NTE Patch 1.3
I was hoping that NTE would continue to improve by adding interesting content, but as you may have guessed by my using "was hoping," it has not really improved in any significant capacity. I want to talk to you about the content we've seen since the last major story patch, and in my opinion, the current state of the game shows a notable decline due to bugs, poor translation, and a clear lack of QA.
Limited-Time Events
There were a few events that I didn't get to talk about from patch 1.2 that I'd like to cover briefly.
Going Going Gone is now a permanent in-game event that's all about the auction mini-game, but now in a PvP format. Players have access to a shop to buy items to improve their odds of getting a bunch of goodies from the auction. If you're familiar with Storage Wars, this is a way for you to experience it for yourself. With occasional wallhacks.
We had the Fishing Frenzy which was the easiest, fastest, and best way to burn your city stamina per week. While spear, net, and bomb-fishing, you were able to increase your fishing level rather quickly for minimal effort. In addition, you could finish your entire city stamina bar for the week in maybe 10 minutes per week. Excellent.
The last "event" was the Warren Lucky Flip. Just when I thought we were done with 999 Nights, we got the Warren Lucky Flip. Which was just flipping 2 cards a day for 8 days. It was the biggest non-event event I've seen in a game. The rewards were mediocre at best, but I guess that's all you can expect from an event that requires a max of 2 minutes per day.
Now let's talk about Patch 1.3, which in combination with the previously reviewed Patch 1.2, doesn't signal the death of the game, but certainly has me worried for the future in terms of gameplay.
In terms of events, we have Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, Wave Racer 64, Legally Distinct Survivors, a boss rush event, more 999 Nights stuff, Shipwreck Salvage and Brick-by-Brick.
Starting with Neverness or Everness Xtreme Beach Volleyball, this was 100% made to appeal to gooners. It gives the excuse to put Zankou and Mint into swimsuits and really focus on their assets, if you know what I mean. This is the fanservice beach episode. There's no 2 ways about it since the volleyball mechanics aren't particularly good. The characters stats' are somewhat nebulous and don't seem to affect things as much as they would seem to on paper. The available camera angles make it a tad difficult to line up good hits, but the AI is so inept that you can do a basic underhand serve and still get points occasionally. Winning is not super difficult, but finding the will to grind out the event is. Speaking of winning, if you choose to play as Mint and win, you get gratuitous cleavage and fanservice. Zankou's is a little less fanservice-y, but people with a certain inclination for the dogs will enjoy it a bit more than others. Also the keen-eyed among you might've noticed a weird visual bug when winning as Zankou. If you didn't see the bug, there were two random silver orbs: one above her navel and one above her cleavage although this appears to have been patched. As a side note, the volleyball mini-game is classified as a race going by the English text. I guess you could say it's a race to get the winning number of points, but that feels like a stretch.
Wave Racer 64 is possibly the easiest racing event in a video game. You have tons of time to ride through easy courses, getting points that are actually difficult to miss due to the hitbox size of the objects you're required to hit, and there are few obstacles. The lack of opposition, the gracious time limit, the simple courses, and the easy point requirements make this feel like an ad for the newest mystery box. Also there's a fun bug where a sailboat will spawn 90% underwater on a certain track. That's two bugs.
Hunter's Crucible makes a return being even less fun than before for me. I liked the first one and I thought it was a nice challenge, but I suppose the metrics back at Hotta HQ must have shown that too many people 100%ed the event. There's been a (Payday 2 Cloaker noise) "difficulty tweak" for the points required to 100% the event. There are now bosses that give nothing but in exchange give a higher point total when defeated. You need to have airtight team comps that are seriously geared to have a chance at full clearing the boss rush this time around.
