Is The Bag Half Empty Or Half Full? I think We All Know The Answer To That One...

I was going pull out a Grab Bag today but I used one of the grabs yesterday and made a whole post out of it, so now I only have two left. Two grabs do not a bag make, I fear. Still, I don't have anything else so let's make the best of it. Maybe something will come to me as I go along.

Kickstarter Doesn't Work For MMORPGs

Oh, yeah? Go tell that to Artix Entertainment.

As you may know, Artix is the developer behind the AdventureQuest franchise. I've been playing their most recent MMORPG, AdventureQuest 3D, on and off since open beta back in 2016. 

I still play, on occasion. Steam tells me the last time I logged in was just before the end of January. Yes, this year. 

I will almost certainly play some more AQ3D at some point, most likely when I see they've added something new that interests me. And they will because Artix Entertainment is quite possibly the most pro-active of all MMO studios when it comes to adding new content. They drop new content weekly, without fail, and have been doing so, consistently, for the entirety of their existence, at least as far as I can tell.

That's the kind of behavior that generates loyalty, something that's very clear from the response to the company's new Kickstarter. With 31 days still to run, the project has already racked up over a million dollars in pledges from more than thirteen thousand backers. 

Guess how much they were asking for? 

A dollar. One single buck. Talk about over-achievers!

I guess that's one way to ensure your Kickstarter at least doesn't fail. So, what do they want all that money for, anyway? A new game? 

Not exactly. They already have two successful MMORPGs. They don't need another. What they do need, apparently, is one that will run well and look good on phones, tablets and Steam.

Wait, though... Didn't I just say I played AQ3D on Steam already? I sure did. But the Kickstarter isn't for the newer MMORPG. It's for the older one. The original. The browser-based one you can only play on PC, through the in-house Artix Game Launcher.

The Kickstarter is to convert the entire game, AdventureQuest Worlds, into AdventureQuest:Worlds Infinity, remaking virtually everything and ensuring full cross-play and backwards compatibility with existing accounts. So, why go to all that bother for an old game when you have a new one? 

I guess if you still have 8000 people playing every day, despite the game being ancient and only available through a narrow channel, it might seem worth it. Especially if you can get those people to pay for the conversion. Actually, more than just those people by the look of it.

Here's the thing. Artix has established a reputation that allows them to leverage player trust to an extent matched by few other developers working in the genre. They say what they're going to do and then they do it. They also listen to feedback and act on it when it makes sense to do so. 

As Project: Gorgon proved, if you just keep doing what you said you'd do and avoid ripping anybody off, people will give you money and play your game. And the longer you keep doing it, the longer they'll stick around. It's odd how few developers seem to get that, isn't it? You wouldn't think it would be that hard to understand.

I've never played AQW and I don't plan on pledging the Kickstarter. I'll be adding it to my Steam library when it arrives, though, you can bet on that. And unlike most Kickstarters for MMOs, you can also bet on it really happening. 

It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's... Supergirl!

 

Observant users of the Blog Roll off to the right may have noticed a few non-gaming entries creeping in over the years. One such is Supergirl Comic Commentary, a blog by Anj. 

I'm not a huge Supergirl fan like he is but I grew up with Kara, like I grew up with the rest of her family. I read her stories but it was mostly Superman and Superboy that had my attention back when I was in short trousers. (Don't get me started on grown men in shorts or we'll be here all day. It's an abomination, that's all I'm saying..)

I always liked her well enough though, especially when she appeared in my favorite Superhero series of all time, The Legion of Superheroes. Over the decades she's been indifferently served by too many writers and artists to remember, as have most DC superheroes. 

It's the curse of the long-running character. For all the endless droning on about "continuity" and "canon", no-one survives the endless revamps and new directions entirely unscathed. I've learned to tune out the changes I don't like. You have to or you'd go insane, as an hour in the bar of any comic convention will demonstrate all too convincingly.

The Girl of Steel's screen career has been similarly variegated. The 1984 movie featuring Helen Slater was not well-received or reviewed. Worse, it lost money. 

It was thirty years before Supergirl got her own tv series. It began in 2015 and ran for six seasons with Melissa Benoist in the title role. I watched every episode and bought most of the seasons on DVD, so I must have liked it. It wasn't an awful lot like the Supergirl I remember, though.

Nevertheless, it may be the relative success of that show, along with an influential, high-profile limited-run comic, Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, that's led to this year's tent-pole release in the DCMU schedule, the very simply named Supergirl, starring Milly Alcock. And in an attempt to drum up interest and media coverage, DC have gender-swapped this year's Superman Day.

Come on! Don't pretend you never heard of Superman Day! Superman Day is on April 18 as everyone knows. Look, I wrote about it in 2024.  

Only this year it isn't. April 18 is Supergirl Day instead. Not sure why they can't have a day each but there you go. Alright, I do know, really. It's just crass to point out the commerciality.

To be fair, if you scroll down that long, long page of events and special issues I just linked, you'll see it turns into a promo for Superman after a while. He's getting his share and I'm sure he won't begrudge his little cousin taking the lead for one year.

I'm not planing on celebrating the day myself but I might log into DCUO if there any freebies to be had, which I'm sure there will be. I might also pick up a copy of Woman of Tomorrow. We have it at work in the excellent and attractive new DC Compact format, which I highly recommend as a great alternative to the more expensive and generally too glossy graphic novels. 

And I will definitely be watching the movie when it arrives in June. The trailer looks very encouraging. I doubt I'll get to see it at the cinema, though. I'll wait for the DVD. I can shelve it next to the TV series.

Finish With A Song

I mean, it worked for Morecambe and Wise...

Sorry Anyway - Rosa Walton

Rosa Walton is, of course, one half of Lets Eat Grandma. Didn't need to tell you that. Sorry, anyway.

The duo is on a break just now and Rosa's pal, Jenny Hollingworth, has been releasing material under the name Jenny on Holiday, some of which has appeared on this very blog. Big surprise!

They both have solo albums either out or coming soon. Jenny released hers, Quicksand Heart, in January and Rosa's, Tell Me It's A Dream, is out on June 5. 

Expect further examples of both right here.

For Every Dawn, There's A Sunset

 

Here we are on Thursday with the sun shining brightly outside and the buds beginning to pop on the trees. What better time to say goodbye to an old favorite?

Well, an old favorite of mine, anyway. Not, I imagine, of anyone else. 

Who remembers Dawnlands? Hands up... 

No-one? Okay, then.

There are fifteen posts tagged "Dawnlands" here and most of them are all about my time with the game, which ranks sixth in my Steam library by hours played at 105. The last time I wrote about that was on April 29, 2024, when I made a brief visit in the wake of the close-down of another of my favorite games of recent years, Noah's Heart.  

Back then, as I wrote, "I decided to spend some time in a game that's still around - although, if I was going to bet on it, not for much longer." I was right about that, although in the event Dawnlands hung on a while longer than I expected. It's still up as I write this but the servers are due to go down for good on 27 March.

