Tarisland First Impressions: Story

I'm having a great time playing Tarisland. I keep forgetting it's a beta. Partly that's because it's pretty slick on the whole but mostly it's because every new MMORPG I've played for as long as I can remember was at least as janky at launch. Seriously, when did anyone ever release one of these things in a state that could reasonably be described as finished, let alone polished?

The game has all the usual progression hooks but for once the thing that's driving me forward is the storyline. It's not great - let's put that out there right away - but it's coherent, I can follow it and I'm enjoying it. The characters are personable, the voice acting is pleasant, the writing is competent. It's generic fantasy but what in this genre isn't?

The main reason the storyworks well for me has very little to do with its quality. It's all about the delivery. The pacing is just about right, for a start. The cut scenes are frequent but short. There haven't been many moments where I've felt I might as well be watching a movie, something that's happened altogether too frequently in some games I've played.

The cut scenes are well-integrated into the action and the gameworld, too. Much of the time I'll be on a quest, folowing a quest marker or a glowing trail to the next location, and when I get there the other characters will just start talking. Other times I have to click on someone to speak to them, as you normally would in a quest. Either feels comfortable in context. The whole thing just trucks along, carrying me with it.

The characters are fairly strongly individuated. It's easy to tell who's speaking by how they express themselves. That applies to the writing, not just the voice acting. Visually, the character animations seem more limited than usual but for the most part they're expressive enough to carry the tone and import of the dialog.

As someone said in general chat, I wasn't expecting the little guy from Game of Thrones.

There's a test I can apply right now to prove or disprove my thesis. In most cases, if you asked me to name the characters in a new MMORPG I'd just played, I almost certainly wouldn't be able to do it. This time, without looking anything up, I can tell you that the elven healer in the story is Jeya, the minotaur warrior is Lorne, the Princess from the big city is Catherine, the elf queen is Eolona (Or something like that), the dwarf acolyte to the master-builder is Orrin (I forget the master's name but he's Sir Something-or-Other) and the current villain I'm fighting is Zelo, who (SPOILER!) was masquerading as a kindly archivist called Sullivan.

That's a lot more information than I normally retain after 24 - 48 hours, trust me! I could also give a fairly comprehensive summary of the plot but don't worry, I'm not going to.

I'd be able to sum the whole thing up even more convicingly if it wasn't for two things, both of which I outlined in some detail on the feedback survey that popped up when I logged out the other evening. Neither of the problems is unique to Tarisland. One is annoyingly common in most imported titles and the other can be found not infrequently in MMORPGs from both East and West.

Why? What's wrong with Catherine? Oh! You mean for this group!

The first, of course, is the translation. Tarisland sits very much at the upper end of the quality scale for translated MMORPGs but sadly that scale is itself so degraded, even being near the top doesn't mean it's acceptable. 

One of these days, when I have nothing better to do, I might log into every translated MMORPG I have access to and rank the translations. I'm not sure which would come out on top - I suspect it might be Blade and Soul - but I'm pretty sure none would get a flawless score. 

(And before anyone mentions Final Fantasy XIV, I believe I looked into that all the way back when A Realm Reborn launched and found that all the dialog and quest text there is written in English in the first place, not translated from the Japanese. The exact method used seems to be a closely-guarded secret (What else? It's Square!) but this reddit thread suggests that my original understanding is probably close.)

He's referred to consistently elsewhere as her brother. I'm hoping it's a translation error...

The issues with the translation in Tarisland are minor compared with the other problem, which is purely technical, not aesthetic, and needs to be fixed: truncated or overlapping speech and text. Together, these nuisances, while they don't by any means render the game unplayable, do detract significantly from the enjoyment I'm otherwise getting from the plot and storyline.

There are three separate issues: firstly, lines of dialog frequently get cut off before the voice actor has finished speaking. I've seen this in many games and it drives me nuts, not least because it seems so unecessary. Surely someone knows how long each of these sound samples runs? Would it kill them to pass that information along to whoever codes the audio playback?

Fortunately, thanks to the subtitles and captions, I can usually read what would have been spoken but sometimes I miss a line and have to figure out what happened, which leaves me playing verbal catch-up for the rest of the scene. It's distracting and breaks immersion.

Thanks, but I think I've got something on, that day.

Arguably more realistic but practically even worse is the way multiple characters speak over and across one another, something that happens in most games with any kind of ambient voiced dialog. 

