Coming Back To Wuthering Waves or How Can I Miss You If I Never Go Away?

The main problem with having played fifty hours of Once Human in two weeks and having written several thousand words about the experience is that it's left precious little time for anything else. Before all that, I was perfectly content with Wuthering Waves. I feel like I ought to apologize to my Resonators for ghosting them. It wasn't like they - or the game - did anything wrong.

The tide has yet to turn on my obsession with Starry's survival MMORPG but today I did at least manage to tear myself away for long enough to log into Wuthering Waves, finish some quests and reach Union Level 30. I also took a whole bunch of screenshots because damn! this game is beautiful!

I don't have a big essay to write about it (Waits for the cheering to die down...) but I would like to share a few of those shots with a comment or two on both the process and the content.

In particular, I'd like to praise the game's exemplary screenshot functions. Both of them. There's one of those stop-everything-and-pose-for-a-picture features that allow you to change the focal length, lighting and so on so you can get the shot just right without having to wait for the right time of day or whatever. 

Those are great for serious compositions but you always have to go into the UI and fiddle with the controls to get things set up and that's not so good for quick snaps or action shots. Luckily, there's also a camera you can get from the storyline and add to the selectable wheel menu you control by a single press of the "T" key. 

You can T-bind a grapple or a sensor and a few other devices as well as the camera and I imagine most people do but I have the camera selected most of the time. It comes in handy when I turn a corner and happen on something like this...

That's two gigantic bears locked in a vicious battle to the death. When I first spotted them going at it, there was some human or other in the middle of it  but whoever they were, they didn't last long. The bears finished them off then turned on each other. 

I absolutely love it when games have hidden animosities or factions that pit certain creatures against each other when they meet but it's going above and beyond to set things up so even two of the same species can start a ruck. Or maybe it was friendly fire in the original fight that started it, which is something I enjoy seeing even more.

As you can see from the second shot, these two were really going at each other. Those are some great facial expressions. What I didn't get a shot of was my character running back to a nearby node that had an exploding rock she could pick up and throw. There are lots of those all over the place. It's a mechanic designed for a kind of physical puzzle but you can chuck the rock at anything. 

I chucked it at the bears. It exploded and did damage so I kept doing it to see if they'd notice and come for me. The rock reappears instantly on its spot after it's been used so I just kept throwing it until the bears were almost dead. 

Not that my rocks were responsible. I wasn't even doing enough damage to draw their attention away from each other. They were evenly matched so they both got to about five percent health at the same time, at which point I jogged over and killed them both. That's what I call entertainment!

This is the Great Banyan. It was corrupted somehow and I cleansed it. Here I am, admiring my handiwork. I forget the exact details because I started the quest before Once Human and didn't finish it until today.

A slightly unusual feature of Wuthering Waves I really like are the regional quests to cleanse large areas from some kind of corruption, after which you really get to see them change. There was one region that was so polluted with some gaseous chemical that drained your health really fast if you even tried to pass through on the way to somewhere else. I died the first time I went there because I didn't notice just how bad the pollution was.

It's very satisfying to see places like that change into really lovely, scenic countryside and stay that way. That's the big advantage single-player or co-op games have over true MMOs: the developers don't have to fudge permanent change with awkward workarounds like phasing that never really seem to work.

And finally, something that can often be an under-rated feature in many games: player-character resting animations. In Wuthering Waves they're seriously good. There's spoken dialog with some of the animations, too, and that's almost always charming.

Given that they're something you end up looking at one whole hell of a lot, it's always a pleasure when the artists have really taken some trouble over them, which they very much have here. Encore is especially fun to watch when she's doing nothing. Her fighting style involves summoning a couple of pets she calls "Woolies", little stuffed toys that fly around and do a lot of damage. When they're not fighting, they vanish into some other dimension but if Encore isn't doing anything in particular they have a tendency to pop out and try to get her to play with them.

In the shot above, she's spinning around, trying to get one of them to go back where it came from. But that's not even her best resting animation. This is:

After a while she just sits down on the ground and starts counting. Best of all, that's always what she's doing when you log her in. I dunno, maybe I'm easily pleased but this sort of thing is worth more to me than a good boss fight. It's what makes the characters sing.

Hmm. Now there's an idea ...

I've Been Out On That Open Road : Pickaxes And Pick-Ups In Once Human

After two weeks, I'm forty-five hours deep into Once Human. Level 37, two-thirds of the way to the cap. In most MMORPGs about now, I'd be in position to offer something a bit more informed than a few First Impressions. Not quite so easy this time. Everything I think I've learned could blow away with the wind when the first Season comes to an end next month.

It's frustrating to feel I have to keep reflecting everything through the lens of the Season concept but the further into the game I get, the more progress I make, the more it becomes clear no real assessment of the game can begin until we've been through at least one full cycle. Even then, since Starry says there will be different lengths and kinds of Season, it's far from sure any conclusion drawn from the first will hold much relevance for the rest.

Of course, most of the fundementals won't change... probably. The graphics will remain excellent, along with the world-building, vibe and aesthetic, all of which are top-notch. I've seen absolutely no slippage in the high-quality English translation as I reach the middle levels either, so I'm confident that will continue. 

Eternaland means that if your main focus is building, Seasonal changes should barely be noticeable. For those most invested in the main storyline or the many side quests, the picture is a little less clear but the intention there is certainly to keep full continuity across Seasons.

The very big deviated elephant in the room is the core survival gameplay itself. Bizarrely, that appears to the main element Starry are prepared to throw away in favor of a fresh start every six weeks. Progress? What progress?

Survival games in general tend towards a really simple gameplay loop. Start with nothing in a hostile environment where everything is trying to kill you, then find the world is stuffed to bursting with resources so all you have to do is find them, take them and learn how to use them to make your life so much better. 