Not that you'd know unless you were paying very close attention indeed. I only found out because I happened to see a passing comment about the closure when I was looking for something entirely different. I didn't get an email or see a news item about it on Steam. There's been no word at all from Seasun Games on the platform since December 2023. I had to go to the official website and hunt around until finally I found this closure notice under the News tab.

There's no mention of the shut-down on the Steam Store page, where you can still download the game. Since it's free to play that's not such a problem as it might be but even so, you'd think they might want to warn potential new players of the extremely short time they'll have to enjoy that new game they just downloaded.

Except, of course, there aren't likely to be any new players. That's why the game is closing down. Lack of interest.

It's not that no-one's playing. Dawnlands isn't a dead game, or at least not for a couple of weeks or so yet. Steam records a fairly consistent population over the last year of between fifty and a hundred players, mostly hovering around eighty. There are plenty of games with a lot fewer people playing than that.

 

Still, it's obviously not a viable population for a commercial product, especially one that relies on micro-transactions to keep it going. Then again, Steam isn't the only way to play. Dawnlands is available on mobile devices via both Android and iOS and there's a stand-alone installer for Windows you can download directly from the publisher.

All of those platforms together must not add up to enough income to keep the servers running, or so I have to assume. It's always possible the company has just lost interest in maintaining it but I imagine if it wasn't costing them money they'd have just let it run silent as they have for the last two years.

All of which raises the question of why Dawnlands ever needed to be a live service game in the first place. As Tyler F. M. Edwards asked in his MassivelyOP piece on the about-to-launch horse mystery MMO Equinox Homecoming, "Why is this a multiplayer live service game?"

Dawnlands doesn't even have the excuse that it's trying to be an MMO. You can play up to four-person co-op or solo. There's absolutely no need for it to be a live service game at all, other than to support the business model. It's cartoon Valheim and Valheim has an offline mode. So could Dawnlands - if it was buy-to-play.

Here's the thing. All of these solo and co-op open-world survival-and-craft games, of which there must by now be hundreds, if not thousands, would work perfectly well, not to say better, as buy-to-play titles. It's perfectly possible to be successful using that model as we've seen with Enshrouded, which fully supports offline play.

It's also possible to retro-fit an offline version onto the business model if the live service route fails, as happened with Nightingale. The conversion was a bit clunky, sure, but it works. But Nightingale was also buy-to-play.

With a free-to-play model, though, there's very little incentive for a developer to offer any kind of local solution. Why would they? You get what you paid for and you paid for nothing which is exactly what you're left with when the servers go down. Seems fair.

All of which is a bit notional, if I'm honest. It makes little difference to me whether the games I play persist or don't any more. I rarely go back and never for long.

Still. the collector in me would love to have a copy of the game stored safely away and the nostalgist would like to be sure he could drop back in whenever he felt like taking another look around the old place. It's better to have and don't need than to need and don't have, as Don Covay used to say, even if by "need" you mean indulge the occasional whim.

 

Realistically, I would never have played the game in any meaningful fashion again even if the servers stayed up until doomsday. I last logged into Dawnlands on 27 September 2025, when all I did was wander about aimlessly for a few minutes, soaking up the ambience, before logging out and forgetting all about it. If the game wasn't about to close down, I certainly wouldn't be here writing about it now.

The same applies to any number of titles. Looking at my Steam library, it's unlikely I'll ever again spend a serious amount of time with any of the dozen most-played games I see there. I do, occasionally, log in to a few - Valheim, Nightingale, Once Human, Bless Unleashed, Rift, New World... but the only ones I might ever spend any significant time with again are the MMORPGs and then only if something new happens there.

MMORPGs do need to be both online and Live Service. They rely on lots of players sharing the same space and they stagnate without a continuing stream of new content. When either or, worse, both of those stop, there probably isn't much of an alternative to closing the whole thing down, at least as far as the official, money-making operation goes. They may live on in an emulated afterlife but in most cases only as museum pieces. 

For MMORPGs there's also no real prospect of any kind of offline port. It would be nice for nostalgia but without a population much of the content would be meaningless.

For most other genres, though, and particularly for single-player or co-op titles, there seems to be no good reason, other than money, why they ever needed an online connection or had to be played on someone else's hardware in the first place. I don't generally have a lot of sympathy with the Stop Killing Games initiative but the evidence against both the Live Service and the Online Connection Required models does seem to be piling up now. It's being applied indiscriminately and it doesn't suit many games at all.

I'm a long-time advocate of the better free-to-play payment models but I'd have to acknowledge that what you gain on the ease of access roundabout you often lose on the long-term stability swings. The F2P revolution has meant I've been able to play far more games than I otherwise would but also that many of them are no longer available to me now.

 

Which begs the question would I have wanted them to be? Would I even ever have played most of them at all? 

For example, had Dawnlands been a buy-to-play title retailing at $30, would I have bought it? Almost certainly not. There are dozens of better games at lower prices on my wishlist and I'm not ponying up for those.

There must be scores of games where I spent many entertaining sessions that I would never have played at all, had I had to pay at the door. It renders the question of how much longer those games would have lasted had they charged an entry fee entirely moot, at least for me.

On balance, I think I prefer to have more new games available at zero cost, even in the knowledge they may only hang around for a year or two. Why pay just for the security of knowing I could play them forever when I know I'd only play for a while and then never think of them again?

More to the point, how many would I buy anyway? Even the really good ones stay on the shelf. I still haven't bought Enshrouded, for example, even though I played and enjoyed the demo and keep reading about what a good game it is and how it's getting better all the time.

I guess the flip to that coin is that I can buy Enshrouded any time I feel flush. And having bought it, I can play it for as long as it interests me. It feels like a very theoretical advantage all the same. That's exactly what happened with Nightingale and am I ever going to play that again? I doubt it.

I don't have a good answer to this one. It seems like there are strong arguments on both sides. I guess the ideal would be for the games to be both free-to-play and offline but that's a pipe dream. No-one's making any money with that.

As for Dawnlands, I'll remember it fondly. I had some good times there. Like some holiday I took years ago, though, if I want to relive the experience I have my screenshots and the posts I wrote about it. I'm happy for it to remain a pleasant memory and I'm glad I had the chance to enjoy it while it lasted.

If anyone else had it in mind to get around to playing some day - tough. You missed your chance. 

A Tale Of Two Demos

Next Fest is over for another few months. The timing was bad for me. I didn't get to play many demos. I did, however, manage to spend some time with two I was very interested in; a couple of games that looked very different on the surface but which turned out to be much more alike than I expected.

The two titles are Esoteric Ebb and Zero Parades For Dead Spies. The latter, as I explained in an earlier post, is the follow-up to the much-garlanded Disco Elysium, produced by what's left of the same studio, Za/Um, while the former is merely "inspired" by it. 

So, on the basis of the demos alone, which does a better job of continuing the legacy? The original or the copy?

