Time Flies By (When You're The Rider Of A Horse)

Dawnlands continues to take up most of my gaming time. Steam tells me I've played for sixteen hours in the last two weeks, although since the game only launched a week ago that can't be right. More accurately, I've played sixteen hours in less than seven days. It would have been more but  I didn't play at all yesterday thanks to having to go to work.

Playing anything for more than two hours a day counts as heavy rotation for me these days. What with walking the dog and keeping up with my self-imposed Blaugust commitments, two hours is about all I can fit in, most days.

I can't blame my shorter sessions entirely on Blaugust and Beryl. I believe I have a natural limit for gaming nowadays that begins to make itself felt around the 100 minute mark. A kind of itch to stop and do something else kicks in around then, even when I'm thoroughly immersed and having a great time. 

It's not a new phenomenon. When I think back, even when I sometimes played MMORPGs all day long, I still rarely played for more than a couple of hours at a stretch before taking a break. Maybe three, if I was in a really good group in Velks or Chardok. I rarely indulged in the kind of marathon sessions I've read about, staying up until dawn without a thought for the consequences.

More appropriately dressed this time. Although not by all that much...

The big difference is that back then I'd string those two-hour sessions together, linked by shorter breaks, until I'd racked up six or eight hours gaming in the day. Now it's more likely to be an hour or two in either the morning or afternoon, very rarely both, then another hour in the evening. 

It might come to three hours altogether but that'll be spread across a couple of games; sometimes three or more. Each day, I tend to do routine logins and dailies in whatever my current fancy or fancies might be. On top of that, I try to fit in one moderately significant thing - a couple of levels or some other form of measurable progression - maybe three or four times a week.

In the daytime I play MMORPGs (Or, now, survival-rpg hybrids as well, I guess...). For a long time I was in the habit of playing single-player games in the evening, usually point&click adventures or similar, but of late I seem to have fallen out of that habit. (I must get back to it. It's a nice change of pace.)

From that, it's clear that sixteen hours in one game in less than a week is out of the normal run of things for me. It's especially unusual in that none of that time at all has been spent on dailies or the like. Dawnlands does have daily quests but they're the kind you have to seek out at a board in the village and I generally forget. It has log-on rewards too but they're unobtrusive, at least by the standards of mobile games, and easily ignored.

Pushing my luck in a dungeon well above my level.

What I do in my two hours is play the game and it's a time-consuming process. I don't seem to have achieved as much as you might expect. Mostly that's because there's a lot to do but it's also because doing some of it can take a while. 

For a start, just getting around can fill up most of a session, something that I'm sure will sound very familiar to all veterans of Valheim. It's not quite as simple as that, though. While you're doing it, everything in Dawnlands seems to happen a lot faster than it did in Valheim and yet when you've finished doing it, time seems to have passed just as slowly. It's a curious paradox.

Exploration is the key to everything. The map is a square of featureless blue with the starting point somewhere near the center. The world it conceals is vast and filled with interest, all of which remains invisible and unknown until you go and find it. In this respect, Dawnlands follows the Valheim template almost exactly.

The chart below suggests there are ten biomes, although I'm fairly sure there are only five available in the game right now. I only know the names of two of them (Grassland and Forest.). I've set foot in one more, a wintery snowscape, and I've seen a parched-looking desert from a distance. I'm betting the fifth is "Swampland".

Although I did very tentatively take a look at the snowy place, I'm not planning on exploring any of the rest just yet. Dawnlands employs the exact same progression mechanic as Valheim, in which you need to find a key in a dungeon to mark the location in each biome of a named creature, which you then have to summon using several items you've collected.

As in Valheim, your reward when you defeat each of these creatures is a new tier of crafting recipes, allowing you to make the gear you need to take on the next boss. That already acts as a kind of Must Be This High To Ride mechanic but in Dawnlands the effect is multiplied by the addition of levels, ten more of which become available for each boss you kill.

Kenda, the Grasslands boss was easy. Guya, the Forest boss... not so much.

So far, after sixteen hours I've killed the first boss, located the second, failed to seal him away first time and explored a grand total of 1.22% of the full map. I'm unclear as yet whether every single-player and multiplayer world is procedurally generated as per Valheim or whether we all get the same layout. Either way, I have a lot left to do.

Unlike Valheim, as you slowly push back the fog of war you are at least supplied with some iconography representing what's been revealed. There are symbols for dungeons, settlements, teleporters, monster camps, docks and more. You can also add your own markers although you can't, as I routinely did in Valheim, annotate them with supposedly helpful notes that a few days later will mean little or nothing.

Travel in Dawnlands is much faster than in Valheim. For a start, you can ride a horse. 