Naturally, those resources aren't all immediately available so you have to range further and further afield, exploring new environments and facing new challenges. As you do so you become more and more proficient in using those resources to raise your technological/supernatural/magical/psionic threshold, thereby opening the way to even more complex processes. And repeat.

All of this takes quite a while but eventually you plateau, reaching a point where there's nothing left to discover and nothing new to learn. At that point, survival games that also focus on PvP can keep going indefinitely on the emergent gameplay that comes from throwing a bunch of people into a pit together but for PvE titles, as we've seen with other successful survival games like Valheim, players tend to consider the game over until a new biome gets added. 

That seems to be the business model for many and it's been pretty successful. The games do well, players seem happy. But most of the games we default to calling "Survival MMOs" or survivalboxes, if we want to denigrate the genre, are really co-op games at most. They aren't fully massive, shared, open world MMORPGs. Once Human definitely is. 

Co-op games have plenty of leeway over how and when people play them but true MMORPGS don't have the same luxury of letting everyone leave until the next biome or expansion is ready. Many have to put up with that cycle anyway. Some developers purport to be comfortable with it. Still, none of them really want it that way. They all worry about player retention and do whatever they can to encourage it. 

When Starry chose to weld survival gameplay onto an MMO chassis they were already giving themselves problems but by yoking the game to an unending cycle of server wipes they seem determined to make things as difficult as possible both for themselves and for the players. I really didn't want to focus on this aspect of the game yet again but after everything I've done over the past couple of days I don't see how I can avoid it.

Here's the thing: until very recently, I wasn't feeling the same degree of discomfort or anxiety that many players have been feeling over the Seasonal resets. As I wrote a little while back, I was ready to set my own goals, go at my own pace and play my own way. That seemed quite realistic when, as I claimed, there was far more to do at low level than I was likely to get through in a Season and I wasn't particularly interested in climbing the tech tree anything like as quickly as the game seemed to expect.

Things have changed. After I wrote that post, I made the mistake of getting curious about what would happen if I did knuckle down and get on with things, after all. I haven't made any more progress in the main storyline but it turns out that's no obstacle to progress. Unlike almost every other survival game I've played, Once Human doesn't really gate anything behind the narrative. 

I can't off-hand think of much that's directly linked to a stage in the MSQ. Eternaland was, but isn't any longer. Some things come with a level requirement but as I pointed out earlier, levels come extremely easily in the game, so that's not much of a roadblock. 

In fact, speed of leveling was the main reason I ended up pushing further ahead than I'd intended. At Level 37 it began to feel a bit limiting, planning to spend the rest of the Season in the starting zone and the next one over. I'd already done a bit of exploring but I decided I'd do more. I got on my motorcycle and went cruising down the deserted highways to see what was out there. 

To my great surprise and considerable excitement, what I found was a whole lot of completely safe countryside with little or nothing to stop me doing as I liked. There were ore nodes absolutely everywhere and crafting materials just lying around waiting to be picked up, mostly off the back of abandoned pick-up trucks or the trunks of broken-down cars. The highways are a treasure trove of trash. 

That changed my whole attitude to the game. Until I went touring, I'd assumed there wasn't much point in spending my Ciphers on Mimetics farther up the tech tree than I'd already gone. I wouldn't be able to make most of the advanced work stations, or the weapons and armor they produced, due to all of them requiring resources from areas full of much higher level mobs than I would be able to handle, so why bother? Once I realised I could get just about everything without having to fight a single deviant, though, suddenly I wanted to spend all those Ciphers I'd been saving - more than two hundred of them.

In two lengthy sessions, totalling over four hours, about all I did was ride around on my motorbike, opening Teleport towers, mining ore and looting storage crates. I skipped the Level 35 Settlement and its hinterland completely. It's still fogged over on my map even now. Instead, I went straight to the Level 45 hub, Blackfell, in the Red Sands region and the top-level region above that. 

I started out somewhat nervously, mining Aluminum nodes close to the Blackfell safe zone but very quickly I realised there was nothing to be nervous about. Contrary to pretty much every MMORPG or survival game I've ever played, aggressive mobs in Once Human stick strictly to their designated areas, mostly abandoned buildings, complexes, strip malls or other facilities, all of which are always very obvious and easy to see, both on the map and in the gameworld.

So long as you steer clear of those, the game is safe as milk. There are almost no roamers or wandering monsters other than wildlife and even the animals tend to stay in their appropriate habitats. If you go wading through swampland you may get attacked by crocodiles and woodlands have their share of boars and wolves but even there, by the standards of most games, they're few and far between. 

In Red Desert, all I saw were a few wolves, easily avoided in the daylight, somewhat less so in the dark. In more than four hours, the wolves only came close enough to attack twice and both times I was able to kill them before they killed me, despite a five-level disadvantage and some severely under-leveled gear. The one and only time I got killed was in the highest-level area, Blackheart Region, when a level 52 deviated wolf came out of nowhere in the middle of the night and one-shotted me as I got off my bike to loot a car. 

As time went on, I became more and more confident. The countryside felt almost completely safe, anywhere I went. So did many of the smaller points of interest, many of which often housed only a handful of deviants, all of whom kept pretty much to themselves as I rooted around the dumpsters, or nipped in and out of deserted buildings to grab whatever I could find out of bedside cabinets and storage boxes. 

Security was so lax I was even able to snaffle several Weapon and Gear chests, one of the more prized and usually better-defended looting targets. Twice, I was able to follow a trail of glowing lights to a Mystical Chest, the ones with the really good stuff in that appear mysteriously in unexpected places. I even completed a couple of non-combat puzzle quests and got the rewards with no difficulty whatsoever.

