Soulframe - Final First Impressions

There are only so many First Impressions posts you can write before you're into just plain Impressions and I feel like I've been playing long enough for that. I don't have any of those nifty little apps that monitor and record how much time I'm spending on each game I play but I think it's fair to say that, since I downloaded Soulframe, most of my gaming time has been taken up by it. 

I generally play games for at least a couple of hours a day. Occasionally I might double that but it would be unusual, so in a full week, which is exactly how long I've had access to the Soulframe Pre-Alpha, I've most likely played games for something like fifteen to twenty hours, in total. I've been doing my dailies in Neverness To Everness and putting in a few sessions of Nivalis Nights, here and there, all of which probably doesn't come to more than six or seven hours, so I'd guess I'm somewhere around ten to twelve hours into Soulframe, at least.

A dozen hours in an MMORPG, is more than enough to build a first impression, I'd say. It's nowhere near enough for a full review, which arguably ought to wait at least until the reviewer has been through the entire leveling process, whatever it is, and even had some experience of the end game, assuming there is one. By which time, if the game isn't in maintenance mode, enough will probably have changed to make the review feel out of date before it even goes to print. No wonder reviewers tend to shy away from the genre.

Twelve hours, however, is surely enough for a Final First Impression. And my Final First Impression is...

Favorable. Shading towards Very Favorable. 

I like the combat. It's tactile, intuitive and robust. It has a solidity that feels satisfying. Granted, I've still only played a ranged class, an archer, so melee and magic might be terrible for all I know, but in my experience archery is one of the hardest combat skills for a designer to pull off. If they can get that right, they shouldn't have too much difficulty with the rest, should they?

 

I like the other side of combat, too: the looting. In any game I play, I really like to see the mobs I kill drop something. Preferably something worth having. That's part of the fun of killing them. 

In Soulframe, mobs drop a lot of loot. They spew out money, crafting mats (Not that I've seen any sign of a crafting system so far..) and weapons among other things. No armor, curiously, although I think there's some kind of fragment system, where you have to collect enough bits to make a whole piece. There's always something to pick up, anyway, and most of it looks like it's going to be useful. When I can figure out what to do with it.

Since we're on the subject of loot, I guess we ought to talk about inventory. I'm nowhere near as obsessed with inventory management as I was when I started this blog but I do like to keep an eye on it.  I can't really venture much of an opinion on how well it's being handled in Soulframe because as of now, I have yet to encounter any storage issues at all.

My character has a backpack that doesn't display. It's well-designed, with plenty of tabs and filters to sort the contents by type and quality and so on. I noticed early on that additional inventory space is one of the things for sale in the Cash Shop and I've just made reference to the large amount of loot that drops off everything you kill, so I was expecting something along the lines of Guild Wars 2, where one of the drivers to get you to spend money is making your bags fill up with crap.

And maybe it will happen but it hasn't happened yet. I pick up literally everything that drops. I also forage all the time. It all goes into that invisible backpack and after a week it's still not full. There's also no weight or size limit. Minnow must be carrying about three dozen assorted weapons now but it's fine; they weigh nothing and take up no space. 

Which is just as well because as yet there's no sign of a bank to store any overspill. In fact, there's little sign of any commercial or social infrastructure at all. 

 

That brings me onto a question I raised briefly last time: is Soulframe really an MMO at all? I could look it up, and I will before I'm done here, but first I'm going to give you my take on it from actual, in-game experience. 

In all the time I've been playing, I've seen no more than half a dozen other players and that was only in two very specific circumstances. In my first session, while I was questing, my Sparrow guide led me to one of those glowing tombstones that turn up all over the map. I had no idea what it was for but I clicked on it anyway and it turned out to be a group-finder. 

In a few seconds I was in a party. I assumed grouping was required for the quest so I went along with it. I was ported into an instance, where a couple of people were running around, killing mobs. No-one said anything, naturally, me included. 

I had no clue what we were supposed to be doing and I never found out. After a couple of minutes I found a ladder going down into a well and since it was there, I used it. Why not? At the bottom was an entrance to the Danak Undercity, which was the first time I knew it existed. My Sparrow told me I needed to go in there for the quest I was on but I figured it would need a group, since that was how I got there in the first place, so I waited. 

No-one else came. After a while I got fed up of waiting and climbed back up the ladder. I was still partied with a couple of people but they were nowhere in sight so I decided to give up on that quest and go back to the open world. I couldn't figure out how to leave the group so in the end I had to log out to get rid of the unwanted company. Later on, I found I hadn't needed to group for the quest at all. Clicking on the party-finder stone had been my mistake. The Sparrow was trying to take me somewhere else entirely.

That was the first time I saw other players. The second and so far last time was when I found the Inn. 

 

The Inn is the only social space of any kind I've located to date. I only found it because there's a quest that takes you there. It's an instance but even so, I was surprised to see a couple of other players running around inside. I'm not sure what they were doing. All I could find to do in there was speak to a faction NPC and hand in some items I had in my pack. 

It was right at the end of a session, though, and I didn't really have a good look around. There might be more services in there. There could even be a bank. I really ought to go back and have another look but that was days ago and I haven't really had any reason to return.

Based on those experiences and the rest of my dozen or so hours in the game, I'd have to guess Soulframe is a lobby MMO. It feels like the open world is entirely a solo affair, although I guess it might also be co-op if you have friends who play. Dungeons, which seem to be quite common  (I clicked on several more stones just to check what they were, then declined to make a group when the pop-up appeared.) have so far been optional, although I wouldn't be at all surprised to find some quests require a party.

And now I'm going to check online to see if that's right... and guess what? It is, or pretty nearly.

Here's how Gemini summarizes it:

"Soulframe is not a true MMORPG; it is an action RPG built around single-player and small-group co-op (typically 3-player parties), with MMO-lite elements very similar to the developers' other game, Warframe"

Well there it is. What puzzles me a little is that I could have sworn, back when I briefly played Warframe, that there were at least some true open-world areas there. I guess I misremembered. 

The thing is... it feels like a proper MMO. Not because of the mechanics but because there's a general chat channel, on by default, in which conversation literally never stops. The entire time I've been playing, chat has been scrolling faster than I can read it. It's a very polite, well-mannered sort of general chat, too, and I'd be happy to have it on, except it's much too distracting. I had to shrink the window so the type was almost too small to read, just so I could concentrate on what I was doing.

On that evidence, I'd say that if you're one of those players who likes the idea of playing games in a social space but who doesn't actually want to interact with other people, except at a time and place of your own choosing, Soulframe would be perfect. Lots of chatter to make it feel sociable but no-one sniping your mobs or sending you invites to do things you don't want to do.

 

For me, that can go on the Good Things About Soulframe list, along with Combat, Inventory Management, UI, Graphics, Environment and Sound. The last two need a bit of clarifying, though. The first because I've been slightly misleading in some of the things I've said about it and the second because I haven't mentioned it at all until now.

On the Environment, as Tyler Edwards pointed out in a comment, the reason the entire world looks so miserable is because it's been corrupted. A big part of the gameplay involves you, the player, restoring the land to its former charm. You have to destroy Syphons, which is a whole feature I have yet to experience, so I'll leave it at that for now. Just be advised, the world won't always look so awful.

Another environmental feature I haven't mentioned yet are the World Trees. The map is covered with Fog of War but you can't clear it just by exploring. You have to find the big trees with something that looks like a pitchfork rammed through the trunk and then you have to pull the pitchfork out. That clears a large area of the map, which is great. What's not so great is that there's no way to tell where the trees are, other than by bumping into one by chance. I think some kind of indicator to give a hint at least where to start looking would be helpful.

As for the sound, it's very good, by which I mean it's actually useful. There's some voice acting, which I wouldn't put any higher than competent and professional but the ambient sound is very good. There's bugger all wildlife thanks to the corruption, so there's no cheerful hum of birdsong and insect calls, but the infernal machinery makes appropriately sinister noises and you can hear people at work in the camps.