The implementation of mounts, like much in the game, has an endearingly idiosyncratic texture.Whoever designed the system doesn't seem to have been able to decide between the absolute convenience of World of Warcraft, where your mount is a weightless, intangible appurtenance that appears and disappears on command, and the worldliness of Fallen Earth, where a horse has to be tethered and stabled and can be attacked by passing predators in just the same way as the player character.

Being unable to choose between these entirely discrete and incompatible approaches, the unknown designer clearly thought "I'll just use both." 

A horse can be summoned at any time, from anywhere, simply by pressing "Y", whereupon it  manifests instantly beside you.  Once summoned, to ride the horse you first have to mount by pressing "F". Then, when you want to dismount, you just press "X". 

At this point your horse does not vanish, as it would in WoW. He merely stands there, cropping whatever passes for grass around his feet. As far as I can tell, he'll stay there indefinitely. There's even a marker on the map to show where he is, just in case you forget, although since you can whistle him to you in a nanosecond I don't know why you'd bother.

Oh, wait... yes I do! It'd be to save his life. Your horse can be attacked and killed by any passing monster. As soon as a goblin spots an unattended horse they'll immediately set upon it, presumably looking for the same things I'm after when I pick off a passing deer or boar - hides and meat.

It's alright for you, Sparky.
You don't have to run back.

Unlike the deer, who run away, or the boars, who fight back, your dumb horse will just stand there, oblivious, until either the monsters kill him or you kill the monsters. When this first happened to me, I was at great pains to intervene, fearing I'd lose ol' Sparky for good, but now I tend to finish whatever I'm doing first before going back to rescue him. 

It turns out that dying does nothing more to my horse than it does to me. Less, in fact, since he doesn't drop any saddlebags he has to go back for. You can watch him expire then hit "Y" and see him re-appear right next to you as though nothing at all had happened.

The logic behind having the mount fully "in the world" while also making him indestructable and instantly available through the UI defeats me but I love it. It combines all the granularity of those Fallen Earth mounts with all the convenience of WoW, it makes absolutely no sense and it's genius.

You can push it even further if you want. Literally. Like all mobs in Dawlands, horses have full collision so you can physically shove them around if you feel the need. 

I tried it once, just for science. Horses despawn in deep water, re-appearing on the nearest bank or shore they just left, but if you're quick, you can dismount and leave them standing in the river up to their fetlocks. I was able to jump off my horse in mid-stream then push him back to dry land. It was pointless but it was fun!

Riding or running aren't the only ways to get about. There's an instant travel system, too. I'd explain exactly how it works but first I'd have to know, myself. 

As far as I can make out, there's a network of Teleport Beacons you can find and, if necessary, cleanse of corruption so you can move between them. The Teleport Beacons are very few and far between, which would be highly restrictive if it wasn't for the fact that you can also teleport to all kinds of other locations as well - any of the icons marked on the map, in fact, which in practical terms means just about everywhere. 

Unfortunately, teleporting to any of them requires a Teleportation Potion every time. The potion is consumed on use and the only place I've found them is on vendors in the Shelters. They're cheap but there's only one vendor in each village, each vendor only has five potions to sell and they're never restocked. If there's a recipe to craft them, I haven't found it yet.

There is another, craftable consumable, called a Reverie Stone. It claims to be able to return you to your last-visited resurrection point, which would normally be wherever you last slept. That's probably your current house, where you keep all your stuff, so it would be very useful. Unfortunately, when I tried one that I'd made, it didn't work. 

It might have been because the specific Reverie Stone I used was bugged or because the system itself was but it could also be that I don't know how to use it properly. The materials to make the stones aren't common but, when and if I get a few more, I'll try to figure out whose fault it is the thing isn't working.

The upshot of all of this is that even though you can theoretically zap about all over the map at will, in practice you end up hoarding your precious potions and going everywhere on horseback instead. You can, of course, also make boats of various kinds and travel longer distances over water but so far I haven't opened any of the recipes past the basic raft nor found any bodies of water large enough to require transportation by vessel. I can swim across a river or ride around a lake!

These are the kinds of quirks that make a game both memorable and absorbing. Or bloody irritating, depending on your point of view. Personally, I love it.

Since this is a post about why I don't seem to have all that much to show for my sixteen hours in the game, I had been meaning to say something about crafting. Making the items themselves is almost instantaneous but refining the raw resources can take quite a while. In a game that's almost wholly reliant on crafted gear, that does tend to slow things down a little.

Looking at how long this post is already, though, and how long it's taken me to write it, I think I'll leave that for another time. Which makes this post something of a metaphor for the game itself, really, now I come to think of it...