Villagers & Heroes part 2

After I spent some time finding portals and exploring new locations, it turns out that the core set of quests specifically sends you to all those places in a sensible level order.  Head to X to talk with Y, then Y sends you to X2 to talk to Y2, regularly going back to the original town.  On one of the visits back to Summer Hollow, it's nighttime and there are no people on the street, carts are turns over and there are papers and debris all over -- at this point NPCs tell you that all the townspeople are vanishing.  I thought that was a nice set of details.

When I see other players running through the area I'm visiting, I wonder if they are really in the same world.  Would they also see the debris in the streets and get the same responses from the NPCs?  It would be a serious code challenge to filter the PCs to only see each other if they're in approximately the same quest space.

The quests range from classy (find out what someone buried behind the hooded statue, and find an engagement ring) to lowbrow (I need some greasy entrails for a potion).  I have issues with how my player changes size constantly.  Just going around a corner, I change from 9 feet tall down to shorter than a barrel.  I always have issues with on-screen joystick controls.  I have gotten pretty good and navigating in this world, but there are times when it's a bother.  Other times it gets me attacked by mobs I was trying to avoid.

At one point, people in the chat were posting what year they were born.  Mostly older than expected, then it turned into actual old-person jokes.  Pretty funny for a while, but I usually have that turned off.

3/23: 

I had about an hour to go through a few more quests.  The overall story of the identity of the shape-changing badguy is interesting enough, I guess.  I went to an island of fungus creatures because the wiki said that's where some mining could be done, but there was nothing of the sort on the map.  So I'm level 10 now and have still not seen a single rock I can mine.  I did some more quests where I went down a watery tunnel to beat goblins to get to the three glowing women who made me a potion to protect me from the scary hag I was supposed to talk to, who turned out to be very reasonable.  

I also found that convict everyone had been talking about but the prison he was in was a ring of glowing plants instead of a big building.

Meh, there was this scary evil guy who almost took over the world once, but he was beaten and now his followers want to bring him back.  I would like to do some more gathering and crafting and less of that story, but comically when I went back to the Hollow to sell stuff from my overflowing bag of goodies, all the people were gone.  Nobody left to sell to.  So I went to Dagmar Strand and although the NPCs are still there, I found no general shops.  Maybe I have to go back to the Village where my house is?

I did gnogment a few things, but it's easier to just equip the newer better pieces when I get them than do the whole mix and match process.

There was a pretty funny encounter with a wordsmith who needed tiny hammers to smith words, and her assistant who sounded tired and incoherent at first but then talked in big words trying to explain how annoying it all was.

3/25: I got to the big battle with the Miscreant:

 

After that I was invited to the castle to give the half of the magical item to the princess,and of course found that there was another group of badguys.  The princess went missing and the relic never got where it was meant to go, so now I have to track all those things down.  I'm level 13 and the overall progression is good.  As expected, I found actually ores to mine in My Village and got up to mining level 12 or so, and crafted some belt buckles and things.  I was also able to sell some things to the people hanging around the village center.

It has been an enjoyable ride so far.  I wish the models for the human characters were not so lumpy and homely.  The voices readings the first lines of the dialog have done pretty good so far.