One Day I'll Leave This City

This weekend saw another open playtest for the retro MMORPG Monsters & Memories. The servers opened on Friday afternoon and stayed up until midnight on Sunday. The developers, the appropriately and amusingly named Niche World Cult, were clearly expecting increased interest. They not only added several servers but also cloned all the characters from the earlier Stress Test to a server of their own to avoid crowding.

I didn't make a character for that test a month ago and I missed the previous opportunity altogether. My only hands-on time with the game was back in May last year, when I called the build I saw "a hugely impressive achievement". 

After another couple of hours with the game, that remains my impression although I have to temper it  by saying I did pretty much the exact same thing this time I did a year ago, so any changes or improvements made since then were probably lost on me. 

One of the most instructive things about having a blog is that I get to see just how very predictable I can be. In May 2023 I made a Human Elementalist and spent most of my time trying to find the Guildmaster so I could hand in my note and join the guild. This time I did almost exactly the same and it wasn't until I was in the middle of doing it that I realised I'd done it all before.

Anyone got a box I can stand on?

In fact, pretty much the only thing I did differently this time was to go Gnome instead of Human. I even made the exact same mistake when I spawned into the world, heading off in the direction I was facing, instead of just turning around and going through the gate behind me. That meant I had to go all the way around the city walls on the outside, until I find a way in, which also meant swimming across the harbor, just like last year.

At least this time I had the sense to cling to the wall so I only had to swim the very last part. It was a interesting journey, with ramps to climb and ships to hop on and off. Aso a lot shorter than I remember, although only because I resisted the temptation to go exploring and stuck the the task in hand instead.

This time, I also took the trouble to read the note carefully, which was just as well as it contained the only directions I was likely to get. Monsters & Memories is seeking to be so authentically old school there's no in-game map. Not just no mini-map - no map at all. 

The note helpfully tells you which directions the sun rises and sets and, crucially, that the sea is to the south. It also tells you the name of the guild you're looking for - The School of the Fourfold Path - and a couple of salient points about its location. It's in the harbor district, directly south of a named park. 

Step One: Find the harbor. Check!

Observant readers may notice that I haven't provided a screenshot of the note. That's because I neglected to take one. I also haven't checked online to see if anyone else did and I haven't looked any of this up on any kind of wiki or guide. It's all straight out of my memory, which I find kind of remarkable. I can almost remember the name of that park, too...

I think this says something about why some veteran  MMORPG players feel so strongly about restricting or even excluding elements that, objectively, would seem to be nothing more than straightforward quality of life improvements. The kind of supposedly uncontroversial additions to the genre made over the years. I mean, who wouldn't want a map? It's one of the very first omissions that gets a third party solution if the developer is slacking, isn't it?

If I'd had a map, though, would I have remembered all of those details? Or any of them? Wouldn't I have been more likely only to remember that I opened the map and used it to find my way to where I wanted to go? And if I'd had a directional marker on the map or a text prompt or even one of those sparkly wisp-trails that act as stand-in for GPS in fantasy games, would I remember anything about the note at all? Would the note even have told me anything more than "Give this note to the Elemental Guildmaster"?

Well, maybe. There is such a thing as flavor text, although whether anyone reads it is another matter. And I do look around me while I run, most of the time. I imagine I'd still have noticed how mind-bendingly huge the starting city in this game is, for a start. It is - and I rarely use this word because it's so ridiculous but this one time it feels right - humungous! 

Clothwalking. It's a Gnome innate. What? Yes it is!

It feels as though it has to be one of the largest MMORPG cities I've seen. Maybe it isn't really that vast but it feels as though it is, partly because you can see lots of it from everywhere so it always seems as though there's city all around you.

Many cities in games feel quite constricted if you traverse them at ground level. You can see the streets you're in but not much else. This one is very three-dimensional, full of ramps and stairs and parapets and towers. And the streets are a maze. Combined with movement that feels relatively slow, it always seems as though you can see your destination but it's not getting any closer. 

Why the city needs to be so big is another question. It certainly makes it feel convincingly city-like in stature, if that's the intention. One of the big drawbacks of MMORPG cities used to be that they felt more like villages or outposts. If the idea here is to make players feel an appropriate sense of scale then goal accomplished. Since most of the buildings are empty, though, there's not really any greater sense of realism or authenticity than if the city was a tenth the size but every building had a clear and obvious purpose.

The game is still a year and a half out even from Early Access so it's more than possible all that space will have been furnished and populated by then. If so, that's going to make the city even more convincing but also even more intimidating. It's bad enough having to navigate a warren of empty streets and untenanted buildings but at least you know there's nothing there you're missing. Imagine if you needed to check them all and speak to every NPC, just in case they had a quest to offer.

Hey! You're the guy from the note!

