Tarisland Closed Beta First Impressions: Dungeons

There's always a conflict when I find a new game that really intrigues me; I want to play it all the time but I also want to post about it. Yesterday, my blogging side won out. Today I'm going to play.

Ahh, crap. No, I'm not. I'm going to have to write this damn post first or I'll never be able to settle. 

What I will do, though, is keep to a single subject for once, instead of running off in all directions like I usually do. And today's topic is...

Dungeons

Surprised? I was. I have about a million things I'd rather talk about than boring old dungeons. But for once I've actually done a couple and I have a few things to say about the experience, one of which is that it... wasn't terrible. In fact. I quite enjoyed it.

The longer I play MMORPGs, the older I get, the less I enjoy dungeons or dungeon-like instances. I don't like the commitment, for a start. I like to be able to stop playing at a moment's notice, either leaving my character idling or logging out altogether.

Even solo dungeons generally don't let you do that safely or without losing progress. Obviously it's out of the question if you group. Okay, I know people do drop group without warning but there's no excuse for copying bad behavior.

I also don't much enjoy the mechanics. I used to like it when everything was about crowd control and aggro. That was fun. Now it's all about mechanics and scripts and every blasted fight feels like taking an exam. 

Put those two together and clearly dungeons are not ideal content for me. Unfortunately, many developers seem to think players can either be co-erced into enjoying them or have a moral obligation to run them at least once, as some kind of return on investment. They made these things and by god you are going to see them whether you like it or not!

That leads to to the - to my mind - unforgiveable design decision to incorporate dungeons into the main storyline and use them as gatekeepers. If you don't do the dungeon you don't get to find out what happens next. I could probably live with that but sometimes you also don't get to level up any further or gain key abilities or unlock new explorable areas or ever do anything new ever again ever!

I tend to think of it as the Final Fantasy XIV effect because although FFXIV didn't invent it, that's where I first ran hard into the roadblock of compulsory dungeon play and bounced off it even harder. When I got to Level Seven in Tarisland and found the MSQ similarly gated by unskippable combat instances, I can't say I was surprised but I can say I was not happy.

Still, what the hell, it's beta and it's Level Seven. Two things about that. 

1. Nothing you do at Level Seven in an MMORPG is going to be that tough.
2. In beta, no-one knows what the hell they're doing, anyway. No-one's gonna yell at you.

Well, hopefully.

So, I hit the Matchmaking button and got put into the instance in seconds. A few confirmation buttons popped and I said I was ready and off we went. I felt okay about it. As I mentioned yesterday, one reason I went with Ranger was so I could stand back and keep out of the way if something like this happened. 

And that's what I did and it all went fine. The tank ran ahead and pulled stuff. I started off trying to follow his target but when I used my AE nothing peeled off so after a while I just shot whatever and it was all good. Someone was healing and who else was doing what, I didn't really pay much attention. 

As for mechanics, if there was a marked area on the ground I got out of it and if the loud voice yelled at me to do something, I did it, which brings up the first thing I wanted to say about Tarisland dungeons:

Strats

I don't know if this goes on all through the game or if it's just for the lower levels but Tarisland's dungeons are the best-documented I've ever seen. I didn't spot it yesterday but in the Level Thirteen dungeon I did this morning I noticed an icon on the upper right that said "Guide". So I clicked and guess what? 

It's a guidebook on the dungeon you're doing. It has a page for each Boss and each page has tabs for a description of the Boss, what they do and how to deal with it. It's literally like they put the entire walkthrough right there in the UI. 

It ought to mean there's no excuse for anyone saying they don't know the strats but of course you do actually have to read the thing first and understand it and commit it to memory so no, that's not going to happen. But guess what? The devs thought of that, too!

Coaching

Even if you didn't have time to flip through the whole book because the Tank was all "Go! Go! Go!" you still don't get a pass for shooting the wrong thing or running the wrong way. Not only does a notice come up on screen whenever some new mechanic kicks in, telling you what it is and what to do about it, there's a fricken' commentator who yells out instructions!

Remember when I said yesterday that a disembodied voice yells "Dodge!" whenever you should have but didn't? The same thing happens in dungeons only it applies to everything you ought to be doing. 

