and that was the Dreamwalk Corridor which also unlocked the Sunward Island location. Dreamwalk Corridor had lots of good moments and focused on Nanally; if you've read my previous review of NTE, you may recall that I didn't care for Nanally. I still don't, but Dreamwalk Corridor did a good bit of work to try and make me like her more. It also gives a bit of info about Daffodil's "family" which is an interesting dynamic. The writing is much better than I expected, but I also know that NTE's writing team can do a good job. I'm really hoping they continue the trend of having more serious moments getting time to breathe.
999 Nights is also technically story content because it gives you more insight into Iroi as well as Shinku's backstory. That said, Shinku's backstory is poorly set up. She acts like a lone wolf because she's afraid of getting close to other people. Consequently because of her lone wolf act, she doesn't get enough screentime or development for the players to actually care about her. The reveal of her backstory lacks any impact or weight. It's difficult to empathize with her since you just don't know who she is. Overall, I'd say 999 Nights' backstory for Shinku is much worse than Dreamwalk Corridor's backstory for Nanally.
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