NTE beta impressions: Technically impressive, but still a little empty
By Marco Wutz
Hotta Studio’s upcoming open-world RPG Neverness to Everness, NTE for short, is a curious amalgamation of elements: You have the wide, sprawling worlds of Genshin Impact and Tower of Fantasy, the urban vibes of Zenless Zone Zero and Grand Theft Auto, the light-hearted, fun writing of Honkai: Star Rail, and a supernatural theme akin to Ghostwire: Tokyo.
In terms of atmosphere, NTE hits the mark: When you drive your car through a rainy night with NTE’s version of Eurobeat music blasting from the radio and the neon lights of the city passing by, reflected in the puddles on the road, the melancholy you’d expect such a scene to evoke absolutely hits. When investigating the supernatural Anomalies occurring in town, all tricks from the horror media playbook are being pulled out — disconnected telephones are ringing, shadows follow you, fog limits your vision, you feel eyes on you where there are none.
Whether it’s goofing around with your colleagues or doing your job as a ghostbuster, NTE is very good at immersing you in its world and making sure that its contrasting themes don’t clash. The variety of character expressions, animations, and camera angles is great as well, adding to the storytelling. And, hey, there’s a skip button for those who are only there for the gameplay.
The premise of its story is nothing you haven’t seen before: You are an amnesiac with special powers, somehow connected to the mysterious, supernatural Anomalies that plague the world. Following your grand entrance, the BAC – Bureau for Anomaly Control – conscripts you into its service and places you with a group of Anomaly Hunters in the city of New Hethereau.
New Hethereau is a sprawling metropolis and all of NTE – at least at this point – takes place in this city and its various districts. It’s a visually and technically impressive map that’s essentially seamless and works without any loading screens. Some scene transitions are a little choppy in the beta, but for a work-in-progress version this is seriously robust.
As fantastic as the atmosphere of New Hethereau is, after a while it begins to feel a bit empty. A lot of the shops that are currently open don’t actually offer any services or goods and there isn’t all too much to discover at the moment. Hotta has built itself a wonderful foundation, but there’s currently not enough incentive to go out and explore.
The Anomalies that do appear in the city are very well integrated and quite varied in terms of gameplay, but they alone aren’t enough to fill a metropolis as big as this one.
NTE features a heat system similar to GTA or Cyberpunk 2077 — and it has the same problem Cyberpunk 2077 had at the beginning: It doesn’t feel organic. When you steal from shops, are violent towards NPCs, or go on a road rampage, police units will simply spawn in behind you, but you can’t really outrun them or hide. Teleporting to your house will get rid of them, but the system is pretty much designed to catch you, should you provoke the ire of the law. It doesn’t serve too much of a purpose aside from prompting GTA comparisons at the moment.
The game’s life sim features – similar to the city itself – are great foundations for expansion. You can own and run businesses to earn money used in the game’s world, but also in shops that’ll help your account progress, e.g. by exchanging the money for premium currency. This business system is well integrated with the game’s characters, which all come with special skills that help their assigned shops, and features a restaurant minigame that has you prepare foods and drinks and serve them to customers as quickly as you can.
It’s a fun mode, but needs an encyclopedia for recipe combinations. Likewise, the entire business tycoon section needs graphs to track revenue and such — there’s a lack of information at the moment, so you don’t really have a sense of whether you’re even running a profitable business. Also, graphs that go upwards are very satisfying and I want to see my business empire grow.
Elements like housing and vehicle modifications have much potential as well. It’s fun to own a home and a car and to customize them. It’s nice to have goals to work towards.
The game’s driving system obviously won’t be able to compete against actual racing games, but from my perspective it fulfills its purpose — mind you that I’m playing with mouse and keyboard, which makes it difficult for even the best racing games to make driving feel amazing. You feel a clear difference between vehicle types and surfaces (dry, rainy, and snowy) and can learn how these vehicles behave under these conditions, giving you the opportunity to learn and adapt. Personally, I don’t need more from the system, but of course that’s not a universal opinion.
What I would like to get more out of is the game’s movement and combat systems. NTE follows the Wuthering Waves route in using no stamina for sprinting and enabling wall-running, but the latter feels quite clumsy and gets interrupted all the time. Dodges, too, feel underwhelming and clunky. There is this strange delay between triggering a dodge and the character actually doing it, which kills the entire flow of combat in combination with some of the animations being a bit stiff. NTE doesn’t feature parrying, but has interruption and break systems akin to Wuthering Waves. A rotation system with entry attacks incentivizes the cycling of characters.
And here’s where this somewhat middling combat system gets a little more interesting. NTE has a system that’s somewhat reminiscent of Genshin Impact’s Elemental Resonance, but is a more amped up version of that. Putting Espers of certain damage types into the same squad unlocks special effects, both passive and active, which mainly trigger when you cycle characters. This creates a lot of team-building intrigue and makes the order of rotation in combat important.
Getting duplicates of Espers in NTE allows you to unlock extra passives, as is usual for this type of game. Hotta allows you to freely choose between all the available abilities, though, and you can switch between them whenever you like, which is commendable and player-friendly. NTE allows you to unlock several S-Rank Espers and Arcs via gameplay, giving you goals to work towards aside from farming premium currency and following the story. That said, NTE’s daily missions take a bit of time and there are two stamina systems to manage (one for characters and one for management), which will be a negative for those who play several gachas.
NTE is leaving me with a much stronger impression than Hotta’s previous title, Tower of Fantasy, but it’s clear that there is work ahead of the studio. Some of the foundations it laid are very impressive, such as the seamless city, presentation, and atmosphere, and some merely need more meat on their bones to be outstanding. But other systems are disappointing, such as the wanted mechanics, which lack a real purpose and fun engagement angle, and the stiff combat, which lags behind the buttery smooth experiences offered by competitors.
Given more time, though, NTE certainly has the potential to become one of the big names on the block, as the draw of its setting and feature combination is undeniably strong.
The impressions described in this article are based on a PC version of the game accessible to media ahead of the Containment Test.
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