In Tarisland, someone's taken the trouble to write plenty of quite good background conversation for incidental NPCs standing around the streets and squares of the city. It adds a lot to the flavor of the soundscape as you pass through the city but it's hell to listen to when a story beat plays out next to a couple of children arguing about elves or a street vendor yelling. 

That, you would think, could be avoided by better use of phasing, which the game already employs, or by automatically muting background sound during storyline sequences. The storyline characters also occasionally speak across each other, although that happens more rarely. Again, you'd think they could be coded to speak in sequence, although that might sound a little unnatural, so maybe some of them should just keep their thoughts to themselves.

Introducing Captain Obvious.

Finally and by far most egregiously, something that really needs to be fixed before the game goes live is the tendency for the text of dialog responses offered to the player to cut off after a few words. This didn't start happening until yesterday so either it's a bug I've picked up that applies to my character specifically or it's something that's crept into the storyline mid-flow. I wasn't seeing until I hit the mid-twenties.

It means that I sometimes have to choose between two options, neither of which I can read. My character is saying things but I don't know what they are. I'm hoping it's all just flavor and nothing I say affects the way the storyline develops but even if it does I have to pick something to say or the narrative won't move on at all. 

Despite these annoyances I'm still managing to enjoy the plot. It moves along entertainingly but not exhaustingly. 

You can't fool me. You're no elf. You're Spanish!

There have been a couple of pauses for breath, where Lone, who seems to be taking the lead most of the time, asks me to come back tomorrow or the next day, which is a lore-appropriate way of telling me to get another level or two first. In other games I've played, this kind of level or time gating has proved an irritant but in Tarisland it seems like a natural break, an intermission, the end of a chapter.

It helps that it's only been taking me half an hour or so to go get the extra level or two I need to carry on with the story. There's a lot to do other than slavishly follow the plot and I've appreciated the hint that I should go explore and have fun on my own for a while.

To pick up on a conversation from the comments in a post from a couple of days ago, I can now confirm the characters with the sticky-out ears are indeed elves. To be precise, they're High Elves, the only elven variant to survive the wrath of a dark god who destroyed their home planet eons ago. A different god, late on the scene, was only just in time to save the High Elves by moving them to Tarisland. 

For which we all give thanks.

See? I remembered all of that without looking it up! I must really be following the plot!

Somewhere in the twenties the narrative moves to the Elven homeland, the generically-named Misty Forest, which comes complete with all relevant elven trappings including a world tree big enough to build a city in. Naturally the tree is dying and of course we have to be the ones to do something about it but I won't spoil the plot any further, mostly because that's about as far as I've got.

Like everywhere else I've seen in Tarisland, Misty Forest is gorgeous. I spent a lot of time taking screenshots. The cut scene that tells the history of the elves is also delightfully illustrated. Tarisland is very lovely to look at. 

All together now, children! He's behind you!

Another thing I want to clear up is the "Three Days Earlier" moment in the tutorial that I referred to in my first post abiout the game. I wasn't imagining it. That really is what it said. The whole starting zone with the minotaurs, in which you level up to the high teens, is a flashback. The game catches up with the tutorial in the second zone, where the storyline wraps all the way around to finish with the same fight with the dragon that ended the tutorial. 

It's really well done and I was very impressed. It came as a surprise to me but I don't believe it was supposed to, just as I don't think any of this is really a spoiler because it does tell you it's a flashback - I just didn't believe it at the time.

The drawback of such a strong, clear, linear storyline is that it's going to be compelling once, bearable twice and bloody annoying ever afterwards. If, as I suspect, the only way to level alts in Tarisland is going to be to take them through the storyline, that's going to get old very fast indeed.

By way of hyperspace, apparently.

It's not, however, a problem unique to this game. It's a very retrograde design choice that's become commonplace throughout the genre. Creating multiple starting zones and levelling paths is obviously expensive so most developers don't do it. And as the game matures, no doubt alternate methods of levelling or ways to skip content will appear.

For now, I'm happy to go through the story this one time to see how far I can get before the beta ends. I'm level 27 now. I think there might be 80 levels. I'll be happy if I can get halfway.

Got to leave something in reserve for when the game goes live. It looks odds on I'll be playing then, too, by which time I hope most, if not all of the issues I've highlighted will be no more than a memory.