It was all hugely enjoyable. I had a really good time just riding around, jumping on and off my bike, hitting "Q" to set off the pulse that illuminates anything of note in a wide circle around the player, then stuffing everything I could find into my voluminous backpacks.

I interspersed looting with mining, which was even easier. There were ore nodes everywhere. I'd made the gadget that highlights them but I never needed to use it. I was literally bumping into ore nodes everywhere I went.

Once again, the game is very generous, a key design feature. Higher level areas add new metals but still keep the old ones, meaning you would never need to go back to the lower areas to mine copper or tin, which continue to be useful even after you graduate to aluminum and tungsten. I considered moving my house to one of the ore-rich areas of the desert so my two Digby Boys could supply me with all the ores I'd ever need (They dig up whatever is present in the local area.) but I actually find mining quite relaxing so I'm happy to do it myself.

As a result of all of this virtually risk-free scavenging, in what ought to have been but really weren't high-risk areas, after a couple of enjoyable sessions I was in a position to replace my Intermediate crafting stations with Advanced. I also had enough mats left over to start changing out my Tier 2 armor and weapons - not for Tier 3 or even 4 but for the top-rank - Tier 5.

I only had enough for a couple of pieces, though, which is when the full impact of the proposed seasonal resets really hit me. To get all the mats to upgrade all my armor and weapons, a process that would ideally involve multiple armor sets and weapon types due to the various functionalities and the kinds of situations that might call for each of them, is clearly going to take me several more lengthy scavenging sessions. 

Even though I'll become much more powerful and capable as I upgrade my gear, meaning I'll be increasingly willing and able to exploit the richer pickings available in areas more densely populated by deviants, I would guess it will still take me the rest of this Phase and some of the next to get everything I want. Probably another dozen hours or so at a rough guess.

And that's fine, in and of itself. Gathering, mining and scavenging makes for a very enjoyable way to pass a few hours. Satisfying, too. In any MMORPG, if I could put in fifty or sixty hours in the first month and finish close to the level cap, in good, solo-end-game gear, I'd count it time well spent. 

Would I feel so happy about it if I knew all that progress was going to be wiped a week or two later, sending me all the way back to Level 1, all my gear gone, along with all my crafting stations and even my knowledge of how to make replacements? I wouldn't even have the teleport points I'd opened, or a  motorbike to make getting any of it back any easier.

I'm really not sure how this is all going to work out. Right now, I feel emotionally out of phase with the game. I would really like to carry on working on improving my gear. It's fun and better gear will make the boss fights very much easier, strongly encouraging me to get back to the storyline. On the other hand, it seems like a hell of a lot of effort to put in for a benefit that at best is going to last me a couple of weeks before everything vanishes and I get sent back to the start to do it all over again.

It makes me feel as though the rational move would be to put Once Human on hiatus for the time being and play something else until I see how the first Seasonal reset goes. If I do carry on, I probably ought to concentrate on those parts of the game that will carry over to the next season - finding Blueprints in storage chests, building a really nice house, blueprinting it so I can re-make it next Season, working on stuff in Eternaland...

I probably won't do that, mostly because Once Human is so much fun, especially while it's fresh and new. I could just keep hammering away at it until it stops being fun any more, without giving too much thought to sunk cost and all of that. That would certainly work in the short term. If I end up playing for maybe sixty or seventy hours before moving on, well, that's a good run in any game.

Runs in MMORPGs, though, tend to be measured in the hundreds or thousands of hours. It's quite hard to see how that's going to work in this one. I guess only time and several Seasonal resets will tell whether Starry have invented a whole new way to play MMOs that everyone will be copying for the next five years or if they've holed their own boat and we'll all get to watch it sink.

Breaking News - Hello Kitty Is A Cat

 

Yesterday, I was stunned to read - in The Independent, no less - that “Hello Kitty is not a cat.” According to the article, which quotes as its source Sanrio director of retail business development Jill Koch, in an interview she gave on the Today Show, "She’s actually a little girl born and raised in the suburbs in London."

It seemed so unlikely I wasn't prepared to accept it just like that, even on the say-so of a respectable, old media source like a national print newspaper, where traditional, pre-internet journalistic standards might be presumed still to exist, so I engaged in a modicum of fact-checking. Something you might have thought whoever subbed the piece for the Indie might have thought to do before running it.

It's not as though it took me much time or effort, either. It took maybe thirty seconds to confirm that

a) It's not true.

and

b) It's not news.

The claim originally surfaced a decade ago in a 2014 Los Angeles Times article, ahead of the style icon's 40th Anniversary, when Christine R Yano, an anthropologist from the University of Hawaii and the author of  Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek across the Pacific, was interviewed in relation to a Hello Kitty exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum. 

Among other surprising facts, Yano revealed that Hello Kitty "is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature." She also explained that Sanrio, who presumably ought to know, had made all of this very clear to her in a response to the script she sent them for approval while preparing the show.

It seems the revelation didn't gain quite as much traction in the U.K. back then as it has now, on the occasion of Hello Kitty's fiftieth anniversary, when it suddenly resurfaced and became a news story across the British media. If you google it, you'll find numerous reports on all kinds of responsible outlets, from The Guardian to Sky News.

Once again, none of them seemed to think it worth checking with Sanrio for confirmation, possibly because this time the claims were, after all, being made by a senior representative of the company.Apparently no-one even bothered googling it.

Had they done so, they'd soon have discovered, as Kotaku did back in 2014, that the whole thing was nothing more than a combination of translation issues and cultural differences. The Kotaku piece goes into considerable detail about the nuances of language that apparently led to the confusion, all of which are very interesting but which I won't repeat here. 

The key facts were summarised neatly by The Week, where Catherine Garcia explains 

"Hello Kitty is just one in a long line of personified animal characters, including Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Goofy, and others. Although he may be able to drive cars, steer boats, and serve as a sorcerer's apprentice, Mickey's still a mouse, just like Hello Kitty — who bakes, goes to school, and is on the side of a 777 — is still a cat."