Shipwreck Salvage is a neat mini-game that gets old after an hour. You hop on a jet ski with a harpoon and winch, and you drive around in the sea to try and get loot. You need to manage the weight of the items you're carrying, the amount of fuel you have, and the distance to shore. If you run out of fuel without returning to shore, you get nothing. You can upgrade your jet ski and harpoon; your jet ski upgrades will increase the total fuel amount as well as the cargo capacity. The harpoon will allow you to grab heavier items from further away. They both max out at level 3, which doesn't take too long to get to. I think the event can be full cleared in an hour or two depending on RNG. However even with everything maxed out, occasionally the game will spawn a crate that you can't pick up. So that's another fun bug. We're at three now. Now for what it's worth, native English speakers will also notice that the dialogue with the event NPC also has grammatical errors. I'm not one to dock points for this, but considering how rushed content has felt, I think this might be indicative of QA not being up to snuff when combined with other bugs.
Brick-by-Brick is accessed through the city activities menu and is decently entertaining, but it's more fun to go to them through the open world exploration. There are construction sites around the new zone of Duskmoor, where you can get into construction equipment and mess around on the construction sites. Only time will tell what this means, but this is by far my favorite thing. You can drive a roadroller, digger, some other heavy machinery, and as someone that was forklift certified, a forklift again. Hurray! Unironically my favorite thing from Patch 1.3.
Lastly is Everness Survivors (Runaway Echoes). It's bad. I'm an avid fan of Survivors-likes, as I mentioned in my review of Warhammer Survivors. This isn't the worst one I've played but definitely leans towards the garbage side. Part of the fun of Survivors-likes is becoming incredibly OP and discovering fun combinations. NTE doesn't let you do that. You match elemental affinities and you build them up. They all are more-or-less the same. The actual ability affects are basically all the same, there are zero combinations of skills, all of the skills have levels that are hard-capped at level 15, AoE skills have a hard capped range value, and the skill tree is wholly uninteresting. It's easy, not many mobs spawn, and once you see what the skill tree gives you, it's even easier. You can clear all the basic stages with zero points in the skill tree by the way. You can run around in a circle, and as long as you pick good skills and get lucky with RNG for skill buffs, all 6 intro stages are an absolute cakewalk. Just run around in a circle. It's boring. I was hoping for something interesting to happen, but around 29 minutes in to the Endless mode, I just gave up. Also certain text pops up in Chinese! Bug number four, hurray.
There's one more event coming up called Breezy Tour and I hope it's nice and chill. I just wanna spend some time with Linko. I think she's neat.
New Vehicles, Home, and Zone
Vehicles
There are 3 new vehicles with this patch, and boy howdy they are certainly some of the vehicles of all time. While the Porsche collab for the Spyder was a must-buy (for me at least), all 3 of these vehicles are very much optional; not even nice-to-have like the Draco.
First we have the Tide. The Tide is the only water-vehicle thus far, however it's stuck in a mystery box. The box itself isn't awful, if you have Nanally and want the Tide, and follows the trend of the other mystery boxes but I do think it's the worst box so far. While our last box had outfit colors that you might never get to see if you didn't get the outfit, this one gives you a new outfit for Nanally. I do not have Nanally. I wasted 2 million Fons for a character's outfit while lacking the character, while ALSO having zero plans to ever pull for said character. Even full clearing the box, I have a dead item. That said, the Tide is easy to handle and can be useful outside of just wandering around in the ocean.
We also have the Sirocco ATV and Yesteryear bicycle. I called it on Bagel that we're getting a bicycle btw, you're welcome. The Sirocco ATV isn't particularly useful if you have the Draco. It's the most expensive ATV I've ever seen at a whopping 4 mil. I can't see a reason to buy it in terms of practicality, unless you wanna show off your Zankou livery. We also have the Yesteryear bicycle (with Linko livery!) which follows the theme of goofy slow vehicles that allow you to exist in Hethereau. At only 800k, I see no reason to avoid it aside from some jank, especially since the other goofy slow vehicles are a pain to get (also you tell the bike seller you want to buy a car smh).