The really effective use of sound, though, is the yells of your enemies. Every last humanoid mob speaks or more often shouts as soon as they gain aggro on you, which is extremely helpful of them. Thanks to the rain and fog and the smart but annoying tendency of the enemy to use cover effectively, I often can't see where the arrows or the fireballs are coming from. But I can hear! Minnow echo-locates like a bat half the time. It's very organic.

 

You can, as it happens, make the enemy light up so you can see them more easily. It's a talent you put points into. I only figured out how to use it today. Which brings up the main thing I don't particularly like about the game: the over-complicated, often awkward mechanics.

I suspect much of this may come from the game having been designed first for controllers rather than keyboard or mouse, but some of the combinations required to do things feel far from natural. There's too much pressing and holding two keys and I really don't think the scroll wheel on the mouse ought to come into things at all.

I've had a quest to equip, charge and use a rune for about five days now and I still haven't been able to do it. At first I thought I'd just play and it would become obvious but that never happened so I googled it and read the very lengthy explanation Gemini gave me. 

Maybe it's just me, but I feel that if an AI needs five paragraphs to summarize the mechanics of a simple thing like charging and casting a rune, your design might need a rethink. Still, at least now I knew what I had to do... So I did it and it still didn't work! I've equipped my rune and charged it now but can I figure out how to fire it? Can I hell! I even watched a YouTube video and it still didn't make it clear.  

This isn't all that unusual in my experience so far. I had to redo the quest to get the wolf pup pet three times because twice the key for the cage didn't drop. I didn't do anything wronmg and it isn't exactly a bug. It's just too finnicky to be 100% reliable. It's worth it, though. The pup is very cute and apparently one day Minnow will be able to ride her as a mount. Which, since there seems to be no instant travel at all, will be nice.

These kinds of things are quite common, it seems. Remember all that buzz in General Chat I was talking about earlier? At least half of it must be people trying to find out how to do something the game isn't letting them do. Or more likely isn't making it clear how to do. It's in this way that Soulframe really does feel like a Pre-Alpha.

 

Another thing I'm not fond of is the extent to which the developers seem to be excited by their own lore and jargon. I've been talking about "questing" but that's not a word the game uses. It doesn't say"missions", either, which would be equally acceptable. Soulframe likes to call those things it wants you to do "Votives" or "Fables". 

Fables are Main Story Quests. Votives are side quests. I had to look that up. It was not clear to me at all just from playing the game. I know it's boring , using the same language as everyone else, but conventions exist for a reason, guys! 

If you want to see just how off-putting the shop-talk can be, try reading the recent Update notes. I'm broadly in favor of in-character patch notes, especially when it's done for laughs, but this is just too much flavor for something that's primarily meant to be informative, particularly for a new player. I know that, after a while, meaning will seep into all those currently incomprehensible words and I'll stop noticing how uncomfortably self-conscious it all sounds but this is a First Impressions piece and I'm not quite there yet. 

I am, however, at the end of both the post and my initiation into the game. No more First Impressions from now on. Just play reports and opinions. Although I suspect it will be hard to tell the difference. 

My tl:dr for an overall first impression of the game? Some work still to be done but, all things considered, very promising. 

Very promising indeed! 

Every Night, When The Stars Come Out

I never really reviewed the first season of Edgerunners, even though I wrote about it several times and stuck the label on half a dozen posts. I wrote more about the soundtrack than I did about the show itself and the only reason I watched it at all was because Rosa Walton of Let's Eat Grandma did a song specifically for the show. 

That song turned out to be the iconic I Really Want To Stay At Your House, which soundtracks the equally iconic ending of the final episode. You know you're not exploiting the overused "iconic" accolade, when you only have to think of the song and it all comes back. Well, not if you have a memory like mine, anyway. Not to mention the official video for the song on Netflix' YouTube channel has ninety-five million views...

The soundtrack to Season 2 isn't quite up to the standard of the first but it's pretty good all the same. I was very surprised and not a little delighted to see Petit Meller put in an appearance with two songs, including the closing theme. Using the Cure's 10.15 Saturday Night for the opening was a counterintuitive masterstroke. Fifty year old minimalism meets future maximalism and it's perfect.

Competing with all of that iconicism from series one was always going to be tough, though. At the time, I never thought they'd even try. At the end of the first season I wrote 

"Without getting too spoilery, the series pretty much ran as a one-and-done, the ending leaving little room for a second season, the final episode being one of the more conclusive and downbeat resolutions I've seen for a while." 

Yeah. True, that. And so there was a second season anyway. It just didn't have anyone from the first season in it. What them all being...

Hang on a moment. It's pretty much spoilers all the way down from here. I guess we'd better have a 

 S P O I L E R    W A R N I N G !

...dead and all.

So, Season 2 has the same setting and some of the same themes but none of the same characters. It was also mostly made by the same people. Is it as good?

No, of course it's not. That would be too much to hope for. 

Sidebar - I had a sarcastic paragraph here that I had to remove, where I was saying it's a bad idea to go iconic with your first season of anything because where are you going to go from there? But then I realized there are probably shows that managed to start out iconic and then top it second time out, so if I was going to say otherwise, I'd need to go do a whole lot of research to stand it up and I really didn't want to do that, so I just cut the whole thing. See that? That's the magic happening right there...

How do you write a second season of a show when not a single significant character from the first is left alive? Oh, wait... Lucy... (And Falco, according to Gemini, who I have doing my fact-checking for me, which is a bit like having Freewheeling Franklin monitoring your medication, but I can't off the top of my head remember who Falco was, so I'm not going to worry too much about forgetting him...)

Apparently you do it by setting the sequel in the future, albeit only by a couple of years and by having a brand new set of leads, not one of whom has any connection to the last lot. And it might work, too, given the star of the entire IP is arguably Night City itself. 

Except you don't really get to see a lot of Night City in Season 2. I mean it's there but it's hardly a focus, more a backdrop. In the foreground there's just a bunch of people, none of whom seems to have all that much to do with any of the others to begin with but by the end of the ten episodes... they still don't.

Oh, they do if you go by the plot. They all get to meet and do things with each other or to each other and all their individual stories intertwine except they don't much have individual stories. They have vaguely sketched-in backstories but what they don't have is much of a sense of belonging together. They meet, they do stuff, they leave. That's it. The first Season had a Crew. The second has some people who happen to be going in the same direction for a while. It's hardly enough.

I think the best way to describe the show might be to record my feelings on each of the main characters. I can at least remember them, which is a tick in the positives column, although it has only been barely twelve hours since I watched the closing credits. I'll take them in the order they come to me, which ought to say something about how memorable I found them.

  

Roman - I liked Roman. That seems to be a minority position, based on some of the reviews and Reddit threads I skimmed after the final episode ended. A lot of the audience for this kind of show really doesn't like children, that's the vibe I'm getting. 

Roman is a twelve year-old boy with an antique video camera and an obsessive desire to film everything that happens. Why he has it and why he became so driven to make home movies was either not explained or I missed it, although I do remember it was money that drove him to attempt to get footage of a crew of mercenaries called Maelstrom, which is what leads to his involvement with the whole escalating clusterfuck to begin with. 

Roman doesn't really have much of a personality but he has more excuse for that than most of the cast, not having had as long to develop one. He's a weirdly innocent child, given the circumstances of his life, although even as I type that, I realize we know absolutely nothing of those circumstances. He comes across as bashful, modest, certain only of his great ability with the camera and apparently on loan from the 1950s. He also seems to have some kind of superpower (Metaphorically, I should make it clear.) that means he could probably walk through a collapsing building without even getting dust on his lens. Then again, everyone else seems to be able to get up and walk away from explosions or collisions that would crush a bus, so maybe invulnerability is a Night City thing.

If Roman has any traits on his character sheet other than Blank Slate they'll probably be Everyman and Moral Compass. He's an okay stand-in for the viewer but he's really not qualified to offer a moral center, even if he's probably the only member of the cast who doesn't kill anyone for the entire ten episodes. Still, he sure as hell hangs around with the ones who do and he does very little to stop any of it. I like him but he's hardly there a lot of the time. He's a cipher. The only time he shows any real emotional involvement is when someone tries to leave him, which suggests abandonment issues. Or he's just annoying, which is another popular viewpoint.