Why it ever needed anyone to spell this blindingly obvious fact out in simple terms is as much a mystery as how the story came to be resurrected (Hint: It's the fiftieth anniversary and hey, look! There's Hello Kitty in the news!) I'm actually more concerned by the apparent failure of almost all of the mainstream news sources to realise the "news" they were breaking was a decade out of date than I am to find they didn't bother to do due diligence on a silly-season story about a cartoon cat.

Anyway, in honor of the Great Event I'm pleased to present for you a choice selection from the many, many songs that have been written in Kitty White's honor over the last half century. That's Hello Kitty's real name, by the way. Did you not know?

Some of these may have appeared here before but they may also be the best ones so no apologies for bringing them back. And with that, let's have

Hello Kitty - Avril Lavigne

Avril's having something of a renaissance right now. She played Glastonbury for the first time and in what the NME described as "one of the weekend’s most highly-anticipated performances" she played a dozen of her best-known hits. This wasn't one of them.

Hello Kitty - Jazmin Bean

I'm pretty sure Kitty and her twin sister Mimmy would't be allowed to watch this. It'd either give them  nightmares or make them big-headed. Bigger-headed....

Hello Kitty - PiNKII 

Or this one, either, probably. For other reasons. Then again, PiNKII is PG compared to most of the rappers who've riffed off  HK. I had to stop clicking on those after about the fifth one I tried. Seriously, what is with rap and Hello Kitty?

HELLO KiTTY - OH!DULCEARi x LESTON

Spanish-language hyperpop is a sub-genre I am coming to adore. The glitching in this is superb. Two million views on YouTube says I'm not crazy, too.

🪲Hëłłœ Kįttÿ🐜 Alice Longyu Gao

Pretty much just Avril Lavigne for little Kitty White then, I guess. I mean, this one probably could do with a content warning. I guess they all could, although it's a bit late now...

Maybe we'd better finish with something wholesome.

Hello Kitty: Super Style! - Carly Rae Jepsen

Pity it's so short but then - SO IS HELLO KITTY!

Boom! Boom!

Okay, now that makes me wonder... is Basil Brush really a fox...? 

Hello Kitty would get that reference. She is British, after all. 

From Here To Eternaland

Of all the open world survival games, single player, co-op or massively multiple, that I've played over the past couple of years - and it's been a few - Once Human is certainly the one that takes the most explaining. The genre is supposed to be very straightforward: you start in with nothing, punch some trees, pick up some rocks and start building yourself a house, Then you work your way up the tech ladder until eventually you're the apex predator and ruler of all you survey. 

Starry Studio, the developer of Once Human, decided to change that up a little. It doesn't look like they had a problem with survival game tropes per se, more as though someone reckoned if it was fun to do it all once, it would be even more fun to do it over and over again. Like, how about every six weeks?

When the concept of Seasons was revealed back in beta there was a lot of pushback. There still is. The original seasonal concept was a lot more radical, offering almost no sense of permanence and continuity at all. Very quickly the devs realized that wasn't going to fly, which is when the idea of Eternaland first appeared:

"... we’ve received lots of helpful feedback about the seasonal gameplay, such as how entering a new season could result in major item loss, how some felt disappointed when homes they’d built got destroyed, or how some felt it was too abrupt to go straight from one season to the next.  

We’ve taken your feedback to heart, and are working to optimize our seasonal content. On top of this, we’re unveiling Eternaland, which will also function as a transition between seasons and a unique world for each Meta-Human.  "

As far as I know, the changeover of season were never tested in beta so pretty much everyone is waiting to see how it all works out. I wish I had the popcorn concession for the first reset.

Eternaland was tested, to some extent, and it's certainly in the game now. I went there for the first time a couple of days ago and let me tell you, it is idyllic. It feels almost like a snapshot from the afterlife, an impression that may not be entirely unintentional.

First, how to get there? I thought I'd have to do a quest because that's what several sources told me when I googled. That turned out not to be true, although I noticed today it still says it is on the first login screen. The Eternaland option shows as Locked until I select a server and if I click it, it tells me I need to do a Main Story quest in Iron River to unlock the option. Once Human may only have been Live for a couple of weeks but the data-trail has already begun to decay, both in and out of the game.

Because of that, I am not going to try and list the ways you can get to Eternaland. There may be several for all I know but I'm going to stick with the one I used, which also has to be the simplest. All I had to do was get to Level 20. Everything else followed automatically from there.

I had been pushing on to twenty, thinking that would let me pick up the aforementioned quest. I assumed I'd need to complete it before I could use some portal to get to the promised land. That may well still be an option but for me it wasn't necessary.

What happened was much more prosaic. The moment I dinged, a notice popped up on my screen, inviting me to go to Eternaland. I followed the prompts and there I was. As simple as that. It seems once you're tall enough, you can take the ride to Eternaland right from the UI, any time you like. Just press Escape to open the main menu, click on the Eternaland icon in the row along the top and off you go.

V, the firehawk who used to be a Mayfly but now acts as my personal assistant, wasn't impressed when we arrived but I was. Eternaland is beautiful, providing you derive your aesthetics of beauty from the Western Romantic tradition. My first thought was that we'd been translocated to the Aegean but a tour around the island suggested, based on the rock formations and the flora, that we'd arrived somewhere much further north, albeit in the midst of an unexpectedly glorious, Mediterranean summer.