I won't bury the lede. The copy wins by a mile. 

Both the demos are huge. I put just under an hour into Zero Parades and twice that into Esoteric Ebb. In both cases it felt like I'd barely gotten started. In large part that's because they each require an enormous amount of reading and, in the case of ZP, listening. 

Whether the maps are extensive in the demos I can't say. I barely got past the opening areas of either. I suspect there's plenty more I could explore but in each case I felt I'd seen enough, albeit for very different reasons.

With Esoteric Ebb, I didn't want to carry on much further because it's very likely I'll buy the full game. There was an option at the beginning of the demo for progress made there to be carried over and I took it, but I'm not sure it worked. Since I don't want to have to do all that reading again, I think I'll wait until I have the game installed before I carry on (Although I did install the demo on my laptop so I could carry on playing it in bed last night...)

I could buy the game right now if I wanted, of course. It went on sale yesterday. It's been well-received so far, with a Very Positive rating on Steam and a score of 88 on Metacritic. From what I've seen of the demo, that's well deserved.

 

Esoteric Ebb doesn't look much like Disco Elysium in screenshots or sound like it in the description. It's an RPG with a cartoon aesthetic that's very European. It reminds me of any number of strips in publications like Pilote or Metal Hurlante back in the '80s. 

It's also solidly placed in the fantasy genre, even if the specific stripe of fantasy is "post Arcanepunk", whatever the hell that is. It has magic, spells, levels, classes, all the standard RPG trappings, although if you're expecting a standard RPG, you're going to be very disappointed.

Zero Parades, on the other hand, looks almost exactly like Disco Elysium and takes place in a very similar setting. Possibly in the same world, I'm not sure. If you're expecting a faithful sequel you're going to be, once again, very disappointed. 

I was. I was more than willing to cut Za/Um some slack over the controversies that have dominated all news about the studio for the last couple of years. I haven't really been paying that much attention the details, the rights and wrongs of the whole affair. I was just hoping whoever was still using the name would come up with a worthy successor.

On the evidence of the demo, that's not happening. The whole thing felt like a second-rate imitation to me.

Not the visuals, which are up to the standard of the original and look very much like it. Nor, really, the gameplay, which was fine as far as it went. Superficially, Zero Parades is Disco Elysium 2.

The problems start with the writing. It's not bad by any means but it has that awkward sense of trying just a little too hard to be something it doesn't quite know how to be. 

Disco Elysium was truly, genuinely, effortlessly unhinged. That was its glory. By comparison, Zero Parades reads like a bunch of familiar tropes, layered over with a thin veneer of by-the-numbers weirdness. It's like a student review version of a hit show - earnest, eager and unconvincing.

The very premise gave me trouble. Making the game about spies imparts a totally different spin from Disco's police procedural. In DE, you start out as some kind of burned-out detective, stuck with a much slicker partner, working a dead-end case in a no-hope town. In ZP you're some kind of disgraced super-spy, who's just been woken from cryo-sleep and sent on a mission that's gone wrong even before it's begun.

I can see how these are supposed to be equivalents but they really aren't. One is grim, gritty and bleak. The other is exciting, dramatic and adventurous. Still, the settings are equally down-at-heel and the central character equally adrift from the course they're supposed to be following, so that oughtn't to matter so much.

The reason it does matter is that all the info-dump about the political background, so subtle and complex in Disco Elysium, is here thrust at you in wodges of dull jargon that doesn't give much of an impression of nuance below the surface. What was kept to the background in the earlier game is foregrounded here and I found it off-putting, like having to sit through a series of political lectures when all I wanted was to get on with the plot. Or, indeed, find the plot.

Worse than the uninspired writing, though, are the voice-overs. I talked a little about the truly awful narration the last time I wrote about ZP and it absolutely does not improve on further hearing. None of the other voices are anything like as bad but neither is any of them much good. After about half an hour, I couldn't take any more. I switched the voices off altogether. That is not something I do often or feel I need to.

Mechanically, I did like the demo. The controls feel intuitive, it's easy to spot things you ought to investigate and the character animations are very impressive. The game looks good and plays well. Arguably, better than Disco.

 

The problem was, nothing I was doing seemed all that interesting. Long before I decided I'd had enough I'd stopped caring about the political situation people kept talking about and the constant references to spycraft were no more welcome than they are in any game. I just don't find spies a very interesting bunch of people, I guess. As for the mission, it never got started.

It's possible all of the things I'm complaining about are artifacts of the slow-burn design Za/Um is famous for. Disco Elysium took hours and hours to warm up and didn't really get its hooks into me until about twenty hours in. 

But it had something, right from the start. An edge, a sparkle, a glint. A mystery, just out of sight, that I couldn't ignore. On the evidence of the demo, Zero Parades doesn't have anything like that working for it.

Esoteric Ebb, on the other hand, very much does. Even though it opens with that exhausted and exhausting cliche, the main character waking up on a slab in the morgue, it grips from the start. 

Mechanically it's very similar to Zero or Disco. You wander about, looking at stuff or talking to people and every time you open a dialog with a person or an object you're set to spend the next few minutes clicking and reading. Seriously, if you aren't the sort of person who's ecstatic at the thought of starting a five-hundred page novel, you'd be better off looking anywhere else than at any game that claims to be inspired by Disco Elysium.

 

There are two huge differences between Esoteric Ebb and Zero Parades, though. Firstly, in EE the text is cynical, satirical, witty and frequently genuinely funny. Secondly, there are more than ample opportunities to make choices and choose responses that feel like they might change something.

There are even dice to roll. Where ZP has some indecipherable process involving mental states and meters, none of which seem to be under your direct control, EE has RPG stats and ability checks. And amazingly it manages to integrate those into the process without detracting from the aesthetic.

Another huge advantage EE has over ZP, especially in a demo, is a clear and comprehensible plot. Well, not so much a plot as the starting point for one. And in that way, it's a lot closer to Disco than Zero. 

Disco Elysium begins with the player character knowing they've been sent to investigate a dead body hanging from a tree. Esoteric Ebb begins with the player character knowing they've been sent to investigate an explosion in a tea shop. From there, everything slides in all directions but at least you know what you're supposed to be doing. 

ZP starts with the mission you've been woken up for being terminated and your orders being changed to "Come back to base immediately". From there on, you're on your own. That theoretically gives you complete freedom to act but it mostly left me feeling confused and directionless. In Esoteric Ebb, I always had a purpose, even if mostly I kept getting distracted from pursuing it.

 

Perhaps the most surprising difference between the two demos is the way each explains the political and cultural background that's so important to them both. ZP either layers it in gnomic jargon, presumably intended to feel deep and meaningful but actually just coming across as obtuse and tedious, or reveals it through stilted, unnatural conversations, some no more enjoyable than sharing a bus ride with a conspiracy theorist.

