Sign-Up Season Begins

You don't see a sign-up form for weeks and then three come along all at once...

Tarisland Revs Up

For launch. Sometime. Would be nice if we had an actual date but you can't have everything.  According to MassivelyOP we can rule out 14 June, at least. Hardly surprising since that's a Friday. When did any game ever launch on a Friday? (Cue comments listing all the famous games that did indeed launch on a Friday...)

I'm not sure I'd call June "near" but I suppose its all context. Everything is context. Since I was already registered from the closed betas last year, I wasn't sure if I'd need to "Sign Up" again but I figured it would be best to check. 

Just as well I did. I used the same email address and my application was accepted as if it was the first time Level Infinite had ever seen it so I'm guessing we're starting over as though we've never met.

I'd make some observations here about whether or not I'm likely to play Tarisland and if so how seriously and for how long but June might as well be the year 3000 as far as that goes. If I'd made book at New Year on what games I'd be playing until Easter I'd have lost my Gunsmith Cats tee. Come the launch, I could be playing anything so I'm making no promises.

That said, I did like Tarisland quite a bit. It's retro enough to feel nostalgic but modern enough not to come across as old-fashioned. It does feel a bit generic in places but it zips along and it's fun to play so why not? Also, I imagine it will be the new hotness for at least five minutes and I'd like the blog to bask in that heat, so it'd take something big to stop me at least giving it a run, I think.

Throne and Liberty Goes West

Apparently a lot of people have been angsting about not being able to play this one since the it launched in South Korea last December. I can't say I've been paying much attention although I did vaguely remember the name. Yesterday there was finally news of a playable opportunity for everyone outside the current launch region as sign-ups opened for a global closed beta starting on 10 April. 

In something of an autonomic reaction I immediately went to register but balked at having to input my Amazon account details. I'd completely forgotten the game was being published by Amazon here. While I was checking it was all legit, I discovered the beta is under NDA so that was the end of that. 

If I was desperate to play I'd have sucked it up and signed but given the only reason I was even looking at the beta was in the hope of squeezing a few blog posts out of the experience, there really wouldn't have been much point. I'll wait until they drop the NDA or go into open beta or maybe even actually launch the damn thing.

The whole thing did have the effect of making me curious about Throne and Liberty in a way I wasn't before, so at least there's that. As far as I can tell the game still has no launch window more specific than "soon". I'm wondering what the heck they need to do to it to make it ready, given it's already up and running in some territories.

I watched the trailer, flipped through the screen shots and read the description on Steam. It looks like every other imported MMORPG of the last six or seven years to me, albeit marginally prettier. My PC doesn't meet even the minimum specs but then that's true of plenty of games I play with no issues at all. I got very lucky with my CPU, it seems. It always outperforms benchmarks.

I'll give T&L a go when it comes out of NDA, anyway. It's on Steam and it's free so why not? Can't imagine I'll play for more than a handful of sessions but at least it'll give me a chance to write some First Impressions posts. I do love doing those.

Palia Steams In

Whoop, and if you'll pardon me, de-do. I mean, I'm not complaining. As we've discussed before, it's very handy to have all the games under one roof. I am a Steam convert if not actually a Steam fan. 

I haven't played Palia since... hmm. Let me check... looks like last August. If you asked me I wouldn't say I'd given up on it but I never seem to find any reason to log in. Until last night.

As soon as I saw the news, I went to Steam to download the client and... it wasn't available. I was too early! I added it to my wishlist and forgot about it... for all of five minutes, after which I got an email from Steam telling me it was available. That's what I call service!

I started the download running but what I wanted to know was whether I'd have to begin again from scratch or whether I'd be able to transfer my existing character and progress to my Steam account. I spent a good while googling that without finding any useful information at all so when the big, green PLAY button lit up I thought I'd just click it and see what would happen. 

It wasn't as though I'd gotten very far last time. Or at least I didn't think I had. I couldn't actually remember how far I had got. Anyway, starting over didn't seem like it would be much of a problem.

As it turns out it wasn't any kind of a problem at all because I didn't have to do it. You can indeed carry on from where you left off. Steam pretty much does all ther admin for you, too. A window popped up asking if I wanted to link my Steam and Singularity 6 accounts. I said I did, found my old login and password, entered them in the relevant fields and that was all there was to it. Slick and quick.

If there was a problem, it didn't come from the process. It came from the game. I can't recall the last time I logged into a game I haven't played for a while and felt my mood slump so fast. Almost from the moment I was in I wanted to leave. 

So I did. My current played time for Palia on Steam is five minutes. It may well stay that way, possibly forever. There's nothing actively wrong with Palia that I can put my finger on... I just find it stiflingly dull. 

Dull to look at and dull to play. I don't even think it's an issue with the implementation; I think it's the genre. 

According to the description on the Steam store page, Palia is a "a cozy community sim MMO made for you and your friends". I don't have any friends to play Palia with and frankly I don't want to get any. I find it hard to imagine how doing the things you can do in Palia with other people would make doing those things any more interesting than doing them alone. They just aren't very interesting to me, period, and that's an end to it.

It's not that it's the kind of gameplay I find intrinsically uninteresting. Other than the lack of combat, there's little fundemental difference between the activities on offer in Palia and those in Nightingale. There is quite a difference in the visuals and the setting, though, and it's clear that Nightingale's world appeals to me aesthetically in a way Palia's does not. Palia's world is also tiny compared to Nightingale's, which makes the explorer in me sad. 

Still, I think the real difference between them lies in the word "cozy".

I love being cozy. I like to sit in my comfy chair with the fire blazing and Beryl snoozing on the rug beside me. It's the very image of coziness. Virtual coziness, though? Is that appealing? Isn't it literally emulating on screen what I'm experiencing in real life? Don't we play to experience something different? Something thrilling, even.

I know I frequently claim I don't appreciate challenge in my games but what I mean by that is challenge that makes me tense, anxious or stressed. Challenge that falls well within my capabilities feels satisfying. Palia, from what I remember of it from last summer, manages to be both unchallenging and yet still  low-key stressful by way of its annoyingly awkward gameplay, while not providing much in the way of intellectual curiosity, emotional engagement or excitement by way of compensation

It's not so much cozy as dull, that's how I remember it and five minutes there last night brought all of that dullness back. I'm not saying I won't play it any more but I can't say I have any immediate plans. Still, it's there on Steam if I want it, now, which has to increase the chances somewhat.

Now if Once Human would just... oh, wait a moment...