The island is very large for a personal domain. You can build anywhere, with even fewer restrictions than those on the already-lenient mainland. In Eternaland, there's no requirement for structures to follow the normal physics of weight and mass, meaning you can build without concern for support. Take away the walls and the ceilings won't fall down

You also don't need materials other than one. Rendering the entire building trade redundant at a stroke, Astral Sand does everything. This magical resource replaces all other building materials, looking and acting exactly like wood or stone or glass when put to use. You don't even have to go dig it up. It's not just a material, it's a currency. You can trade for it and with it.

This is the strange part. Well, one of the strange parts. Given the reason Eternaland exists is to mitigate the impact of losing everything at the end of each Season, it would have been easy enough just to give players an island and infinite resources to build what they wanted; a sop to those who couldn't handle change. But that's not what Starry have chosen to do. They've tried to make Eternaland into a bona fide game all of its own.

Eternaland has an economy as well as some lore and a number of tasks you can do. It may lie outside of the game-world but it's still part of the game and therefore it needs gameplay, most of which revolves around acquiring Astral Sand and the other currency, Astrealite.

There are a few Journal entries to complete that reward Astral Sand but the quickest way to get some is to sell your unwanted stuff from the regular world through the Eternaland UI. Deviants sell for plenty, which suits me because I have plenty of spares I'm happy to dispose of.

And guess who's there to greet you when you arrive and explain how everything works? Good old Mitsuko! I was very suprised to find her waiting on the banks of the lake in the middle of the island. She has some dialog and a couple of tasks that mostly involve fixing up the big house across the lake. 

Although the island is all yours, someone must have owned it before you. There are several houses dotted around in various states of disrepair so if you're not into building you still have somewhere to sleep. 

Whoever was there before must have been a keen gardener. There are planting beds laid out and you can buy seeds from the shop - with Astral Sand naturally. I'm not a big fan of farming or gardening in games as a rule. It generally feels like a lot of busy-work to me. I'd rather someone else did it and sold me the produce. Consequently, I haven't bothered with it in Once Human so far, even though it's quite a well-developed part of the game.

In Eternaland, though, it's not like I have a choice. Not if I want to do any landscaping, anyway. It seems having one, universal currency isn't enough for eternity. There have to be at least two. The second is Asterealite, which you need to buy things like trees and rocks and whatever else gets added later. Furniture I bet, for a start.

Astrealite can only be had by filling Orders. Orders for whom is not clear, just as it's unclear who's buying and selling items in the Shop. The lore doesn't cover any of that. It's just there. Best not to think about it.

It may be that later there will be other options but currently all the orders are either for plants, fruit or fish. Fishing is always fun and there's no shortage of water, this being an island with a lake in the middle, but catching fish is both time-consuming and takes full attention, whereas gardening is pretty much fire-and-forget.

Well, in Eternaland it is, because not only are there already quite a few plant beds ready to be used but unlike on the mainland you don't need to worry about the weather. In the Bubble you are god. You can set a whole raft of conditions for your island, anything from who can visit and whether they can kill you to what the weather is going to be. If you make it sunny all day, every day, all you need to do is add fertilizer and water and your plants will grow fast.

Already there's plenty to be getting on with but also it's plain there's a foundation for much more. I haven't seen anything to suggest it's in the plans but self-evidently Eternaland could easily develop into something much more than a bolt-hole to hide from the six-weekly apocalypse.

Speaking of which, the fundemental purpose of the mechanic is to provide a means of storing and transferring items from one Season to the next. There's a list of things that can and cannot be carried across the seasonal divide, some of which would appear to be automatic, others that you have to insitgate and manage.

And that is where my personal experience ends and I'll have to stop describing and start guessing. There's an interface for transferring supplies but it's currently unuseable because it requires "Material Points". Those are allocated at the start of a new season, but that doesn't appear to include the very first one, since I currently have zero. Without trying it, I can't quite figure out just how the transfer system is going to work so that's yet another thing we'll have to wait for the first reset to discover.

All things considered, though, I'm impressed with Eternaland. It looks fantastic to the point where I feel a little uncomfortable building there. The background music is also very restful. It's just a lovely place to spend some downtime. Fortunately, the prefabricated houses are quite ugly so I feel entirely justified in tearing them down and building something more aesthetically pleasing.

I'd like to build in stone but one interesting design choice is that Eternaland only recognizes the building options already unlocked through the Mimetic system in the main game. I would have thought, given the emphasis on freedom to build, they might have unlocked everything automatically for Eternaland. I've unlocked stone now but I'm curious how it's going to work when all of my Memetics get reset to zero with the next season. Maybe that's one of the things I'll need to spend my Material Points on...

There should be plenty of time to figure out all of that when we get to the final Phase, A New Dawn. Apparently each Season ends with a coda, when you take time out to sort all your stuff and decide what you want to keep. Maybe I'll return with a follow-up post when I've seen how that goes.

Meanwhile, I'm off to see how my oranges are doing. I didn't get quite enough from the first planting to fill the order. I'm new at this gardening game...

As The Seasons Turn: Speeding Up And Slowing Down In Once Human

About two weeks and twenty levels into Once Human, I'm beginning to get a sense of the shape of it at last.  It's my impression that the whole Season mechanic has been throwing most peoples' estimation of the game right off and I believe that won't really change until the first seasonal reset, which ought to come about a month from now. For the moment, though, I do finally feel as if I'm getting some clarity at last, at least in relation to the way I'm choosing to engage with the game.

Here's the thing; the way Once Human works makes it something of a paradox for me. It's all at once too fast and too slow. The accelerated pace comes with the game, the slowness is something I'm bringing with me.

Before I get into the specifics, I ought to caveat everything from here on in with the usual warning that I may very well not know what I'm talking about. I know, I know, same as ever... but in this case this is a brand new game with systems no-one has yet seen in action. With that in mind, I'm not going to speculate about how successful the Seasons mechanic is likely to be over the months and years to come. I'm just going to speak to how it's affecting me already.