 

D - D stands for David. David is called David because the central character in Season One was called David. Not that he's related to him or even knew him. The writers thought it would be a way to link the two stories. They were wrong. It's just a bit confusing. The actual link is that both Davids were nominally included in some kind of corporate deviance concerning individuals with a greater than normal resistance to cyber-psychosis. Their names are in the same files and that's it.  

D appears out of nowhere to save Roman from the Maelstrom crew, who have him hog-tied and are about cut him open to give him cybber implants he doesn't want. It's a disturbing scene, possibly the most unsettling in the whole run. D comes in, acting like a superhero. He pretty much looks like one, too. At this point he's cool and he seems admirable. 

It's all downhill from there as he reveals himself to be a borderline alcoholic, self-medicating for his extreme PTSD. It gets much worse as he succumbs to depression and mania and finally something that looks a lot like psychosis. He does have a tragic backstory but I found it pretty hard to sympathize with him as he moved from specific revenge against the individuals he believed had slaughtered his tribe to pretty much killing anyone who looked at him funny, then sitting around watching while a whole load of D-Wannabes played riot games. The scene where one of his acolytes casually shoots a cowering girl in the head was a highlight.

By the time we get to the last episode, where there's an attempt to recapture the magic of the first season's final moments, it's so obvious none of it has been earned it's embarrassing. We'd need to like D by then for that to come off. I sure didn't. Does anyone like him? Even Roman calls him an idiot.

 

Weak - Weak is apparently what David from Season One would have become if things had gone differently; if he'd lived out his life as an Edgerunner. He'd have gone full cyber-psychotic, murdered a bunch of people for no reason, then had all his cyberware stripped out for his, and everyone else's, safety, leaving him a powerless husk, unable to back up the threats he'd carry on making.

Weak (Real name Weak Kingsley, once known as King. Oh, the symbolism...) is quite an endearing character in his way. He's certainly loyal. And stubborn. And deluded if he thinks he can pull off any of the things he says he can. Mostly he gets beaten up - a lot - and all his attempts to do just about anything fail. Still, he's giving it his best shot and he's generally trying to do something that could just about be seen as the right thing, if you squinted really hard... 

Weak also believes (Wrongly, as it turns out.) that he's the real father of

Talia - She's made to be everyone's favorite. A feisty teenage girl with a smart mouth and a terminal illness. How could she not be? Plus she has a horrible father and an overprotective mother and she's just Trying To Live Her Own Life, Her Way. Talk about stacking the pack...

So, yes, I liked Talia. It'd be bloody-minded not to. She doesn't actually kill people for one thing, well, not until right at the end, when she does make up for it but then there are mitigating factors. She's also genuinely nice to poor old Roman when she could quite justifiably tell him to get lost. Then again, she's very short with him at other times. Still, teenage mood swings... And she must be on a lot of drugs...

 

Kyoko - Kyoko is... hmm. What is Kyoko? About three feet tall for a start. For several episodes I thought I was watching another child, probably someone younger than Roman. I also thought I was looking at a boy. 

Kyoko turns out to be an adult woman. Everyone in the cast immediately accepts this as if it's obvious. They are clearly seeing something I'm not. She's a Mad Scientist of the old school. She looks and acts like she's in a 1970s Saturday morning cartoon, except for all the murdering. She was involved in a project that somehow condensed a whole lot of human consciousnesses into an AI. She did that for the same Corp that was the big villain in Season 1, Arasaka. Her project cost them a fortune, didn't show enough results and got shut down. Is she bitter? What do you think?

Her AI, which was on a chip, somehow got lost. I expect that got explained but I don't remember any of it. The chip somehow ends up in D's slot and Kyoko wants it back. She tries to catfish Roman for it, she sucks up to Talia's Bad Father, who's an Exec in another Corp. She promises him all the same things she promised Arasaka and he goes for it because he really is an idiot. Just because he's also a prick doesn't make him smart.

Kyoko starts out as an unmitigated villain but there seems to be some sort of half-assed attempt to engage our sympathies for her in the last couple of episodes. It's like wrapping a feather boa round a rattlesnake and asking people to cuddle it. I was not fooled. She's a fun character all the same. Just not in any way lovable. Or believable. 

 

Capricorn - Aka Capri. Capri is an AI. Or something like that. A digital consciousness? She's a hoot, anyway. I bet everyone loves Capri. She's two-dimensional, as in she's a flat drawing in a medium that's all flat drawings and yet somehow she manages to look flatter than everything else. She's red but she's also green, when she gets split. She's in the chip and she's in whoever the chip's in, which is mostly D until it's also Talia. They each get some Capri. Then Talia gets it all and there's no more Talia, only Capri, until D gets the chip back and there's no more D or Capri because they went to space and now look! Talia's back.The few bits that are left of her after the EMP and the airstrike, anyway. Did you miss her? Yes, we missed her. 

Capri is a lot of fun, visually and verbally. She probably kills more people than everyone else put together but she's an AI so it doesn't count. Talia's Last Dying Wish is for Capri to kill Bad Dad in the most gruesome way possible. She does her best but in the end a building falls on him.

Okay, I think that's all the ones I think of as Main Cast. Let me see if I missed anyone... 

Nope, that's the lot, although where you draw the line between Main Cast and Supporting Cast is a judgment call. Gemini only gives Roman, D, Weak and Talia the honor. No Capri. No loyalty among AIs, apparently.

There are quite a few significant supporting characters, including Avida and Kiril (Talia's mom and dad, both dead now, so Talia's an orphan, I guess.), Omi (D's old friend from the tribal days. I liked her. She wasn't in it enough.), and Yupi (Harley Quinn to D's Joker. She was good value. The writers gave her more subtext than pretty much anyone. She could have made for an interesting spin-off if she hadn't gotten shot.) but my rule is that if I had to look up their names, they can't be Main Cast and I had to look up all of those.

 

That makes for a fairly chaotic overview which is fair because it's a fairly chaotic series. I think the writers might have been aiming for that Robert Altman gestalt, where you just keep introducing character after character and eventually some kind of shape to the story just coalesces around them. And it kinda does do that... it's just not a very good story.

Entertaining, though. I'll happily give it entertaining. I enjoyed every episode. The last couple are a real thrill-ride, even if I found it close to impossible to take any of it remotely seriously. Kyoko on her tricycle, racing to stop the bombs with the EMP in her backpack is like Elliot and his pals trying to save ET on their pushbikes, only played for laughs.

Apart from having absolutely none of the gravitas or emotional heft of the first season, Season 2 of Edgerunners is also more cartoony and feels much lighter, even with all the endless murdering and exploding heads. In part that's because most of the cast survive and there's something that's not a million miles from a happy ending. The final scenes of Season 1 are authentically harrowing. I can't say I'm sorry we didn't get a rerun.

I'll just throw in a word of praise for the voice acting, which is uniformly excellent. Every major character is a joy to listen to. The standard of voice acting is so high these days, though, it's all too easy to take excellence for granted. Same for the animation, really. We just expect it to be this good now. And it is.

Whether we needed a Season 2 at all is another question but since we got one, I'll take it. It was a good watch while it was on but I don't imagine I'll go back to it again. It just made me want to rewatch the first one. 

There's no word on a Season 3. Clearly, if they're going to use this episodic "Tales of Night City" approach, they can keep going as long as the interest is there. I suspect they won't but I won't be annoyed if they do. 

Either way is good with me. 

Soulframe Pre-Alpha - First Impressions - Look And Feel

 Oh, look! Another post about Soulframe! That makes three out of the last four. Regular readers may recognize a pattern here...

Over the lifetime of this blog, there have been any number of times where I started playing a new game and it immediately became the only thing I seemed to want to write about. Most of those games were either MMORPGs or, in more recent times, single-player RPGs or survival/crafting games.

There are two simple reasons for that and the most significant of the two is probably how very easy it is to come up with things to say about those kinds of games. At the start of any game it's all first impressions but with those genres, it can take weeks to get to grips with the mechanics, the lore and all the weird idiosyncratic choices the developers have made, which makes for plenty of post hooks. 