The NPCs in Esoteric Ebb not only have much sprightlier conversational skills, they have much deeper dialog trees that range widely across a range of topics and still manage to keep most of them interesting and relevant. The dialog is far more naturalistic, too, albeit only by the terms of an RPG. The complex social, cultural, religious and political background bleeds through by osmosis. 

Which isn't to say there's no info-dump. There's plenty but it's handled almost wholly through highlighted key-words on which you can, if you wish, click to get a short explanation or gloss. It's like having an internal wiki for the game. I found it useful and enlightening.

I could go on but there's every chance I will, at some point, buy Esoteric Ebb, at which point I'm sure there will be more posts about it here. I wouldn't rule out buying Zero Parades entirely but given I can't even summon up the enthusiasm to finish the demo, that does seem unlikely.

If anyone else has played either of the demos, especially if they've also played Disco Elysium, I'd be interested to hear other opinions, particularly on Zero Parades. Maybe I'm missing something... 

At Last!

 Baldur's Gate 3 is back in the box. Or it would be, if there was a box.

I'm very happy to have finished it. Firstly, because I'd had enough some time ago and secondly because it makes a nice change to finish a game at all, these days. Also I think it means I've played all three Baldur's Gates through to the credits, although I can't be absolutely sure I got right to the end of the second one. Pretty sure I did, though...

Two questions remain, I guess:

1. Was it any good?
2. How satisfying was the ending?

As to the first, yes, obviously it was good. It would be ridiculous to pretend otherwise. Clearly, this was a massive technical achievement on Larian's part and a very worthy addition to the celebrated series. It was also fun, enjoyable, entertaining and addictive in the best "just one more try" way. Not much more you could ask of a video game, really.

That said, I didn't exactly love it. As previously discussed, it went on far too long. Having finished it, I'm even more of the opinion it would have been better split into at least two separate games or even a trilogy. So much happens that it's very hard to remember it all, far less appreciate it. As a studio, Larian always seems to want to take the maximalist approach and it's not my preference at all.

Leaving aside the whole "too much of a good thing" problem, though, I don't have anything other than praise for the quality of the writing or the voice acting. One of the reasons it took me as long as it did was that I had to hear every word spoken out loud and I had to find and read every book on every shelf. It wasn't until the epilogue that I finally decided I could just glance at the subtitles and skip ahead rather than listen to Wyll droning on - but then he was by a wide margin the least interesting character. I never skipped on anyone else.

Visually, the game looks amazing. The level of detail is overwhelming. I spent a lot of time just wandering about, looking at stuff. I wasn't entirely happy with the way the camera worked but it wasn't terrible. Most of the time, anyway.

The tactical gameplay was everything I could have asked for. I found the fights perhaps the most addictive part of the whole game although it was the ones I managed to avoid by dint of persuasion that felt, ironically, like the most satisfying of victories. I played the entire campaign on the default setting and it seemed just about right. I can only remember giving up altogether on one fight but several came right down to the last person standing, which felt pretty good, at least when that person was one of my party.

The story was OK. I find it hard to get emotionally involved in narratives that include gods and archdevils as active participants. The whole thing began to feel a bit above my pay-grade by about halfway through and by the end it was so far removed from anything I could associate with it ceased to feel like any choices I made had any relevance at all.

But that's the generic problem with D&D. You start out worrying whether two goblins might be one too many for the party and end up riding on an Ancient Red Dragon as you head into a battle with a demi-god. 

Or something. I gave up my AD&D campaign back in the '80s when the party reached 7th level because it got too hard to take any of it seriously any more. BG3 is, I think, the highest I've ever taken a character in any version of the rules and even then Larian had to pull the plug on XP at Level 12 because anything beyond would have been impossible to balance.

So, I'd say Baldur's Gate 3 is a good game despite the IP, not because of it. I'd honestly have preferred to stay in Act I in terms of both the narrative and the gameplay. The problems there seemed a lot more approachable and the tactics more comprehensible. Then again, the higher level spells are certainly a lot more spectacular, so there's that.

Speaking of spells and abilities, there are far, far too many of them and the mechanics of preparing them are far too abstruse. I found it verging on impossible to know what to pick on Level-Up and in the entire 155 hours I never figured out how to change prepared spells efficiently. I either forgot about it altogether or when I remembered and tried to swap spells out it didn't work for some reason I couldn't grasp. 

By the final battle my bags were bursting with those potions that add or restore spell slots but I never did manage to get one to work, which was how I ended up with so many unused ones in the first place. I don't enjoy fiddling about with builds or specs or anything of the kind so for the entire game I had the exact same party - my character, Shadowheart, Lae`zel and Gale and they all used pretty much the same set of spells and abilities for the whole run.

Frequently, that meant I didn't have what I needed to get a fight done efficiently but I almost always just muddled through as best I could. I did make extensive use of scrolls, because those I could understand and I always had stacks of them, but it seemed very odd that my magic-users were so limited by what they could remember, while anyone at all could cast any spell, providing they had a bit of paper in their hand.

The worst example of these self-inflicted limitations  in the whole game came right at the end, when Tipa tipped me to the fact that you can skip the entire penultimate set-piece battle simply by making all your characters invisible. It was a great tip but by then I had precisely no characters who could cast any form of invisibility and exactly two invisibility potions between five of them (Orpheus, the tag-along, being the one who needed invisibility most of all.)

The mechanics of the game at that point precluded a trip back to a vendor or my camp stash to restock. I would have had to go back to a very much older save for that. Instead I ended up spending several hours working on a strategy to get Orpheus and my character to the Crown unseen, so my character could read from a scroll of Globe of Invulnerability and keep them both safe while Orpheus cast Karsus' Compulsion and maintained it for long enough to trigger the cut scene.

And now we're sliding into that second question: how satisfying was the ending? Hmm. There's no easy answer to that one.

For a start, it depends what you mean by "ending". The final fight is a huge anti-climax, especially if you've just taken three days and about eight or nine hours getting through the one before, not to mention almost as long on the one before that. 

In the event, I went into the last fight with just Orpheus and my character. I'd ungrouped for tactical reasons in the penultimate battle and at least one of those characters was dead anyway so I saved at the zone-in, then went in with just the two of us, intending to see how it went and then try again, with the full group if necessary. 

It was not. Two of us were more than enough to subdue the Netherbrain. I absolutely am not complaining about it being too easy. As I said, I'd been itching to get the game over with for a long time by then so the easier the better. It still seemed like a weird design choice, all the same. 

Speaking of difficulty, in typical fashion, I neglected to use two of the biggest boosts available. After all that work in Act III, gathering a bunch of allies to call on for help in the final battle, I never even saw them. I managed to kill the entire horde of enemies in the stages leading up to the final confrontation with the Netherbrain without any help from outside the party and when I wanted to bring in my allies for the difficult second-to-last fight, the button to call them had disappeared! Apparently I'd missed my chance and they'd all gone off to do something else.

Similarly, I saved Shadowheart's Divine Intervention (Only One Use Per Game.) for a Very Dire Situation but never found one that was quite dire enough. I did use it on one attempt to get Orpheus to the Crown but that attempt failed so I reloaded an earlier save and I never called on Selune again.