The current Season is split into six phases, each of them approximately a week long. All the phases have names as well as numbers: we're currently in Phase 3, Wrath of the Rift. 

Each Phase comes with its own set of goals and plenty of them. There are four tracks - Territory, Exploration, Secure and Challenges - each with a number of specific tasks, targets, requirements or benchmarks. Completing any of these goals earns you a currency called Mitsuko's Marks.

You can spend the currency in the Season Shop, where you'll find various cosmetics, furniture items and the like but just acquiring the Marks pushes a blue line around a circle on the left of the screen. Around that circle are one, two and three star markers and when the line reaches each of those you get a reward - a few items, some Starchrom (Another currency, used in the Wish Machine.) and most importantly Ciphers aka Meme Points.

Ciphers are used to buy Mimetics, the game's name for the skills and abilities in the four tech trees that comprise most of the progression in the game. In the betas I played, the only way I remember getting Ciphers was by leveling. It made progression feel steady and manageable. Everything opened up at just about the time I was ready for it and it all seemed quite natural and organic.

With the Live build, that rhythm has been disrupted. Ciphers come mainly from the Seasonal Goals and at a pace I find far too fast to feel comfortable. 

I'm not one to complain about anything in a game being too easy but it's undeniable that many of the Seasonal Goals are very simple. I didn't even they were there at first, although the game does prompt you to look at the UI page whenever you complete one. Just playing the game normally will quickly fill out some of the goals and once you start actively working on them, more can be completed very swiftly indeed.

They need to be that way because there are new ones every week and the whole thing only last a month and a half. There isn't time for too much that's long, complicated or difficult. All of which would be fine if the rewards weren't so generous. 

The first Phase was okay. I completed all three sections of the wheel without any pressure, which gave me a nice glow of satisfaction and thirty Ciphers altogether, a nice boost. I appreciated it.

Things began to change in Phase Two, when the reward for hitting each of the Star markers jumped from ten Ciphers to thirty-five and then forty. I didn't fill out the whole wheel to get the third batch before Phase Three dropped but I still got seventy-five ciphers. We're now a couple of days into the new Phase and I've already passed the first star, netting myself another forty.

I have no idea what to do with that many. I wasn't even using all the ones I'd gotten from leveling. When I realized just how many I had, I spent a long time yesterday, going through all of the options and even after I'd bought everything I wanted, I still had 165 Ciphers left. Skills do cost more than one Cipher each - the most I've seen so far is seven - but even so that represents a lot of spending power. 

Obviously, I could just spend them on whatever and there is a button that lets the game choose them for you but either of those options completely breaks the natural progression that was part of what I found so compelling about the game in the first place. Worse, I'd end up with a whole load of abilities I couldn't use because they all require mats that are only available from parts of the game-world I haven't reached yet and where I couldn't hope to survive at my current level.

A little of this comes from my personality. I strongly dislike buying things I don't immediately need, either in real life or in games. I'd far rather save the money, virtual or actual, for when I can spend it on something I'm going to use right away. That quirk aside, though, the developers clearly expect players to be progressing at a far faster pace than I am, which I'm not at all sure can be healthy for anyone.

I already feel mildly uncomfortable about the amount of time I'm spending with the game. From my perspective, I've been playing Once Human a lot since launch. It's been out for less than two weeks and Steam tells me I've played for almost 33 hours. I do occasionally wonder if I've been playing too much. I've certainly chosen to play the game once or twice at times when I knew I should have been doing something else, which is never a good sign.

And yet, with all of that, I am clearly far behind where the developers expect me to be by now. It's not just the avalanche of Ciphers. Some of the Phase Two goals and most of Phase Three's relate to things I haven't done yet or happen in areas of the game-world I haven't reached.

The level cap in Once Human is fifty. The map is made up of six very large regions, each with content appropriate for a specific level range. I guess that could be meant for one region per Phase, meaning players would take just a week to complete each of them. (Contradicting that theory is the fact that all quest progress, including regional and side stories, is carried across into the new Season, suggesting the devs aren't expecting anyone to do all, or even much, of it in a single Season.)

I am still in Dayton Wetlands, the starting zone. The content there goes to about level 15 or so. I haven't even explored the whole of the area yet, far less seen all the content. I have a dozen side-quests in my Journal and there are plenty more markers on the map where I could pick up more. I haven't even visited all of the marked areas of interest on the map, let alone done what there is to do in them, and by no means is everything shown on the map.

At a conservative estimate, I would guess that Dayton Wetlands alone would keep me busy and entertained for at least a month, even if I played fifteen hours a week, which is definitely more hours than I'd want to spend on it. I don't think I'd even out-level the area, going at that pace. The only reason I'm Level 27 and theoretically ready for the next region, Iron River, is the Commission system. 

Commissions are just what you'd expect: tasks you get from a notice board in the main settlements. There's a quest that introduces you to the concept but after that it's down to you to find the boards and take the commissions.

I hadn't been bothering with them until I decided I wanted to rush to Level 20 so I could get the quest to open Eternaland. (Separate post about that to come.) At that time, xp was coming steadily enough but it would have taken me several days of normal play to get to 20 and I was in a hurry, so I did a bit of googling to see how I could speed things up. Commissions seemed like the way to go.

You can take five Commissions per Phase. Most of them are incredibly easy, things like smelting fifty ores or driving 3000 meters. It takes literally a few minutes to do all five and each of them gives a huge wodge of xp. Pretty much a level every time. Since I started doing them just before the weekly reset, I was able to do ten in a couple of days, which jumped me from the high teens to the high twenties almost overnight. ( I just took ten minutes out of writing this post to take and complete the Phase 3 Commissions and now I'm Level 35!)