First impression posts are incredibly easy to write, too, and I've always enjoyed writing them. They're like reviews but with none of the finality. Writing a review can feel like an onerous responsibility, something you feel you have to get right, first time. Recording a First Impression is nowhere near as serious an undertaking: everyone knows anything you say is subject to change as you gain experience and understanding.

The second reason is, if I'm enjoying something, I want to talk about it. Growing up, I always wanted to be a reviewer. I didn't particularly want to be a critic. Critics take the whole thing a bit too seriously. Reviewers seem to have a lot more fun. 

I didn't want to make definitive judgments on things. I just wanted somewhere I could express my opinions on things I liked, only on paper to an audience instead of just to my friends in the pub. That's how I got into the zine scene. 

And it would have been things I liked, for the most part. I do like to tear into things that really annoy me, once in a while, but it's a self-indulgence, something to save for special occasions.

 

If there are multiple posts about a game here, particularly all clumped together with barely anything else between them, it almost certainly means I'm really enjoying whatever it is I'm writing about. 

I am really enjoying Soulframe. I didn't expect to. I downloaded it not out of any great personal desire to play it, not quite on a whim, more with a sense of duty. This is, even now, as much a blog about MMORPGs as it is a blog about anything and Digital Extremes is a relatively significant player in that market. 

They're a Western developer with a commercially successful MMO in operation and there isn't exactly a surfeit of those these days, especially in the AAA bracket. Warframe may not technically qualify as a triple-A game - it doesn't cost $70 for one thing - but it comes close, certainly in terms of quality and continued development, so a second MMO from the same developer ought really to be quite a big deal around here. I could hardly ignore it when they decided to go public with the current build.

I wasn't looking forward to playing it all that much. I was definitely curious but I thought it would be a quick in and out. I'd play just enough to get the feel for it, write a post or two and then, if I didn't hate it, I'd probably keep it on the hard drive to check back in, now and again, if and when I heard there was anything new worth writing about there.  

I didn't expect it would turn into the game I feel like playing when sit down at the PC every day. Okay, it has only been five days but still. A lot of games I write a post about here don't get even to Day Two.

This morning, for example, I could have been playing through the new storyline in Neverness To Everness. It went live late yesterday evening. But I didn't. I did log in to NTE today but only to do my dailies and such. I didn't hang around because I was itching to get back to Soulframe. 

 

The reason for that itch is revealing in itself. I really enjoy Neverness To Everness. I play every day and I'm up to date with the storyline. I'm invested in the game and I have no plans to stop playing it, at least until Ananta arrives in January. 

But as I've said many times, open world gacha games can be more like watching a TV show than playing a video game. I was aware as I made my choice of what to play this morning that if I went with NTE, I'd almost certainly be spending the next couple of hours effectively watching a movie. I'm confident it will be a good movie but quality's not the issue; participation is.

It doesn't help that I'm also playing Nivalis Nights every day, another game I'm really enjoying. I've had to restrain myself from not writing post after post about that one, too. Gameplay there is more active than the story content in NTE bit it's still mostly talking and there's no combat at all. Playing Soulframe has reminded me that sometimes I just like to kill things.

I'm sure there's a lot more to the game than that but so far it's pretty much all I've been doing: running all over the place, partly exploring but also looking for things to kill. People to kill. Firing arrows at anyone who looks at me funny. 

And it's been ridiculously entertaining. As I said in the last First Impressions post, the bow is really satisfying to use. It's easy to aim, it does a lot of damage and my arrows set things on fire! Nothing like a flaming arrow to brighten up the day.

Even though I've had a couple of crashes logging out, which makes me concerned for the strain playing the game might be putting on my machine, I'm still very keen to keep on playing. At this stage it's not even about progression, the hook in all MMORPGs. It's mostly the tactility and the tactics. 

 

Ever since early EverQuest, I've always enjoyed "clearing a camp".  You find a tent or a campfire or a building with three or four hostiles hanging around just minding their own business and you start picking them off, one by one. It's psychotic behavior that shouldn't be encouraged but boy, is it fun! 

It's also been out of fashion in MMORPGs for far too long. Everything there for years seems to have been all about running into the middle of a camp and firing off every AE all at once to kill the whole lot as fast as you can. Or maybe that's just the classes I've been playing...

With the ranger or whatever it's called in Soulframe, I have the pleasure of standing well outside the camp, assessing the risks, seeing who's there and what they might be able to do to me, then taking a long, careful aim and, if I'm lucky, one-shotting whichever lucky sap I've settled on as my first victim. If they survive, a second shot before they know what's happened to them usually does the job.

Sometimes, if I'm really being cautious, I can whittle the guards down one by one but they aren't anywhere near as dumb in this game as in most, so they do tend to both notice and react when the guy standing next to them suddenly bursts into flames and falls over. Unlike other games, though, they don't always boil out of the camp in a mindless frenzy. The archers and mages hang back and even take cover while the heavies put up their big shields and stomp towards me, slowly, flanked by their lighter-armored pals and their armored wardogs. 

The melees dodge and weave, too. There's a lot to think about. It can turn into something between a dance and a game of tag as I try to keep them out of melee range while not getting punctured by arrows or blasted with lightning from the back line. It's not subtle - well, not the way I do it - but it's involving and a lot of fun. Not least because I almost always win!

I'm quite taken with the general look and feel of the game outside of combat. It's just different enough from most of the fantasy MMORPGs I've played to feel fresh, although I'm not making any claims for originality by saying that. It's more that the designers have taken a selection of familiar tropes and put them together in a slightly different order from how I'd expect to see them. It may not be original but it definitely has its own personality.

 

For example, Soulframe has probably the best login sequence I can remember. It's an odd thing to be praising but when it comes to first impressions, you can't make one much earlier than at the login screen. I'll describe how it works.

What you see above is the static screen, where you enter your login details. It isn't entirely static, of course. Like many MMO login screens, there are moving parts to the image but it goes a lot further than that. When you input your name and password and press Login to enter the game... you enter the game. From that screen, just as you see it. There's no discernible transition. You're just... there, somehow.

The platypus rolls over, the fawns stand up (It's not always the same fawns, either.), your character gets to their feet and the screen becomes the world. I still haven't figured out how it's done. 

If you look at the shot above and the one at the top of the screen, you can also see that they're kind of in the same place and kind of not. It's not just the change in the weather, the perspective is different and the foliage, too. I haven't figured that out yet, either, whether it represents the place you were at when you logged out or if its a generic location.

I didn't notice it at first but after a while I started to get the feeling I was in a different place when I logged back in from where I remembered being when I quit. And then one session I logged out in an Inn (The only Inn I've seen to date.), expecting to be there when I came back. But I wasn't. 

I was somewhere on the hillside, outside the village. I noticed that, alright but that Inn is an instance of some kind so that might explain the relocation. Once I'd had it brought to my attention, though, I started to think about how it never seems that I come back exactly where I was. I'm going to have to take screenshots to be sure it's not my imagination but that's how it feels. 

That, though, isn't the really discomfiting part. What makes me feel slightly disoriented every time is the way the login image somehow shifts, pretty much imperceptibly, to become the gameworld itself as my character rouses herself and gets to her feet. It's like a magic trick.

There's no obvious transition, even though what you see in the image isn't necessarily the exact same spot where your character appears. Somehow the whole image coalesces and there you are, in the game, with WASD working and the rain falling and everything changed. I've never experienced anything quite like it in a game before (Or possibly I have and I've forgotten but let's not get into all that again.) 

That's the most unusual of the transitional effects but by no means the only one. There are some actual cut scenes in the game, and very good they are too, but there are odd inserts that appear at the bottom of the screen, with a character's image, a voiceover and some text and there are appearances by ghosts, who just pop up in the world and talk to you, and there are mysterious voices that tell you things without you being able to see who's speaking.

