Tarisland Closed Beta: Final Impressions

One day I'll learn to take my own advice. I've been banging the gong for weeks, warning everyone not to take anything the current batch of so-called AIs say at face value . Use them to do some of the grunt work, by all means, but always check their results. They can't be trusted.

I wish I'd done that when I copy-pasted Bard's reply to my query about the NDA. Actually, I did, but I only cross-referenced the substantive NDA part. The rest of the information I let slide and somehow something Bard said lodged in my memory as fact: "The closed beta for Tarisland started on June 27, 2023. It is available on PC and will run for two weeks."

Yeah, no it won't. The Tarisland Closed Beta Test lasted exactly one week. It began on June 27 and ended on July 4. So, when I said on Tuesday the beta had a few days left to run... it did not. I found that out when I logged in to play yesterday evening and the servers were still down.

I had logged in the day before to play and the servers were down then but either the full closure notice wasn't up or I somehow missed it. I only saw something about "maintenance". I assumed they were patching. I remember wondering if it meant we might be getting something new.

Last night, when I went to log in, I found the servers still weren't up. The closure notice was, though. I was mildly surprised and mildly disappointed. I'd played at least an hour or two every day, sometimes a good deal longer. I had things in mind still to do, both for posts and for fun.

If I'd known the test was half as long as I though it was, I'd have made different plans. I did wonder why the in-game beta calendar had rewards for hitting daily benchmarks over just seven days. I figured maybe there'd be a new one for the second week. 

Both the lighting and the weather effects are excellent.

There is no second week, sadly. We're done. Time for the wrap party. 

On the evidence of the closed beta, I'd be quite keen to play Tarisland when it goes live. It's bright, cheerful, well-made and fun. It's not original or profound or ground-breaking but it doesn't need to be. It's a mainstream MMORPG, aimed at the existing MMO audience. Judged like that, it ought to meet most reasonable expectations.

Whether it can hold the attention of its target audience for any length of time is another matter. The extremely well-established pattern of the last decade or more is for large numbers to flock to the opening of any new, well-publicised MMORPG, like a flock of seagulls descending on the city dump, only to leave as quickly as they arrived, when the novelty wears off. It usually takes no more than a couple of weeks; almost never more than a couple of months.

Based on what I experienced and observed during the beta, a number of things stand in Tarisland's favor, perhaps most significant among them its professionalism. Everything works and that's an achievement all of its own, these days.

There are a lot of mini-games. This one was tough. But fun.

In the whole time I played, which probably amounted to a dozen hours and thirty-five levels, I never encountered a single bug. There was almost no lag or latency at any time, even though I was connecting from the UK to a server in North America. I managed twice to get stuck on geometry but an "Unstick" button in the UI fixed that immediately.

I didn't see any items with strings of data instead of names, something I see regularly in Noah's Heart, which has been live for almost a year. Every function and service within the game seemed to be working as it should. I've played plenty of live MMORPGs that were far buggier and less polished.

The beta did only include three zones, so it may be optimistic to extrapolate that level of quality control to the full game-world, when it arrives. I can name several MMORPGs I've played that seemed fully-functioning and polished up to a certain level, after which everything fell apart. (Okay, I'll name a couple: Dark Age of Camelot, which had virtually no content after level 30 at launch although the max level was 50 and Guild Wars 2, where the zones up to mid-level were as slick as you'd like but then rapidly deteriorated into a bug-ridden, unfinished mess.) 

But professionalism will only take you so far. Tarisland doesn't strike me as an ambitious and adventurous game, designed and built by an enthusiastic but inexperienced team, learning from their mistakes as they made them, like New World. Neither does it feel like a passionate but ill-judged attempt to make the game the developers wanted to play in the forlorn hope that there was an audience that wanted to play it too, like Wildstar. That lack of passion and adventure may or may not be a good thing. It's hard to tell.

Welcome to the big city. And Catherine. She talks a lot.

As An apt recent comparison might be Lost Ark, another very professional title, designed to serve an already-extant audience. Lost Ark demonstrates that even having a polished, working game and running it efficiently while adding content regularly isn't always enough. Despite the enormous interest the game generated in the weeks and months leading up to launch and the generally high levels of satisifaction expressed by those who played it when it went live, player numbers have dropped precipitously since.

Tarisland does have the advantage of something of a captive market in its home territory of China, where a huge opportunity has been created by the forced withdrawal of World of Warcraft. As has been pointed out by others many times, Tarisland has to have been in development for years, making its considerable and convenient similarity to WoW rather curious.

Conspiracy theories aside, the beta very much gave the impression of a composite product made up of a number of quite specific influences and inspirations, not just a slavish copy of one game. It looks and plays like a considered attempt to combine the most popular and successful features of the most popular and successful MMORPGs in the Western fantasy genre, something many developers have tried before with very limited success.

There it is, Ducky! My ancestral home. No! I am not a squirrel!

It would tempting to call it cynical but I have to say Tarisland in beta didn't feel like that - or at least no more so than any would-be mainstream MMORPG. The world felt like a place with both a past and a future, somewhere created by people who cared about it, at least a little. 

Once again, I'd stress that absolutely nothing about the setting or the lore or the storyline felt original or inspired but I'd say the same about at least two-thirds of all the fantasy MMORPGs I've ever played. And two-thirds is being generous. 