With the extra levels, I was able to do some exploring in Iron River, something I needed to do because the materials to make stuff I wanted for my house weren't available in the starting zone. It all went quite well. I was able to pick up quests and I could just about handle the mobs at the lower end of the level range. 

I considered staying there. Iron River is a nice area. Thanks to the excellent Move option, I could just pick up my whole house and everything in it and put it down again in a new spot but I'm don't feel ready to do that quite yet. I'm not usually one for worrying about "completing" a zone before I move on but in this case I barely feel like I've gotten started in Dayton Wetlands. 

Not only is there still a ton of stuff to do there, most of it still gives very decent experience. Plus I like the place where I'm living. I took some trouble to find it and I don't much want to move. If I did, it would be just a little way down the coast to an even better spot I happened on last night. I feel very much as though this is a both a game and a region where I could settle down for the medium to long term. Make my home there, you could say, in more ways than one.

The developers very clearly don't see that as an aspiration to be encouraged or supported. They want me to get on with the Scenario provided. I ought to be zipping through the levels and the regions, spending all my ciphers as I go, not slacking in the starting zone. They even upped the rate of gain on basic materials in the current phase just to make it clear you don't need to hang about in the starting zone, mining tin and copper, even though you can never have enough of either.

There's a fundamental mis-match between what they anticipate I'll find fun and what I actually enjoy doing but frankly it's been that way in almost every MMORPG I've played since EverQuest so I'm used to it. In pretty much every case, I've been able to work around the expectations of the designers and make my own way through the game, at my own pace.

This time that might not work. The entire game as it is now will vanish in about a month from now. My character will go back to Level 1. I'll lose my house, my furniture and all the Mimetics I've unlocked. The fog of war will roll in to cover the whole of the map once again. There seems to be some argument over whether all the Deviants I've collected will also be removed at the end of each Season but that does seem like the most likely reading. 

With that in mind, it's easy to see why progression is on fast-forward. If it went at the pace you'd expect from an MMORPG, most of the population would never get out of the mid-levels before they were back where they started. This way, everyone ought to be safely at the cap in good time, unless they play the way I do.

Whether it's a workable model for player retention is another matter. The sweetener for explorers, achievers and completionists, who might very well find both the pace and ephemerality off-putting, is that every Season supposedly brings a whole new tranche of content - new places to go, new things to collect, new goals to reach. Whether that's going to provide enough in the way of compensation for the perceived loss of status and the time spent acquiring it is something we won't find out until the first Season ends.

It does also raise questions in mind concerning the exact nature of such new content as may come. The second Season is rumored to be focused mostly on PvP, which seems like a risk. 

From a PvE perspective, there's mention of new regions to explore but I foresee problems even with that, given the way level has been linked to geography. It would suit me extremely well if a new season came with a new low-level area but I'm sure most players would see that as a pointless waste of resources, especially if the pace of progress means most will be through it and gone within days.

If  a new region comes at the higher end of the level curve, though, I imagine plenty of people will be unhappy about having to level through all the same content again just to get to it. I, of course, will most likely never see it at all.

Maybe the new Seasonal content won't be geographically linked in the same way. Perhaps it will stand separate from the areas we know now or operate in some kind of level-agnostic fashion. The information available at this stage is still so vague it's impossible to tell. 

I did say at the start that I wouldn't speculate on the longer-term prospects for Seasons so I'll stop before I take that line of thought any further. What I will say is that I can now see a way forward for myself, even with my preferences and predilections, one that might allow me to negotiate the intentions of the developers and adapt them to my own. What I mostly need to do is adjust my thinking.

It's going to take some effort but it could be fun to try. I just need to not get too attached to my little pets. If they'd let us take our Deviants into Eternaland with us, I think that would make a deal of difference. Because I've seen Eternaland now and I like the look of it.

More on that another time.

Throne And Liberty: More First Impressions

It took a long time and a lot of work but I finally managed to get off the starter island, out of the solo instance and into Throne and Liberty for real. The issue turned out not to be with the server after all but with my installation which, despite Steam telling me it had validated and repaired it, was still corrupted in some way.

In the end I uninstalled the whole thing and downloaded it again, this time on an external SSD and since then I've had no problems at all. I was able to pat Lunar-O, the little stone golem, on the head and start the very long cut-scene that ended with my arrival in the port city of Kastleton alongside hundreds of other players, most of whom were standing around motionless and each of whom had, for some inexplicable reason, a small, grey lozenge floating over their head.

Kastleton. And about flaming time!

I'm going to take this opportunity to complain yet again about the default settings in so many MMORPGs. I understand why developers feel the need to flag up absolutely everything any new player might conceivably need to find or know. I also understand that many, quite possibly most, players prefer to have practical, game-mechanic-related information instantly available, in natural line of sight, while they play.

But it looks fricken' terrible! When you've made what may very well be the best-looking game in the genre we're likely to see this year, why ruin any good first impression it's likely to make by cluttering the entire screen with crap? It would be really nice, just for once, to be able to log into a new MMORPG without having to go immediately into Settings to switch it all off.

Speaking of Settings - and game mechanics for that matter - Throne and Liberty is a prime example of why traditional MMORPGs remain a relatively niche genre. Yes, I know millions of people play them but billions of people play video games. There's no MMORPG equivalent of Candy Crush or Fortnite or even Call of Duty and for good reason.

There are literally dozens of separate items of information on this one screen...

Wilhelm's recently posted on Raph Koster's latest pronouncements on his Stars Reach project. Raph very clearly wants to target a much broader demographic than the PC-based MMORPG crowd and he's identified the kind of complexity and clutter I'm talking about as one of the key problems in doing so. 

Mostly he seems to be talking about having fewer buttons to press but he also mentions choosing "elegance over visual cruft". I really hope by that he also means the kind of thing I'm talking about here, most specifically all those words and symbols hanging over NPCs and players' heads, but also floating damage numbers and similar aesthetic horrors. 