I got yelled at to keep away from my companions, not to get in front of the Boss because he was going to charge, to kill the minions first and so on and so on. It felt kind of like my days back in EverQuest when we'd run with one of those really chill, together tanks, who somehow has time to type in a running commentary on what they're doing and what to expect. 

I loved playing with tanks like that. Dungeons were fun back then, weren't they? Well, 'till you wiped and it took three hours to get your corpse...

This is a lot more soulless and automated than that but it's still a hell of an improvement on silence. Once I got used to it I was waiting for instructions and carrying them out just like a good little soldier. Not that it got me off the bottom of the DPS list. 

Oh yes, there's a list. Didn't I say?

Damage Meters And Stats

Tarisland is in no doubt which side it comes down on in the debate over whether there should be damage meters and, if there are, whether they should be public. There's one on-screen in the upper, right corner all the time and when you finish you get a report card. 

You can toggle the display to show healing and damage taken and other stuff, I think. I was trying to play around with it but it's a bit awkward in a firefight. Everyone's name is color-coded but I haven't figured out what the colors mean. 

I do know that as a ranger I probably shouldn't be at the bottom of the DPS list. And I wasn't. Not quite. I was ahead of the tank and the healer! 

Players And NPCs

At least I didn't get yelled at for slacking, which was something. At first I put it down to what I said earlier - it's beta and no-one knows anything yet. But then something really weird happened...

This was in the Level Thirteen dungeon. I'd used Matchmaking to put me into a group and we'd run in and killed the first Boss easily enough. We moved on to the next room and...

Nothing.

Everyone just stood there. No-one said anything. Or moved. It was freaky.

I figured maybe the Tank was reading the strats. I had a look myself. I could hear the Mage periodically buffing herself but everyone else was eerily still and silent. 

I had time to use the in-game camera to take a photo. Then I had more time. And still more. 

There's an on-screen timer. It said we'd been standing in the doorway for almost five minutes. This was getting ridiculous. I considered just closing the client and quitting the dungeon so I could start over but I didn't want to risk bugging myself. 

(Interestingly, I realize now that at no point did I even consider speaking in group to ask what was happening or sending anyone a private message. It quite literally did not occur to me to do anything like that. It's only now, as I write this paragraph, that I've thought of it at all. That must mean something - although I'm not sure what.)

A couple of times I considered just whanging an arrow into the Boss, who was standing there staring at us from across the room. I didn't want to be That Ranger but seriously, someone was going to have step up. And in the end that's what I did.

I did it because by then I was entertaining a very strong suspicion I'd figured out what was going on. I was beginning to think the rest of my party weren't living, breathing players like me at all. I was starting to think they were all... NPCs!

And they bloody were! The moment I stepped into the room and fired my bow they all magically came to life. The tank ran in and took agro, the healer began healing him and the other two began pumping out the damage. 

I'd been Matchmade into a party of AI Mercenaries and I hadn't even noticed! What does that say about me? And the game? And the genre!?

Not that I'm complaining. I'd much prefer to be partied up with imaginary people who already know the strats, never complain, don't mind stopping if I need to take the dog out for ten minutes and can basically carry me through the whole thing if need be. I would, however, like to know it was happening!

My next mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find out if the storyline dungeons always and only use NPC companions or if the Matchmaker just shoves them in if no-one else happens to be LFG for that dungeon when you hit the button. I'll probably need to do some research on it because I doubt my anecdotal data from the handful of dungeons I'll be doing will prove conclusive either way and I'm certainly not doing extra to find out.

Repetition

That said, if I was going to play Tarisland seriously, I'd need to get used to doing a lot of dungeons. They're "the main source of equipment" as the game cheerfully explains. If you "want to get stronger" you're going to be doing them a lot.

And we all want to get stronger, don't we? Well, no, not especially. I want to get through the dungeons so I can hear the next part of the story, which I'm finding unexpectedly involving. 

But that's a post for another day. I said I was going to play, not post and I'm bloody well going to, even if it is hard to stop writing. Why does just doing somthing for the fun of it  feel like goofing off, sometimes? 

I mean, it's not like I'm getting paid to do this...