I think it's fair to say that if I'd had to rely on my wits and skill, I would never have finished the game at all, or not yet, anyway. A significant proportion of the big fights can be rendered almost trivial by certain strategies or tactics and once I started looking those up whenever I ran into trouble, things got a great deal easier. That and save-scumming, of course.

That said, I never felt like I was actually cheating - just not coming up with all the ideas on my own. But then, there were three other people in the party so I really shouldn't have needed to, should I?

So much for the final fights. What about the narrative conclusion?

Bleh! This is where I think Larian really dropped the ball. There's a long epilogue, all cut scenes and talking, which is clearly supposed to tie up all the loose ends and give all the characters a nice, tidy ending. Unfortunately, it just makes things worse.

For one thing, several hanging swords never fall. My plan was always to give the Crown to the devil I'd contracted with to do so but that option simply never appeared. Instead, I got a cut-scene late on, when he complained about my not having fulfilled the contract but declined to do anything much to punish me. Apparently he was content to just watch, as everything would inevitably go wrong for me from then on without any further intervention on his part.  

That made no sense at all but it was in good company. There were many examples of things not making any sense, not least all the supposedly deep and meaningful conversations with "companions" about the amazing times we'd had together, when about the only thing we'd ever done together was hang around in camp. Since I'd avoided any kind of romance and we had never fought alongside each other, the supposed bonds we'd formed seemed delusional.

The single, worst example, though, was Jaheira. I got her killed in a fight in Act II. I know for certain she was dead because if Jaheira is dead, it's impossible to calm Minsc down when you fight him later and you have no option but to kill him. Which I did. I read the strats and the only dialog option that works is not present if Jaheira is dead. That dialog option was not present for me plus I saw her die. Ergo, Jaheira is dead.

Except she turns up in the Epilogue, chatty as anything, apparently remembering nothing about her demise. Yes, it's D&D so maybe somehow she got resurrected but if so you'd think she might have mentioned it. The game just doesn't keep tabs accurately on what you've done, something I found a problem right from the start.

More annoying than that, though, were two things that happened - or didn't happen - at the reunion party six months after the destruction of the Netherbrain. Everyone comes back for a catch-up and I talked to them all - except for the very two I most wanted to see. One of those couldn't talk to me and the other wasn't even there.

The mute companion was Scratch, the dog. I always talked to him by using a Potion of Animal Speaking, several of which I had on me at all times. Except when I opened my inventory to drink one, I found it completely empty. Apparently, having spent moths carrying the contents of a medium-sized store around with me, I'd suddenly decided to throw it all away and go around with nothing but the clothes on my back.

That was very annoying but Scratch could still bark and I could rub his ears. That gave me some closure, at least. What I really wanted to know - and still do - is what happened to the girl, Yenna, who I rescued twice, once from a life on the streets and once from a psychopathic killer, and who was last seen relatively happily employed as camp cook.

Apparently no-one at Larian thought to write a farewell script from her so she just vanishes. Meanwhile, all those layabouts she spent her time feeding get to stuff themselves while button-holing me to yak on about the great times we never had.

As I said, bleh! Not impressed at all with the wrap-up. Also, I have one final complaint. The ending comes with several obvious set-ups for a sequel, some just hinted at in a line or two of dialog, a couple with their own full cut-scenes. That would be fine if there was going to be a sequel but Larian has made it abundantly clear they aren't going within a thousand miles of one. They're done with the franchise for good.

Whether it gets handed on to another studio remains to be seen but even if it does, I very much doubt that studio will want to start from where Larian left off, so all those teasers are more like taunts, now. Still, if someone does ever make a Baldur's Gate 4, I guess I'll play it. And it'll have to go some to beat this one, for all its many flaws.

As for a replay of BG3, I wouldn't say never but I'm really not feeling it right now. Time for something new. Past time, truly. 

A Runaway Success?

Before I forget everything I wanted to say about the show, I guess I'd better deal with Runaways. Or rather Marvel's Runaways as it's officially called. Why it has to have the name of the company bolted onto the front beats me. They don't call it Marvel's Wandavision or Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, do they?

I guess it might be because there's already a better-known Runaways brand in the culture, the all-female proto-punk band put together by Kim Fowley in the '70s, from which the legend that is Joan Jettt emerged. It's hard to imagine a situation where anyone would confuse the two, though, so it made me wonder if there was another comic-book outfit using the name. 

I checked. There isn't.

Leaving the problematic nomenclature aside, how's the show? Pretty good, I'd say. I enjoyed it a lot, anyway. 

Not that it's without flaws. As quite a few of the comments on reddit suggest, it does take its time getting going. For a super-hero show, it's not all that action-packed and I certainly wouldn't call it fast-paced, particularly in the first season.

Ah, the first season. I remember that one. Vaguely. I watched it a few years ago then took a long break until the second and third seasons turned up on a streaming service I was subbing, Amazon Prime. I've talked about the problems that hiatus caused already so I won't go over it again. I'll just say that most of the plot of Season One has come back to me now so I can see how the whole thing fits together.

There may be spoilers from here on in, so it you haven't seen the show and plan to, something I'd recommend if you have any interest either in YA dramas or super-hero shows or better yet both together, you may want to bookmark this post and come back to it after you've finished watching.

Here's how the story arc goes: 

Season One - a bunch of rich kids in their mid-teens find out their parents are serial killers. Yes, all of their parents. The kids try to foil their parents' nefarious plans and then run away from home, giving the series its title and USP. 

Season Two - the kids find a super-hero base to hang out in and spend most of the season trying to stop an alien collapsing the whole of California into the sea. The alien is the one who manipulated their parents into doing all those murders and by now not all of the parents are as on-board with the whole kidnap-and-murder lifestyle as they used to be.

Season Three - the alien is duly foiled but another threat immediately appears and needs some foiling of its own. By the end of the season some of the kids are dead (But not really.) and some of the parents too (For real.) and some of the parents aren't as evil and nefarious as they used to be, or not as far as their children see it, anyway.

There are a couple of problems. First there's the pacing, which is, as I've suggested, variable at best. I enjoyed the first season but it really took its time to get going. It's more of a mystery than an action show at times because it takes the kids a while to figure out what's going on and even longer for them to do anything about it. 

Season Two moves faster, has more action and is probably the most consistent and coherent of the three. There are clear villains and clear threats and almost everything makes sense. Season Three though...

I enjoyed the third season but it does a hard pivot half-way through, turning into what almost feels like a different show entirely. The first two-and-a-half seasons are science fiction but the final half-season is pure fantasy, with magic taking over completely. 

Also, in that last segment the remaining parents unequivocally ally with the runaway teens and become heroes instead of villains, many of them appearing to have had complete personality transplants in the process. By the end, the kids and their parents, for the most part, have reconciled.