There's an interesting discussion thread following the post, in which I made some rather cynical comments about Stars Reach obviously being designed as a mobile game first and foremost. On reflection, I'm not at all sure that's a bad thing. 

Oh, great. Something else to learn.

Most of the games I've played on PC recently and really enjoyed have either been mobile ports or were developed as cross-platform titles to be released on both PC and Mobile. Those games play more fluidly and feel more natural than the new, PC-native MMORPGs I've tried this year, first Tarisland and now Throne and Liberty.

Heartless Gamer, in Wilhelm's comment thread, says of the current beta "There is so much going on in the T&L interface and I spend more time in the UI than the world. " I can't help but agree with him. It's a trope of MMORPGs in general but in this one it's off the scale. 

The menus are vast and numerous and even the relatively few game mechanics I've been introduced to so far are offputting in their complexity. When a tutorial prompt has to lead you through half a dozen separate button presses just to show you how to use an upgrade item, there has to be something wrong in the basic design.

No wonder everyone's standing around looking dazed.

That said, I also recognize there's a great desire for exactly this kind of "depth" in systems among the subset of players who flock to games like this. Most of the Chinese, Korean and Japanese imports I've played have positively revelled in the complexity of their systems and mechanics. It's clearly something the audience they're addressing either wants or expects or both. Western-made MMORPGs might be a little less fussy but surely not by much.

Throne and Liberty is very much that game. It feels weirdly old-fashioned, almost nostalgic. It's very comfortable and familiar, to use another of Raph's buzz-words. Mrs Bhagpuss hasn't played an MMORPG in a couple of years and this is the first new one I've seen in that time that I've thought might be worth mentioning to her. I did think about Tarisland but, ironically, that one feels almost too old-fashioned. 

Throne and Liberty looks modern but feels quite the opposite. It also has the considerable advantage of a very much better English translation than we've been used to seeing. With the caveat that translations all too often deteriorate the further into the game you get, this one so far has been pretty much flawless. 

By that, I'm not saying the prose is great. It's not. It's perfectly fine by MMORPG standards but that's really not a high bar. What I mean is that everything reads as though it's been written by a fluent speaker of English, not someone with a basic understanding and access to Google Translate.

It's hard to say why this is something worth mentioning. It really shouldn't be. If there's one thing most MMORPGs have in common it's that they expect players to read a lot of text. It's a shockingly text-heavy genre, what with all the endless questing, the eternally evolving narrative and the aforementioned deep and complex systems, each with its own extensive notation and instruction. 

On top of all that there's also, quite frequently, a vast amount of in-game collectable lore in the form of diary pages, journals, letters and notes scattered far and wide across the landscape. Throne and Liberty leans hard into the found social history trope right from the start with papers glowing purple all over the place, just begging to picked up and read. 

It's easy to forget, as you skim-read or simply skip another page filled with inconsequential trivia, that someone had to come into work every day, sit down at their desk and write all this stuff. You'd think they'd at least want it to be reproduced in the game in a comprehensible, recognizeable form. We all know most players are going to nope right past it but surely the people creating all that imaginary history have to believe it's going to be of genuine interest to someone or why even bother? If it was worth taking the trouble to write it and put it into the game, why wouldn't the translation merit the same degree of care and attention?

In T&L, that professional courtesy does appear to have been paid. And it makes sense that it has because the whole game looks like a labor of love, at least by the creatives on the team. The world is stunningly visualised. I haven't been this taken aback by the sheer attention to detail in a game's visuals since Black Desert, which shows how hard it it is to push that kind of graphical boundary forward any further.

Can't help but feel I'm over-dressed for the climate.

I said at the time that the villages and countryside in BDO looked like parts of Mediterranean Europe I'd visited. So does Throne and Liberty. It's not just the architecture, although some of that looks like it's been taken from photographs. It's the texture of the roads and paths, the way the plants grow up between the cobbles, the convincing realisation of aridity and dessication in a land that sees far more sun than rain.

This looks very much like one of those games I might end up playing for a while mostly because it feels like being on holiday. That happens more than you might imagine and accounts for some of my affection for a number of MMORPGs that, in objective gameplay terms, probably weren't all that good.

I remember when it was all fields around here...

Whether the gameplay in T&L is good or not I can't really say. After almost four hours I've barely seen any yet. All I've done is follow some very directive instructions, almost all of which involve going from one NPC to another, listening to what they have to say, doing what they tell me, then being passed along to the next in line to do something extremely similar.

There has been a small amount of trivial combat but I still have no clue what any of the abilities on my hot bars do because button mashing works every time. At some point, presumably, I'll run up against something that requires some basic understanding of the character I'm playing and her abilities but that time has not yet arrived.

If this was a launch, I would very definitely be carrying on until I reached the moment when I'd have to make a decision on whether to invest the time and effort required to learn how to play. It's often surprising how long that can take and in some games it never seems to come at all. 

Adventure awaits!

However long that's likely to be for Throne and Liberty, I don't see much percentage for me in getting anywhere close during a five day beta. I'll be doing all of this again, when the game goes live in a couple of months because, in case it hasn't been clear, I've been enjoying myself quite a lot so far. The game looks good, reads well, feels comfortable. What, as they say, is there not to like?

For that reason, I don't think I'll be pressing very much further ahead for now. With launch so near that would seem both a waste of energy and also a slight risk. Why make the real thing feel any less fresh than it needs to be?

Still, I probably won't entirely be able to resist the temptation to have a bit more of a poke around so this might not be the last time I write about it. For now I'll just say Throne and Liberty has made a good first impression and I definitely want to see more and leave it that. If anything worth writing about comes up before the beta ends, so be it. If not, everyone meet back here in September and we'll do it again for real.