It's a bit of a mess, really. It does feel like at times like the designers are trying out a few different options to see which works best. hey probably are. It is a pre-alpha, after all. I imagine after a while they'll settle on the ones they like best but at the moment I'm enjoying the chaos of it all. And that login trick is really something. They'd better keep that.

The other thing I wanted to talk about under "Look and Feel" is the setting and the lore. Once again, I ought to make it clear I've done next to no research about Soulframe outside the game and, frankly, precious little inside it, either, so I don't know anything other than what I've seen and heard and read as I've explored, talked to NPCs and done their quests. 

With that caveat, the scenario seems to go something like this: a militaristic regime of humans or humanoids, using what looks like steampunk/magitech technology, has invaded and subdued all or part of a landmass that was previously the home of some kind of druidic/shamanistic/animist culture. The invaders may be from another planet. Certainly I saw something that looked very much like a spaceship.

 

You, the player character, seem to be one of the invaders, or you were, once. Minnow has been called a traitor by the invaders, anyway. She's also referred to repeatedly as an "Envoy" by both sides, suggesting she's been sent from one to the other. Then again, all that stuff with grandpa suggests she grew up in the druid culture, so I'm torn on her origins. I imagine it all gets explained in the main storyline, eventually.

The supposedly subjugated population isn't entirely cowed. Minnow has already been recruited by one of their resistance groups and been given a mission against the occupying forces. She's also rescued a number of animals, some of whom have talked to her. There's a lot of rescuing animals to do in this game. The non-talking ones seem very grateful. There are some really lovely moments, when the rabbits and squirrels you can set free from cages in camps pause, before running off, to jump into your arms for a quick cuddle.

The talking animals, which may or may not be spirit beasts, aren't nearly as friendly. The two I've rescued have been pretty pissy about it, in fact. The stag knocked Minnow down and the wolf threatened to kill her. Neither of them seemed inclined to trust her, both referring to her species - human, I assume - as proof of her untrustworthiness, no matter what she might have done to show otherwise.

There's quite a lot of that sort of thing and I like it a lot. I'm a little less keen on the pseudo-Celtic/Norse mythology at the back of it, though. Partly, that's because those two traditions have been done to death in fantasy games over the years. I'd be happy not to hear about any more Norse or Celtic mythology for a couple of decades. 

Mostly, though, it's all those Hibernian accents and especially the dialects. They sound genuine enough. Authenticity isn't the problem. They're just drawing too much of my attention to the way things are said,  pulling it away from what's being said. I haven't switched the voices off yet (If you even can.) but it could come to that.

I recognize, even as I'm saying it, that what I'm finding mildly annoying is almost certainly delighting other players. Ah yes, other players. Now we come to it, don't we? This is an MMORPG, isn't it? So where is everybody?

But, yet again, this post has breached the two-thousand word barrier before I've covered everything I was going to talk about. That's long enough for a blog post (Unless you're Kaylriene, of course. I ran this one through a word counter and it came out at over 11,000 words, which may well be the longest blog post I've ever seen...).

To be continued, then. And it will be. I'm certainly going to be playing more Soulframe, which means I'll just as certainly want to keep on writing about it.

Congratulations To M. John Harrison On A Much Deserved And Long Overdue Win

The best-known literary prize in the United Kingdom is the Booker. I quite like literary prizes but I never had much time for this one, neither before I worked in a bookshop nor while I was there.  

I saw it as dry, predictable and insular, a kind of back-slapping celebration of a particular strand of authorship, the sort that appealed, professionally, to editors of literary magazines and the Book Section of heavyweight Sunday papers, along with the critics employed by them.

Before I worked in the trade I simply ignored the Booker. It had nothing to do with me. Once I was required, at least, to know who was on the shortlist every year, I shifted from indifference to condescending contempt, a take that served me well for many years. 

In recent times, though, the long-lists have often included a few books I quite liked. Some of them even made onto the short-list.

Even then, no author I ever considered a true favorite has gone on to win. There have been a few winners whose books I've read and enjoyed -  Kazuo Ishiguro, Margret Attwood, Kingsley Amis - but no-one I'd ever have considered for my personal top hundred, let alone the true pantheon.

Until now. Yesterday, to my complete astonishment, one of my favorite writers and quite possibly my favorite prose stylist, M. John Harrison, won the 2026 Booker prize with his latest novel, The End of Everything. 

Harrison is eighty-one years old, making him the oldest Booker winner ever. The BBC news item that gave me that little gem describes M. John (How are you supposed to address people who put an initial at the front of their name, anyway?) as a "titan of literary science fiction" and the Booker Prize Chief Executive, Gaby Wood, said he was ""the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world"."

He is not, of course, the first winner to have written quite a lot of literary science fiction. All three of the names I mentioned earlier have strong claims to be, at least in part, sci-fi writers and, in Amis's case, a sci-fi critic. 

Margaret Attwood's reputation rests to some degree on The Handmaid's Tale, a future dystopia (Also a broad description of this year's winner.) but she wrote a trilogy of less-celebrated novels known as the  MaddAddam trilogy, which are what most people would call science fiction, even though the author herself insists on the term "speculative".

Ishiguro, at least three of whose novels are clearly either Sci-Fi or Fantasy, is a lot less prickly but he's still been wary of his work being reviewed or marketed as genre fiction, reasoning quite logically that such labeling could eat into the number of readers willing to give them a try. As an ex-bookseller, I can affirm that's a very genuine concern. A lot of readers are very prejudiced about genre. Then again, he could always wave his Nobel prize in their general direction.

As for Amis, although he did produce several novels that could be called science fiction, he's the one of the three I least associate with the form, other than as a fairly vociferous advocate for it. He compiled and edited an influential collection of essays on the genre, New Maps of Hell, back at the start of the 'sixties and he was a regular reviewer of new science fiction for the Observer throughout that decade.

M. John Harrison, though, is the first Booker winner most science fiction fans would unhesitatingly acknowledge as one of their own, although the fact that the only major SF award he's won (So far...) is the Arthur C Clarke (For Nova Swing in 2007.) points up how undervalued he's always been, even among his own tribe. I hope winning the Booker will make up for that.

In the way the aforementioned mainstream authors all published some science fiction, M. John has written at least one undoubtedly mainstream novel, Climbers, which centers on his favored hobby, rock-climbing. He also co-wrote, with Jane Johnson, an anthropomorphic tetralogy about a gang of cats, published under the pseudonym Gabriel King.

I've read a lot of his work but not all of it. My favorites are The Centauri Device, published in 1975 and without whose influence it's hard to imagine either the space opera of Iain M. Banks or most of cyberpunk, and the so-called Kefahuchi Tract trilogy (Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.). 

The first of his four talking cat books, The Wild Road, is also excellent but I found it such a tough read I haven't been able to attempt the rest of the series, even though I bought them all at the same time. They've been sitting in the "To Read" pile for a decade now. Children's literature it is not.

But the book that introduced him to me was 1985's Viriconium Nights. It, too, remains a favorite. 

At the time it was published, I was writing reviews of sci-fi books for a semi-pro comics zine with the unfortunate name Fantasy Advertiser, (A name inherited from its previous publisher, when a friend of mine took it over. He kept it for recognition value only.). 

My friend was also the GM of our tabletop gaming group and we used to meet at his place every Sunday, when he'd share out any review copies he'd received. I used to pick the ones that looked interesting and one week one of those happened to be a collection of linked short stories, set in a fantastic city called Viriconium. I'd not heard of the author, nor the series, of which this was the third, but I had a glance at the first page or two and the guy seemed to have an interesting prose style, so I took it.

There's a scan of the review I wrote, as published in FA 93, up above but to make it easier on the eyes, here's the full text:

"Viriconium Nights by M. John Harrison Gollancz, 158 pages, £8.95. 

M. John Harrison said "The best fantasy is a terra incognita. The reader is first lured into it and then abandoned." That gets my vote. I don't know what Viriconium is. I read every story in that goddamn book and Viriconium is a blur, it's a melange of impressions, it's lanterns and railed walkways, it's flagstone courtyards and swirling clouds of lazy twinkling motes buzzing slowly from a blade. Viriconium can't even keep its name straight. 