I can see how this would piss some viewers off. As far as I can tell, the original comic on which the show is based presented the parents as unambiguously Evil with a Capital E. There was no light and shade at all. Kids = Good. Parents = Bad. If you were on board with that, you're not going to be happy about how the show handles those relationships.

For my part, though, I am already on record as describing those original issues of the comic, written by Brian K. Vaughan, as "execrable" and "one of the worst comics I'd read in fifty years". Since one of the reasons I loathed the comic book so much was the staggering immaturity of the writing, I was very much happier with the increasingly nuanced handling of complex inter-generational relationships as developed over the course of the three seasons of the adaptation.

In fact, that's the strongest aspect of the show. The kids are not wrong about their parents. They did indeed kidnap and kill a teenager a year at the behest of a charismatic cult-leader. All of them knew what they were doing, too, even if they'd been lied to about why. They are, as their children frequently call them, murderers. And all of the parents consistently claiming "But we did it for you! We just wanted to keep you safe!" neither expalins nor excuses the choices they made.

What does both explain and in some part excuse them is knowing they were being manipulated by a body-swapping alien the whole time. Also that at least some of them genuinely bought into the mysticism of that alien's fake church, a tenet of whose religion is that nothing ever really dies. So the kids they killed were just being assimilated into the energy of the universe or some such bullshit.

Seasons Two and Three really ramp up the ambiguity with both kids and parents being used as host bodies by aliens or being enchanted by Morgan le Fay (Yes, that one.) to do her evil will. It's a wonderfully evocative and affecting metaphor for the way children and parents are forced to re-evaluate each other as they age. 

After a while, no-one is really sure who anyone is any more. No-one knows anyone's motives. No-one knows who they can trust. As one character eventually points out, it's only by their actions they can be judged.

I loved all of that and there was a lot of it. By the end I doubt there was a single character on either side of the age gulf left unaffected or unchanged by the experience. There's some real character growth on show here and I found much of it very satisfying.

I also liked nearly all the characters, kids and parents both, although you can't really "like" the parents until they stop behaving like sociopaths, which doesn't happen until well into Season Two. It's an odd YA show in that there are more adult characters as there are teens, what with everyone having two parents and all of those parents having a fully-developed role. For much of Seasons Two and Three, it's also the parents who are, by a wide margin, the more interesting. 

And better acted, too, as evidenced in the many scenes where someone is playing a character being controlled by another character, sometimes pretending to be the original and sometimes revealing their true identity. The adult actors generally pull that difficult trick off more convincingly than their younger counterparts although everyone does a pretty good job of it.

If you're looking for a super-hero show, though, you're going to have to wait a long while before you get one. There are some good set-piece fights in Season Two but it isn't until the whole show pivots mid-Season Three that it turns into a full-on fight-fest. There are some good battles with Morgan and her Dark Dimension lackeys then.

Since I'm on the subject of super-heroics, let me just mention something about the Runaways as a super-hero team. They aren't one. Literally just one of them, Molly, not co-incidentally the youngest, believes they ought to be. No-one else is remotely interested in the idea.

To be a super-hero team, anyway, they'd need powers. What powers do they have?  

Nico has a very powerful magic staff that she doesn't fully know how to use and doesn't always have with her. Chase has a pair of military-grade battle-gloves he calls "Fistigons", which he frequently forgets to bring with him. Gert has a telepathic mind-link with a retro-engineered dinosaur she calls Old Lace, who nearly always has to be left somewhere safe because even in LA you can't go around with a dinosaur and not have people notice. As for Alex, he has no powers whatsoever. He's just great with computers and comesup with all the clever plans. 

The only two who have some super-ability always available are Karolina, the half-human, half-alien hybrid, who can glow, levitate and put on light-shows and Molly, who can become super-strong but also gets super-tired doing it. When most conflicts arrive, the team is woefully under-powered. 

Until the second half of season three, that is, by when they suddenly take it up a notch. Or, more specifically, Nico and Karolina do, with Nico eventually learning not only to master the staff but to do magic without it and Karolina firing force-blasts from her hands. Molly doesn't seem to need a lie down after every fight any more, either.

The show was cancelled after three seasons but it was clearly heading towards more traditional super-hero territory. The whole thing wraps up with a two-part, time-travel finale that I found both thematically and emotionally rewarding. There's a tiny lead-in at the very end that would obviously have been the set-up for a fourth season if there'd been one but it's very easy to dismiss. The whole thing comes to a neat and satisfying conclusion.

Overall, it's not a great show but it's a very good one. I feel like the time I spent watching was time well-spent. Can't ask for much more than that.

We're On A Road Trip To Nowhere

Given my current circumstances, I've had to abandon my usual plan to play and review half a dozen demos from the current Next Fest. Instead, I'm limiting myself to a more achievable two or three. I already had a couple of definites in mind, one of which was Outbound.

The game's Steam Store page describes it as "a cozy open-world exploration game set in a utopian near future". I spent a few minutes yesterday, skimming the list of demos on offer and the first thing I noticed was just how many games like this there are now. I started at the top of the "Browse All Titles" list and worked my way down and eight of the top ten were some kind of survival sim. 

Of course, that's a list tailored to what Steam believes is likely to interest me. If I look at the options without being logged in, I get a much broader selection of genres. Even so, I notice I'm getting no point-and-click demos and very few tactical rpgs, both of which I play more than survival games. That's because there are far fewer of them, I'm betting.

In a crowded marketplace, most of the survival games make some vague attempt at grabbing attention with a trope or quirk that supposedly makes them special. Scanning down the list again I see, in order from the top, pirates, creature-collecting, medievalism, Old West, space, ranching and, after an unscheduled interruption from something that's not a survival game at all, Outbound, whose USP is that you drive a camper van.

I've often fantasized about buying a camper van and heading off into the unknown, just driving around, stopping anywhere that seemed interesting and staying as long as it stayed that way. That was what attracted me to outbound the first time I heard about it.

I have to say my fantasies of a life on the open road have never included making tools, on a workbench in the back of the camper, out of scrap metal and bits of wood picked up from the side of the road so I can repair broken barriers, clear fallen trees or rebuild collapsed bridges. Nor did I imagine I'd be living on berries scrounged up from the undergrowth or fueling my van with fallen tree branches I'd have to feed into some weird device in the engine compartment.

For that matter, I hadn't envisaged the van itself turning into some kind of Wacky Races house on wheels. One of the goals of the game appears to be to turn your compact camper into a traveling farmhouse-cum-luxury-apartment. Like this:

Who would live in a house like this? Professor Pat Pending, perhaps?

That monstrosity isn't my van. I doubt you can build anything like it in the demo. It is the ambition you're expected to have for your vehicle, though. I took the picture from the Steam Store page, where it's presumably supposed to trigger desire rather than, as it does in me, disbelief. 

After 78 minutes, my camper was much more modest. I hadn't built anything outside the van at all, just a couple of utilities inside, neither of them anything I would have envisaged needing on a road trip. Would you expect to build a trash compactor and a sawmill inside your camper van?