And you would have to speak to them all because, naturally, no-one in Monsters & memories is going to wear a punctuation mark for a hat. You have to go up to them and /hail to get them to speak to you. Or I guess you do. I haven't actually found any quests yet, other than the one the guildmaster gave me when I handed in the note. 

When it comes down to it, I haven't really done much. I'd have liked to but I haven't been able to find the time. Unfortunately, NWC (Niche World Cult. Remember?), like many developers, prefer to run their tests at the weekends, which is the worst possible time for me. I work every Sunday and every other Saturday. Also, weekends are when everything interesting tends to happen, so there's plenty of competition. 

This weekend just gone saw the Glastonbury Festival happening, just down the road from me. While I have no affection for festivals in general and a particular dislike of Glastonbury in particular, having been there just once, on the wettest of the wet years, an experience I have yet to wipe from my memory almost forty years later, I do like to watch the excellent BBC coverage, at least when they show one of the few bands playing that I actually like. Consequently, when I got home from work this weekend, I placed a higher priority on watching the likes of Blondshell and Fontaines DC than on a playtest for a game still nearly two years away from becoming a real thing.

Even so, I managed to fit a few minutes in between sets and what I saw remains an impressive achievement. Whose achievement is a moot point. As I suggested in those previous posts, Monsters & Memories isn't so much inspired by EverQuest as it is a remake. So many facets and features are all but identical, from the way the spellbook looks and functions to the names and appearance of the mobs.

Is this what they call an homage?

Of course, many of the mobs are drawn from life so no-one can claim to have invented them. (Except God, if you feel that way inclined. Or named them, for that matter. Except Adam, ditto.) Brad McQuaid neither invented nor named fire beetles and dune scarabs. They're actual, living creatures. Even so, having them wandering around outside the gates of starting cities in both games isn't something that happened by chance.

This time, I even got to kill a few. Well, a few snakes and rotting skeletons, at least. Last year I'm not sure I ever got as far as hunting mobs for xp. This weekend I managed to find a moment to venture outside the Western Gates and try out my one damage spell and my feeble dagger on the local wildlife. I even managed to do it without dying although I did have to run to the guards every time I got an add.

Combat, if you can even call it that at Level One, seemed pretty solid. My Flameburst cast fast and knocked a chunk off the mob's health. Mana dropped about as quickly as you'd expect and I was soon out of spell juice. One resist and I had to finish the creature off with my dagger. At least I didn't have to sit and med for as long as the fight before I got going again but I imagine that joy will come soon enough.

Although maybe not that soon because half a dozen snakes and skeletons barely moved the dial on the xp I needed to get to Level Two. Not that there was a dial, just an undifferentiated block of yellow whose incremental progress was hard to estimate. The whole thing felt unnervingly authentic, if the authenticity you're after is the outmoded gameplay of the late twentieth century.

Even the fricken' spell effects are the same...

And, curiously, I suppose it might be, at that. Having just bounced quite hard off both the 2006 stylings of Anashti Sul and the all mod cons convenience of Tarisland, once again I found Monsters & Memories relentlessly retrograde take on the MMORPG experience disturbingly addictive. That Skinner Box gameplay loop hasn't lost any of its efficacy in a quarter of a century.

It certainly helps that, visually, the game has the same low rent luster that served Valheim so well. The graphics may be simple but they're elegant and easy on the eye. I thought at first there must have been a polish pass since last time I played because everything really did look better than I remembered but looking at the screenshots I took last May it may be my memory that needs polishing. They look very much the same.

One thing that was different was the sandstorm. It began while I was looking for the Guild and never let up until I logged out. I'm not absolutely sure a sandstorm is a positive addition to gameplay per se but if there are going to be weather effects, this is a good way to do them. The sand stormed convincingly around the streets, reducing visibility but not so much I couldn't still enjoy the view, while the wind wuthered atmospherically in the background. 

It's possible that at some point in development weather effects like this will acquire stat penalties or other negative properties, although perhaps not. That certainly wouldn't be true to the status quo ante M&M seeks to restore. When it rains in Norrath, no-one gets wet. 

Pretty sure the city's over there, somewhere.

I wonder at what point the line between authentically nostalgic inconvenience and modern-day quasi-realism will be drawn? There's certainly a masochistic demographic that would like to go back to the way things were, only worse.

I suspect Niche World Cult will avoid traps like that. As I said before, of all the teams working on projects like this, so far they seem like the one that has both the clearest idea of what they want to achieve and the best shot at achieving it.

Once again, I wish them all the luck with the game and I hope there'll be plenty more opportunities to test it for free before the paywall comes down in 2026. Next time I might even remember to try a different class and see a little of the world beyond the starting area. Always assuming I can find a zone wall to hug, that is.

We can do that, right? If not I don't imagine I'll be traveling very far. Not alive, anywa