As far as world-building and narrative goes, the Tarisland I saw in closed beta more than met average expectations for the genre. How much something like that plays into player retention and loyalty is hard to say but I suspect it's more than we generally acknowledge. The games that really bed in and hang around - WoW, FFXIV, EverQuest, GW2 for example - all have labyrynthine backstories and enough lore to fill a library. It may not be what people come for but it could be a reason they stay.

It's something of a truism that most players don't read quest text so it may be that the flatness of the translation won't be the problem for many that it was for me. Of all the aspects of Tarisland I considered when I thought about the prospect of playing the game for an extended period, the narrative and the characters who carry it came close to the top of the list. I found the NPCs more rounded and convincing than many in similar games and the story more engaging.

You can hear the writer's voice in there under the translation. It just needs a polish.

Unfortunately, the translation, while it wasn't bad by any means, tended to put up a wall between the meaning of what was being said and its emotional impact. I could always understand everything clearly, which is a lot more than I can say for many such translations in other games, but there was a slight but unmistakeable tendency towards the kind of inflection that comes from someone trying to express themselves in a language they know only from formal education, not from life. 

A bit like that last paragraph...

Playing EverQuest II for a while yesterday gave me a very useful point of comparison. Quest dialog in EQII is by no means great literature. It's often fanciful, occasionally overwritten and not always grammatically correct. What it always is, however, is unmistakeably the work of someone who either grew up speaking English or now speaks it with complete fluency. It may not always read elegantly or melifluosly but it always reads naturally.

This one still manages to be quite funny. I bet the original's a hoot.

It's unlikely that either the storyline or the quality of the writing, voice-acting or translation will be the key factor in most players' decision on whether to carry on playing Tarisland after their initial curiosity has been satisfied. That choice is much more likely to revolve around how much there is to do and how compelling it feels.

Here, the prospects look better, if only because the entire game has evidently been constructed as a nested heirarchy of seemingly achievable, if extremely time-consuming goals. Exactly what MMORPG players respond best to, in other words. If you like making numbers go up while completing prescribed, repetetive tasks, one of the more successful recipes for MMORPGs in recent times, Tarisland has you covered.

There are plenty of repeatable dungeons with increasing difficulty levels including one of those infinitely ascending solo instances. There are PvP battlegrounds. There are raids and world bosses.  There are rep grinds and tradeskills and achievements - everything a fully-featured MMORPG ought to have. It's an impressively comprehensive offer for a game still in beta.

Maybe, but I woudn't trust anyone dressed like that.

If that makes it all sound a little formulaic, well it is. As I said, someone has clearly done some research into what's worked for other developers. About the only major feature I didn't see in beta was housing, which at least leaves something aspirational for the first expansion.

My biggest concern, looking towards any potential future I might have with the game, was the apparent lack of much in the way of open world, explorative gameplay. It felt as though most of what lay ahead would be a linear plotline (Broken up into "Seasons", as is currently the fashion.) and a lot of grinding of one sort or another. 

I don't discount any of that as entertainment. It all has its pleasures. It seemed like a shame, though, to have created such an expansive, aesthetically appealing world, yet not to have filled it with the kinds of small stories that bring the landscape to life. 

It took a while but eventually I realised that's exactly what the developers had done. The storyline may whip you through each zone at such a pace it's hard to take anything in but these aren't the sort of zones you see once and never again. 

Did I mention the GW2-style instant travel?

One thing I've neglected to mention until now is that Tarisland uses a flat levelling structure similar to Elder Scrolls Online. Everywhere you go, it's alway the same level; your level. In combat terms, you never outgrow a zone but also you always have good reason to return; those rep grinds, for one.

As I moved back and forth across the three available zones, I noticed new quests popping up on my map. The game doesn't seem to employ the old-fashioned quest hub system, where a whole bunch of quests appear in one place when you flip some invisible switch. Rather, as you do quests in one place, more seem to pop up around the map. 

I didn't have time to investigate just how it all worked before the beta came to its unexpected end. It may turn out to be less organic than it felt at the time. All I can say for now is that I found it quite engaging while I was doing it; less mechanical than a standard quest hub set-up, more like a natural outcome of wandering around, poking my nose into other people's business.

Overall, I had a good deal of fun in the Tarisland Closed Beta. I found myself looking forward to playing every day. I played it in preference to other games and not just because I knew my time there was limited. When I discovered the beta had ended "early" I was a little bit disappointed. If I'd known it was going to be half as long as I thought it was I'd have played twice as much.

Okay, but when does the next beta start?

I can't see Tarisland becoming my next big MMORPG but I can easily imagine it taking the place of the disgraced World of Warcraft in my rotation until and unless Blizzard sorts itself out or gets sold. It scratches that exact itch, as it's clearly been designed to do.

It also doesn't hurt that Tarisland will be fully free-to-play, whereas the endless free trial for WoW comes with a lot of very serious restrictions. Even if the Microsoft deal goes through and I feel okay about playing WoW again, I'm unlikely to resubscribe for more than the odd month, here and there. Tarisland could win out purely on ease of access alone.

Finally and quite importantly, I ought to reiterate that Tarisland is a rare example in these modern times of a true WoW-style, tab-target MMORPG. In that respect it plays exactly like a Western-made game from fifteen years ago. There's no hint of action combat, click-to-move or even autopathing. 

If that's your style, as it is mine, it's not like you're so overwhelmed with choice you can afford to give Tarisland a miss. It might be a long while before another one like it comes along. Unless it's a massive hit, of course. In which case, welcome to the WoW-Clone revival.