It's obvious Outbound has no interest in simulating an actual road trip, at least not in the demo, and since the demo is basically the first of the four biomes scheduled for launch, I guess the same will apply to the finished game. There's nothing particularly unusual about a lack of realism in a survival/crafting game but what did surprise me a little was the complete absence of any kind of plot or narrative.

I think all the games in this genre I've played have had some kind of story. It's not always very deep or convincing but there's at least a nominal reason for you to be pushing forwards, beyond a simple drive for self-improvement and desire to see what's over the next hill. In Outbound, as far as I can see, that's all there is.

Well, perhaps not exactly all. There may not be a narrative but that doesn't mean there's no structure. There are lots of short and medium term goals, called Objectives and Side Tasks, respectively. Objectives are things like "Build a Recycler on a Counter". Side Tasks are cumulative actions, such as "Light four campfires". 

The game constantly prompts you to make the next tool or utility and you really have no choice when you find an obstruction blocking the road. That happened to me three times in the first hour I played, meaning I had to make myself a wrench, an axe and ten planks before I could carry on driving.

As well as tasking you with removing obstacles, the game also asks you to visit specific locations, not all of which are close at hand. In other games, this would be part of a storyline but in Outbound there's no ostensible reason to go to any of them other than that the game is telling you that's what you need to do. Chances are you'd have gone there anyway, out of curiosity, though, so it doesn't feel as directive as it might.

When you get to the location, you may find something of practical interest. The Firewatch Tower had a blueprint terminal, for example. Blueprints are needed to make new tools and utilities and, well, anything, really. To download each blueprint you need a token. You get tokens by picking up litter and feeding it into your trash compactor. I guess they did say it was the near future.

There are Download Towers along the road and as far as I can tell, each tower offers specific items. I needed to make planks, for which I needed a Sawmill, but I couldn't find the blueprint until I went a long way up a side road to a tower I wouldn't have otherwise have passed. 

The rooftop patio of the surprisingly well-appointed Firewatch Tower, where I found two of three items I needed.

I'm not sure if the placement of blueprints is randomized or not. When I couldn't find the one I needed, I watched a YouTube video of someone else lookingg for one and they found theirs in the Firewatch Tower. When I was there, all I got was a blueprint for a food mixer. Of course, the game is still in development so maybe they just changed the locations.

The terminals in the regular towers are immediately accessible but the one in the Firewatch Tower required me to find three items first before I could switch it on. That was about the only puzzle I came across, if you can call a scavenger hunt a puzzle. Maybe there's more of that sort of "content" later but so far it's been the exception.

And that's OK. The game bills itself as "cozy" and describes the setting as "utopian". Threat of any kind doesn't enter into it and I very much doubt challenge does, either. You're on an extended vacation in some beautiful scenery, living off the land, which is exceptionally hospitable, providing everything you need. 

If that's not enough to keep you entertained, you probably need to look for another survival/crafting/exploration game. The good news there is you won't have to look far!

I really enjoyed the Outbound demo. Not that I've finished it. The map looks huge. It feels like I've hardly started to explore it. 

And exploring it is a pleasure. The landscape is very pretty, with a simple, attractive aesthetic that employs a lot of flat surfaces and plenty of saturated color. Sunrise and sunset are particularly delightful and night is a gorgeous, rich, velvety blue-black that feels oddly safe.

But then, the whole game feels safe. Not only are there no enemies, in nearly eighty minutes I didn't see another human being at all. Not one NPC. Very little wildlife, either. I think I saw a rabbit, once.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there are no other vehicles. I had the road to myself.

Just as well. I was driving in the middle of it half the time. Controlling the van isn't difficult but it's not particularly smooth or intuitive. There may have been some lurching. I might have hit a few rocks. 

Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to damage the camper. Or to hurt yourself. If this is a survival game at all it's very much survival-lite. 

In true survival-sim style, though, there are a couple of meters that have to be kept topped-up. One for you and one for the van. Your meter measures how hungry you are and so, I suppose does the van's. It tells you when you're running out of fuel. What happens if either hits zero I can't say because I didn't let it happen but I doubt it's anything very bad.

The absence of anyone at all to communicate with does give the demo a somewhat lonesome feel. The game is co-op four up to four people, though, and in the full version of the game you get a dog to accompany you on your travels, so the final version ought to be a lot more social. (There's an apology at the start of the demo for the dog not being available yet.)

Leave the door open all night if you want. It's not like anyone's going to steal anything.

I really enjoyed Outbound. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting but I liked what I got. I didn't run into any bugs or glitches although my overall impression was that there might need to be some optimization before launch. The controls and movement felt a little off at times although not in a way I could really put my finger on.

I have some minor concerns about the complete absence of any kind of narrative structure, too. Not that the game necessarily needs one if it's supposed to be a building/crafting/survival sim. No, it's the use of the term "road trip" to describe the gameplay that worries me. I can't imagine how you can have a road trip without a goal or a destination or a purpose. Road trips always tell a story.

Without a story, it's not a trip, just an existence. And that's probably how the game should be framed; as a life-sim. You're not really going anywhere, just driving aimlessly around some beautiful countryside, enjoying your freedom. Honestly, who needs anything more?

I already had Outbound wishlisted. There's a decent chance I might even buy it, one day. If I do I'll definitely wait until I can have a dog to share my adventures.

Ride Your Pony - The Equinox Homecoming Demo

Apologies for the expected interruption to normal posting. Predictable real life issues. Situation likely to continue, at least for a while.

Without that, Monday would have seen a post about which demos I'd chosen for the current Steam Next Fest. Unfortunately, as yet, I haven't picked any. I did have a browse through the list yesterday on Tuesday (This post having been delayed a further day due to more hospital visiting.) but I was on my laptop, sitting in a side-room at the hospital as I waited for my mother to go through various scans, so it was a bit hard to concentrate.

Fortunately for the blog, on Monday I did manage to spend some time with a demo that came out just before Next Fest, the intriguing "horse mystery" mmorpg Equinox Homecoming. I didn't quite finish the demo but Steam says I played for 86 minutes, which certainly seems like enough to form some kind of judgment.

And that judgment, to pre-empt the entire post, would be largely favorable. I really enjoyed my hour and almost-a-half with the game, which ran well, looked good and seemed like a lot of fun, at least as far as it went, which wasn't all that far.

The demo would appear to be the opening of the game, the tutorial mostly, although there doesn't seem to be anything to stop you just riding around the island, exploring, if you want. I didn't because I was mostly following the quest prompts but I did get lost a few times, wandering through the woods and it all looked very pretty.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start where all good MMORPGs begin, with character creation. It's fairly basic as these things go. You pick a feature from a list rather than fiddle with an infinite number of sliders. But that's fine. 

 

More than fine, actually. I was able to get a character I felt comfortable with very easily. Sliders are overrated in my opinion, especially in games where you effectively spend 95% of your time staring at the back of your character's head, although to be fair to this one, you get to see plenty of your character's face in the many cut scenes.