Stillmeadow House
What an absolute disgrace. While it is cheaper than the most expensive property, it's also significantly smaller and features fewer anomaly furniture. Considering you have a house in the countryside, even though it is cheaper, you'd expect something that makes the house worth it. Instead, you have a small property with narrow hallways, fewer anomaly furniture than I'd like considering the price, and a garden. You'd think the garden would be great, but it's mostly for AFKing your city stamina to grow plants. Plant seeds cost Fons, which means you're technically LOSING money to grow plants rather than do other city activities. Aesthetically, it's fantastic because it does really look like a house in the countryside. It allows you to park a car in the car port to show it off too. However I think this is realistically on par with the apartment that got released with the Porsche... meaning it's a skippable property.
Duskmoor
Duskmoor is kind of an interesting zone, because it's the first non-urban area. While the other parts of the game (excepting the Bureau's island and the resort island) are very much urbanized, Duskmoor stands out. It starts as pine forest zone that might be familiar to people in the Pacific Northwest or northern California. At first blush, I thought it wasn't particularly beautiful, nor was it what I was hoping the next zone would be, but it did offer a nice change of scenery. However it does open up to a nice ring road around a lake with cherry blossoms, maples, and bamboo and mountains in the distance. It's a great driving experience. But it wouldn't be patch 1.3 without some problems at this point. When speaking to the old man that runs the jet ski mod shop, all of his dialogue and my responses were in Chinese suddenly. That bug has since been fixed, but would have been at least 5 bugs by now. The northern majority of the map is inaccessible, really killing the idea of dropping 4 mil to buy the ATV for me personally.
Changes to the Bank Heist
The bank heist was apparently too difficult or time consuming, so certain activities now contribute to the tycoon incentive fund. The tycoon incentive fund will pay out 1 mil every 2 weeks by doing certain marked activities (like volleyball), and this includes bank heisting. I personally wouldn't mind having the tycoon incentive fund be an addition to the bank heist 1 mil, but now the best way to reach the 1mil cap is to do your weekly volleyball tournament and complete the rest of your 400-500k through heisting, which should only take about an hour every 2 weeks. I dislike this change, since this is easily done with a static group, but I understand that not everyone has 1-3 friends to play with, and pugging heists is not a stellar experience. I'd honestly prefer if more activities gave the tycoon incentive rather than just volleyball, heisting, and the auction minigame.
Story Progression - Fogden Game
I don't wanna give anything away too obviously, but depending on your literacy comprehension and your familiarity with media terms such as "in media res", this will have spoilers.
First off, the intro. It takes us to the edge of the new Duskmoor zone to investigate a place that has some spooky stuff happening. There are some cheap attempts at jump scares but it creates a real spooky atmosphere once you enter the zone. I also got stuck on spawn multiple times when loading in, so bug number 6 is the first real scary part. The entire intro feels long and doesn't really add a lot for the amount of time it takes to traverse the zone and go through the lore. It also doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about the sequence of events prior to your entry.
Potential Spoilers Start Here
Once you learn about the Fogden Game and how it all works, you take control of characters that aren't the MC and progress through the world. I'm fairly certain that a bunch of stuff from 999 Nights is reused here, but there are some interesting bosses to face with fun gimmicks. You get a little bit of lore but nothing is really clear as to how this whole world works. It's ripe for fan theories.
You also get to play as Linko, which was great because you got some unexpected lore about other characters you know through her journey. Also I just like Linko. I said it before and I'll say it again.
At the end of the story there's an excessively long boss battle that isn't particularly fun to play through, but in terms of lore is very cool. There's an unexpected return and deus ex machina, which for me was the most interesting part of the patch.
Potential Spoilers End Here
I know that was very vague, however I want to say that this was unimpressive to me as far as story progression. It does wrap up the previous arc, so I'm curious to see where it goes from here since they've only really established one other major threat. I have concerns that this will go the way of WoW and start asspulling new major enemies now, so they need to start laying a lot more groundwork for enemies.
Wrap Up
Overall I'm at a strong 5/10 for the game right now. I also want to clarify something about scores. 5/10 is perfectly fine. Average. Stop setting 7/10 as your bar for "okay". Use the whole scale.