"Viriconium Nights" is a fabulation. It's not genre fantasy, genre science fiction, genre anything. You can swim in this book, it bears you up. Struggle for conventional narrative structure and you'll drown. This is a playful book, proud of the way it says things but not ashamed of what it has to say. It's a joy to read a fantasy novel packed with words that count, words picked for their weight, texture and sound as well as their simple meaning. It's a joy to read someone who can play with words without making a pun. Most of all it's a joy to read a book that doesn't cram everything down your throat, doesn't feel honour-bound to explain every reference, that isn't scared to be self-referential, to lift itself up by its own bootstraps.

Viriconium is a city that always has been. M. John Harrison doesn't create it before your very eyes, there's no cheap sf thrill as the mighty author warps the fabric of space and time to create...life! Viriconium is as real as Babylon or Alexandria or Belona. In "Viriconium Nights" there are six stories in and around Viriconium, and one other. They centre on ritual. Women chase the lamb to bear it to the ground in their teeth, the child locked in the glottokoma has a trade for life, the sin-eater takes the salt, the Mari horse bobs and weaves. In one of the more accessible stories there is a duel, street gangs hunt the victor across the city, the tension is almost conventional. In another a hero quests for a fateful meet with a family curse and, unthinkably, lays it. Harrison moves around fantasy cliches, ignoring them, spinning away into areas off to one side, leaving the light for the clarity of shadows. Nothing in this book is expected, nothing fails to make you think. 

The last story, "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium", folds back in on itself as the writer wanders a northern town searching for Viriconium. He finds men who found the path, went and returned, remembering Viriconium as glory and ashes, and still, or because, he cannot find the way himself. Maybe Viriconium is a state of mind, it is a way of seeing. Read it and use it as a filter every day. 

Face it, at £8.95 hardback none of you are going to buy this book. Without a review copy I'd never have read it. Life is ruled by chance and circumstance but sometimes luck will split it wide. If you read sf and fantasy, give "Viriconium Nights" the chance to break your expectations. If you don't read sf and fantasy, why are you reading this, voyeur?"

Seems I quite liked it. 

Also, yes, £8.95 must really have seemed like a lot of money for a book in those days. According to Gemini, £8.95 in 1985's money would be £35.20 today. The End of Everything is only £16.99....

Photo from 

"Wikimedia"

Soulframe Pre-Alpha - First Impressions - World, Combat, Mechanics

There were other things I could have posted about today but I guess I'd better carry on with my first impressions of Soulframe, before I forget what they were. To refresh my memory, this morning, before I started writing, I logged in for a quick reminder, so I'm now about four and a half hours into the game. 

A lot less far into the story, though. I don't seem to have made a lot of progress there...

This seems like a good moment to talk about the structure of the game, in terms of what you can do and what it seems the developers would prefer that you do. As far as I can tell, it's a true open world game, the kind where you can go anywhere you want, regardless of whether it's in your best interests to go there, but if you let it, the game will keep you running on rails. From the minute you arrive in the world (It has a name, by the way. It's called Alca.) you're given a list objectives, something I found very familiar from numerous recent survival and open-world titles I've played. 

It seems to be standard practice these days and it sometimes means I find it hard to be sure whether I've finished the Tutorial or not. The instructions just keep on coming, long after it feels like they're really needed. The most extreme example I can remember was Chimeraland, where I played for weeks without ever getting to the point where the game wasn't telling me what to do next, but they almost all do it to some degree. 

I have no way of knowing where to place Soulframe on that spectrum because almost as soon as I'd started, I gave up taking direction and wandered off to do my own thing instead.

Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration. Before I broke ranks, I did do as I was told, for a while. After I got reacquainted with grandad, I got sent to a tower, where I found the ghost of a scholar. He was quite a disturbing apparition, having apparently nailed a baby to his shoulder. Well, glued, perhaps. Fixed in a wholly unnatural position, anyway. It made it hard to concentrate on what he was saying, that's for sure.

I ought to make it clear it wasn't that the designer couldn't draw babies, something not uncommon in video games, where it often seems the art department have very little experience (Or interest.) in drawing anyone other than teenage girls or bodybuilders. It was more that this baby pretty obviously wasn't an actual baby. I said "homunculus" to myself the moment I saw it. Out loud, too. Lucky I was on my own at the time.

 

Minnow (That's my character's name. Don't look at me that way. I didn't pick it.) talked to the ghost and he sent her to find his old quill pen, which she found on a tree stump, where it was lying for no reason I can tell you. I guess there might have been an explanation but I was a bit busy killing people at the time, so I just grabbed it and ran.

We need to talk about the killing. There is a lot of it. Really a lot. I know all fantasy MMORPGs revolve almost entirely around indiscriminate slaughter but in most, a great deal of the bloodshed involves animals or monsters, which somehow dulls the "demented mass murderer" tone to everything you do. There's no such get-out clause in Soulframe, not that I've seen. So far, I've encountered precisely two kinds of enemies: humans and dogs. 

The good news is that you don't actually have to kill the dogs. They're war-dogs in armor and when you reduce their hit points to zero they don't die, they just run away, howling. The seemingly endless horde of knights in armor and archers that accompany them isn't handled so sensitively. They just fall down dead.

And they are everywhere. Well, everywhere that isn't just bleak, barren, empty countryside. There's a lot of that. The world, as far as I've explored it, is a wasteland. (There's an exception, which I'll come to...) It looks like there was a war not too long ago, one of those wars of attrition, where everything gets churned into mud. Now everything's quiet again. Mostly because there's nothing left alive.

There are some villages, here and there, and they have villagers. Rarely more than one or two. You can't kill them. You can't talk to them, either. If you get close, they say something along the lines of "Please don't kill me" and then they either carry on working or run away. 

Often there are knights in armor and archers in the same villages and they definitely don't run away. They run straight out you, yelling. Then they do their damndest to kill you.

Apart from the battered countryside, there's the sea and a huge wall, something along the lines of the one in Attack On Titan. (Full disclosure: I have neither read nor watched Attack On Titan.) My working theory is that the knights are an occupying army and their home is beyond that wall. 

 

Except I've been beyond that wall (Had to kill a bunch of guards and use a lever to open the gate.) and it's pretty much more of the same. It's all pretty much more of the same and yet quite different enough to be interesting. Minnow wandered along the coast, through what's left of the forest, swam to an island and went down into the undercity, which is the exception I mentioned earlier. The undercity is where all the good weather, flowers and sunlight are.

Yes, underground. If you want to get out of the gloom and despair and you're looking for light and fresh air, go down a hole! Digital Extremes does like to be different. 

Beneath the land lies a maze of tunnels, lit by braziers, torches and shafts of sunlight. In numerous places there are gaping holes where the tunnels have been breached and exposed to the sky. The whole time I was down there, the sunlight just poured in. Sunlight, I should point out, which was nowhere in evidence when I was on the surface.

What's even stranger is that, wherever the sun comes in, the floor is covered with grass and flowers. It's like late spring in an alpine meadow down there. Why? How? Who knows! It's just a relief to have something nice to look at for a change.

Ah, that's unfair though. Soulframe is a very good-looking game. The world may be dour and filled with mud but it's beautifully appointed. There's scenery everywhere. The character models are great, too. In both look and feel,it  immediately brings to mind another game...

In the comments on the previous post, Tyler Edwards brought up the New World comparison. It's extremely valid. One of the first things I thought, as soon as I started exploring, was "This reminds me of New World."

As I've been saying, much of the landscape I've seen so far is a lot less attractive than Aeternum but it has a very similar aesthetic. Traveling through the landscape feels very similar, except that there's no climbing mechanic (Yet - it is pre-alpha...), which made for a jarring disconnect every time Minnow ran at a wall and didn't immediately haul herself up on top of it. On the other hand, she jumps like a jackrabbit.

 

The mechanics bear close comparison, too. I'm still figuring it out but the basics seem really close to New World's. You can use a variety of weapons and your skill increases with use. You can spend points to open more effects or abilities for each weapon and you can augment them with various materials. 