Once you've settled on your character's appearance and given them a name, you need to do the same for your horse. The equine appearance options are more limited but there's still a good choice. Assuming you care about what your horse looks like, of course, which it's probably safe to assume most people laying down £25 for the full game definitely will.

And so to the game itself, where one of the oddest things is that the name you gave your character never gets used in the game itself. I named my character Flora and the avatar I was looking at was definitely the one I made but every dialog, voice and text, called her Alex.

That would be fine if it was an RPG but it doesn't make a lot of sense for an MMO. It looks as though your personalized character identity applies to you as a player, in chat and when grouping (Assuming there is grouping - I didn't see or do any.) but all the player-characters are the same person for narrative purposes.

Can that be right? It does seem weird. I guess I ought to go go into the game and check... Nope. That's not right, either. It might be what happens from someone else's perspective - no-one spoke in general chat while I was testing it - but when I spoke, whatever I said was attributed to the generic "You". 

Minor point, perhaps, but it does bring up the question of why Equinox Homecoming needs to be an MMORPG in the first place. The developers are adamant that's what it is, to the point where they removed the "single player" tag from the Steam description to avoid confusion.

 

Except it feels a lot more like a single-player game in the demo. It has a central narrative driven by quests that focus entirely on Alex, as would be typical of a solo RPG. There's no indication you can group up for these and if you could, it would make no sense. Everyone would be the same person.

In other MMOs that might not matter so much. Grouping would revolve around fighting enemies that need  more than one person to defeat. Only there's no combat in this game, none at all. 

Unless there are multi-person puzzles, like the ones some games have where require several people to stand on separate pressure-plates at the same time, there wouldn't be any need to group up with other players.

There are lots of races but, in the demo at least, they're all time trials. You don't compete directly with other players, just with yourself or to climb the leader board. There are guilds called Riding Clubs but what they do I have no idea. The multiplayer element to the game seems nominal at best. 

I just did a little bit of mild research on all of the above points and it seems most have been contentious for a while. There are Steam threads questioning the rationale behind the naming convention and wondering if and why the game is an MMORPG. 

The devs who have answered have mostly offered some variation on "Because that's how it is." There's even a suggestion from a developer that anyone who wants to play the game as a single-player game can just select an empty server and play on their own, although they don't guarantee there will always be empty servers. It makes me wonder why they have so many servers in the first place if some of them are always empty.

I've side-tracked myself a little, focusing on these odd inconsistencies, which makes it sound as though I didn't enjoy my time with the demo. The opposite is true. I thought the world looked very attractive and felt like it would be a pleasure to explore, albeit not so much of a pleasure as to make me go and do that right away. 

 

I found the plot interesting, the writing engaging, the mechanics solid and the gameplay entertaining. I also thought the voice acting was good. Naturalistic. Convincing. Not overdone. 

The plot, which as many reviews on Steam make a point of mentioning, is unusual for a horse game and probably not suitable for a very young audience, involves the central character, Alex, as she returns to the island where she grew up to try and find out what could have happened to her eccentric mother, now missing for reasons unknown. 

Alex, who I would guess to be in her very late teens or possibly her very early twenties, left after a blow-out with her mom over the bizarre way they'd been living. Inconveniently, Alex runs out the door right at the moment when her mother is offering to tell her everything, which at least alerts us to the fact that there's something to be told. 

Alex hasn't been back since. Until now. Oh, and let's not forget  a girl has been found dead in the woods and a bunch of wild animals have been killed and mutilated, too. It's a mystery, as Toyah would say, and a spooky, disturbing one, too. It's lucky Alex's mom trained her in survival techniques by leaving her alone in the woods overnight when she was ten years old...

So, this is not exactly a cosy game where you look after your horse and ride around in some beautiful countryside, although it is that too. You need to groom and feed and care for your horse, which is how your horse levels up, because this is an MMORPG for reasons, so of course there are levels. 

Also, you want to look after your horse, don't you? Otherwise why are you even here?

 

Except you don't have to look after your horse at all. Or rather, you do if you want your horse to level up but the game tells you not to worry if you forget or can't be bothered because not looking after your horse has no gameplay implications. Again, weird design choice.

It's clear even from the demo that Equinox Homecoming incorporates many of the standard tropes of the genre. The MMO genre, that is. I wouldn't know what the tropes of the horse riding genre would be. 

There are plenty of NPCs and as usual they'd like you to go do the little jobs they don't have time for, mostly in a  quid pro quo fashion, where they give you goods or services you can't afford because you seem to have come home from wherever it is you ran away to with no money. Most of those same NPCs also collect something for some reason and they're keen for you to find lots of whatever it is they're after and bring it to them for some benefit as yet undisclosed, since I didn't do it.

That employs the standard "pick stuff up off the ground" mechanic we're all familiar with - plants, flowers, feathers, all the regular litter. It leads me to suspect there may also be crafting but I didn't see any sign of it in the demo. 

Once you have your horse (A loaner from your friend.) and have everything you need (Like a saddle.) and the game has made sure you know how to stay on and turn corners without falling off, it's on with the mystery. Investigation, for me at least, mostly involved following prompts. It seemed very linear but it is only the tutorial phase so I wouldn't read too much into that.

There's quite a sizeable town on the island, which I found it a lot easier to explore on foot rather than on horseback. It looked pretty good to me but there are plenty of complaints in the reviews of the demo on Steam that claim the game is made up of standard UE5 assets. Even if that's true, they've been employed effectively enough, so I don't quite get what the objection would be.

 

There are also complaints that the game uses generative AI, something the developers have categorically refuted. Accusing games of using AI is becoming a problem, not least because allegations often seem to rely on nothing more than someone thinking an image looks like it was done by AI. There was plenty of bad art in games before generative AI was ever thought of and plenty of humans couldn't agree on whether art made by other humans was any good or not anyway, so saying something is "obviously AI" isn't really a convincing argument.

More concerning is the announcement, flagged on the opening splash screen of the demo, that the game is leaving Early Access and launching for real in barely a week's time, on 5 March. In EA, Equinox Homecoming has a Very Positive rating on Steam from over 700 reviews (The demo, separately rated, is Mixed but from just twenty-five.) but many of those positive reviews specifically talk about the game being "promising", having "potential" or being in a good state "for an Early Access title".

From what I've seen in the demo, the game would appear to be mostly complete and free of major bugs but as I said at the start, the demo isn't much more than the tutorial. Tutorials and the first few hours of MMORPGs are frequently far more polished than the rest of the game at launch. I have no way of knowing if that's the case here and neither will anyone else who plays the demo.

With that caveat, if the full release lives up to the demo and if the developer, Blue Scarab Entertainment, continues to add content and update the game in the manner of an MMORPG, then it might be a pretty good game. 

Whether it will be a pretty good MMORPG is another matter. I still can't really see why it needs to be one at all.