I'm vague on this for a couple of reasons. The game explains almost nothing, which is fine for the most part because it's all very intuitive, but which leaves any subtleties or nuances largely invisible at these early stages. And I've chosen not to look anything up because so far everything feels extremely organic and natural, again something I always found New World to be, so I haven't needed to.

I think that, in contrast to New World, it may be the actual weapons that improve, rather than your skill in using them. All of them are named and the skill increases that appear on screen every time you level up always have the name of the weapon. For example, Minnow started with a bow called Thistle and that bow is now Level 17. She's acquired several more bows since - weapons drop all the time - but they all have different names and they're all Level 1.

I could look all this up and if I was writing a guide, I would. But I'm giving my first impressions and those are that I don't really need to know yet and I quite like not knowing. I'll dig into it if I start having difficulty but so far, I have had very little trouble killing my way across the map. Very little trouble indeed.

As I said last time, picking a ranger or a scout in a new game doesn't generally go well for me. I often have to swap to a melee character just to get the hang of things. Or to stay alive. In Soulframe, it's been a pleasure. The bow is a joy to use and it's very effective. 

For one thing, there's no ammunition. You never run out of arrows. For another, the aiming is really excellent. If you have the target in sight and in range, the red health bar appears. If not, it doesn't. Hard to get that wrong. You can prepare a shot by holding down RMB, which makes it do more damage. It also zooms in on the target, making aiming even easier. Then you hit LMB while still holding RMB and off the arrow goes. It feels very tactile and satisfying.

Mostly, though, I've been proceeding by the inelegant practice of backpedaling while firing, something that's extremely easy to do on the mostly open, flattish surfaces. Each successful shot has a high chance of staggering the enemy, a chance that can be increased by spending points, so it's fairly simple to keep the target from getting to you before it dies. It felt really familiar from an ancient memory of bow-kiting in EverQuest, where I'd snare something so it couldn't catch up to me and the pump it full of arrows at little risk to myself. 

If the victim manages to catch up, Minnow can turn into a butterfly for a few seconds and fly away, which nearly always gives her enough space to start raining arrows again. Health is restored with potions, of which you can carry only five. I imagine at some point she'll be able to buy or craft them but so far she's been getting a plentiful supply from the downed bodies of her victims.

Drinking a potion is easily done, even in combat, by pressing X and clicking the potion that appears on screen with the mouse. I am generally very bad at using potions but I can use these just fine. 

Mobs drop loot - quite a lot of loot. Much of it seems to be either currency or crafting mats, none of which I yet have found a use for. I have yet to meet a single friendly NPC other than a couple of questgivers, neither of whom seemed to be actually alive. Most loot gets hoovered up automatically as you run over it but any weapons or other objects, you have to stop and click on, which seems like an excellent system to me.

All things considered, I've been finding Soulframe a very enjoyable game, mecanically. It feels very natural and once again the closest comparison I can come up with is New World. The combat has the same "I could just keep doing this for the fun of it" feeling, which is not something I say about a lot of games. 

Where the combat departs from New World's, though, might be in how far above my weight limit I seem to be able to punch. Like, about thirty levels...

In my second session, instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing, I went exploring. There are bizarre magitech constructs all over the place and it's far too tempting not to go look at them. In that regard, the other game it reminds me of is Nightingale. Which, now I come to think of it, always reminded me of New World...

 

As I worked my way along the coast, clearing hostiles out of villages and settlements as I went, I noticed the numbers next to the soldiers I was killing were getting higher and higher. I wasn't precisely sure of my own level, if the player-character indeed has a specific level, rather than just the level of the weapon they're holding, but I was pretty sure it was in the low teens at the most.

The mobs I was killing went into the teens, then the twenties and carried on rising. I kept going, mostly to see when I'd get out of my depth. It was when I'd just pulled and successfully kited and killed a group of four mobs in their low 40s that I started to wonder if that was ever going to happen. It did, eventually, when I finally got overconfident, taking on a team of guards in the high forties, but even then I could easily have backed off and whittled them down, one by one.

By then, I was actively looking for something to kill me. I had yet to die in almost three hours of play and I was curious to see what happened. 

It turned out to be as confusing as most things in the game. On her death, the viewpoint changed to one of the big, glowing tombstones that appear, here and there, and Minnow was given the choice of reviving there or sending Sparrow to her corpse.

Since then I've died a few times and I've tried both options. I'm still not clear on how the Sparrow one works. Getting up at the stone is straightforward but if I choose Sparrow and fly back, I never seem to go to exactly the same place I died and I don't see my body on the ground, either. That might be because I didn't really know where I was when I died, of course. Also, Sparrow's flight is likely to induce motion sickness in anyone who's sensitive to it so be warned of that.

 

As for a death penalty, other than the interruption, I'm not sure if there is one. I didn't get any messages about skill loss or debuffs and if I was missing anything, I didn't notice. 

And that's where I'm going to leave it for now, this post having taken me all day, on and off. Not to mention that, as usual, it's running long. Before I go, I'll just bring it back round to where it was supposed to be headed in the first place, namely the difference between what the game wanted me to do and what I did, to say that very little of what I've described has anything to do with the objectives the game was clearly intending me to concentrate on but that I had a whole load of fun just doing my own thing.

After something like three hours of fairly chaotic exploration, all of which was very enjoyable and quite satisfying, I did eventually decide it might be time to get back on the rails. I logged out this morning having just gotten Minnow back to where she first decided to run off into the countryside. That would seem to be a good place to pick things up next time, when I come to write the third in what is clearly going to be a series of First Impression posts.

The tl:dr so far is that Soulframe is a lot of fun. It looks good and it plays well. It's felt both familiar and new from the start and if I was going to play a fantasy MMORPG right now, I think I'd be as likely to play this one for a while as any. And if I was looking for a new game to try for when New World sunsets, I'd definitely check it out.

Worth the download, then. Now I just have to wait and see how long it holds my attention, I guess. I'll most likely be writing about it as long as it does. I'm not short of things to say about it, that's for sure.

Soulframe Pre-Alpha - First Impressions - Set-Up, Cinematic, Character Creation And Tutorial

 I didn't have any particular intention of playing another MMORPG but here we are again... It was Saturday morning, Mrs Bhagpuss was at work, Beryl was asleep and there it was, served up to me in the feeds. So why not?

The Soulframe alpha seems to have been running a little under the radar in this part of the blogosphere, especially since several bloggers I read - or used to read, when they were active - were quite keen on Warframe. But the pre-alpha started in 2023 and the NDA dropped the year after, yet I've hardly heard a word about it. 

I guess that might change, now the doors to the alpha have been thrown open for everyone. I knew it was coming but I had so little interest in Soulframe I'd already forgotten until I saw that piece at MMOBomb this morning. But now it was there, I thought...why not? So I did.

My lack of enthusiasm stems from two sources. I didn't much like Warframe, for one. I mean, I didn't hate it... there are a few posts here from the brief time I had with the game, where I say things like "I had fun. Warframe is good, I think. Definitely not my kind of thing but not not my kind of thing either." 

Which is about as equivocal a recommendation as you can get, isn't it? I really didn't want to commit myself. I think the fact that I only posted about it two or three times, though, tells its own story.

Mostly, what I didn't like about Warframe was the aesthetic, which is kind of Sci-Fi meets body horror. Also the way your character is really nothing but a wardrobe full of mech-suits. Soulframe is Digital Extremes' version of basically the same game but with a fantasy skin and an actual character you can see, meaning it has both a setting and a look that ought, in theory, be more to my taste.

 

Only my tastes seem to be changing of late. The classic fantasy tropes that used to feel like sinking into a cosy, comfortable armchair in front of the fire are starting to seem more like perching on a hard wooden bench in a cold waiting room to me, these days. I don't know if I'm just all fantasied out after soaking the stuff up for the best part of fifty years or if the examples I've been seeing in recent times just haven't been up to code. Whatever it is, rough stone walls, thatched roofs, peasants with pitchforks and knights on horseback aren't really doing it for me any more.

Apparently, though, it takes more than a lack of enthusiasm to stop me downloading a free game. Not when it's something as arguably significant as this, anyway. 

Warframe itself may have slipped down the MMO news editors' agenda these days - I remember when it seemed like I was always reading about it - but for a while it was widely being hailed as the model for a whole new generation of MMORPGs, particularly in the F2P sector, where Digital Extremes were often quoted as having the best payment model.

When Soulframe was announced, I remember people talking about it not just as a breath of fresh air for the moribund fantasy MMO scene but very possibly for the future of the genre. And then, I guess, Light No Fire came along.

Except LNF is likely still years away but you can play Soulframe now. And I have.

What's more, I enjoyed it. Quite a lot. I played for a couple of hours, took a break for lunch, then played another hour and a half. By the end I was starting to feel a bit burned out but that's a long day's gaming for me now, especially in a single game. 

Starting at the start, set-up was very easy. The game will be on Steam eventually - it already has a Store page where you can wishlist it - but for now you have to go direct to the website and register with an email address to download the client, which is currently about 12GB, despite the specs suggesting you need four times that. 

That all went smoothly enough. I had the game installed in a just few minutes. And I started playing it immediately so I may have been a little keener to try it than I suggested. 

 

The game opens in a somewhat unusual fashion, with you playing your mother. What looks like a standard opening cinematic morphs into character creation, where you get to choose a few basics like the color of your skin, hair and eyes color along with a hairstyle. Your choices are applied to the woman on screen, who's been standing there the whole time, holding a baby.

That baby? That's you, that is!

Then the screen goes black and you wake up chained to a chair. In your underwear.

I'm going to call this, now. The whole trope of "waking up in your underwear" at the start of a game has had its day. It was fun for a while but it's more than getting old. It's bad enough your character is bound to a chair - at least let them wear some pants!

Your character inherits all the characteristics you chose for the mother and you also get to decide your gender, although, as has become almost traditional, that's not what the game calls it. In keeping with the IP, you get to pick a "Frame", which I guess made sense when what you were picking was a battlesuit but since this is your actual body, maybe not so much...

As if waking up in your skivvies, chained to a kitchen chair, wasn't bad enough, it gets worse. The big figure in armor, who's presumably the one who tied you up, hisses something about remembering you're family, then slaps you round the side of the head with a sword. The flat of the sword, so thanks for small mercies, I guess. And with a family like that, who's going to need enemies?

Next thing, my character, who I just now realize I was never given a chance to name, is lying face down in a shallow stream in the pouring rain, still in her underwear. Once again, I re-iterate, this is not how I want to start any game. How many games start with the player-character being dropped into the sea or washed up, sprawled, half-drowned, on a beach? Too many, that's how many.

 

What do you think would be more distressing than coming to with a blinding headache from being smacked with a lump of metal, lying face down in cold water, dressed in nothing but your wet underwear? Hands up who said "being rescued by a moose"?  That person, take a No-Prize! 

That's what happens. A huge moose, with all kinds of gewgaws and trinkets dangling off its antlers, moseys up, takes a look at you, grabs hold of your blue arm and drags you onto the shore. Oh, didn't I mention you have a blue arm?  Well you do. You had it as a baby, too, so I don't know if it's a tattoo sleeve or if you were born with it. I imagine it means something but no-one even mentioned it, the whole time I was there, so your guess is as good as mine. 

Also, you have metal armor on that arm. Just that one arm. And a metal mask covering your mouth. 

It might be a metal arm. The mask might be part of you. Maybe you're a cyborg... look, I don't know. 

It certainly isn't explained. Nothing is explained. It's the least explainy MMORPG I've played for a long while. I had to look two things up on Google before I even got out of the Tutorial...

So, getting back to the action, a window pops up, thanking you for playing the Prelude and a little hint appears at the top of the screen, suggesting you might want to press "G" to get your Sparrow to come help you. This turns out to be a clever, lore-appropriate way to give you a quest marker. Whatever quest you're currently tracking, pressing "G" will summon a tiny bird that flies off in the direction you need to go, leaving a glowing trail in the air behind it. It's basically the sparkle trail SOE added to EverQuest II in about 2005, only now there's a reason for it to be there.

 

The bird flies off to a small cottage close by. I could hear someone calling my name, too. Well, the name the Scottish voice in the cinematic called me, anyway: Minnow. The only name I had was the Display Name I had to choose when I set up the account. I hate games using your Account name to identify you in game. It's bad enough in a FPS - it should never happen in an RPG.

I followed my sparrow to the door, opened it, went inside and suddenly I was a child. This is so confusing! I'm an in media res, don't need no stinkin' explanations kind of guy but still and even...

It seems to be some kind of magical flashback. The Scotsman turns out to be Minnow's grandfather. I found that out only by wandering around his hobbitty home (He has a lot of pets...) and eventually finding the one thing you can interact with, which is some kind of ocarina. When you pick it up a tune plays. There's a score on screen and the keys you have to press are indicated and when you play the melody, such as it is, the Scottish fellow appears.

Or he does eventually. Not the first time. Not for me, anyway. 

It wasn't because I had any difficulty with the mini-game. I'm terrible at these sorts of things but its a four-note melody and three of the notes are the same. Even I can manage that. So I blew on the thing and nothing happened. 

Well, the Ocarina vanished, so I suppose that happened. But nothing lit up and no-one appeared. My Journal still told me I had to play the tune even though I'd just played it. I wandered around the house for a while, looking at everything for a a second and even a third time. I didn't have much else to do. The door wouldn't open so I was stuck there. Bah, I thought. Must be bugged.

 

But Bhagpuss! Didn't you say you didn't come across any bugs or glitches? 

Yes I did say that and it's true. After about five minutes of nothing happening, I closed the game to see if restarting would fix it. 

And that's when I found my internet had been down the whole time. Presumably from about when I blew on the ocarina. Maybe longer. That's quite a lot of offline persistence for an online game. I'd be happy with less.

I had to reboot the router to get back in but once that was done I was able to re-blow the ocarina and finally meet my grandfather. Or the ghost of my grandfather. Or a memory of my grandfather. I'm kinda vague on the whole grandfather timeline, not to mention his state of existence.

Soulframe seems to like shifting from one mode of being to another. There's the open world, which I guess is "real" and there are talking ghosts and then there's also the Nightfold, which is where I went after I met grandpa. 

The Nightfold is where you go to do all the practical stuff, like changing armor and weapons, assigning Virtue points and going to the cash shop. Oh yes, it's a pre-alpha but it's got a cash shop. The Nightfold is a very odd place with tents that come up out of the water and a camel and pillars of stone that you can walk into and who knows what else. It's also where you finish up Character creation because, in case you forgot about it, you haven't picked a class yet.

Or, I should say, a Pact. Can't just have a class, can you, not nowadays. Except the choice is very clearly between Fighter, Rogue and Healer. They all have fancy names but that's what they are. 

 

Much against my better judgment, I picked the Ranger archetype, aka the Pact of Grace. You can try all three out before deciding but I just wanted the bow. I know. Playing a ranger rarely works out for me but I still can't resist. Everyone knows you ought to pick a Fighter for a first run through a game but fighters are so bleh and I thought rangers were cool, when i was twenty. Hmm. Maybe that's the problem. I'm not twenty any more.

And so we come to the end of the beginning. The real game was just about to begin and somehow, my character, who I guess I'm going to have to call Minnow, had gotten hold of a full set of armor, so at least she wasn't going to be running around in her undies any more. 

I am going to double down and ask why she ever was? If the game is going to hand you armor before you even leave character creation, why have whole sections of the intro where you run around nearly naked?

Rhetorical question. I think we all know the answer to that one.

I imagine I've missed a few important points but Soulframe is open access now so you can make a character and see for yourself if you want. I recommend it. It's free and its fun, at least for a while. Or you could just watch this video on YouTube and see pretty much exactly what I did, except this guy has the sense to try out all three Pacts before choosing one.

I think everything I've described took maybe just the first forty-five minutes. Certainly no more than an hour. But this post is long enough. I'll get to the rest in Part Two. There's quite a bit more to tell.